Ernesto and I got the boy down the stairs. We hailed a taxi and waited at the entrance to the Clover Hotel. Shortly afterward, Arturo emerged. My recollections of that night when anything could have happened, but nothing did, are fragmentary, as if mauled by an enormous animal. Sometimes, thinking back, I can see a big thunderstorm moving in from the north toward the center of Mexico City, but my memory tells me that there was no thunderstorm that night, although the high Mexican sky did descend a little, and at times it was hard to breathe; the air was dry and it caught in the throat. I remember Ernesto San Epifanio and Arturo Belano laughing in the taxi, laughing their way back to reality or what they liked to think of as reality, and I remember the air as we stood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and then inside the taxi, a cactus air, bristling with every one of Mexico's countless species of cactus, and I remember saying, It's hard to breathe, and, Give me back my knife, and, It's hard to talk, and, Where are we going. I remember that every time I spoke, Ernesto and Arturo burst out laughing, and I ended up laughing too, as much as them or more, we all laughed, all except the taxi driver, who at one point looked at us as if we were just like all the other clients he had picked up that night (which, given that this was Mexico City, would not have been at all unusual), and the sick boy, who had fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder.

And that was how we entered and left the kingdom of the King of the Rent Boys, an enclave in the wasteland of Colonia Guerrero, Ernesto San Epifanio, aged twenty or nineteen, a homosexual poet born in Mexico (and one of the two best poets of his generation, the other being Ulises Lima, who we didn't know at that stage), Arturo Belano, aged twenty, a heterosexual poet born in Chile, Juan de Dios Montes (also known as Juan de Dos Montes and Juan Dedos), aged eighteen, apprenticed to a baker in Colonia Buenavista, apparently bisexual, and myself, Auxilio Lacouture, of definitively indefinite age, reader and mother, born in Uruguay or the Eastern Republic, if you prefer, and witness to the intricate conduits of dryness.

And since I shall have no more to say about Juan de Dios Montes, I can at least tell you that his nightmare came to a good end. For a few days he lived at Arturito's place, then he drifted from one rooftop room to another. In the end a group of us found him a job at a bakery in Colonia Roma and he disappeared from our lives, or so it seemed. He liked to get high sniffing glue. He was melancholic and glum. He was stoic.

One day I ran into him by chance in the Parque Hundido. I said, How are you, Juan de Dios. Real good, he answered. Months later, at the party that Ernesto threw when he was awarded the Salvador Novo fellowship (Arturo wasn't there-they had fallen out, as poets do), I said that on the night of our adventure (it already seemed so long ago), the life in danger hadn't been his, as we had all thought, but Juan's. Yes, said Ernesto, that's the conclusion I've come to as well. It was Juan de Dios who was going to die.

Our hidden purpose had been to stop him from being killed.

Nine

After that I came back to the world. I've had it with adventures, I said in a tiny little voice. Adventures, adventures. I had known the adventures of poetry, which are always matters of life and death, but when I came back to the streets of Mexico, I was content with everyday life. Why ask for more? Why go on fooling myself? The everyday is like a frozen transparency that lasts only a few seconds. So I came back and saw it and let it envelop me. I am the mother, I told it, and honestly I don't think I'm cut out for horror movies. Then the everyday began to expand like a soap bubble gone crazy, and popped.

I was back in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and it was September 1968 and I was thinking about the adventures of Remedios Varo. There are so few people left who remember Remedios Varo. I never met her. I would sincerely love to be able to say that I'd met her, but the truth is that I never did. I have known marvelous women, strong as mountains or ocean currents, but I never met Remedios Varo. Not because I was too timid to pay her a visit at her house, not because I didn't admire her work (which I admire wholeheartedly), but because Remedios Varo died in 1963, and in 1963 I was still living in my beloved, faraway Montevideo.

Although some nights, when the moon shines into the women's bathroom and I am still awake, I think, No, in 1963, I was already in Mexico City and Don Pedro Garfias is listening distractedly as I ask him for Remedios Varo's address. Although the Catalan painter is not a particular friend of his, he knows and respects her, so he walks somewhat unsteadily to his desk, takes a slip of paper, a diary from a drawer, a fountain pen from his jacket pocket, and ceremoniously copies out the address in his beautiful handwriting.

