2. THE PART ABOUT AMALFITANO

I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa, Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week. Don't you? Don't you really? he asked himself. Really I don't, he said to himself, and that was as eloquent as he could be.

He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came from the south. He had books he'd kept for more than twenty-five years. Not many. All of them old. He had books he'd bought in the last ten years, books he didn't mind lending, books that could've been lost or stolen for all he cared. He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar return addresses, books he didn't even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers, but he didn't know what flowers would do best there-flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary.

He had a daughter named Rosa who had always lived with him. Hard to believe, but true.

Sometimes, at night, he remembered Rosa 's mother and sometimes he laughed and other times he felt like crying. He thought of her while he was shut in his office with Rosa asleep in her room. The living room was empty and quiet, and the lights were off. Anyone listening carefully on the porch would have heard the whine of a few mosquitoes. But no one was listening. The houses next door were silent and dark.

Rosa was seventeen and she was Spanish. Amalfitano was fifty and Chilean. Rosa had had a passport since she was ten. On some of their trips, remembered Amalfitano, they had found themselves in strange situations, because Rosa went through customs by the gate for EU citizens and Amalfitano went by the gate for non-EU citizens. The first time, Rosa threw a tantrum and started to cry and refused to be separated from her father. Another time, since the lines were moving at different speeds, the EU citizens' line quickly and the noncitizens' line more slowly and laboriously, Rosa got lost and it took Amalfitano half an hour to find her. Sometimes the customs officers would see Rosa, so little, and ask whether she was traveling alone or whether someone was waiting for her outside. Rosa would answer that she was traveling with her father, who was South American, and she was supposed to wait for him right there. Once Rosa 's suitcase was searched because they suspected her father of smuggling drugs or arms under cover of his daughter's innocence and nationality. But Amalfitano had never trafficked in drugs, or for that matter arms.

It was Lola, Rosa 's mother, who always traveled with a weapon, never going anywhere without her stainless-steel spring-loaded switchblade, Amalfitano remembered as he smoked a Mexican cigarette, sitting in his office or standing on the dark porch. Once they were stopped in an airport, before Rosa was born, and Lola was asked what she was doing with the knife. It's for peeling fruit, she said. Oranges, apples, pears, kiwis, all kinds of fruit. The officer gave her a long look and let her go. A year and a few months after that, Rosa was born. Two years later, Lola left, still carrying the knife.

Lola's pretext was a plan to visit her favorite poet, who lived in the insane asylum in Mondragon, near San Sebastian. Amalfitano listened to her explanations for a whole night as she packed her bag and promised she'd come home soon to him and Rosa. Lola, especially toward the end, used to claim that she knew the poet, that she'd met him at a party in Barcelona before Amalfitano became a part of her life. At this party, which Lola described as a wild party, a long overdue party that suddenly sprang to life in the middle of the summer heat and a traffic jam of cars with red lights on, she had slept with him and they'd made love all night, although Amalfitano knew it wasn't true, not just because the poet was gay, but because Lola had first heard of the poet's existence from him, when he'd given her one of his books. Then Lola took it upon herself to buy everything else the poet had written and to choose friends who thought the poet was a genius, an alien, God's messenger, friends who had themselves just been released from the Sant Boi asylum or had flipped out after repeated stints in rehab. The truth was, Amalfitano knew that sooner or later she would make her way to San Sebastian, so he chose not to argue but offered her part of his savings, begged her to come back in a few months, and promised to take good care of Rosa. Lola seemed not to hear a thing. When she had finished, she went into the kitchen, made coffee, and sat in silence, waiting for dawn, although Amalfitano tried to come up with subjects of conversation that might interest her or at least help pass the time. At six-thirty the doorbell rang and Lola jumped. They've come for me, she said, and since she didn't move, Amalfitano had to get up and ask over the intercom who it was. He heard a weak voice saying it's me. Who is it? asked Amalfitano. Let me in, it's me, said the voice. Who? asked Amalfitano. The voice, while still barely audible, seemed indignant at the interrogation. Me me me me, it said. Amalfitano closed his eyes and buzzed the door open. He heard the sound of the elevator cables and he went back to the kitchen. Lola was still sitting there, sipping the last of her coffee. I think it's for you, said Amalfitano. Lola gave no sign of having heard him. Are you going to say goodbye to Rosa? asked Amalfitano. Lola looked up and said it was better not to wake her. There were dark circles under her blue eyes. Then the doorbell rang twice and Amalfitano went to open the door. A small woman, no more than five feet tall, gave him a brief glance and murmured an unintelligible greeting, then brushed past him and went straight to the kitchen, as if she knew Lola's habits better than Amalfitano did. When he returned to the kitchen he noticed the woman's knapsack, which she had left on the floor by the refrigerator, smaller than Lola's, almost a miniature. The woman's name was Inmaculada, but Lola called her Imma. Amalfitano had encountered her a few times in the apartment when he came home from work, and then the woman had told him her name and what she liked to be called. Imma was short for Immaculada, in Catalan, but Lola's friend wasn't Catalan and her name wasn't Immaculada with a double m, either, it was Inmaculada, and Amalfitano, for phonetic reasons, preferred to call her Inma, although each time he did his wife scolded him, until he decided not to call her anything. He watched them from the kitchen door. He felt much calmer than he had expected. Lola and her friend had their eyes fixed on the Formica table, although Amalfitano couldn't help noticing that both looked up now and then and stared at each other with an intensity unfamiliar to him. Lola asked whether anyone wanted more coffee. She means me, thought Amalfitano. Inmaculada shook her head and said there was no time, they should get moving, since before long there would be no way out of Barcelona. She talks as if Barcelona were a medieval city, thought Amalfitano. Lola and her friend stood up. Amalfitano stepped forward and opened the refrigerator door to get a beer, driven by a sudden thirst. To do so, he had to move Imma's backpack. It was so light it might've held just two shirts and another pair of black pants. It's like a fetus, was what Amalfitano thought, and he dropped it to one side. Then Lola kissed him on both cheeks and she and her friend were gone.

A week later Amalfitano got a letter from Lola, postmarked Pamplona. In the letter she told him that their trip so far had been full of pleasant and unpleasant experiences. Mostly pleasant. And although the unpleasant experiences could certainly be called unpleasant, experiences might not be the right word. Nothing unpleasant that happens to us can take us by surprise, said Lola, because Imma has lived through all of this already. For two days, said Lola, we were working at a roadside restaurant in Lerida, for a man who also owned an apple orchard. It was a big orchard and there were already green apples on the trees. In a little while the apple harvest would begin, and the owner had asked them to stay till then. Imma had gone to talk to him while Lola read a book by the Mondragon poet (she had all the books he'd published so far in her backpack), sitting by the Canadian tent where the two of them slept. The tent was pitched in the shade of a poplar, the only poplar she'd seen in the orchard, next to a garage that no one used anymore. A little while later, Imma came back, and she didn't want to explain the deal the restaurant owner had offered her. The next day they headed back out to the highway to hitchhike, without telling anyone goodbye. In Zaragoza they stayed with an old friend of Imma's from university. Lola was very tired and she went to bed early and in her dreams she heard laughter and loud voices and scolding, almost all Imma's but some her friend's, too. They talked about the old days, about the struggle against Franco, about the women's prison in Zaragoza. They talked about a pit, a very deep hole from which oil or coal could be extracted, about an underground jungle, about a commando team of female suicide bombers. Then Lola's letter took an abrupt turn. I'm not a lesbian, she said, I don't know why I'm telling you this, I don't know why I'm treating you like a child by saying it. Homosexuality is a lie, it's an act of violence committed against us in our adolescence, she said. Imma knows this. She knows it, she knows it, she's too clearsighted not to, but all she can do is help. Imma is a lesbian, every day hundreds of thousands of cows are sacrificed, every day a herd of herbivores or several herds cross the valley, from north to south, so slowly but so fast it makes me sick, right now, now, now, do you understand, Oscar? No, thought Amalfitano, I don't, as he held the letter in his two hands like a life raft of reeds and grasses, and with his foot he steadily rocked his daughter in her seat.

Then Lola described again the night when she'd made love with the poet, who lay in majestic and semisecret repose in the Mondragon asylum. He was still free back then, he hadn't yet been committed to any institution. He lived in Barcelona, with a gay philosopher, and they threw parties together once a week or once every two weeks. This was before I knew you. I don't know whether you'd come to Spain yet or whether you were in Italy or France or some filthy Latin American hole. Ihe gay philosopher's parties were famous in Barcelona. People said the poet and the philosopher were lovers, but it never looked that way. One had an apartment and ideas and money, and the other had his legend and his poetry and the fervor of the true believer, a doglike fervor, the fervor of the whipped dog that's spent the night or all its youth in the rain, Spain's endless storm of dandruff, and has finally found a place to lay its head, no matter if it's a bucket of putrid water, a vaguely familiar bucket of water. One day fortune smiled on me and I attended one of these parties. To say I met the philosopher would be an exaggeration. I saw him. In a corner of the room, talking to another poet and another philosopher. He appeared to be giving a lecture. Then everything seemed slightly off. The guests were waiting for the poet to make his entrance. They were waiting for him to pick a fight. Or to defecate in the middle of the living room, on a Turkish carpet like the threadbare carpet from the Thousand and One Nights, a battered carpet that sometimes functioned as a mirror, reflecting all of us from below. I mean: it turned into a mirror at the command of our spasms. Neurochemical spasms. When the poet showed up, though, nothing happened. At first all eyes turned to him, to see what could be had. Then everybody went back to what they'd been doing and the poet said hello to certain writer friends and joined the group around the gay philosopher. I had been dancing with myself and I kept dancing with myself. At five in the morning I went into one of the bedrooms. The poet was leading me by the hand. Without getting undressed, I began to make love with him. I came three times, feeling the poet's breath on my neck. It took him quite a while longer. In the semidarkness I made out three shadowy figures in a corner of the room. One of them was smoking. Another one never stopped whispering. The third was the philosopher and I realized that the bed was his and the room was the room where, the gossip was, he and the poet made love. But now I was the one making love and the poet was gentle with me and the only thing I didn't understand was why the other three were watching, although I didn't much care, in those days, if you remember, nothing really mattered. When the poet finally came, crying out and turning his head to look at his three friends, I was sorry it wasn't the right time of month, because I would've loved to have his baby. Then he got up and went over to the shadowy figures. One of them put a hand on his shoulder. Another one gave him something. I got up and went to the bathroom without even looking at them. The last party guests were in the living room. In the bathroom, a girl was asleep in the tub. I washed my face and hands. I combed my hair. When I came out the philosopher was kicking everyone out who could still walk. He didn't look the least bit drunk or high. He looked fresh, as if he'd just got up and drunk a big glass of orange juice. I left with a couple of people I'd met at the party. At that hour only the Drugstore on Las Ramblas was open and we headed there without a word. At the Drugstore I ran into a girl I'd known a few years before who was a reporter for Ajoblanco, although it disgusted her to work there. She started to talk to me about moving to Madrid. She asked if I felt like I needed a change. I shrugged my shoulders. All cities are more or less the same, I said. What I was really thinking about was the poet and what he and I had just done. A gay man doesn't do that. Everyone said he was gay, but I knew it wasn't true. Then I thought about the confusion of the senses and I understood everything. I knew the poet had lost his way, he was a lost child and I could save him, give him back a small part of all he'd given me. For almost a month I kept watch outside the philosopher's building hoping one day I'd see the poet and he'd ask me to make love with him again. I didn't see him, but one night I saw the philosopher. I noticed that something was wrong with his face. When he got closer (he didn't recognize me) I could see he had a black eye and was covered in bruises. No sign of the poet. Sometimes I tried to guess, by the lights, what floor the apartment was on. Sometimes I saw shadows behind the curtains. Sometimes someone, an older woman, a man in a tie, a long-faced adolescent, would open a window and look out at the grid of Barcelona at dusk. One night I discovered I wasn't the only one there, spying on the poet or waiting for him to appear. A kid, maybe eighteen, maybe younger, was quietly keeping watch from the opposite sidewalk. He hadn't noticed me because clearly he was the heedless type, a dreamer. He would sit at a bar, at an outside table, and he always ordered a can of Coca-Cola, sipping it slowly as he wrote in a school notebook or read books that I recognized at a glance. One night, before he could get up from the table and dash away, I went over and sat down next to him. I told him I knew what he was doing. Who are you? he asked me, terrified. I smiled and said I was someone like him. He looked at me the way you look at a crazy person. Don't get the wrong idea, I said, I'm not crazy, I'm in full Possession of my faculties. He laughed. You look crazy, he said, even if you aren't. Then he motioned for the check and he was about to get up when I confessed that I was looking for the poet, too. He sat down again abruptly, as if I'd clapped a gun to his head. I ordered a chamomile tea and told him my story. He told me that he wrote poetry, too, and he wanted the poet to read his poems. There was no need to ask to know that he was gay and very lonely. Let me see them, I said, and I pulled the notebook out of his hands. His poems weren't bad. His only problem was that he wrote just like the poet. These things can't have happened to you, I said, you're too young to have suffered this much. He made a gesture as if to say that he didn't care whether I believed him or not. What matters is that it's well written, he said. No, I told him, you know that isn't what matters. Wrong, wrong, wrong, I said, and finally he had to cede the point. His name was Jordi and today he may be teaching at the university or writing reviews for La Vanguardia or El Periodico.

Amalfitano received the next letter from San Sebastian. In it, Lola told him that she'd gone with Imma to the asylum at Mondragon to visit the poet, who lived there, raving and demented, and that the guards, priests disguised as security guards, wouldn't let them in. In San Sebastian they had plans to stay with a friend of Imma's, a Basque girl named Edurne, who had been an ETA commando and had given up the armed struggle when democracy came, and who didn't want them in her house for more than one night, saying she had lots to do and her husband didn't like unexpected guests. Her husband's name was Jon, and guests really did make him nervous, as Lola had opportunity to observe. He shook, he flushed as red as a glowing clay pot, he always seemed about to burst out shouting although he never spoke a word, he was sweaty and his hands shook, he was constantly moving, as if he couldn't sit still for two minutes at a time. Edurne herself was very relaxed. She had a little boy (though Lola and Imma never saw him, because Jon always found a reason to keep them out of his room) and she worked almost full-time as a street educator, with junkie families and the street people who huddled on the steps of the cathedral of San Sebastian and only wanted to be left alone, as Edurne explained, laughing, as if she'd just told a joke that only Imma understood, because neither Lola nor Jon laughed. That night they had dinner together and the next day they left. They found a cheap boardinghouse that Edurne had told them about and they hitchhiked back to Mondragon. They weren't allowed into the asylum this time either, but they settled for studying it from the outside, noting and committing to memory all the dirt and gravel roads they could see, the gray walls, the rises and curves of the land, the walks taken by the inmates and their caretakers, whom they watched from a distance, the curtains of trees following one after the other at unpredictable intervals or in a pattern they didn't understand, and the brush where they thought they saw flies, by which they deduced that some of the inmates and maybe even a worker or two urinated there in the dark or as night fell. Then they sat together by the side of the road and ate the cheese sandwiches they'd brought from San Sebastian, without talking, or musing as if to themselves on the fractured shadows that the asylum of Mondragon cast over its surroundings.

