So there I was, cradled in snow and prepared to die, when suddenly I heard something dripping and I said to myself, How can that be? I must be hallucinating again, nothing drips in the high Himalayas, everything is frozen solid. That little sound was enough to stop me falling into an everlasting sleep. I opened my eyes and tried to see where it was coming from. I thought, Could the glacier be melting? The darkness seemed almost absolute, but it was just that my eyes were taking some time to adjust, as I soon discovered. Then I saw the still moon reflected in a tile, a single tile, as if it was waiting for me. I was sitting on the floor, resting my back against the wall. I got up. The faucet in one of the sinks in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor was not properly turned off. I turned it on and splashed my face… Then the moon changed tiles.

Fourteen

That was when I decided to come down from the mountains. I decided not to starve to death in the women's bathroom. I decided not to go crazy. I decided not to become a beggar. I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at. I began my descent. All I can remember is the freezing wind like a blade against my face and the moon glowing. There were rocks and ravines; there were post-nuclear ski slopes. But I didn't let them bother me; I continued my descent. Somewhere in the sky an electric storm

was brewing, but I didn't worry too much about that. I was thinking happy thoughts as I continued my descent. I was thinking about Arturito Belano, for example, and how, when he came back to Mexico City, he started hanging out with new friends, kids who were younger than him and the other young poets of Mexico: sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. And then he met Ulises Lima and began to laugh at his old friends, including me, forgiving their errant ways, as if he were Dante and had just returned from Hell, what am I saying, as if he were Virgil himself, such a sensitive boy, he started smoking marijuana, commonly known as weed, and messing with substances I would rather not even imagine. But for all that, deep down, he was, I knew, the same sweet kid he had always been. And so, when we happened to meet, by sheer chance because we weren't hanging out with the same crowd anymore, he would say, How's it going, Auxilio, or play on my name, calling out Help, Help! Help!! from the opposite sidewalk on the Avenida Bucareli, leaping around like a monkey with a taco or a slice of pizza in his hand; he was always with Laura Jáuregi, his girlfriend, who was very pretty, but also supremely arrogant, and Ulises Lima and that other young Chilean, Felipe Miiller, and sometimes I even plucked up my courage and joined them, but they spoke Gliglish, and although it was clear that they liked me and knew who I was, they talked Gliglish amongst themselves, which made it hard for me to understand the ins and outs of the conversation, so in the end I went back to following my path through the snow.

But don't think they were making fun of me!. They listened to what I said. But I didn't speak Gliglish and they simply couldn't stop using their private slang, poor kids. Poor forsaken kids. Because that's what they were: no one loved them. Or no one took them seriously. Or only they did; too much, I sometimes felt.

And one day someone told me that Arturito Belano had left Mexico. Then added: This time, let's hope he doesn't come back. And that made me furious, because I had always liked Arturito and I think I probably insulted that person (mentally, at least), but first I had the presence of mind to ask where Arturito had gone. The person didn't know: Australia, Europe, Canada, somewhere like that. Afterward I kept thinking about him, and about his mother, who was so generous, and his sister, and the afternoons we spent together at their apartment making empanadas, and the time I made noodles and we hung them up to dry all over the place, in the kitchen, the dining room and the little living room they had in that apartment on the Calle Abraham González.

I can't forget anything. That's my problem, or so I've been told.

I am the mother of Mexico 's poets. I am the only one who held out in the university in 1968, when the riot police and the army came in. I stayed there on my own in the Faculty, shut up in a bathroom, with no food, for more than ten days, for more than fifteen days, from the eighteenth to the thirtieth of September, I think, I'm not sure any more.

I stayed there with a book by Pedro Garfias and my satchel, wearing a little white blouse and a pleated sky-blue skirt, and I had more than enough time to think things over. But I couldn't think about Arturo Belano, because I hadn't met him yet.

I said to myself: Hang in there, Auxilio Lacouture. If you go out they'll arrest you (and probably deport you to Montevideo, because, naturally, your immigration papers aren't in order, you silly girl), they'll spit on you and beat you up. I prepared myself to endure. To endure hunger and solitude. For the first few hours I slept sitting in the stall, the one I was in when it all began, because in my destitution I believed that it would bring me " luck, but sleeping on a throne is extremely uncomfortable, and in the end I curled up on the tiles. I had dreams, not nightmares but musical dreams, dreams about transparent questions, dreams of slender, safe airplanes flying the length and breadth of Latin America through skies of brilliant, cold blue. I woke up frozen stiff and ravenous. I looked out of the window, the little round window over the sinks, and saw the new day dawning in pieces of the campus like pieces of a puzzle. I spent that first morning crying and thanking the angels in Heaven that they hadn't cut off the water. Don't get sick, Auxilio, I told myself, drink all the water you like, but don't get sick. I leaned against the wall and let myself slide to the ground, and once again I opened that book by Pedro Garfias. My eyes closed. I must have fallen asleep. Then I heard steps and hid in my stall (it was the nun's cell I never had, my trench and my Duino Palace, my Mexican epiphany). I read Pedro Garfias. Then I fell asleep. Then I looked out of the bull's-eye window and saw very high clouds and thought of Dr. Atl's pictures and the most transparent region. Then I started thinking pleasant thoughts.

How many lines of poetry did I know by heart? I started reciting, murmuring the lines I could remember, and I would have liked to write them down, but although I had a ball-point pen, I didn't have any paper. Then I thought: Silly, you have all the paper you need. So I ripped off squares of toilet paper and began to write. Then I fell asleep and dreamed, and this is really funny, I dreamed of Juana de Ibarbourou and her book La rosa de los vientos (The Compass Rose), published in 1930, and her first book too, Las lenguas de diamante (Diamond Tongues), such a pretty title, exquisite, it could be the title of an avant-garde book published last year in French, but Juana de America published it in 1919, at the age of twenty-seven. What a fascinating woman she must have been then, with the world at her feet and all those gentlemen gallantly prepared to do her bidding (they are all gone now, although Juana remains), all those modernist poets prepared to give their lives for poetry, so many glances and compliments, so much love.

Then I woke up. I thought: I am the memory.

That's what I thought. Then I went back to sleep. Then I woke up, and for hours, maybe days, I cried for times gone by, for my childhood in Montevideo, for faces that disturb me (even now, more than ever, in fact), faces of which I prefer not to speak.

Then I lost count of the days I'd spent shut up in there. From my little window I saw birds, segments of tree trunks or branches growing from somewhere invisible, shrubs, grass, clouds, walls, but I couldn't see people or hear noises, and I lost track of the time I had been shut up in there. Then, maybe remembering Charlie Chaplin, I ate toilet paper, but only a little, I couldn't stomach more. Then I realized that I was no longer hungry. Then I picked up all the pieces of toilet paper on which I had written, threw them in the toilet and pulled the chain. The sound of the water gave me a start, and I thought I was finished.