I know that the landscape, the enormous valley, vaguely reminiscent of a Renaissance backgrounds is waiting.

But what is it waiting for?

And then Remedios Varo covers the canvas with the skirt and offers me a cup of coffee and we start talking about other things, aspects of daily life, although words from a different kind of context find their way into our conversation, like parousia or hierophant, like psychotropic drugs and elec-troshock therapy. And then we talk about someone who recently went on a hunger strike, and I hear myself saying, After a week without food, you don't feel hungry anymore, and Remedios Varo looks at me and says, You poor thing.

Just at that moment the heavy lilac curtain stirs and I leap to my feet and I can't (and won't) think about what the Catalan painter has just said. I go to the window, draw the curtain aside and discover a black kitten. I heave a sigh of relief. I know that behind me Remedios Varo is smiling and wondering who I am. The window gives onto a little courtyard with a garden where five or six other cats are taking a siesta. So many cats! Are they all yours? More or less, says Remedios Varo. I turn to look at her: the kitten is in her arms and she is saying, in Catalan: There you are, sweetie. Where were you? I've been looking for you for hours.

Would you like to listen to some music?

Is she talking to me or to the kitten? Me, I suppose, because she talks to the kitten in Catalan, although it's clear at a glance, to anyone, that the kitten is Mexican born and bred, from a line of Mexican stray cats going back at least three hundred years, and now that the moon is stealing from one bathroom tile to another with delicate feline steps, I ask myself if there were cats in Mexico before the Spanish came, and I answer in a dispassionate, objective, and even slightly indifferent manner, No, there were no cats; the cats came with the second or third wave of Europeans. And then, speaking like a sleepwalker, because I am thinking about the sleepwalking cats of Mexico, I reply, Yes, and Remedios Varo goes to the record player, an old record player, which is not at all surprising since we are in the incredible year 1962 and everything is old, everything raises a hand to its mouth as I do to stifle a cry of surprise or an untimely confession, and she puts on a record and says, It's the Concertino in A minor by Salvador Bacarisse, and, listening to that Spanish music for the first time, I begin to cry, again, while the moon jumps from one tile to another in slow motion, as if I and not nature were directing this film.

How much time do we spend listening to Bacarisse?

I don't know. All I know is that at some point Remedios Varo lifts the arm of the record player and brings the listening to an end. And then I go to her (I have to admit it, I don't want to leave) and, blushing deeply, I offer to wash the cups we used, to sweep the floor, to dust her furniture, to scour the pots and pans in her kitchen, to go out and do the shopping, to make the bed or run a bath, but Remedios Varo smiles and says, I don't need you to do any of that, Auxilio, but thanks anyway. I'm fine, really. I don't need any help. As she shows me to the front door I think, Liar! How can she not need any help?

And then I see myself in the hallway of her house. She is inside with her hand on the doorhandle. There are so many things I would like to ask her. For a start, if I can visit her again. Now the whole street is awash with sunlight like white wine. That sunlight illuminates her face and tinges it with a brave melancholy. Fine. Everything is fine. It's time for me to go. I don't know whether to shake her hand or kiss her on both cheeks. Latin American women, as far as I know, give just the one kiss. On one cheek. Spanish women give two. And French women three. When I was a girl I used to think that the three kisses stood for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Now I know they don't, but I still like to think they do. So I give her three kisses and she looks at me as if she too, at some point, had shared my theory. A kiss on the left cheek, one on the right, and a final kiss on the left. And Remedios Varo looks at me and her eyes say, Don't worry, Auxilio, you're not going to die, you're not going to go crazy, you're upholding academic independence, you're defending the honor of our American universities, at worst you might become terribly thin, or have visions, or they might even find you, but don't think about that, be strong, read poor old Pedrito Garfias (you could at least have brought something else to read, you silly girl!) and let your mind flow freely through time, from the 18th to the 30th of September 1968, not one day more, that's all you have to do.

And then, as Remedios Varo shuts the door, she darts a last gaze straight into my eyes, and it is implacably clear to me that she is dead.

Ten

I left Remedios Varo's house like a sleepwalker, but even more lost, because sleepwalkers always find their way back, and I knew that I would never return to that house. I knew that I would wake up shelterless, at night or as the day was breaking, not that it mattered, somewhere in the heart of the city that love or rage had led me to choose.

And now my memories, wandering without rhyme or reason backward and forwards from that helpless month of September 1968 mumble and stutter and tell me that I decided to stay there and wait in that watery sunlight, standing on a corner, listening to all the sounds of Mexico City, down to the sound of architectural shadows pursuing one another like wild animals sprung from a taxidermist's lair.

My senses held me pinned in a purely spatial world, so I couldn't say whether a long or a short span of time elapsed before I saw the door of Remedios Varo's house open and a woman come out, the one who had been hiding in the bedroom or the bathroom or behind the curtains during my visit.

A woman who, although she had long slim legs, was inferior to me in stature, I reckoned as I followed her. Because although the woman was tall, especially by Mexican standards, I was taller still.

Tailing her, I could see only her back and legs. She was slimly built, as I said, with a head of brown, slightly wavy hair falling below her shoulders, hair which, in spite of a certain disarray (which could have been taken for scruffiness, though I wouldn't dare call it that), was not without grace.

Everything about her, in fact her whole person, gave off a kind of grace, though it was hard to tell exactly why, since she was dressed in a sober and unexceptional manner, and there was nothing particularly original about her clothing: a black skirt and a cream-colored cardigan, both very worn, of the kind that can be bought for a few pesos from a market stall. Oddly, however, she was wearing high-heeled shoes, not very high heels, but dressy all the same, shoes that really didn't match the rest of her attire. She was carrying a folder full of papers under her arm.

Instead of waiting at the bus stop, as I'd thought she would, she kept walking toward the center of the city. After a while she went into a café. I stayed outside and watched her through the front window. I saw her approach a table, take something out of the folder and display it: one sheet, then another. They were drawings, or reproductions of drawings. The man and the woman sitting at the table looked at the papers and then shook their heads. She smiled at them and then proceeded to the next table, where the scene was repeated. The result was the same. Undeterred, she went to another table, then another and another, until she had approached them all. She sold one drawing. For just a few coins, which made me think that it was a buyer's market. Then she went to the bar, where she exchanged a few words with a waitress. She spoke and the waitress listened. They probably knew each other. When the waitress turned around to make a coffee, she took the opportunity to engage the men at the bar in conversation and try to make a sale, but this time she spoke without moving from her place and one or maybe two men came over to where she was and glanced idly at her treasures.