For their third try, they called to make an appointment. Imma passed herself off as a reporter from a Barcelona newspaper and Lola claimed to be a poet. This time they got to see him. Lola thought he looked older, his eyes sunken, his hair thinner than before. At first they were accompanied by a doctor or priest, who led them down the endless corridors, painted blue and white, until they came to a nondescript room where the poet was waiting. It was Lola's impression that the asylum people were proud to have him as a patient. All of them knew him, all of them greeted him as he headed to the garden or went to receive his daily dose of tranquilizers. When they were alone she told him that she'd missed him, that for a while she'd kept watch over the philosopher's apartment in the Ensanche, and that despite her perseverance she'd never seen him again. It's not my fault, she said, I did everything I could. The poet looked her in the eyes and asked for a cigarette. Imma was standing next to the bench where they were sitting and wordlessly she handed him a cigarette. The poet said thank you and then he said perseverance. I was, I was, I was, said Lola, who was turned toward him, her gaze fixed on him, although out of the corner of her eye she saw that Imma, after flicking her lighter, had taken a book out of her bag and begun to read, standing there like a tiny and infinitely patient Amazon, the lighter still visible in one of her hands as she held the book. Then Lola started to talk about the trip they had made together. She spoke of highways and back roads, problems with chauvinist truck drivers, cities and towns, nameless forests where they had pitched camp, rivers and gas station bathrooms where they had washed. The poet, meanwhile, blew smoke out of his mouth and nose, making perfect rings, bluish nimbuses, gray cumulonimbuses that dissolved in the park breeze or were carried off toward the edge of the grounds where a dark forest rose, the branches of the trees silver in the light falling from the hills. As if to gain time, Lola described the two previous visits, fruitless but eventful. And then she told him what she had really come to say: that she knew he wasn't gay, she knew he was a prisoner and wanted to escape, she knew that love, no matter how mistreated or mutilated, always left room for hope, and that hope was her plan (or the other way around), and that its materialization, its objectification, consisted of his fleeing the asylum with her and heading for France. What about her? asked the poet, who was taking sixteen pills a day and recording his visions, and he pointed at Imma, who read on undaunted, still standing, as if her skirts and underskirts were made of concrete and she couldn't sit down. She'll help us, said Lola. In fact, the plan was hers in the first place. We'll cross into France over the mountains, like pilgrims. We'll make our way to Saint-Jean-de-Luz and take the train to Paris, traveling through the countryside, which is the prettiest in the world at this time of year. We'll live in hostels. That's Imma's plan. She and I will work cleaning or taking care of children in the wealthy neighborhoods of Paris while you write poetry. At night you'll read us your poems and make love to me. That's Imma's plan, worked out to the last detail. After three or four months I'll be pregnant, and that will prove for once and for all that you aren't a non-breeder, the last of your line. What more can our enemy families want I'll keep working a few more months, but when the time comes, Imma will have to work twice as hard. We'll live like mendicants or child prophets while Paris trains a distant eye on fashion, movies, games of chance, French and American literature, gastronomy, the gross domestic product, arms exports, the manufacture of massive batches of anesthesia, all mere backdrop for our fetus's first few months. Then, when I'm six months pregnant, we'll go back to Spain, though this time we won't cross over at Irun but at La Jonquera or Port Bou, into Catalan country. The poet looked at her with interest (and also at Imma, who never took her eyes off his poems, poems he'd written perhaps five years ago, he thought), and he began to blow smoke rings again, in the most unlikely shapes, as if he'd spent his long stay in Mondragon perfecting that peculiar art. How do you do it? asked Lola. With the tongue, and by pursing the lips a certain way, he said. Sometimes by making a kind of fluted shape. Sometimes like someone who's burned himself. Sometimes like sucking a small to medium dick. Sometimes like shooting a Zen arrow with a Zen bow into a Zen pavilion. Ah, I understand, said Lola. You, read a poem, said the poet. Imma looked at him and raised the book a little higher, as if she was trying to hide behind it. Which poem? Whichever one you like best, said the poet. I like them all, said Irnma. So read one, said the poet. When Imma had finished reading a poem about a labyrinth and Ariadne lost in the labyrinth and a young Spaniard who lived in a Paris garret, the poet asked if they had any chocolate. No, said Lola. We don't smoke these days, said Imma, we're focusing all our efforts on getting you out of here. The poet smiled. I didn't mean that kind of chocolate, he said, I meant the other kind, the kind made with cocoa and milk and sugar. Oh, I see, said Lola, and they both were forced to admit they hadn't brought anything like that either. They remembered that they had cheese sandwiches in their bags, wrapped in napkins and aluminum foil, and they offered them to him, but the poet seemed not to hear. Before it began to get dark, a flock of big blackbirds flew over the park, vanishing northward. A doctor approached along the gravel path, his white robe flapping in the evening breeze. When he reached them he asked the poet how he felt, calling him by his first name as if they'd been friends since adolescence. The poet gave him a blank look, and, calling him by his first name too, said he was a little tired. The doctor, whose name was Gorka and who couldn't have been more than thirty, sat down beside him and put a hand on his forehead, then took his pulse. You're doing fucking great, man, he said. And how are the ladies? he asked, with a smile full of health and cheer. Imma didn't answer. Lola had the sense that Imma was dying behind her book. Just fine, she said, it's been a while since we saw each other and we're having a wonderful time. So you knew each other already? asked the doctor. Not me, said Imma, and she turned the page. I knew him, said Lola, we were friends a few years ago, in Barcelona, when he lived in Barcelona. In fact, she said, looking up at the last blackbirds, the stragglers, taking flight just as someone turned on the park lights from a hidden switch in the asylum, we were more than friends. How interesting, said Gorka, his eyes on the birds, which at that time of day and in the artificial light had a burnished glow. What year was that? asked the doctor. It was 1979 or 1978, I can't remember now, said Lola in a faint voice. I hope you won't think I'm indiscreet, said the doctor, but I'm writing a biography of our friend and the more information I can gather on his life, the better, wouldn't you say? Someday he’ll leave here, said Gorka, smoothing his eyebrows, someday the Spanish public will have to recognize him as one of the greats, I don't mean they'll give him a prize, hardly, no Principe de Asturias or Cervantes for him, let alone a seat in the Academy, literary careers in Spain are for social climbers, operators, and ass kissers, if you'll pardon the expression. But someday he'll leave here. There's no question about that. Someday I'll leave, too. And so will my patients and my colleagues 'patients. Someday all of us will finally leave Mondragon, and this noble institution, ecclesiastical in origin, charitable in aim, will stand abandoned. Then my biography will be of interest and I'll be able to publish it, but in the meantime, as you can imagine, it's my duty to collect information, dates, names, confirm stories, some in questionable taste, even damaging, others more picturesque, stories that revolve around a chaotic center of gravity, which is our friend here, or what he's willing to reveal, the ordered self he presents, ordered verbally, I mean, according to a strategy I think I understand, although its purpose is a mystery to me, an order concealing a verbal disorder that would shake us to the core if ever we were to experience it, even as spectators of a staged performance. Doctor, you're a sweetheart, said Lola. Imma ground her teeth. Then Lola began to tell Gorka about her heterosexual experience with the poet, but her friend sidled over and kicked her in the ankle with the pointed toe of her shoe. Just then, the poet, who had begun to blow smoke rings again, remembered the apartment in Barcelona's Ensanche and remembered the philosopher, and although his eyes didn't light up, part of his bone structure did: the jaws, the chin, the hollow cheeks, as if he'd been lost in the Amazon and three Sevillian friars had rescued him, or a monstrous three-headed friar, which held no terror for him either. So, turning to Lola, he asked her about the philosopher, said the philosopher's name, talked about his stay in the philosopher's apartment, the months he'd spent in Barcelona with no job, playing stupid jokes, throwing books that he hadn't bought out the window (as the philosopher ran down the stairs to retrieve them, which wasn't always possible), playing loud music, practically never sleeping and laughing all the time, taking the occasional assignment as a translator or lead reviewer, a liquid star of boiling water. And then Lola was afraid and she covered her face with her hands. And Imma, who had at last put the book of poems away in her pocket, did the same, covering her face with her small, knotty hands. And Gorka looked from the two women to the poet and laughter bubbled up inside him. But before the laughter could fade in his placid heart, Lola said the philosopher had recently died of AIDS. Well, well, well, said the poet. He who laughs last, laughs best, said the poet. The early bird doesn't always catch the worm, the poet said. I love you, said Lola The poet got up and asked Imma for another cigarette. For tomorrow, he said. The doctor and the poet made their way down one path toward the asylum. Lola and Imma took a different path toward the gate, where they ran into the sister of another lunatic and the son of a laborer, also mad, and a woman with a sorrowful look whose cousin was interned in the asylum.

They returned the next day but were told that the patient was on bedrest. The same thing happened the following days. One day their money ran out, and Imma decided to take to the road again, this time heading south, to Madrid, where she had a brother who had done well for himself under the democracy and whom she planned to ask for a loan. Lola didn't have the strength to travel and the two women agreed that she should wait at the boardinghouse, as if nothing had happened, and Imma would be back in a week. Alone, Lola killed time writing long letters to Amalfitano in which she described her daily life in San Sebastian and the area around the asylum, which she visited every day. Clinging to the fence, she imagined that she was establishing telepathic contact with the poet. Most of the time she would find a clearing in the nearby woods and read or pick little flowers and bunches of grasses with which she made bouquets that she dropped through the railings or took back to the boardinghouse. Once one of the drivers who picked her up on the highway asked if she wanted to see the Mondragon cemetery and she said she did. He parked the car outside, under an acacia tree, and tor a while they walked among the graves, most of them with Basque names, until they came to the niche where the driver's mother was buried. Then he told Lola that he'd like to fuck her right there. Lola laughed and warned him that they would be in plain view of any visitor coming along the cemetery's main path. The driver thought for a few seconds, then he said: Christ, you're right. They went looking for a more Private spot and it was all over in less than fifteen minutes. The driver's last name was Larrazabal, and although he had a first name, he didn't want to tell her what it was. Just Larrazabal, like my friends call me, he said. Then he told Lola that this wasn't the first time he'd made love in the cemetery. He'd been there with a sort-of girlfriend before, with a girl he'd met at a club, and with two prostitutes from San Sebastian. As they were leaving, he tried to give her money, but she wouldn't take it. They talked for a long time in the car. Larrazabal asked her whether she had a relative at the asylum, and Lola told him her story. Larrazabal said he'd never read a poem. He added that he didn't understand Lola's obsession with the poet. I don't understand your fascination with fucking in the cemetery either, said Lola, but I don't judge you for it. True, Larrazabal admitted, everyone's got obsessions. Before Lola got out of the car, at the entrance to the asylum, Larrazabal snuck a five-thousand-peseta note into her pocket. Lola noticed but didn't say anything and then she was left alone under the trees, in front of the iron gate to the madhouse, home to the poet who was supremely ignoring her.

Madness is contagious, thought Amalfitano, sitting on the floor of his front porch as the sky grew suddenly overcast and the moon and the stars disappeared, along with the ghostly lights that are famously visible without binoculars or telescope in northern Sonora and southern Arizona.

After a week Imma still wasn't back. Lola imagined her tiny, impassively staring, with her face like an educated peasant's or a high school teacher's looking out over a vast prehistoric field, a woman near fifty, dressed in black, walking without looking to either side, without looking back, through a valley where it was still possible to distinguish the tracks of the great predators from the tracks of the scurrying herbivores. She imagined her stopped at a crossroads as the trucks with their many tons of cargo passed at full speed, raising dust clouds that didn't touch her, as if her hesitance and vulnerability constituted a state of grace, a dome that protected her from the inclemencies of fate, nature, and her fellow beings. On the ninth day the owner of the boardinghouse kicked her out. After that she slept at the railroad station, or in an abandoned warehouse where some tramps slept, each keeping to himself, or in the open country, near the border between the asylum and the outside world. One night she hitchhiked to the cemetery and slept in an empty niche. The next morning she felt happy and lucky and she decided to wait there for Imma to come back. She had water to drink and wash her face and brush her teeth, she was near the asylum, it was a peaceful spot. One afternoon, as she was laying a shirt that she had just washed out to dry on a white slab propped against the cemetery wall, she heard voices coming from a mausoleum, and she went to see what was happening. The mausoleum belonged to the Lagasca family, and judging by the state it was in, the last of the Lagascas had long since died or moved far away. Inside the crypt she saw the beam of a flashlight and she asked who was there.

Christ, it's you, she heard a voice say inside. She thought it might be thieves or workers restoring the mausoleum or grave robbers, then she heard a kind of meow and when she was about to turn away she saw Larrazabal's sallow face at the barred door of the crypt. Then a woman came out. Larrazabal ordered her to wait for him by his car, and for a while he and Lola talked and strolled arm in arm along the cemetery paths until the sun began to drop behind the worn edges of the niches.

Madness really is contagious, and friends are a blessing, especially when you're on your own. It was in these words, years before, in a letter with no postmark, that Lola had told Amalfitano about her chance encounter with Larrazabal, which ended with him forcing her to accept a loan of ten thousand pesetas and promising to come back the next day, before he got in his car, motioning to the prostitute who was waiting impatiently for him to do the same. That night Lola slept in her niche, although she was tempted to try the open crypt, happy because things were looking up. The next morning, she scrubbed herself all over with a wet rag, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, put on clean clothes, then went out to the highway to hitchhike to Mondragon. In town she bought some goat cheese and bread and had breakfast in the square, hungrily, since she honestly couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten. Then she went into a bar full of construction workers and had coffee. She'd forgotten when Larrazabal had said he'd come to the cemetery, but that didn't matter, and in the same distant way, Larrazabal and the cemetery and the town and the tremulous early morning landscape didn't matter to her either. Before she left the bar she went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She walked back to the highway and stood there waiting until a woman stopped and asked where she was going. To the asylum, said Lola. Her reply clearly took the woman aback, but she told her to get in nevertheless. That's where she was going. Are you visiting someone or are you an inmate? she asked Lola. I'm visiting, answered Lola. The woman's face was thin and long, her almost nonexistent lips giving her a cold, calculating look, although she had nice cheekbones and she dressed like a professional woman who is no longer single, who has a house, a husband, maybe even a child to care for. My father is there, she confessed. Lola didn't say anything. When they reached the entrance, Lola got out of the car and the woman went on alone. For a while Lola wandered along the edge of the asylum grounds. She heard the sound of horses and she guessed that somewhere, on the other side of the woods, there must be a riding club or school. At a certain point she spotted the red-tiled roof of a house that wasn't part of the asylum. She retraced her steps. She returned to the section of fence that gave the best view of the grounds. As the sun rose higher in the sky she saw a tight knot of patients emerge from a slate outbuilding, then they scattered to the benches in the park and lit cigarettes. She thought she saw the poet. He was with two inmates and he was wearing jeans and a very tight white T-shirt. She waved to him, shyly at first, as if her arms I were stiff from the cold, then openly, tracing strange patterns in the still-cold air, trying to give her signals a laserlike urgency, trying to transmit telepathic messages in his direction. Five minutes later, she watched as the poet got up from his bench and one of the lunatics kicked him in the legs. With an effort she resisted the urge to scream. The poet turned around and kicked back. The lunatic, who was sitting down again, took it in the chest and dropped like a little bird. The inmate smoking next to him got up and chased the poet for thirty feet, aiming kicks at his ass and throwing punches at his back. Then he returned calmly to his seat, where the other inmate had revived and was rubbing his chest, neck, and head, which anyone would call excessive, since he had been kicked only in the chest. At that moment Lola stopped signaling. One of the lunatics on the bench began to masturbate. The other one, the one in exaggerated pain, felt in one of his pockets and pulled out a cigarette. The poet approached them. Lola thought she heard his laugh. An ironic laugh, as if he were saying: boys, you can't take a joke. But maybe the poet wasn't laughing. Maybe, Lola said in her letter to Amalfitano, it was my madness that was laughing. In any case, whether it was her madness or not, the poet went over to the other two and said something to them. Neither of the lunatics answered. Lola saw them: they were looking down, at the life throbbing at ground level, between the blades of grass and under the loose clumps of dirt. A blind life in which everything had the transparency of water. The poet, however, must have scanned the faces of his companions in misfortune, first one and then the other, looking for a sign that would tell him whether it was safe for him to sit down on the bench again. Which he finally did. He raised his hand in a gesture of truce or surrender and he sat between the other two. He raised his hand the way someone might raise a tattered flag. He moved his fingers, each finger, as if his fingers were a flag in flames, the flag of the un-vanquished. And he sat between them and then he looked at the one who was masturbating and said something into his ear. This time Lola couldn't hear him but she saw clearly how the poet's left hand groped its way into the other inmate's robe. And then she watched the three of them smoke. And she watched the artful spirals issuing from the poet's mouth and nose.

