Poets, I said. What I would have liked to say was: we poets. But he looked at me as if the flesh had been stripped from my face and it was just a skull, he looked at me with a smile and said: don't be corny, Perla. That was all. I turned pale and flinched, only managing to move a little bit away, and I tried to get up but I couldn't, and all that time he sat there motionless, looking at me and smiling, as if all the skin, muscles, fat, and blood had slid off my face, leaving only the yellow or white bone. At first I was unable to speak. Then I said or whispered that it was late and I had to go. I stood up, said goodbye, and left. He didn't even look up from his book. When I crossed the empty living room, the empty hallway, I thought I would never see him again. A little while later I started college and my life took a ninety-degree turn. Years later, purely by chance, I ran into his sister handing out Trotskyist propaganda at the Faculty of Literature. I bought a pamphlet from her and we went to have coffee. By then I'd stopped seeing the director, I was about to finish my degree, and I was writing poems that almost no one read. Naturally, I asked about him. Then his sister gave me a detailed account of his latest adventures. He had traveled all over Latin America, returned to his native country, suffered through a coup. All I could bring myself to say was: what bad luck. Yes, said his sister, he was planning to stay there to live and a few weeks after he got there the military decides to stage a coup, pretty rotten luck. For a while we couldn't think of anything else to say to each other. I imagined him lost in a white space, a virgin space that kept getting dirtier and more soiled despite his best efforts, and even the face I remembered grew distorted, as if while I was talking to his sister his features melded with what she was describing, ridiculous tests of strength, terrifying, pointless rites of passage into adulthood, so distant from what I once thought would become of him, and even his sister's voice talking about the Latin American revolution and the defeats and victories and deaths that it would bring began to sound strange and then I couldn't sit there a second longer and I told her I had to go to class and we'd see each other some other time. I remember that for two or three nights I dreamed of him. In my dreams he was thin, all skin and bones, sitting under a tree, his hair long, his clothes ragged, his shoes ruined, unable to get up and walk.