So off I go flying to Remedios Varo's house, which is in Colonia Polanco, isn't it? Or Colonia Anzures, perhaps, or Colonia Tlaxpana? Memory plays malicious tricks on me when the light of the waning moon creeps into the women's bathroom like a spider. In any case, I rush headlong through the streets of Mexico City, which flash past, changing as I approach her house (each change building on the one that went before, each a sequel and a reproach), until I reach a street where all the houses seem to be ruined castles, and then I ring a doorbell and wait a few seconds, during which all I can hear is my heart beating (because I'm silly like that-when I'm about to meet someone I admire, my heart starts racing) and then I hear faint steps and someone opens the door and it is Remedios Varo.

She is fifty-four years old. Which means that she has a year left to live.

She invites me in. I don't have many visitors, she says. I walk in and she follows me. Go in, go in, she says, and I proceed down a feebly illuminated corridor to a large sitting room with two windows facing an interior courtyard, their heavy, lilac curtains drawn. In the sitting room there is an armchair, in which I sit down. There are two cups of coffee on a small round table. I notice three butts in an ashtray. The obvious conclusion is that there is a third person in the house. Remedios Varo looks me in the eye and smiles: I'm alone, she declares.

I say how much I admire her, I talk about the French surrealists and the Catalan surrealists, the Spanish Civil War, I don't mention Benjamin Péret because they parted in 1942, and I don't know on what terms, but I talk about Paris and exile, her arrival in Mexico and her friendship with Leonora Carrington, and then I realize that I am telling Remedios Varo the story of her life, I'm behaving like a nervous schoolgirl reciting her lesson for a non-existent board of examiners. And then I go red as a tomato and say, Sorry, I don't know what I say, I say, Do you mind if I smoke? and I look for my pack of Delicados in my satchel, but I can't find it, so I say, Do you have a cigarette? And Remedios Varo, who is standing with her back to a picture, a picture covered with an old skirt (but that old skirt, it occurs to me, must have belonged to a giant), says that she has given up smoking, that her lungs are delicate now, and although she doesn't look like she has bad lungs, or has even seen anything bad in her life, I know that she has seen many bad things, the ascension of the devil, the unstoppable procession of termites climbing the Tree of Life, the conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting against the Enlightenment since the beginning of time (a conjecture of mine, which the official representatives of the Enlightenment would no doubt reject), I know that she has seen things that very few women know they have seen, and now she is seeing her own death, which is set to occur in less than twelve months' time, and I know that there is someone else in her house who smokes and does not want to be discovered by me, which makes me think that whoever it is, it must be someone I know. Then I sigh and look at the reflection of the waning moon in the tiles of the fourth-floor women's bathroom, and, overcoming weariness and fear, I raise my hand, point at the picture behind the giant skirt, and ask her, What is it? Remedios Varo smiles at me, then turns around; she turns her back on me and for a while she examines the picture, but without removing or drawing aside the skirt that shelters it from prying eyes. It's the last one, she says. Or maybe she says, It's the second-to-last one. Her words reverberate off the tiles scored by moonlight, so the second might have been smothered by an echo. And in that phase of radical insomnia I see all of Remedios Varo's pictures passing one after another like tears cried by the moon or my blue eyes. So, honestly, it's hard to notice details or distinguish clearly between last and second-to-last. And then Remedios Varo lifts up the giant's skirt to reveal an enormous valley, viewed from the highest mountain, a green and brown valley, and the mere sight of that landscape makes me anxious, because I know, just as I know there is another person in the house, that what the painter is showing me is a prelude, the setting for a scene that will be scorched into my soul, or no, not scorched, since nothing can affect me like that any more, what I sense is more like the approach of an ice man, a man made of ice cubes, who will come and kiss me on the mouth, on my toothless mouth, and I shall feel those lips of ice on my lips, and I will see those eyes of ice a few inches away from mine, and then I shall faint like Juana de Ibarbourou, and I will murmur, Why me? (a coquetry for which I shall be forgiven) and the man made of ice cubes will blink, and in that blink of an eye, I shall catch the briefest glimpse of a blizzard, as if someone had opened a window and then, on second thought, shut it again suddenly, saying, No, you shall see what you must, Auxilio, but all in good time.