The next and final letter Amalfitano received from his wife wasn't postmarked but the stamps were French. In it Lola recounted a conversation with Larrazabal. Christ, you're lucky, said Larrazabal, my whole life I've wanted to live in a cemetery, and look at you, the minute you get here, you move right in. A good person, Larrazabal. He invited her to stay at his apartment. He offered to drive her each morning to the Mondragon asylum, where Spain 's greatest and most self-deluding poet was studying osteology. He offered her money without asking for anything in return. One night he took her to the movies. Another night he went with her to the boardinghouse to ask whether there was any word from Imma. Once, late one Saturday night, after they'd made love for hours, he proposed to her and he didn't feel offended or stupid when Lola reminded him that she was already married. A good person, Larrazabal. He bought her a skirt at a little street fair and he bought her some brand-name jeans at a store in downtown San Sebastian. He talked to her about his mother, whom he'd loved dearly, and about his siblings, to whom he wasn't close. None of this had much of an effect on Lola, or rather it did, but not in the way he had hoped. For her, those days were like a prolonged parachute landing after a long space flight. She went to Mondragon once every three days now, instead of once a day, and she looked through the fence with no hope at all of seeing the poet, seeking at most some sign, a sign that she knew beforehand she would never understand or that she would understand only many years later, when none of it mattered anymore. Sometimes, without calling first or leaving a note, she wouldn't sleep at Larrazabal's apartment and he would go looking for her at the cemetery, the asylum, the old boardinghouse where she'd stayed, the places where the tramps and transients of San Sebastian gathered. Once he found her in the waiting room of the train station. Another time he found her sitting on a seafront bench at La Concha, at an hour when the only people out walking were two opposite types: those running out of time and those with time to burn. In the morning it was Larrazabal who made breakfast. At night, when he came home from work, he was the one who made dinner. During the day Lola drank only water, lots of it, and ate a little piece of bread or a roll small enough to fit in her pocket, which she would buy at the corner bakery before she went roaming. One night, as they were showering, she told Larrazabal that she was planning to leave and asked him for money for the train. I'll give you everything I've got, he answered, but I can't give you money to go away so I never see you again. Lola didn't insist. Somehow, though she didn't tell Amalfitano how she did it, she scraped together just enough money for a ticket, and one day at noon she took the train to France. She was in Bayonne for a while. She left for Landes. She returned to Bayonne. She was in Pau and in Lourdes. One morning she saw a train full of sick people, paralyzed people, adolescents with cerebral palsy, farmers with skin cancer, terminally ill Castilian bureaucrats, polite old ladies dressed like Carmelite nuns, people with rashes, blind children, and without knowing how she began to help them, as if she were a nun in jeans stationed there by the church to aid and direct the desperate, who one by one got on buses parked outside the train station or waited in long lines as if each person were a scale on a giant and old and cruel but vigorous snake. Then trains came from Italy and from the north of France, and Lola went back and forth like a sleepwalker, her big blue eyes unblinking, moving slowly, since the weariness of her days was beginning to weigh on her, and she was permitted entry to every part of the station, some rooms converted into first aid posts, others into resuscitation posts, and just one, discreetly located, converted into an improvised morgue for the bodies of those whose strength hadn't been equal to the accelerated wear and tear of the train trip. At night she slept in the most modern building in Lourdes, a functionalist monster of steel and glass that buried its head, bristling with antennas, in the white clouds that floated down from the north, big and sorrowful, or marched from the west like a ragtag army whose only strength was its numbers, or dropped down from the Pyrenees like the ghosts of dead beasts. There she would sleep in the trash compartments, which she entered through a tiny door. Other times she would stay at the station, at the station bar, when the chaos of the trains subsided, and let the old men buy her coffee and talk to her about movies and crops. One afternoon she thought she saw Imma get off the train from Madrid escorted by a troop of cripples. She was the same height as Imma, she was wearing long black skirts like Imma, her doleful Castilian nun's face was just like Imma's face. Lola sat still until she had gone by and didn't call out to her, and five minutes later she elbowed her way out of the Lourdes station and the town of Lourdes and walked to the highway and only then did she try to thumb a ride.

For five years, Amalfitano had no news of Lola. One afternoon, when he was at the playground with his daughter, he saw a woman leaning against the wooden fence that separated the playground from the rest of the park. He thought she looked like Imma and he followed her gaze and was relieved to discover that it was another child who had attracted her madwoman's attention. The boy was wearing shorts and was a little older than Amalfitano's daughter, and he had dark, very silky hair that kept falling in his face. Between the fence and the benches that the city had put there so parents could sit and watch their children, a hedge struggled to grow, reaching all the way to an old oak tree outside the playground. Imma's hand, her hard, gnarled hand, roughened by the sun and icy rivers, stroked the freshly clipped top of the hedge as one might stroke a dog's back. Next to her was a big plastic bag. Amalfitano walked toward her, willing himself futilely to be calm. His daughter was in line for the slide. Suddenly, before he could speak to Imma, Amalfitano saw that the boy had at last noticed her watchful presence, and once he had brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes he raised his right arm and waved to her several times. Then Imma, as if this were the sign she'd been waiting for, silently raised her left arm, waved, and went walking out of the park through the north gate, which led onto a busy street.

Five years after she left, Amalfitano heard from Lola again. The letter was short and came from Paris. In it Lola told him that she had a job cleaning big office buildings. It was a night job that started at ten and ended at four or five or six in the morning. Paris was pretty then, like all big cities when everyone is asleep. She would take the metro home. The metro at that hour was the saddest thing in the world. She'd had another child, a son, named Benoit, with whom she lived. She'd also been in the hospital. She didn't say why, or whether she was still sick. She didn't mention any man. She didn't ask about Rosa. For her it's as if Rosa doesn't exist, thought Amalfitano, but then it struck him that this might not be the case at all. He cried for a while with the letter in his hands. It was only as he was drying his eyes that he noticed the letter was typed. He knew, without a doubt, that Lola had written it from one of the offices she said she cleaned. For a second he thought it was all a lie, that Lola was working as an administrative assistant or secretary in some big company. Then he saw it clearly. He saw the vacuum cleaner parked between two rows of desks, saw the floor waxer like a cross between a mastiff and a pig sitting next to a plant, he saw an enormous window through which the lights of Paris blinked, he saw Lola in the cleaning company's smock, a worn blue smock, sitting writing the letter and maybe taking slow drags on a cigarette, he saw Lola's fingers, Lola's wrists, Lola's blank eyes, he saw another Lola reflected in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris, like a trick photograph that isn't a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary, sending messages from the coldest, iciest realm of passion.

Two years after she sent this last letter, seven years after she'd abandoned Amalfitano and her daughter, Lola came home and found them gone. She spent three weeks asking around at old addresses for her husband's whereabouts. Some people didn't let her in, because they couldn't figure out who she was or they had forgotten her long ago. Others kept her standing in the doorway, because they didn't trust her or because Lola had simply got the address wrong. A few asked her in and offered her a cup of coffee or tea that Lola never accepted, since she was apparently in a hurry to see her daughter and Amalfitano. At first the search was discouraging and unreal. She talked to people even she had forgotten. At night she slept in a boardinghouse near Las Ramblas, where foreign workers crammed into tiny rooms. She found the city changed but she couldn't say what exactly was different. In the afternoons, after walking all day, she would sit on the steps of a church to rest and listen to the conversations of the people going in and out, mostly tourists. She read books in French about Greece or witchcraft or healthy living. Sometimes she felt like Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, wandering in disguise through Mycenae, the killer mingling with the plebes, the masses, the killer whose mind no one understands, not even the FBI special agents or the charitable people who dropped coins in her hands. Other times she saw herself as the mother of Medon and Strophius, a happy mother who watches her children play from the window while behind them the blue sky struggles in the white arms of the Mediterranean. She whispered: Pylades, Orestes, and those two names stood in her mind for the faces of many men, except Amalfitano's, the face of the man she was looking for now. One night she met an ex-student of her husband's, who recognized her at once, as if in his university days he had been in love with her. The ex-student took her home, told her she could stay as long as she wanted, fixed up the guest room for her exclusive use. The second night, as they were having dinner together, the ex-student embraced her and she let him embrace her for a few seconds, as if she needed him too, and then she said something into his ear and the ex-student moved away and went to sit on the floor in a corner of the living room. They were like that for hours, she sitting in her chair and he sitting on the floor, which was a very odd parquet, dark yellow, so that it looked more like a tightly woven straw rug. The candles on the table went out and only then did she go and sit in the living room, in the opposite corner. In the dark she thought she heard faint sobs. She supposed the young man was crying and she fell asleep, lulled by his weeping. For the next few days she and the ex-student redoubled their efforts. When she saw Amalfitano at last she didn't recognize him. He was fatter than before and he'd lost some of his hair. She spotted him from a distance and didn't hesitate for a second as she approached him. Amalfitano was sitting under a larch and smoking with an absent look on his face. You've changed a lot, she said. Amalfitano recognized her instantly. You haven't, he said. Thank you, she said. Then Amalfitano stood up and they left.

In those days, Amalfitano was living in Sant Cugat and teaching philosophy classes at Barcelona 's Universidad Autonoma, not far away. Rosa went to a public elementary school in town and left at eight-thirty in the morning and didn't come home until five. Lola saw Rosa and told her she was her mother. Rosa screamed and hugged her and then almost immediately ran away to hide in her bedroom. That night, after showering and making up her bed on the sofa, Lola told Amalfitano that she was very sick, she would probably die, and she had wanted to see Rosa one last time. Amalfitano offered to take her to the hospital the next day, but Lola refused, saying French doctors had always been better than Spanish doctors, and she took some papers out of her bag that stated in no uncertain terms and in French that she had AIDS. The next day, when he got back from the university, Amalfitano spotted Lola and Rosa walking near the station holding hands. He didn't want to disturb them and he followed them from a distance. When he got home they were sitting together watching TV. Later, when Rosa was asleep, he asked Lola about her son Benoit. For a while she was silent, recalling with near photographic memory each part of her son's body, each gesture, each expression of astonishment or surprise, then she said that Benoit was an intelligent and sensitive boy, and that he had been the first to know she was going to die. Amalfitano asked her who had told him, although he thought, with resignation, that he knew the answer. He realized it without anyone telling him, said Lola, just by looking. It's terrible for a child to know his mother is going to die, said Amalfitano. It's worse to lie to them, children should never be lied to, said Lola. On her fifth morning with them, when the medicine she had brought with her from France was about to run out, Lola told them she had to leave. Benoit is little and he needs me, she said. Actually, he doesn't need me, but that doesn't mean he isn't little, she said. I don't know who needs who, she said at last, but the fact is I have to go see how he is. Amalfitano left a note on the table and an envelope containing a good part of his savings. When he got back from work he thought Lola would be gone. He picked Rosa up at school and they walked home. When they got there Lola was sitting in front of the TV, which was on but with the sound off, reading her book on Greece. They had dinner together. Rosa went to bed near midnight. Amalfitano took her to her bedroom, undressed her, and tucked her in. Lola was waiting for him in the living room, with her suitcase packed. You should stay the night, said Amalfitano. It's too late to go. There aren't any more trains to Barcelona, he lied. I'm not taking the train, said Lola. I'm going to hitchhike. Amalfitano bowed his head and said she could go whenever she wanted. Lola gave him a kiss on the cheek and left. The next day Amalfitano got up at six and turned on the radio, to make sure no hitchhiker on any highway nearby had been murdered or raped. Nothing.

And yet this vision of Lola lingered in his mind for many years, like a memory rising up from glacial seas, although in fact he hadn't seen anything, which meant there was nothing to remember, only the shadow of his ex-wife projected on the neighboring buildings in the beam of the streetlights, and then the dream: Lola walking off down one of the highways out of Sant Cugat, walking along the side of the road, an almost deserted road since most cars took the new toll highway to save time, a woman bowed by the weight of her suitcase, fearless, walking fearlessly along the side of the road.

The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It also was like an empty dance club.

