We started to walk toward Reforma. Rosario took my arm the first time we crossed the street and didn't let go.
"I want to be like your mother," she said, "but don't get the wrong idea, I'm not a slut like that Brígida, I want to help you, be good to you, I want to be with you when you become famous, darling."
This woman must be crazy, I thought, but I didn't say anything. I just smiled.
NOVEMBER 27
Everything is getting complicated. Horrible things are happening. At night I wake up screaming. I dream about a woman with the head of a cow. Its eyes stare at me. With touching sadness, actually. On top of it all, I had a little "man-to-man" talk with my uncle. He made me swear that I wasn't doing drugs. No, I said, I don't do drugs, I swear. None at all? he said. What does that mean? I said. What do you mean what does that mean! he roared. Exactly what I say, what do you mean? Could you please be a little more precise, I said, shrinking like a snail. At night I called María. She wasn't there, but I talked to Angélica for a while. How are you? she said. Not very well, really, I said, in fact, pretty bad. Are you sick? said Angélica. No, nervous. I'm not very well either, said Angélica, I can hardly sleep. I would've liked to ask her more, one ex-virgin to another, but I didn't.
NOVEMBER 28
Horrible things keep happening, dreams, nightmares, impulses I indulge that are completely out of my control. It's like when I was fifteen and always masturbating. Three times a day, five times a day, nothing was enough! Rosario wants to marry me. I told her I didn't believe in marriage. Well, she said with a laugh, married or not, what I'm trying to say is that I NEED to live with you. Live together, I said, in the SAME house? Well, of course, in the same house, or in the same ROOM, if we don't have enough money to RENT a house. Or even in a cave, she said, I'm not PICKY. Her face shone, whether from sweat or pure faith in what she was saying I'm not sure. The first time we did it was at her place, a crummy tenement building way out in the Colonia Merced Bal-buena, near the Calzada de la Viga. The room was full of postcards of Veracruz and pictures of movie actors tacked to the walls.
"Is it your first time, papacito?" Rosario asked me.
I said yes, I don't know why.
NOVEMBER 29
I drift from place to place like a piece of flotsam. Today I went to Catalina O'Hara's house without being invited and without calling first. It so happened that she was there. She'd just gotten home and her eyes were red, an unmistakable sign that she'd been crying. At first she didn't recognize me. I asked her why she was crying. Man trouble, she said. I had to bite my tongue not to say that if she needed someone I was there, ready and willing. We had some whiskey-I need it, said Catalina-and then we went to pick up her son at nursery school. Catalina drove like a maniac and I felt sick. On the way home, as I played with her son in the backseat, she asked whether I wanted to see her paintings. I said yes. In the end we finished half a bottle of whiskey and after Catalina put her son to bed she started to cry again. Don't go near her, I told myself, she's a MOTHER. Then I thought about graves, about fucking on a grave, about sleeping in a grave. Luckily, the painter she shares the house and studio with came in a few minutes later and the three of us started to make dinner together. Catalina's friend is separated, but evidently she handles it better. As we were eating she told jokes. Painter jokes. I'd never heard a woman tell such good jokes (unfortunately I can't remember a single one). Then, why I don't know, they started to talk about Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. According to Catalina's friend, there was a poet who was six and a half feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds, the nephew of an administrator at UNAM, who was looking to beat them up. Knowing he was after them, they'd disappeared. But Catalina O'Hara didn't buy it; according to her, our friends were off looking for Cesárea Tinajero's lost papers, hidden in archives and used bookstores around Mexico City. I left at midnight, and when I was outside all of a sudden I had no idea where to go. I called María, prepared to tell her everything about Rosario (and while I was at it, about the affaire in the storage room with Brígida) and ask her to forgive me, but the telephone rang and rang and no one answered. The whole Font family had disappeared. So I set off south, toward Ulises Lima's rooftop. When I arrived, no one was there, so I ended up heading downtown again, toward Calle Bucareli. Once I got there, before I went to the Encrucijada Veracruzana, I looked in the window of Café Amarillo (Quito was closed). At one of the tables, I saw Pancho Rodríguez. He was alone with a half-drunk cup of coffee in front of him. He had a book on the table, one hand flat on the pages to hold it open, and his face was twisted in an expression of intense pain. From time to time he grimaced, making faces that were terrifying to see through the window. Either the book he was reading was having a wrenching effect on him, or he had a toothache. At one moment he raised his head and looked all around, as if he sensed that he was being watched. I hid. When I looked in the window again, Pancho was still reading and the expression of pain had disappeared from his face. Rosario and Brígida were working that night at the Encrucijada Veracruzana. Brígida came up to me first. In her face I detected bitterness and resentment, but also the suffering of the rejected. Honestly, I felt sorry for her! Everybody was suffering! I bought her a tequila and listened without flinching to everything she had to say to me. Then Rosario came over and said that she didn't like to see me standing at the bar writing, like an orphan. There's no free table, I said and went on writing. My poem is called "Everybody Suffers." I don't care if people stare.
NOVEMBER 30
Last night something really bad happened. I was at the Encrucijada Vera-cruzana, leaning on the bar, switching back and forth between writing poems and writing in my diary (I have no problem going from one format to the other), when Rosario and Brígida started to scream at each other at the back of the bar. Soon the grisly drunks were taking sides and cheering them on so energetically that I couldn't concentrate on my writing anymore and decided to slip away.
I don't know what time it was, but it was late, and outside the fresh air struck me in the face. As I walked I started to feel like writing again, recovering the inclination if not the inspiration (does inspiration really exist?). I turned the corner at the Reloj Chino and started to walk toward La Ciudadela looking for a café where I could keep working. I crossed the Jardín Morelos, empty and eerie, but with glimpses of secret life in its corners, bodies and laughter (giggles) that mocked the solitary passerby (or so it seemed to me then). I crossed Niños Héroes, crossed Plaza Pacheco (which commemorates José Emilio's grandfather and which was empty, no shadows or laughter this time), and as I was about to turn up Revillagigedo toward the Alameda, Quim Font emerged or materialized from around a corner. The shock almost killed me. He was wearing a suit and tie (but there was something about the suit and tie that made them look all wrong together), and he was dragging a girl after him, her elbow firmly in his grip. They were going the same way I was, although on the other side of the street, and it took me a few seconds to react. The girl Quim was dragging after him wasn't Angélica, as I had irrationally supposed when I saw her, although her height and build added to my confusion.
Clearly the girl had no great desire to follow Quim, but neither could it be said that she was putting up much resistance. As I drew level with them, heading up Revillagigedo toward the Alameda, I couldn't stop staring, as if to make sure that the nocturnal passerby was Quim and not an apparition, and then he saw me too. He recognized me right away.
"García Madero!" he shouted. "Over here, man!"