One afternoon Amalfitano went into the yard in his shirtsleeves, like a feudal lord riding out on horseback to survey his lands. The moment before, he'd been sitting on the floor of his study opening boxes of books with a kitchen knife, and in one of the boxes he'd found a strange book, a book he didn't remember ever buying or receiving as a gift. The book was Rafael Dieste's Testamento geometrico, published by Ediciones del Castro in La Coruna, in 1975, a book evidently about geometry, a subject that meant next to nothing to Amalfitano, divided into three parts, the first an "Introduction to Euclid, Lobachevsky and Riemann," the second concerning "The Geometry of Motion," and the third titled "Three Proofs of the V Postulate." This last was the most enigmatic by far since Amalfitano had no idea what the V Postulate was or what it consisted of, nor did he mean to find out, although this was probably owing not to a lack of curiosity, of which he possessed an ample supply, but to the heat that swept Santa Teresa in the afternoons, the dry, dusty heat of a bitter sun, inescapable unless you lived in a new apartment with air-conditioning, which Amalfitano didn't. The publication of the book had been made possible thanks to the support of some friends of the author, friends who'd been immortalized, in a photograph that looked as if it was taken at the end of a party, on page 4, where the publisher's information usually appears. What it said there was: The present edition is offered as a tribute to Rafael Dieste by: Ramon BALTAR DOMINGUEZ, Isaac DIAZ PARDO, Felipe FERNANDEZ ARMESTO, Francisco FERNANDEZ DEL RIEGO, Alvaro GIL VARELA, Domingo GARCIA-SABELL, Valentin PAZ-ANDRADE and Luis SEOANE LOPEZ. It struck Amalfitano as odd, to say the least, that the friends' last names had been printed in capitals while the name of the man being honored was in small letters. On the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento geometrico was really three books, "each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole," and then it said "this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's reflections and research on Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the fundamentals of Geometry." At that moment, Amalfitano thought he remembered that Rafael Dieste was a poet. A Galician poet, of course, or long settled in Galicia. And his friends and patrons were also Galician, naturally, or long settled in Galicia, where Dieste probably gave classes at the University of La Coruna or Santiago de Compostela, or maybe he was a high school teacher, teaching geometry to kids of fifteen or sixteen and looking out the window at the permanently overcast winter sky of Galicia and the pouring rain. And on the back flap there was more about Dieste. It said: "Of the books that make up Dieste's varied but in no way uneven body of work, which always cleaves to the demands of a personal process in which poetic creation and speculative creation are focused on a single object, the closest forerunners of the present book are Nuevo tratado del paralelismo (Buenos Aires, 1958) and more recent works: Variaciones sobre Zenon de Elea and ¿Que es un axioma? this followed by Movilidad y Semejanza together in one volume." So, thought Amalfitano, his face running with sweat to which microscopic particles of dust adhered, Dieste's passion for geometry wasn't something new. And his patrons, in this new light, were no longer friends who got together every night at the club to drink and talk politics or football or mistresses. Instead, in a flash, they became distinguished university colleagues, some doubtless retired but others fully active, and all well-to-do or relatively well-to-do, which of course didn't mean that they didn't meet up every so often like provincial intellectuals, or in other words like deeply self-sufficient men, at the La Coruna club to drink good cognac or whiskey and talk about intrigues and mistresses while their wives, or in the case of the widowers, their housekeepers, were sitting in front of the TV or preparing supper. But the question for Amalfitano was how this book had ended up in one of his boxes. For half an hour he searched his memory, leafing distractedly through Dieste's book. Finally he concluded that for the moment it was a mystery beyond his powers to solve, but he didn't give up. He asked Rosa, who was in the bathroom putting on makeup, if the book was hers. Rosa looked at it and said no. Amalfitano begged her to look again and tell him for sure whether it was hers or not. Rosa asked him if he was feeling all right. I feel fine, said Amalfitano, but this book isn't mine and it showed up in one of the boxes of books I sent from Barcelona. Rosa told him, in Catalan, not to worry, and kept putting on her makeup. How can I not worry, said Amalfitano, also in Catalan, when it feels like I'm losing my memory. Rosa looked at the book again and said: it might be mine. Are you sure? asked Amalfitano. No, it isn't mine, said Rosa, I'm sure it isn't, in fact, I've never seen it before. Amalfitano left his daughter in front of the bathroom mirror and went back out into the desolate yard, where everything was a dusty brown, as if the desert had settled around his new house, with the book dangling from his hand. He thought back on the bookstores where he might have bought it. He looked at the first page and the last page and the back cover for some sign, and on the first page he found a stamp reading Libreria Follas Novas, S.L., Montero Rios 37, phone 981-59-44-06 and 981-59-44-18, Santiago. Clearly it wasn't Santiago de Chile, the only place in the world where Amalfitano could see himself in a state of total catatonia, walking into a bookstore, choosing some book without even looking at the cover, paying for it, and leaving. Obviously, it was Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia. For an instant Amalfitano envisioned a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago. He walked to the back of the yard, where his wooden fence met the cement wall surrounding the house behind his. He had never really looked at it. Glass shards, he thought, the owners' fear of unwanted guests. The edges of the shards were reflecting the afternoon sun when Amalfitano resumed his walk around the desolate yard. The wall of the house next door was also bristling with glass, here mostly green and brown glass from beer and liquor bottles. Never, even in dreams, had he been in Santiago de Compostela, Amalfitano had to acknowledge, halting in the shadow of the left-hand wall. But that hardly mattered. Some of the bookstores he frequented in Barcelona carried stock bought directly from other bookstores in Spain, from bookstores that were selling off their inventories or closing, or, in a few cases, that functioned as both bookstore and distributor. I probably picked it up at Laie, he thought, or maybe at La Central, the time I stopped in to buy some philosophy book and the clerk was excited because Pere Gimferrer, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and Juan Villoro were all there, arguing about whether it was a good idea to fly, and plane accidents, and which was more dangerous, taking off or landing, and she mistakenly put this book in my bag. La Central, that makes sense. But if that was the way it happened I'd have discovered the book when I got home and opened the bag or the package or whatever it was, unless, of course, something terrible or upsetting happened to me on the walk home that eliminated any desire or curiosity I had to examine my new book or books. It's even possible that I might have opened the package like a zombie and left the new book on the night table and Dieste's book on the bookshelf, shaken by something I'd just seen on the street, maybe a car accident, maybe a mugging, maybe a suicide in the subway, although if I had seen something like that, thought Amalfitano, I would surely remember it now or at least retain a vague memory of it. I wouldn't remember the Testamento geometrico, but I would remember whatever had made me forget the Testamento geometrico. And as if this wasn't enough, the biggest problem wasn't really where the book had come from but how it had ended up in Santa Teresa in one of Amalfitano's boxes of books, books he had chosen in Barcelona before he left. At what point of utter obliviousness had he put it there? How could he have packed a book without noticing what he was doing? Had he planned to read it when he got to the north of Mexico? Had he planned to use it as the starting point for a desultory study of geometry? And if that was his plan, why had he forgotten the moment he arrived in this city rising up in the middle of nowhere? Had the book disappeared from his memory while he and his daughter were flying east to west? Or had it disappeared from his memory as he was waiting for his boxes of books to arrive, once he was in Santa Teresa? Had Dieste's book vanished as a side effect of jet lag?

Amalfitano had some rather idiosyncratic ideas about jet lag. They weren't consistent, so it might be an exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape. He believed (or liked to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn't exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn't exist or hadn't yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn't traveled. This was something he'd probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that he'd forgotten having read.

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

And although Amalfitano later found more information on the life and works of Rafael Dieste at the University of Santa Teresa library-information that confirmed what he had already guessed or what Don Domingo Garcia-Sabell had insinuated in his prologue, titled "Enlightened Intuition," which went so far as to quote Heidegger (Es gibt Zeit: there is time)-on the afternoon when he'd ranged over his humble and barren lands like a medieval squire, as his daughter, like a medieval princess, finished applying her makeup in front of the bathroom mirror, he could in no way remember why or where he'd bought the book or how it had ended up packed and sent with other more familiar and cherished volumes to this populous city that stood in defiance of the desert on the border of Sonora and Arizona. And it was then, just then, as if it were the pistol shot inaugurating a series of events that would build upon each other with sometimes happy and sometimes disastrous consequences, Rosa left the house and said she was going to the movies with a friend and asked if he had his keys and Amalfitano said yes and he heard the door bang shut and then he heard his daughter's footsteps along the path of uneven paving stones to the tiny wooden gate that didn't even come up to her waist and then he heard his daughter's footsteps on the sidewalk, heading off toward the bus stop, and then he heard the engine of a car starting. And then Amalfitano walked into his devastated front yard and looked up and down the street, craning his neck, and didn't see any car or Rosa and he gripped Dieste's book tightly, which he was still holding in his left hand. And then he looked up at the sky and saw the moon, too big and too wrinkled, although it wasn't night yet. And then he returned to his ravaged backyard and for a few seconds he stopped, looking left and right, ahead and behind, trying to see his shadow, but although it was still daytime and the sun was still shining in the west, toward Tijuana, he couldn't see it. And then his eyes fell on the four rows of cord, each tied at one end to a kind of miniature soccer goal, two posts perhaps six feet tall planted in the ground, and a third post bolted horizontally across the top, making them sturdier, the cords strung from this top bar to hooks fixed in the side of the house. It was the clothesline, although the only things he saw hanging on it were a shirt of Rosa 's, white with ocher embroidery around the neck, and a pair of underpants and two towels, still dripping. In the corner, in a brick hut, was the washing machine. For a while he didn't move, breathing with his mouth open, leaning on the horizontal bar of the clothesline. Then he went into the hut as if he were short of oxygen, and from a plastic bag with the logo of the supermarket where he went with his daughter to do the weekly shopping, he took out three clothespins, which he persisted in calling perritos, as they were called in Chile, and with them he clamped the book and hung it from one of the cords and then he went back into the house, feeling much calmer.

The idea, of course, was Duchamp's.

All that exists, or remains, of Duchamp's stay in Buenos Aires is a ready-made. Though of course his whole life was a readymade, which was his way of appeasing fate and at the same time sending out signals of distress. As Calvin Tomkins writes: As a wedding present for his sister Suzanne and his close friend Jean Crotti, who were married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could "go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages." Clearly, then, Duchamp wasn't just playing chess in Buenos Aires. Tompkins continues: This Unhappy Readymade, as he called it, might strike some newlyweds as an oddly cheerless wedding gift, but Suzanne and Jean carried out Duchamp's instructions in good spirit; they took a photograph of the open hook dangling in midair (the only existing record of the work, which did not survive its exposure to the elements), and Suzanne later painted a picture of it called Le Readymade malheureux de Marcel. As Duchamp later told Cabanne, "It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea." I take it back: all Duchamp did while he was in Buenos Aires was play chess. Yvonne, who was with him, got sick of all his play-science and left for France. According to Tompkins: Duchamp told one interviewer in later years that he had liked disparaging "the seriousness of a book full of principles," and suggested to another that, in its exposure to the weather, "the treatise seriously got the facts of life."

That night, when Rosa got back from the movies, Amalfitano was watching television in the living room and he told her he'd hung Dieste's book on the clothesline. Rosa looked at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about. I mean, said Amalfitano, I didn't hang it out because it got sprayed with the hose or dropped in the water, I hung it there just because, to see how it survives the assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate. I hope you aren't going crazy, said Rosa. No, don't worry, said Amalfitano, in fact looking quite cheerful. I'm telling you so you don't take it down. Just pretend the book doesn't exist. Fine, Rosa said, and she shut herself in her room.

The next day, as his students wrote, or as he himself was talking, Amalfitano began to draw very simple geometric figures, a triangle, a rectangle, and at each vertex he wrote whatever name came to him, dictated by fate or lethargy or the immense boredom he felt thanks to his students and the classes and the oppressive heat that had settled over the city. Like this:

Drawing 1

Or like this:

Drawing 2

Or like this:

Drawing 3

When he returned to his cubicle he discovered the paper and before he threw it in the trash he examined it for a few minutes. The only possible explanation for Drawing 1 was boredom. Drawing 2 seemed an extension of Drawing 1, but the names he had added struck him as insane. Socrates made sense, there was a fleeting logic there, and Protagoras, too but why Thomas More and Saint-Simon? Why Diderot, what was he doing there, and God in heaven, why the Portuguese Jesuit Pedro da Fonseca, one of the thousands of commentators on Aristotle, who by no amount of forceps wiggling could be taken for anything but a very minor thinker? In contrast, there was a certain logic to Drawing 3, the logic of a teenage moron, or a teen bum in the desert, his clothes in tatters, but clothes even so. All the names, it could be said, were of philosophers who concerned themselves with ontological questions. The B that appeared at the apex of the triangle superimposed on the rectangle could be God or the existence of God as derived from his essence. Only then did Amalfitano notice that an A and a B also appeared in Drawing 2, and he no longer had any doubt that the heat, to which he was unaccustomed, was affecting his mind as he taught his classes.

That night, however, after he had finished his dinner and watched the TV news and talked on the phone to Professor Silvia Perez, who was outraged at the way the Sonora police and the local Santa Teresa police were carrying out the investigation of the crimes, Amalfitano found three more diagrams on his desk. It was clear he had drawn them himself. In fact, he remembered doodling absentmindedly on a blank sheet of paper as he thought other things. Drawing 1 (or Drawing 4) was like this:

Drawing 4

Drawing 5

193

And Drawing 6

Drawing 4 was odd. Trendelenburg-it had been years since he thought about Trendelenburg. Adolf Trendelenburg. Why now, precisely, and why in the company of Bergson and Heidegger and Nietzsche and Spengler? Drawing 5 was even odder. The appearance of Kolakowski and Vattimo. The presence of Whitehead, forgotten until now. But especially the unexpected materialization of poor Guyau, Jean-Marie Guyau, dead at thirty-four in 1888, called the French Nietzsche by some jokers, with no more than ten disciples in the whole world, although really there were only six, and Amalfitano knew this because in Barcelona he had met the only Spanish Guyautist, a professor from Gerona, shy and a zealot in his own way, whose great quest was to find a text (it might have been a poem or a philosophical piece or an article, he wasn't sure) that Guyau had written in English and published in a San Francisco newspaper sometime around 1886-1887. Finally, Drawing 6 was the oddest of all (and the least "philosophical"). What said it all was the appearance at opposite ends of the horizontal axis of Vladimir Smirnov, who disappeared in Stalin's concentration camps in 1938 (not to be confused with Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, executed by the Stalinists in 1936 after the first Moscow show trial), and Suslov, party ideologue, prepared to countenance any atrocity or crime. But the intersection of the horizontal by two slanted lines, reading Bunge and Revel above and Harold Bloom and Allan Bloom below, was something like a joke. And yet it was a joke Amalfitano didn't understand, especially the appearance of the two Blooms. There had to be something funny about it, but whatever it might be, he couldn't put his finger on it, no matter how he tried.

That night, as his daughter slept, and after he listened to the last news broadcast on Santa Teresa's most popular radio station, Voice of the Border, Amalfitano went out into the yard. He smoked a cigarette, staring into the deserted street, then he headed for the back, moving hesitantly, if he feared stepping in a hole or was afraid of the reigning darkness. Dieste's book was still hanging with the clothes Rosa had washed that day, clothes that seemed to be made of cement or some very heavy material, because they didn't move at all, while the fitful breeze swung the book back and forth, as if it were grudgingly rocking it or trying to detach it from the clothespins holding it to the line. Amalfitano felt the breeze on his face. He was sweating and the irregular gusts of air dried the little drops of perspiration and occluded his soul. As if I were in Trendelenburg's study, he thought, as if I were following in Whitehead's footsteps along the edge of a canal, as if I were approaching Guyau's sickbed and asking him for advice. What would his response have been? Be happy. Live in the moment. Be good. Or rather: Who are you? What are you doing here? Go away.

Help.

The next day, searching in the university library, he found more information on Dieste. Born in Rianxo, La Corufia, in 1899. Begins writing in Galician, although later he switches to Castilian or writes in both. Man of the theater. Anti-Fascist during the Civil War. After his side's defeat he goes into exile, ending up in Buenos Aires, where he publishes Viaje, duelo y perdition: tragedia, humorada y comedia, in 1945, a book made up of three previously published works. Poet. Essayist. In 1958 (Amalfitano is seven), he publishes the aforementioned Nuevo tratado del paralelismo. As a short story writer, his most important work is Historia e invenciones de Felix Muriel (1943). Returns to Spain, returns to Galicia. Dies in Santiago de Compostela in 1981.

What's the experiment? asked Rosa. What experiment? asked Amalfitano. With the hanging book, said Rosa. It isn't an experiment in the literal sense of the word, said Amalfitano. Why is it there? asked Rosa. It occurred to me all of a sudden, said Amalfitano, it's a Duchamp idea, leaving a geometry book hanging exposed to the elements to see if it learns something about real life. You're going to destroy it, said Rosa. Not me, said Amalfitano, nature. You're getting crazier every day, you know, said Rosa. Amalfitano smiled. I've never seen you do a thing like that to a book, said Rosa. It isn't mine, said Amalfitano. It doesn't matter, Rosa said, it's yours now. It's funny, said Amalfitano, that's how I should feel, but I really don't have the sense it belongs to me, and anyway I'm almost sure I'm not doing it any harm. Well, pretend it's mine and take it down, said Rosa, the neighbors are going to think you're crazy. The neighbors: who top their walls with broken glass? They don't even know we exist, said Amalfitano, and they're a thousand times crazier than me. No, not them, said Rosa, the other ones, the ones who can see exactly what's going on in our yard. Have any of them bothered you? asked Amalfitano. No, said Rosa. Then it's not a problem, said Amalfitano, it's silly to worry' about it when much worse things are happening in this city than a book being hung from a cord. Two wrongs don't make a right, said Rosa, we're not animals. Leave the book alone, pretend it doesn't exist, forget about it, said Amalfitano, you've never been interested in geometry.

In the mornings, before he left for the university, Amalfitano would go out the back door to watch the book while he finished his coffee. No doubt about it: it had been printed on good paper and the binding was stoically withstanding nature's onslaught. Rafael Dieste's old friends had chosen good materials for their tribute, a tribute that amounted to an early farewell from a circle of learned old men (or old men with a patina of learning) to another learned old man. In any case, nature in northwestern Mexico, and particularly in his desolate yard, thought Amalfitano, was in short supply. One morning, as he was waiting for the bus to the university, he made firm plans to plant grass or a lawn, and also to buy a little tree in some store that sold that kind of thing, and plant flowers along the fence. Another morning he thought that any work he did to make the yard nicer would ultimately be pointless, since he didn't plan to stay long in Santa Teresa. I have to go back now, he said to himself, but where? And then he asked himself: what made me come here? Why did I bring my daughter to this cursed city? Because it was one of the few hellholes in the world I hadn't seen yet? Because I really just want to die? And then he looked at Dieste's book, the Testamento geometrico, hanging impassively from the line, held there by two clothespins, and he felt the urge to take it down and wipe off the ocher dust that had begun to cling to it here and there, but he didn't dare.

Sometimes, after he came home from the University of Santa Teresa or while he sat on the porch and read his students' essays, Amalfitano remembered his father, who followed boxing. Amalfitano's father used to say that all Chileans were faggots. Amalfitano, who was ten, said: but Dad, it's really the Italians who are faggots, just look at World War II. Amalfitano's father gave his son a very serious look when he heard him say that. His own father, Amalfitano's grandfather, was born in Naples. And he himself always felt more Italian than Chilean. But anyway, he liked to talk about boxing, or rather he liked to talk about fights that he'd only read about in the usual articles in boxing magazines or the sports page. So he would talk about the Loayza brothers, Mario and Ruben, nephews of El Tani, and about Godfrey Stevens, a stately faggot with no punch, and about Humberto Loayza, also a nephew of El Tani, who had a good punch but no stamina, about Arturo Godoy, a wily fighter and martyr, about Luis Vicentini, a powerfully built Italian from Chillan who was defeated by the sad fate of being born in Chile, and about Estanislao Loayza, El Tani, who was robbed of the world title in the United States in the most ridiculous way, when the referee stepped on his foot in the first round and El Tani fractured his ankle. Can you imagine? Amalfitano's father asked. I can't imagine, Amalfitano said. Let's give it a try, said Amalfitano's father, shadowbox around me and I'll step on your foot. I'd rather not, said Amalfitano. You can trust me, you'll be fine, said Amalfitano's father. Some other time, said Amalfitano. It has to be now, said his father. Then Amalfitano put up his fists and moved around his father with surprising agility, throwing a few jabs with his left and hooks with his right, and suddenly his father moved in and stepped on his foot and that was the end of it, Amalfitano stood still or tried to go in for a clinch or pulled away, but in no way fractured his ankle. I think the referee did it on purpose, said Amalfitano's father. You can't fuck up somebody's ankle by stomping on his foot. Then came the rant: Chilean boxers are all faggots, all the people in this shitty country are faggots, every one of them, happy to be cheated, happy to be bought, happy to pull down their pants the minute someone asks them to take off their watches. It was at this point that Amalfitano, who at ten read history Magazines, especially military history magazines, not sports magazines, answered that the Italians had already claimed that role, all the way back World War II. His father was silent then, looking at his son with frank admiration and pride, as if asking himself where the hell the kid had come from, and then he was silent for a while longer and afterward he said in a low voice, as if telling a secret, that Italians were brave individually. In large numbers, he admitted, they were hopeless. And this, he explained, was precisely what gave a person hope.

By which you might guess, thought Amalfitano, as he went out the front door and paused on the porch with his whiskey and then looked out into the street where a few cars were parked, cars that had been left there for hours and smelled, or so it seemed to him, of scrap metal and blood, before he turned and headed around the side of the house to the backyard where the Testamento geometrico was waiting for him in the stillness and the dark, by which you might guess that he himself, deep down, very deep down, was still a hopeful person, since he was Italian by blood, as well as an individualist and a civilized person. And it was even possible that he wasn't a coward. Although he didn't like boxing. But then Dieste's book fluttered and the black handkerchief of the breeze dried the sweat beading on his forehead and Amalfitano closed his eyes and tried to conjure up any image of his father, in vain. When he went back inside, not through the back door but through the front door, he peered over the gate and looked both ways down the street. Some nights he had the feeling he was being spied on.

In the mornings, when Amalfitano came into the kitchen and left his coffee cup in the sink after his obligatory visit to Dieste's book, Rosa was the first to leave. They didn't usually speak, although sometimes, if Amalfitano came in sooner than usual or put off going into the backyard, he would say goodbye, remind her to take care of herself, or give her a kiss. One morning he managed only to say goodbye, then he sat at the table looking out the window at the clothesline. The Testamento geometrico was moving imperceptibly. Suddenly, it stopped. The birds that had been singing in the neighboring yards were quiet. Everything was plunged into complete silence for an instant. Amalfitano thought he heard the sound of the gate and his daughter's footsteps receding. Then he heard a car start. That night, as Rosa watched a movie she'd rented, Amalfitano called Professor Perez and confessed that he was turning into a nervous wreck. Professor Perez soothed him, told him not to worry so much, all you had to do was be careful, there was no point giving in to paranoia. She reminded him that the victims were usually kidnapped in other parts of the city. Amalfitano listened to her talk and all of a sudden laughed. He told her his nerves were in tatters. Professor Perez didn't get the joke. Nobody gets anything here, thought Amalfitano angrily. Then Professor Perez tried to convince him to come out that weekend, with Rosa and Professor Perez's son. Where to, asked Amalfitano, almost inaudibly. We could go eat at a merendero ten miles out of the city, she said, a very nice place, with a pool for the kids and lots of outdoor tables in the shade with a view of the slopes of a quartz mountain, a silver mountain with black streaks. At the top of the mountain there was a chapel built of black adobe. The inside was dark, except for the light that came in through a kind of skylight, and the walls were covered in ex-votos written by travelers and Indians in the nineteenth century who had risked the pass between Chihuahua and Sonora.

Amalfitano's first few days in Santa Teresa and at the University of Santa Teresa were miserable, although Amalfitano was only half aware of the fact. He felt ill, but he thought it was jet lag and ignored it. A faculty colleague, a young professor from Hermosillo who had only recently finished his degree, asked what had made him choose the University of Santa Teresa over the University of Barcelona. I hope it wasn't the climate, he said. The climate here seems wonderful, answered Amalfitano. Oh, I agree, said the young professor, I just meant that the people who come here for the climate are usually ill and I sincerely hope that's not the case with you. No, said Amalfitano, it wasn't the climate, my contract had run out in Barcelona and Professor Perez convinced me to take a job here. He had met Professor Silvia Perez in Buenos Aires and then they had seen each other twice in Barcelona. It was she who had rented the house and bought some furniture for him. Amalfitano paid her back even before he collected his first paycheck to prevent any misunderstandings. The house was in Colonia Lindavista, an upper-middle-class neighborhood of one- and two-story houses with yards. The sidewalk, cracked by the roots of two enormous trees, was shady and pleasant, although behind the gates some of the houses were in advanced states of disrepair, as if the neighbors had left in a hurry, with no time even to sell, which would suggest that it hadn't been so hard to rent in the neighborhood, no matter what Professor Perez claimed. He took a dislike to the dean of the Faculty of Literature, to whom Professor Perez introduced him on his second day in Santa Teresa. The dean's name was Augusto Guerra and he had the pale, shiny skin of a fat man, but he was actually thin and wiry. He didn't seem very sure of himself, although he tried to disguise it with a combination of folk wisdom and a military air. He didn't really believe in philosophy either, or, by extension, in the teaching of philosophy, a discipline frankly on the decline in the face of the current and future marvels that science has to offer, he said. Amalfitano asked politely whether he felt the same way about literature. No, literature does have a future, believe it or not, and so does history, Augusto Guerra had said, take biographies, there used to be almost no supply or demand and today all anybody does is read them. Of course, I'm talking about biographies, not memoirs. People have a thirst to learn about other people's lives, the lives of their famous contemporaries, the ones who made it big or came close, and they also have a thirst to know what the old chincuales did, maybe even learn something, although they aren't prepared to jump through the same hoops themselves. Amalfitano asked politely what chincuales meant, since he had never heard the word. Really? asked Augusto Guerra. I swear, said Amalfitano. Then the dean asked Professor Perez: Silvita, do you know what chincuales means? Professor Perez took Amalfitano's arm, as if they were lovers, and confessed that really she didn't have the slightest idea, although the word rang a bell. What a pack of imbeciles, thought Amalfitano. The word chincuales, said Augusto Guerra, like all the words in the Mexican tongue, has a number of senses. First, it means flea or bedbug bites, those little red welts, you know? The bites itch, and the poor victims can't stop scratching, as you can readily imagine. Hence the second meaning, which is restless people who squirm and scratch and can't sit still, to the discomfort of anyone who's forced to watch them. Like European scabies, say, like all those people with scabies in Europe, who pick it up in public restrooms or in those horrendous French, Italian, and Spanish latrines. Related to this is the final sense, call it the Guerrist sense, which applies to a certain class of traveler, to adventurers of the mind, those who can't keep still mentally. Ah, said Amalfitano. Magnificent, said Professor Perez. Also present at this impromptu gathering in the dean's office, which Amalfitano thought of as a welcome meeting, were three other professors from the literature department, and Guerra's secretary, who uncorked a bottle of Californian champagne and passed out paper cups and crackers. Then Guerra's son came in. He was maybe twenty-five years old, in sunglasses and a track suit, his skin very tanned. He spent all his time in a corner talking to his father's secretary and glancing every so often at Amalfitano with an amused look on his face.

The night before the excursion, Amalfitano heard the voice for the first time. Maybe he'd heard it before, in the street or while he was asleep, and thought it was part of someone else's conversation or that he was having a nightmare. But that night he heard it and he had no doubt whatsoever that it was addressing him. At first he thought he'd gone crazy. The voice said: hello, Oscar Amalfitano, please don't be afraid, there's nothing wrong. Amalfitano was afraid. He got up and rushed to his daughter's room. Rosa was sleeping peacefully. Amalfitano turned on the light and checked the window latch. Rosa woke up and asked what was wrong with him. Not what was wrong, what was wrong with him. I must look terrible, thought Amalfitano. He sat in a chair and told her he was ridiculously nervous, he'd thought he heard a noise, he was sorry he'd brought her to this disgusting city. Don't worry, it's no big deal, said Rosa. Amalfitano gave her a kiss on the cheek, stroked her hair, and went out but didn't turn off the light. After a while, as he was looking out the living room window at the yard and the street and the still branches of the trees, he heard Rosa turn off the light. He went out the back door, without making a sound. He wished he had a flashlight, but he went out anyway. No one was there. Hanging on the clothesline were the Testamento geometrico and some of his socks and a pair of his daughter's pants. He circled the yard. There was no one on the porch. He went over to the gate and inspected the street, without going out, and all he saw was a dog heading calmly toward Avenida Madero, to the bus stop. A dog on its way to the bus stop, Amalfitano said to himself. From where he was he thought he could tell that it was a mutt, not a purebreed. A quiltro, thought Amalfitano. He laughed to himself. Those Chilean words. Those cracks in the psyche. That hockey rink the size of Atacama where the players never saw a member of the opposing team and only every so often saw a member of their own. He went back into the house. He locked the door and windows, took a short, sturdy knife out of a drawer in the kitchen and set it down next to a history of German and French philosophy from 1900 to 1930, then sat back down at the table.

The voice said: don't think this is easy for me. If you think it's easy for me, you're one hundred percent wrong. In fact, it's hard. Ninety percent hard. Amalfitano closed his eyes and thought he was going crazy. He didn't have any tranquilizers in the house. He got up. He went into the kitchen and splashed water on his face with both hands. He dried himself with the kitchen towel and his sleeves. He tried to remember the psychiatric name for the auditory phenomenon he was experiencing. He went back into his office and after closing the door he sat down again, with his head bowed and his hands on the table. The voice said: I beg you to forgive me. I beg you to relax. I beg you not to consider this a violation of your freedom. Of my freedom? thought Amalfitano, surprised, as he sprang to the window and opened it and looked out at the side yard and the wall of the house next door, spiky with glass, and the reflection of the streetlights in the shards of broken bottles, very faint green and brown and orange gleams, as if at this time of night the wall stopped being a barricade and became or played at becoming ornamental, a tiny element in a choreography the basic features of which even the ostensible choreographer, the feudal lord next door, couldn't have identified, features that affected the stability, color, and offensive or defensive nature of his fortification. Or as if there was a vine growing on the wall, Amalfitano thought before he closed the window.

That night there were no further manifestations of the voice and Amalfitano slept very badly, his sleep plagued by jerks and starts, as if someone was scratching his arms and legs, his body drenched in sweat, although at five in the morning the torment ceased and Lola appeared in his sleep, waving to him from a park behind a tall fence (he was on the other side), along with the faces of two friends he hadn't seen for years (and would probably never see again), and a room full of philosophy books covered in dust but still magnificent. At that same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighborhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano's shirts and pants and slipping into his daughter's underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geometrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind.

At eight o'clock Amalfitano dragged himself into the kitchen. His daughter asked how he'd slept. A rhetorical question that Amalfitano answered with a shrug. When Rosa went out to buy provisions for their day in the country, he made himself a cup of tea with milk and went into the living room to drink it. Then he opened the curtains and asked himself whether he was up to the trip planned by Professor Perez. He decided that he was, that what had happened to him the night before might have been his body's response to the attack of a local virus or the onset of the flu. Before he got in the shower he took his temperature. He didn't have a fever. For ten minutes he stood under the spray, thinking about his behavior the night before, which embarrassed him and even made him blush. Every so often he lifted his head so that the water streamed directly onto his face. The water tasted different from the water in Barcelona. The water in Santa Teresa seemed much denser, as if it weren't filtered at all but came loaded with minerals, tasting of earth. In the first few days he had acquired the habit, which he shared with Rosa, of brushing his teeth twice as often as he had in Barcelona, because it seemed to him that his teeth were turning brown, as if they were being covered in a thin film of some substance from the underground rivers of Sonora. As time passed, though, he went back to brushing them three or four times a day. Rosa, more concerned about her appearance, kept brushing six or seven times. In his class he noticed some students with ocher-colored teeth. Professor Perez had white teeth. Once he asked her: was it true that the water in that part of Sonora stained the teeth? Professor Perez didn't know. It's the first I've heard of it, she said, and she promised to find out. It's not important, said Amalfitano, alarmed, it's not important, forget I asked. In the expression on Professor Perez's face he had detected a hint of unease, as if the question concealed some other question, this one highly offensive and wounding. You have to watch what you say, sang Amalfitano in the shower, feeling completely recovered, sure proof of his frequent irresponsibility.

Rosa came back with two newspapers that she left on the table, then she started to make ham or tuna sandwiches with lettuce and slices of tomato and mayonnaise or salsa rosa. She wrapped the sandwiches in paper towels and aluminum foil and put them all in a plastic bag that she stowed in a small brown knapsack with the words University of Phoenix printed on it in an arc, and she also put in two bottles of water and a: dozen paper cups. At nine-thirty they heard Professor Perez's horn. Professor Perez's son was sixteen and short, with a square face and broad shoulders, as if he played some sport. His face and part of his neck were covered in pimples. Professor Perez was wearing jeans and a white shirt and a white bandanna. Sunglasses, possibly too big, hid her eyes. From a distance, thought Amalfitano, she looked like a Mexican actress from the seventies. When he got in the car the illusion vanished. Professor: Perez drove and he sat next to her. They headed east. For the first few miles the highway ran through a little valley dotted with rocks that seemed to have fallen from the sky. Chunks of granite with no origin or context. There were some fields, plots where invisible peasants grew crops that neither Professor Perez nor Amalfitano could make out. Then they were in the desert and the mountains. There were the parents of the orphan rocks they'd just passed. Granitic formations, volcanic formations, peaks silhouetted against the sky in the shape and fashion of birds, but birds of sorrow, thought Amalfitano, as Professor Perez talked to her son and Rosa about the place where they were going, painting it in colors that shaded from fun (a pool carved out of living rock) to mystery, exemplified for her by the voices to be heard from the lookout point, sounds clearly made by the wind. When Amalfitano turned his head to see the expression on Rosa 's face and on the face of Professor Perez's son, he saw four cars trailing them, waiting to pass. Inside each car he imagined a happy family, a mother, a picnic basket full of food, two children, and a father driving with the window rolled down. He smiled at his daughter and turned back to watch the road. Half an hour later they went up a hill, from the top of which he could see a wide expanse of desert behind them. They saw more cars. He supposed that the roadside bar or cafe or restaurant or by-the-hour motel was a fashionable destination for the inhabitants of Santa Teresa. He regretted having accepted the invitation. At some point he fell asleep. By the time he woke up, they were there. Professor Perez's hand was on his face, a gesture that might have been a caress or not. Her hand was like a blind woman's hand. Rosa and Rafael were no longer in the car. He saw a parking lot, almost full, the sun glittering on the chrome-plated surfaces, an open terrace on a slightly higher level, a couple with their arms around each other's shoulders looking at something he couldn't see, the blinding sky full of small, low, white clouds, distant music and a voice that sang or muttered at great speed, so that it was impossible to understand the words. An inch away he saw Professor Perez's face. He took her hand and kissed it. His shirt was damp with sweat, but what surprised him most was that the professor was sweating too.

Despite everything, they had a pleasant day. Rosa and Rafael swam in the pool and then joined Amalfitano and Professor Perez, who were watching them from one of the tables. After that they all bought sodas and went out to walk around. In some places the mountain dropped straight down, and in the depths or on the cliff sides there were big gashes with different-colored rock showing through, or rock that looked different colors in the sun as it fled westward, lutites and andesites sandwiched between sandstone formations, vertical outcrops of tuff and great trays of basaltic rock. Here and there, a Sonora cactus dangled from the mountainside. And farther away there were more mountains and then tiny valleys and more mountains, finally giving way to an expanse veiled in haze, in mist, like a cloud cemetery, behind which were Chihuahua and New Mexico and Texas. Sitting on rocks and surveying this view, they ate in silence. Rosa and Rafael spoke only to exchange sandwiches. Professor Perez seemed lost in her own thoughts. And Amalfitano felt tired and overwhelmed by the landscape, a landscape that seemed best suited to the young or the old, imbecilic or insensitive or evil and old who meant to impose impossible tasks on themselves and others until they breathed their last.

That night Amalfitano was up until very late. The first thing he did when he got home was go out into the backyard to see whether Dieste's book was still there. On the ride home Professor Perez had tried to be nice and start a conversation in which all four of them could participate, but her son fell asleep as soon as they began the descent and soon afterward Rosa did, too, with her head against the window. It wasn't long before Amalfitano followed his daughter's example. He dreamed of a woman's voice, not Professor Perez's but a Frenchwoman's, talking to him about signs and numbers and something Amalfitano didn't understand, something the voice in the dream called "history broken down" or "history' taken apart and put back together," although clearly the reassembled history became something else, a scribble in the margin, a clever footnote, a laugh slow to fade that leaped from an andesite rock to a rhyolite and then a tufa, and from that collection of prehistoric rocks there arose a kind of quicksilver, the American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain. And then Amalfitano switched dreams and stopped hearing voices, which must have meant he was sleeping deeply, and he dreamed he was moving toward a woman, a woman who was only a pair of legs at the end of a dark hallway and then he heard someone laugh at his snoring, Professor Perez's son, and he thought: good. As they were driving into Santa Teresa on the westbound highway, crowded at that time of day with dilapidated trucks and small pickups on their way back from the city market or from cities in Arizona, he woke up. Not only had he slept with his mouth open, but he had drooled on the collar of his shirt. Good, he thought, excellent. When he looked in satisfaction at Professor Perez, he detected an air of sadness about her. Out of sight of their respective children, she lightly stroked Amalfitano's leg as he turned his head and looked at a taco stand where a couple of policemen with guns on their hips were drinking beer and talking and watching the red and black dusk, like a thick chili whose last simmer was fading in the west. When they got home it was dark but the shadow of Dieste's book hanging from the clothesline was clearer, steadier, more reasonable, thought Amalfitano, than anything they'd seen on the outskirts of Santa Teresa or in the city itself, images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments.

That night he waited, dreading the voice. He tried to prepare for a class, but he soon realized it was a pointless task to prepare for something he knew backward and forward. He thought that if he drew on the blank piece of paper in front of him, the basic geometric figures would appear again. So he drew a face and erased it and then immersed himself in the memory of the obliterated face. He remembered (but fleetingly, as one members a lightning bolt) Ramon Lull and his fantastic machine. Fantastic in its uselessness. When he looked at the blank sheet again he had written the following names in three columns:

For a while, Amalfitano read and reread the names, horizontally and vertically, from the center outward, from bottom to top, skipping and at random, and then he laughed and thought that the whole thing was a truism, in other words a proposition too obvious to formulate. Then he drank a glass of tap water, water from the mountains of Sonora, and as he waited for the water to make its way down his throat he stopped shaking, an imperceptible shaking that only he could feel, and he began to think about the Sierra Madre aquifers running toward the city in the middle of the endless night, and he also thought about the aquifers rising from their hiding places closer to Santa Teresa, and about the water that coated teeth with a smooth ocher film. And when he'd drunk the whole glass of water he looked out the window and saw the long shadow, the coffinlike shadow, cast by Dieste's book hanging in the yard.

But the voice returned, and this time it asked him, begged him, to be a man, not a queer. Queer? asked Amalfitano. Yes, queer, faggot, cock-sucker, said the voice. Ho-mo-sex-u-al, said the voice. In the next breath it asked him whether he happened to be one of those. One of what? asked Amalfitano, terrified. A ho-mo-sex-u-al, said the voice. And before Amalfitano could answer, it hastened to make clear that it was speaking figuratively, that it had nothing against faggots or queers, in fact it felt boundless admiration for certain poets who had professed such sexual leanings, not to mention certain painters and government clerks. Government clerks? asked Amalfitano. Yes, yes, yes, said the voice young government clerks with short life spans. Clerks who stained official documents with senseless tears. Dead by their own hand. Then the voice was silent and Amalfitano remained sitting in his office. Much later, maybe a quarter of an hour later, maybe the next night, the voice said: let's say I'm your grandfather, your father's father, and let's say that as your grandfather I can ask you a personal question. You're free to answer or not, but I can ask the question. My grandfather? said Amalfitano. Yes, your grandfather, said the voice, you can call me nono. And my question for you is: are you a queer, are you going to go running out of this room, are you a ho-mo-sex-u-al, are you going to go wake up your daughter? No, said Amalfitano. I'm listening. Tell me what you have to say.

And the voice said: are you a queer? are you? and Amalfitano said no and shook his head, too. I'm not going to run away. You won't be seeing my back or the soles of my shoes. Assuming you see at all. And the voice, said: see? as in see? to tell the truth, I can't. Not much, anyway. It's enough work just keeping one foot in. Where? asked Amalfitano. At your house, I suppose, said the voice. This is my house, said Amalfitano. Yes, I realize, said the voice, now why don't we relax. I'm relaxed, said Amalfitano, I'm here in my house. And he wondered: why is it telling me to relax? And the voice said: I think this is the first day of what I hope will be a long and mutually beneficial relationship. But if it's going to work out, it's absolutely crucial that we stay calm. Calm is the one thing that will never let us down. And Amalfitano said: everything else lets us down? And the voice: yes, that's right, it's hard to admit, I mean it's hard to have to admit it to you, but that's the honest-to-God truth. Ethics lets us down? The sense of duty lets us down? Honesty lets us down? Curiosity lets us down? Love lets us down? Bravery lets us down? Art lets us down? That's right, said the voice, everything lets us down, everything. Or lets you down, which isn't the same thing but for our purposes it might as well be, except calm, calm is the one thing that never lets us down, though that's no guarantee of anything, I have to tell you. You're wrong, said Amalfitano, bravery never lets us down. And neither does our love for our children. Oh no? said the voice. No, said Amalfitano, suddenly feeling calm.

And then, in a whisper, like everything he had said so far, he asked whether calm was therefore the opposite of madness. And the voice said: no, absolutely not, if you're worried that you've lost your mind, don't worry, you haven't, all you're doing is having a casual conversation. So I haven't lost my mind, said Amalfitano. No, absolutely not, said the voice. So you're my grandfather, said Amalfitano. Call me pops, said the voice. So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.

There is no friendship, said the voice, there is no love, there is no epic, there is no lyric poetry that isn't the gurgle or chuckle of egoists, the murmur of cheats, the babble of traitors, the burble of social climbers, the warble of faggots. What is it you have against homosexuals? whispered Amalfitano. Nothing, said the voice. I'm speaking figuratively, said the voice. Are we in Santa Teresa? asked the voice. Is this city part of the state of Sonora? A pretty significant part of it, in fact? Yes, said Amalfitano. Well, there you go, said the voice. It's one thing to be a social climber, say, for example, said Amalfitano, tugging at his hair as if in slow motion, and something very different to be a faggot. I'm speaking figuratively, said the voice. I'm talking so you understand me. I'm talking like I'm in the studio of a ho-mo-sex-u-al painter, with you there behind me. I'm talking from a studio where the chaos is just a mask or the faint stink of anesthesia. I'm talking from a studio with the lights out, where the sinew of the will detaches itself from the rest of the body the way the snake tongue detaches itself from the body and slithers away, self-mutilated, amid the rubbish. I'm talking from the perspective of the simple things in life. You teach philosophy? said the voice. You teach Wittgenstein? said the voice. And have you asked yourself whether your hand is a hand? said the voice. I've asked myself, said Amalfitano. But now you have more important things to ask yourself, am I right? said the voice. No, said Amalfitano. For example, why not go to a nursery and buy seeds and plants and maybe even a little tree to plant in the middle of your backyard? said the voice. Yes, said Amalfitano. I've thought about my possible and conceivable yard and the plants and tools I need to buy. And you've also thought about your daughter, said the voice, and about the murders committed daily in this city, and about Baudelaire's faggoty (I'm sorry) clouds, but you haven't thought seriously about whether your hand is really a hand. That isn't true, said Amalfitano, I have thought about it, I have. If you had thought about it, said the voice, you'd be dancing to the tune of a different piper. And Amalfitano was silent and he felt that the silence was a kind of eugenics. He looked at his watch. It was four in the morning. He heard someone starting a car. The engine took a while to turn over. He got up and went over to the window. The cars parked in front of the house were empty. He looked behind him and then put his hand on the doorknob. The voice said: be careful, but it said it as if it were very far away, at the bottom of a ravine revealing glimpses of volcanic rock, rhyolites, andesites, streaks of silver and gold, petrified puddles covered with tiny little eggs, while red-tailed hawks soared above in the sky, which was purple like the skin of an Indian woman beaten to death. Amalfitano went out onto the porch. To the left, some thirty feet from his house, the lights of a black car came on and its engine started. When it passed the yard the driver leaned out and looked at Amalfitano without stopping. He was a fat man with very black hair, dressed in a cheap suit with no tie. When he was gone, Amalfitano came back into the house. I didn't like the looks of him, said the voice the minute Amalfitano was through the door. And then: you'll have to be careful, my friend, things here seem to be coming to a head.

So who are you and how did you get here? asked Amalfitano. There's no point going into it, said the voice. No point? asked Amalfitano, laughing in a whisper, like a fly. There's no point, said the voice. Can I ask you a question? said Amalfitano. Go ahead, said the voice. Are you really the ghost of my grandfather? The things you come up with, said the voice. Of course not, I'm the spirit of your father. Your grandfather's spirit doesn't remember you anymore. But I'm your father and I'll never forget you. Do you understand? Yes, said Amalfitano. Do you understand that you have nothing to fear from me? Yes, said Amalfitano. Do something useful, then check that all the doors and windows are shut tight and go to sleep. Something useful like what? asked Amalfitano. For example, wash the dishes, said the voice. And Amalfitano lit a cigarette and began to do what the voice had suggested. You wash and I'll talk, said the voice. All is calm, said the voice. There's no bad blood between us. The headache, if you have a headache, will go away soon, and so will the buzzing in your ears, the racing pulse, the rapid heartbeat. You'll relax, you'll think some and relax, said the voice, while you do something useful for your daughter and yourself. Understood, whispered Amalfitano. Good, said the voice, this is like an endoscopy, but painless. Got it, whispered Amalfitano. And he scrubbed the plates and the pot with the remains of pasta and tomato sauce and the forks and the glasses and the stove and the table where they'd eaten, smoking one cigarette after another and also taking occasional gulps of water straight from the faucet. And at five in the morning he took the dirty clothes out of the bathroom hamper and went out into the backyard and put the clothes in the washing machine and pushed the button for a normal wash and looked at Dieste's book hanging motionless and then he went back into the living room and his eyes, like the eyes of an addict, sought out something else to clean or tidy or wash, but he couldn't find anything and he sat down, whispering yes or no or I don't remember or maybe. Everything is fine, said the voice. It's all a question of getting used to it. Without making a fuss. Without sweating and flailing around.

It was past six when Amalfitano fell into bed without undressing and slept like a baby. Rosa woke him at nine. It had been a long time since Amalfitano felt so good, although his classes that morning were entirely incomprehensible. At one o'clock he ate at the cafeteria and sat at one of the farthest, most out-of-the-way tables. He didn't want to see Professor Perez, and he didn't want to run into any other colleagues either, least of all the dean, who made a habit of eating there every day, surrounded by professors and a few students who ceaselessly fawned over him. He ordered at the counter, almost stealthily, boiled chicken and salad, and he hurried to his table, dodging the students who crowded the cafeteria at that time of day. Then he sat down to eat and think some more about what had happened the previous night. He realized with astonishment that he was excited by what he had experienced. I feel like a nightingale, he thought happily. It was a simple and antiquated and ridiculous sentiment, but it was the only thing that fully expressed his current state of mind. He tried to relax. The students' laughter, their shouts to each other, the clatter of plates, made it a less than ideal spot for reflection. And yet after a few seconds he realized there could be no better place. Equally good, yes, but not better. So he took a long drink of bottled water (it didn't taste the same as the tap water, but it didn't taste very different either) and he began to think. First he thought about madness.

About the possibility-great-that he was losing his mind. It came as a surprise to him to realize that the thought (and the possibility) in no way diminished his excitement. Or his happiness. My excitement and my I happiness are growing under the wing of a storm, he said to himself. I may be going crazy, but I feel good, he said to himself. He contemplated the possibility-great-that if he really was going crazy it would gets worse, and then his excitement would turn into pain and helplessness and, especially, a source of pain and helplessness for his daughter. As if he had X-ray eyes he reviewed his savings and calculated that with what he had saved, Rosa could go back to Barcelona and still have money to start with. To start what? That was a question he preferred not to answer. He imagined himself locked up in an asylum in Santa Teresa or Hermosillo with Professor Perez as his only occasional visitor, and every so often receiving letters from Rosa in Barcelona, where she would be working or finishing her studies, and where she would meet a Catalan boy, responsible and affectionate, who would fall in love with her and respect her and take care of her and be nice to her and with whom Rosa would end up living and going to the movies at night and traveling to Italy or Greece in July or August, and the scenario didn't seem so bad. Then he considered other possibilities. Of course, he said to himself, he didn't believe in ghosts or spirits, although during his childhood in the south of Chile people talked about the mechona who waited for riders on a tree branch, dropping onto horses' haunches, clinging to the back of the cowboy or smuggler without letting go, like a lover whose embrace maddened the horse as well as the rider, both of them dying of fright or ending up at the bottom of a ravine, or the colocolo, or the chonchones, or the candelillas, or so many other little creatures, lost souls, incubi and succubi, lesser demons that roamed between the Cordillera de la Costa and the Andes, but in which he didn't believe, not exactly because of his training in philosophy (Schopenhauer, after all, believed in ghosts, and it was surely a ghost that appeared to Nietzsche and drove him mad) but because of his materialist leanings. So he rejected the possibility of ghosts, at least until he had exhausted other lines of inquiry. The voice could be a ghost, he wouldn't rule it out, but he tried to come up with a different explanation. After much reflection, though, the only thing that made sense was the theory of the lost soul. He thought about the seer of Hermosillo, Madame Cristina, La Santa. He thought about his father. He decided that his father would never use the Mexican words the voice had used, no matter what kind of roving spirit he had become, whereas the slight tinge of homophobia suited him perfectly. With a happiness hard to disguise, he asked himself what kind of mess he had gotten himself into. That afternoon he taught another few classes and then he went walking home. As he passed the central plaza of Santa Teresa he saw a group of women protesting in front of the town hall. On one of the posters he read: No to impunity. On another: End the corruption. A group of policemen were watching the women from under the adobe arches of the colonial building. They weren't riot police but plain Santa Teresa uniformed policemen. As he walked past he heard someone call his name. When he turned he saw Professor Perez and his daughter on the sidewalk across the street. He offered to buy them a soda. At the coffee shop they explained that the protest was to demand transparency in the investigation of the disappearances and killings of women. Professor Perez said she had three feminists from Mexico City staying at her house, and that night she planned to have a dinner for them. I'd like you to come, she said. Rosa said yes. Amalfitano expressed no objection. Then his daughter and Professor Perez returned to the protest and Amalfitano continued on his way.

But before he got home someone called his name again. Professor Amalfitano, he heard someone saying. He turned around and didn't see anyone. He wasn't in the center of the city anymore. He was walking along Avenida Madero, and the four-story buildings had given way to ranch houses, imitations of a kind of California house from the fifties, houses that had begun to suffer the ravages of time long ago, when their occupants moved to the neighborhood where Amalfitano now lived. Some houses had been converted into garages that also sold ice cream and others had become businesses dealing in bread or clothes, without any modifications whatsoever. Many of them displayed signs advertising doctors, lawyers specializing in divorce or criminal law. Others offered rooms by the day. Some had been divided without much skill into two or three separate shops, where newspapers and magazines or fruit and vegetables were sold, or passersby were promised a good deal on dentures. As Amalfitano was about to keep walking, someone called his name again. Then he saw who it was. The voice was coming from a car parked at the curb. At first he didn't recognize the young man who was calling him. He thought it was a student. Whoever it was had on sunglasses and a black shirt unbuttoned over his chest. He was very tan, like a singer or a Puerto Rican playboy. Get in, Professor, I'll give you a ride home. Amalfitano was about to tell him he'd rather walk when the young man identified himself. I'm Dean Guerra's son, he said as he got out of the car on the side of the street where the traffic thundered by, not looking either way, ignoring the danger in a way that struck Amalfitano as extremely bold. Walking around the car, he came up to Amalfitano and offered his hand. I'm Marco Antonio Guerra, he said, and he reminded him of their champagne toast at his father's office, Amalfitano's welcome to the department. You have nothing to fear from me, Professor, he said, and Amalfitano couldn't help but be surprised by the remark. The young Guerra stopped in front of him. He was smiling just as he had been the first time they met. A confident, mocking smile, like the smile of a cocksure sniper. He wore jeans and cowboy boots. Inside the car, on the backseat, lay a pearl-gray designer jacket and a folder full of papers. I was just driving by, said Marco Antonio Guerra. They headed toward Colonia Lindavista, but before they got there the dean's son suggested they get a drink. Amalfitano politely declined the invitation. Then let's go to your place and have a drink, said Marco Antonio Guerra. I don't have anything to offer, apologized Amalfitano. Then that's settled, said Marco Antonio Guerra, and he took the first turn. Soon there was a change in the urban scenery. West of Colonia Lindavista the houses were new, surrounded in some places by wide-open fields, and some streets weren't even paved. People say these neighborhoods are the city's future, said Marco Antonio Guerra, but in my opinion this shithole has no future. He drove straight onto a soccer field, across which were a pair of enormous sheds or warehouses surrounded by barbed wire. Beyond them ran a canal or creek carrying the neighborhood trash away to the north. Near another open field they saw the old railroad line that had once connected Santa Teresa to Ures and Hermosillo. A few dogs approached timidly. Marco Antonio rolled down the window and let them sniff his hand and lick it. To the left was the highway to Ures. They began to head out of Santa Teresa. Amalfitano asked where they were going. Guerra's son answered that they were on their way to one of the few places around where you could still drink real Mexican mezcal.

The place was called Los Zancudos and it was a rectangle three hundred feet long by one hundred feet wide, with a small stage at the end where corrida or ranchera groups performed on Fridays and Saturdays. The bar was at least one hundred and fifty feet long. The toilets were outside, and they could be entered directly from the outdoor patio or by way of a narrow passageway of galvanized tin connecting them to the restaurant. There weren't many people there. They were greeted by the waiters, whom Marco Antonio Guerra called by name, but no one came to wait on them. Only a few lights were on. I recommend the Los Suicidas, said Marco Antonio. Amalfitano smiled pleasantly and said yes, but just a small one. Marco Antonio raised his arm and snapped his fingers. The bastards must be deaf, he said. He got up and went to the bar. Some time passed before he came back with two glasses and a half-filled bottle of mezcal. Try it, he said. Amalfitano took a sip and thought it tasted good. There should be a worm at the bottom of the bottle, said Marco Antonio, but those scum probably ate it. It sounded like a joke and Amalfitano laughed. But I guarantee it's genuine Los Suicidas, drink up and enjoy, said Marco Antonio. At the second sip Amalfitano thought it really was an extraordinary drink. They don't make it anymore, said Marco Antonio, like so much in this fucking country. And after a while, fixing his gaze on Amalfitano, he said: we're going to hell, I suppose you've realized, Professor? Amalfitano answered that the situation certainly wasn't anything to applaud, without specifying what he meant or going into detail. It's all falling apart in our hands, said Marco Antonio Guerra. The politicians don't know how to govern. All the middle class wants is to move to the United States. And more and more people keep coming to work in the maquiladoras. You know what I would do? No, said Amalfitano. Burn a few of them down, you know? A few what? asked Amalfitano. A few maquiladoras. Interesting, said Amalfitano. I'd also send the army out into the streets, well, not the streets, the highways, to keep more scum from coming here. Highway checkpoints? asked Amalfitano. That's right. I can't see any other solution. There must be other solutions, said Amalfitano. People have lost all respect, said Marco Antonio Guerra. Respect for others and self-respect. Amalfitano glanced toward the bar. Three waiters were whispering, casting sidelong glances at their table. I think we should leave, said Amalfitano. Marco Antonio Guerra noticed the waiters and made an obscene gesture, then he laughed. Amalfitano took him by the arm and dragged him out into the parking lot. By now it was night and a huge glowing sign featuring a long-legged mosquito shone brightly on a metal scaffolding. I think these people have some problem with you, said Amalfitano. Don't worry, Professor, said Marco Antonio Guerra, I'm armed.

When he got home, Amalfitano immediately forgot about Marco Antonio Guerra and decided that maybe he wasn't as crazy as he'd thought he was, and that the voice he'd been hearing wasn't a bereaved soul. He thought about telepathy. He thought about the telepathic Mapuches or Araucanians. He remembered a very short book, scarcely one hundred pages long, by a certain Lonko Kilapan, published in Santiago de Chile in 1978, that an old friend, a wiseass of long standing, had sent him while he was living in Europe. This Kilapan presented himself with the following credentials: Historian of the Race, President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, and Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language. The book was called O'Higgins Is Araucanian, and it was subtitled 17 Proofs, Taken from the Secret History of Araucania. Between the title and the subtitle was the following phrase: Text approved by the Araucanian History Council. Then came the prologue, which read like this: "Prologue. If proof were desired that any of the heroes of Chile 's Independence shared kinship with the Araucanians, it would be difficult to find and harder to verify. Only Iberian blood flowed in the veins of the Carrera brothers, Mackenna, Freire, Manuel Rodriguez. But the dazzling light of Araucanian parentage shines bright in Bernardo O'Higgins, and to prove it we present these 17 proofs. Bernardo is not the illegitimate son described by historians, some with pity, others unable to hide their satisfaction. He is the dashing legitimate son of Irishman Ambrosio O'Higgins, Governor of Chile and Viceroy of Peru, and of an Araucanian woman who belonged to one of the principal tribes of Araucania. The marriage was celebrated according to Admapu law, with the traditional Gapitun (abduction ceremony). The biography of the Liberator exposes the millenarian Araucanian secret on the very bicentenary of his birth; it springs from the Litrang* to paper, as faithfully as only an Epeutufe can render it." And that was the end of the prologue, by Jose R. Pichinual, Cacique of Puerto Saavedra.

Odd, thought Amalfitano, with the book in his hands. Odd, extremely odd. For example, the single asterisk. Litrang: stone tablets on which the Araucanians engraved their writings. But why footnote litrang and not admapu or epeutufe? Did the Cacique of Puerto Saavedra assume that everyone would know what they meant? And then the sentence about whether or not O'Higgins was a bastard: Bernardo is not the illegitimate son described by historians, some with pity, others unable to hide their satisfaction. There you had the day-to-day history of Chile, the private history, the history behind closed doors. Pitying the father of the country because he was a bastard. Or being unable to conceal a certain satisfaction when discussing the subject. So telling, thought Amalfitano, and he thought about the first time he'd read Kilapan's book, laughing out loud, and the way he was reading it now, with something like laughter but also something like sorrow. Ambrosio O'Higgins as an Irishman was definitely a good joke. Ambrosio O'Higgins marrying an Araucanian woman, but under the aegis of admapu and even going so far as to cap it off with the traditional gapitun or abduction ceremony, struck him as a macabre joke that could point only to abuse, rape, a further mockery staged by fat Ambrosio to fuck the Indian woman in peace. I can't think of anything without the word rape popping up to stare with its helpless little mammal eyes, thought Amalfitano. Then he fell asleep in his chair, with the book in his hands. Maybe he dreamed something. Something short. Maybe he dreamed about his childhood. Maybe not.

Then he woke up and made himself and his daughter something to eat. Back in his office he felt extremely tired, unable to prepare a class or read anything serious, so he returned resignedly to Kilapan's book. Seventeen proofs. Proof number 1 was titled He was born in the Araucanian state. It went like this: "The Yekmonchi,¹ called Chile,² was geographically and politically identical to the Greek state, and, like it, forming a delta, between the respective latitudes of the 35th and 42nd parallels." Ignoring the construction of the sentence (where it read forming it should have read formed, and there were at least two commas too many), the most interesting thing about the first paragraph was what might be called its military slant. It began with a straight jab to the chin or a full artillery assault on the center of the enemy line. Note 1 clarified that Yekmonchi meant State. Note 2 stated that Chile was a Greek word whose translation was "distant tribe." Then came the geographic description of the Yekmonchi of Chile: "It stretched from the Maullis to the Chiligiie rivers, including the west of Argentina. The reigning Mother City, or that is Chile, properly speaking, was located between the Butaleufu and Tolten rivers; like the Greek state, it was surrounded by allied and interrelated peoples, those who were subject to the Küga Chiliches (that is to say the Chilean (or Chiliches: people of Chile) tribe (Küga). Che: people, as Kilapan meticulously took care to recall), who taught them the sciences, the arts, sports, and especially the science of war." Farther along Kilapan confessed: "In 1947," although Amalfitano suspected that this was an erratum and that the year was actually 1974, "I opened the tomb of Kurillanka, which was under the main Kuralwe, covered by a flat stone. All that remained was a katankura, a metawe, duck, an obsidian ornament, like an arrowhead to pay the 'toll' that the soul of Kurillanka had to pay to Zenpilkawe, the Greek Charon, to take him across the sea to his place of origin: a remote island in the sea. These pieces were distributed among the Araucanian museums of Temuco, the future Museo Abate Molina of Villa Alegre, and the Museo Araucano of Santiago, which will soon be open to the public." The mention of Villa Alegre prompted Kilapan to add the oddest note. It read: "In Villa Alegre, formerly Warakulen, lie the remains of Abate Juan Ignacio Molina, brought from Italy to his native city. He was a professor at the University of Bologna, where his statue presides over the entrance to the Pantheon of the Distinguished Sons of Italy, between the statues of Copernicus and Galileo. According to Molina, there is an unquestionable kinship between Greeks and Araucanians." This Molina was a Jesuit and a naturalist, and he lived from 1740 to 1829.

Shortly after the episode at Los Zancudos, Amalfitano saw Dean Guerra's son again. This time he was dressed like a cowboy, although he had shaved and he smelled of Calvin Klein cologne. Even so, all he lacked to look like a real cowboy was the hat. There was something mysterious about the way he accosted Amalfitano. It was late in the day, and as Amalfitano walked along a ridiculously long corridor at the university, deserted and dark at that hour, Marco Antonio Guerra burst out from a corner like someone playing a bad joke or about to attack him. Amalfitano jumped, then struck out automatically with his fist. It's me, Marco Antonio, said the dean's son, after he was hit again. Then they recognized each other and relaxed and set off together toward the rectangle of light at the end of the hallway, which reminded Marco Antonio of the stories of people who'd been in comas or declared clinically dead and who claimed to have seen a dark tunnel with a white or dazzling brightness at the end, and sometimes these people even testified to the presence of loved ones who had passed away, who took their hands or soothed them or urged them to turn back because the hour or microfraction of a second in which the change took effect hadn't yet arrived. What do you think, Professor? Do people on the verge of death make this shit up, or is it real? Is it all just a dream, or is it within the realm of possibility? I don't know, said Amalfitano curtly, since he still hadn't gotten over his fright, and he wasn't in the mood for a repeat of their last meeting. Well, said Marco Antonio Guerra, if you want to know what I think, I don't believe it. People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. I'm telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat.

Despite what he had hoped (to get rid of Marco Antonio Guerra as soon as they emerged from the hallway with its aura of life after death), Amalfitano had to follow him without complaint because the dean's son was the bearer of an invitation to dinner that very evening at the house of the rector of the University of Santa Teresa, the august Dr. Pablo Negrete. So he climbed in Marco Antonio's car, and Marco Antonio drove him home, then chose, in an unwonted display of shyness, to wait for him outside, watching the car, as if there were thieves in Colonia Lindavista, while Amalfitano cleaned up and changed clothes, and his daughter, who of course was invited too, did the same, or not, since his daughter could go dressed as she liked, but he, Amalfitano, had better show up at Dr. Negrete's house in a jacket and tie at the very least. The dinner, as it happened, was nothing to worry about. Dr. Negrete simply wanted to meet him and had assumed, or been advised, that a first meeting in his office at the administration building would be much chillier than a first meeting in the comfort of his own home, a grand old two-story house surrounded by a lush garden with plants from all over Mexico and plenty of shady nooks where guests could gather in petit comité. Dr. Negrete was a man of silence and reserve who was happier listening to others than leading the conversation himself. He asked about Barcelona, recollected that in his youth he had attended a conference in Prague, mentioned a former professor at the University of Santa Teresa, an Argentinian who now taught at one of the branches of the University of California, and the rest of the time he was quiet. His wife, who carried herself with a distinction that the rector lacked, though to judge by her features she had never been a beauty, was much nicer to Amalfitano and especially to Rosa, who reminded her of her youngest daughter, whose name was Clara, like her mother's, and who had been living in Phoenix for years. At some point during the dinner Amalfitano thought he noticed a rather murky exchange of glances between the rector and his wife. In her eyes he glimpsed something that might have been hatred. At the same time, a sudden fear flitted as swiftly as a butterfly across the rector's face. But Amalfitano noticed it and for a moment (the second flutter of wings) the rector's fear nearly brushed his own skin. When he recovered and looked at the other dinner guests he realized that no one had noticed the slight shadow, like a hastily dug pit that gives off an alarming stench.

But he was wrong. Young Marco Antonio Guerra had noticed. And he had also noticed that Amalfitano had noticed. Life is worthless, he said into Amalfitano's ear when they went out into the garden. Rosa sat with the rector's wife and Professor Perez. The rector sat in the gazebo's only rocking chair. Dean Guerra and two philosophy professors took seats near the rector's wife. A third professor, a bachelor, remained standing, next to Amalfitano and Marco Antonio Guerra. A servant, an almost elderly woman, came in after a while carrying an enormous tray of glasses that she set on a marble table. Amalfitano considered helping her, but then he thought it might be seen as disrespectful if he did. When the old woman reappeared, carrying more than seven bottles in precarious equilibrium, Amalfitano couldn't stop himself and went to help her. When she saw him, the old woman's eyes widened and the tray began to slip from her hands. Amalfitano heard a shriek, the ridiculous little shriek of one of the professors' wives, and at that same moment, as the tray was falling, he glimpsed the shadow of young Guerra setting everything right again. Don't worry, Chachita, he heard the rector's wife say.

Then he heard young Guerra, after he had set the bottles on the table, ask Dona Clara whether she kept any Los Suicidas mezcal in her liquor cabinet. And he heard Dean Guerra saying: pay no attention to my son and his foolish notions. And he heard Rosa say: Los Suicidas mezcal, what a pretty name. And he heard a professor's wife say: it certainly is unusual. And he heard Professor Perez: what a fright, I thought she was going to drop them. And he heard a philosophy professor talking about norteno music, to change the subject. And he heard Dean Guerra say that the difference between norteno groups and groups from anywhere else in the country was that norteno groups were always made up of an accordion and a guitar, with the accompaniment of a bajo sexto, the twelve-string guitar, and some kind of brinco. And he heard the same philosophy professor asking what a brinco was. And he heard the dean answer that a brinco could be drums, for example, like a rock group's drum kit, or kettledrums, and in norteno music a proper brinco might be the redova, a hollow wooden block, or more commonly a pair of sticks. And he heard Rector Negrete saying: that's right. And then he accepted a glass of whiskey and sought the face of the person who had put it in his hand and found the face of young Guerra, pale in the moonlight.

Proof number 2, by far the most interesting to Amalfitano, was called He was born to an Araucanian -woman and it began like this: "Upon the arrival of the Spaniards, the Araucanians established two channels for communication from Santiago: telepathy and Adkintuwe.⁵⁵ Lautaro,⁵⁶ because of his notable telepathic skills, was taken north with his mother when he was still a child to enter the service of the Spaniards. It was in this way that Lautaro contributed to the defeat of the Spaniards. Since telepaths could be eliminated and communications cut, Adkintuwe was created. Only after 1700 did the Spaniards become aware of this method of sending messages by the movement of branches. They were puzzled by the fact that the Araucanians knew everything that happened in the city of Concepcion. Although they managed to discover Adkintuwe, they were never able to decipher it. They never suspected that the Araucanians were telepathic, believing instead that they had 'traffic with the devil,' who informed them of events in Santiago. There were three lines of Adkintuwe from the capital: one along the buttresses of the Andes, another along the coast, and a third along the central valley. Primitive man was ignorant of language; he communicated by brainwaves, as animals and plants do. When he resorted to sounds and gestures and hand signals to communicate, he began to lose the gift of telepathy, and this loss was accelerated when he went to live in cities, distancing himself from nature. Although the Araucanians had two kinds of writing- the rope knotting known as Prom,⁵⁷ and the triangle writing known as Adentunemul⁵⁸-they never gave up telecommunication; on the contrary, some Kügas whose families were scattered all over America, the Pacific Islands, and the deepest south specialized in it so that no enemy would ever take them by surprise. By means of telepathy they kept in permanent contact with the Chilean migrants who first settled in the north of India, where they were called Aryans, then headed to the fields of ancient Germania and later descended to the Peloponnese, traveling from there to Chile along the traditional route to India and across the Pacific Ocean." Immediately following this and apropos of nothing, Kilapan wrote: "Killenkusi was a Machi⁵⁹ priestess. Her daughter Kinturay had to choose between succeeding her or becoming a spy; she chose the latter and her love for the Irishman; this opportunity afforded her the hope of having a child who, like Lautaro and mixed-race Alejo, would be raised among the Spaniards, and like them might one day lead the hosts of those who wished to push the conquistadors back beyond the Maule River, because Admapu law prohibited the Araucanians from fighting outside of Yekmonchi. Her hope was realized and in the spring⁶⁰ of the year 1777, in the place called Palpal, an Araucanian woman endured the pain of childbirth in a standing position because tradition decreed that a strong child could not be born of a weak mother. The son arrived and became the Liberator of Chile."

The footnotes made it very clear in what kind of drunken ship Kilapan had set sail, if it wasn't clear already. Note 55, Adkintmve, read: "After many years the Spaniards became aware of its existence, but they were never able to decipher it." Note 56: "Lautaro, swift noise (taws in Greek means swift)." Note 57: "Prom, word handed down from the Greek by way of Prometheus, the Titan who stole writing from the gods to give to man." Note 58: "Adentunemul, secret writing consisting of triangles." Note 59: "Machi, seer. From the Greek verb mantis, which means to divine." Note 60: "Spring, Admapu law ordered that children should be conceived in summer, when all fruits were ripe; thus they would be born in spring when the land awakens in the fullness of its strength; when all the animals and birds are born."

From this one could conclude that: (1) all Araucanians or most of them were telepathic, (2) the Araucanian language was closely linked to the language of Homer, (3) Araucanians had traveled all over the globe, especially to India, ancient Germania, and the Peloponnese, (4) Araucanians were amazing sailors, (5) Araucanians had two kinds of writing, one based on knots and the other on triangles, the latter secret, (6) the exact nature of the mode of communication that Kilapan called Adkintuwe (and that had been discovered by the Spaniards, although they were unable to decipher it) wasn't very clear. Maybe it was the sending of messages by the movement of tree branches located in strategic places, like at the tops of hills? Something like the smoke signals of the Plains Indians of America? (7) in contrast, telepathic communication was never discovered and if at some point it stopped working this was because the Spaniards killed the telepaths, (8) telepathy also permitted the Araucanians of Chile to remain in permanent contact with Chilean migrants scattered in places as far-flung as populous India or green Germany, (9) should one deduce from this that Bernardo O'Higgins was also a telepath? Should one deduce that the author himself, Lonko Kilapan, was a telepath? Yes, in fact, one should.

One could also deduce (and, with a little effort, see) other things, thought Amalfitano as he diligently gauged his mood, watching Dieste's book hanging in the dark in the backyard. One could see, for example, the date that Kilapan's book was published, 1978, in other words during the military dictatorship, and deduce the atmosphere of triumph, loneliness, and fear in which it was published. One could see, for example, a gentleman of Indian appearance, half out of his head but hiding it well, dealing with the printers of the prestigious Editorial Universitaria, located on Calle San Francisco, number 454, in Santiago. One could see the sum that the publication of the little book would cost the Historian of the Race, the President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, and the Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language, a sum that Mr. Kilapan tries to bargain down more wishfully than effectively, although the manager of the print shop knows that they aren't exactly overrun with work and that he could very well give this Mr. Kilapan a little discount, especially since the man swears he has two more books already finished and edited (Araucanian Legends and Greek Legends and Origins of the American Man and Kinship Between Araucanians, Aryans, Early Germans, and Greeks) and he swears up and down that he'll bring them here, because, gentlemen, a book published by the Editorial Universitaria is a book distinguished at first glance, a book of distinction, and it's this final argument that convinces the printer, the manager, the office drudge who handles these matters, to let him have his little discount. The word distinguished. The word distinction. Ah, ah, ah, ah, pants Amalfitano, struggling for breath as if he's having a sudden asthma attack. Ah, Chile.

Although it was possible to imagine other scenarios, of course, or it was possible to see the same sad picture from different angles. And just as the book began with a jab to the jaw ("the Yekmonchi, called Chile, was geographically and politically identical to the Greek state"), the active reader-the reader as envisioned by Cortazar-could begin his reading with a kick to the author's testicles, viewing him from the start as a straw man, a factotum in the service of some colonel in the intelligence services, or maybe of some general who fancied himself an intellectual, which wouldn't be so strange either, this being Chile, in fact the reverse would be stranger, in Chile military men behaved like writers, and writers, so as not to be outdone, behaved like military men, and politicians (of every stripe) behaved like writers and like military men, and diplomats behaved like cretinous cherubim, and doctors and lawyers behaved like thieves, and so on ad nauseam, impervious to discouragement. But picking up the thread where he had left off, it seemed possible that Kilapan hadn't been the one who wrote the book. And if Kilapan hadn't written the book, it might be that Kilapan didn't exist, in other words that there was no President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, among other reasons because perhaps the Indigenous Confederation didn't exist, nor was there any Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language, among other reasons because perhaps said Academy of the Araucanian Language never existed. All fake. All nonexistent. Kilapan, from that perspective, thought Amalfitano, moving his head in time to the (very slight) swaying of Dieste's book outside the window, might easily be a nom de plume for Pinochet, representing Pinochet's long sleepless nights or his productive mornings, when he got up at six or five-thirty and after he showered and performed a few calisthenics he shut himself in his library to review international slights, to meditate on Chile's negative reputation abroad. But there was no reason to get too excited. Kilapan's prose could be Pinochet's, certainly. But it could also be Aylwin's or Lagos 's. Kilapan's prose could be Frei's (which was saying something) or the prose of any right-wing neo-Fascist. Not only did Lonko Kilapan's prose encapsulate all of Chile 's styles, it also represented all of its political factions, from the conservatives to the Communists, from the new liberals to the old survivors of the MIR. Kilapan was the high-grade Spanish spoken and written in Chile, its cadences revealing not only the leathery nose of Abate Molina, but also the butchery of Patricio Lynch, the endless shipwrecks of the Esmeralda, the Atacama desert and cattle grazing, the Guggenheim Fellowships, the Socialist politicians praising the economic policy of the junta, the corners where pumpkin fritters were sold, the mote con huesillos, the ghost of the Berlin Wall rippling on motionless red flags, the domestic abuse, the good-hearted whores, the cheap housing, what in Chile they called grudge holding and Amalfitano called madness.

But what he was really looking for was a name. The name of O'Higgins's telepathic mother. According to Kilapan: Kinturay Treulen, daughter of Killenkusi and Waramanke Treulen. According to the official story: Dona Isabel Riquelme. Having reached this point, Amalfitano decided to stop watching Dieste's book swaying (ever so slightly) in the darkness and sit down and think about his own mother's name: Dona Eugenia Riquelme (actually Dona Filia Maria Eugenia Riquelme Grana). He was briefly startled. For five seconds, his hair stood on end. He tried to laugh but he couldn't.

I understand you, Marco Antonio Guerra said to him. I mean, if I'm right, I think I understand you. You're like me and I'm like you. We aren't happy. The atmosphere around us is stifling. We pretend there's nothing wrong, but there is. What's wrong? We're being fucking stifled. You let off steam your own way. I beat the shit out of people or let them beat the shit out of me. But the fights I get into aren't just any fights, they're fucking apocalyptic mayhem. I'm going to tell you a secret. Sometimes I go out at night, to bars you can't even imagine. And I pretend to be a faggot. But not just any kind of faggot: smooth, stuck-up, sarcastic, a daisy in the filthiest pigsty in Sonora. Of course, I don't have a gay bone in me, I can swear that on the grave of my dead mother. But I pretend that's what I am. An arrogant little faggot with money who looks down on everyone. And then the inevitable happens. Two or three vultures ask me to step outside. And then the shit kicking begins. I know it and I don't care. Sometimes they're the ones who get the worst of it, especially when I have my gun. Other times it's me. I don't give a fuck. I need the fucking release. Sometimes my friends, the few friends I have, guys my age who are lawyers now, tell me I should be careful, I'm a time bomb, I'm a masochist. One of them, someone I was really close to, told me that only somebody like me could get away with what I did because I had my father to bail me out. Pure coincidence, that's all. I've never asked my father for a thing. The truth is, I don't have friends. I don't want any. At least, I'd rather not have friends who're Mexicans. Mexicans are rotten inside, did you know? Every last one of them. No one escapes. From the president of the republic to that clown Subcomandante Marcos. If I were Subcomandante Marcos, you know what I'd do? I'd launch an attack with my whole army on any city in Chiapas, so long as it had a strong military garrison. And there I'd sacrifice my poor Indians. And then I'd probably go live in Miami. What kind of music do you like? asked Amalfitano. Classical music, Professor, Vivaldi, Cimarosa, Bach. And what books do you read? I used to read everything, Professor, I read all the time. Now all I read is poetry. Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game. I don't know if you follow me, Professor. Only poetry-and let me be clear, only some of it-is good for you, only poetry isn't shit.

Young Guerra's voice, breaking into flat, harmless shards, issued from a climbing vine, and he said: Georg Trakl is one of my favorites.

The mention of Trakl made Amalfitano think, as he went through the motions of teaching a class, about a drugstore near where he lived in Barcelona, a place he used to go when he needed medicine for Rosa. One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

That night, as young Guerra's grandiloquent words were still echoing in the depths of his brain, Amalfitano dreamed that he saw the last Communist philosopher of the twentieth century appear in a pink marble courtyard. He was speaking Russian. Or rather: he was singing a song in Russian as his big body went weaving toward a patch of red-streaked majolica that stood out on the flat plane of the courtyard like a kind of crater or latrine. The last Communist philosopher was dressed in a dark suit and sky-blue tie and had gray hair. Although he seemed about to collapse at any moment, he remained miraculously upright. The song wasn't always the same, since sometimes he mixed in words in English or French, words to other songs, pop ballads or tangos, tunes that celebrated drunkenness or love. And yet these interruptions were brief and sporadic and he soon returned to the original song, in Russian, the words of which Amalfitano didn't understand (although in dreams, as in the Gospels, one usually possesses the gift of tongues). Still, he sensed that the words were sad, the story or lament of a Volga boatman who sails all night and commiserates with the moon about the sad fate of men condemned to be born and to die. When the last Communist philosopher finally reached the crater or latrine, Amalfitano discovered in astonishment that it was none other than Boris Yeltsin. This is the last Communist philosopher? What kind of lunatic am I if this is the kind of nonsense I dream? And yet the dream was at peace with Amalfitano's soul. It wasn't a nightmare. And it also granted him a kind of feather-light sense of well-being. Then Boris Yeltsin looked at Amalfitano with curiosity, as if it were Amalfitano who had invaded his dream, not the other way around. And he said: listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater or the latrine and showed Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about the Urals and Siberia and about a white tiger that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And then he took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said:

"I think it's time for a little drink."

And after he had drunk and given the poor Chilean professor the sly squint of a hunter, he began to sing again, if possible with even more brio. And then he disappeared, swallowed up by the crater streaked with red or by the latrine streaked with red, and Amalfitano was left alone and he didn't dare look down the hole, which meant he had no choice but to wake.