"But then they read them, don't they?" I said, slightly annoyed.

"No, you're wrong. Then they give the books to Ulises and Belano, who read them and tell what they're about so the others can go around bragging about having read Queneau, for example, when all they've really done is steal a book by Queneau, not read it."

"Belano is Chilean?" I asked, trying to steer the conversation in a different direction, and also because I honestly didn't know.

"Couldn't you tell?" said María without lifting her eyes from whatever it was she was looking at.

"Well, I did notice that he had a slightly different accent, but I thought he might be from Tamaulipas or from Yucatán, I don't know…"

"You thought he was from Yucatán? Oh, García Madero, you poor innocent child. He thought Belano was from Yucatán," San Epifanio said to the Font sisters, and the three of them laughed.

I laughed too.

"He doesn't look like he's from Yucatán," I said, "but he could be. Anyway, I'm not a specialist in Yucatecans."

"Well, he isn't from Yucatán. He's from Chile."

"So how long has he lived in Mexico?" I said to say something.

"Since the Pinochet putsch," said María without lifting her head.

"Since long before the coup," said San Epifanio. "I met him in 1971. What happened was, he went back to Chile and after the coup he came back to Mexico."

"But we didn't know either of you back then," said Angélica.

"Belano and I were very close in those days," said San Epifanio. "We were both eighteen and we were the youngest poets on Calle Bucareli."

"Will you please tell me what you're looking at?" I said.

"Pictures of mine. You might not like them, but you can look at them too if you want."

"Are you a photographer?" I said, getting up and going over to the bed.

"No, I'm just a poet," said San Epifanio, making room for me. "Poetry is more than enough for me, although sooner or later I'm bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories."

"Here." Angélica passed me a little pile of pictures that they had finished with. "You have to look at them in chronological order."

There must have been fifty or sixty photos. All of them were taken with flash. All were of a room, probably a hotel room, except for two, which were of a dimly lit street at night and a red Mustang with a few people in it. The faces of the people in the Mustang were blurry. The rest of the pictures showed a blond, short-haired boy, sixteen or seventeen, although he might only have been fifteen, and a girl maybe two or three years older, and Ernesto San Epifanio. There must have been a fourth person, the one taking the pictures, but he or she was never seen. The first pictures were of the blond boy, dressed, and then with progressively fewer clothes on. In picture number fifteen or so, San Epifanio and the girl showed up. San Epifanio was wearing a purple blazer. The girl had on a fancy party dress.

"Who is he?" I said.

"Be quiet and look at the pictures, then ask," said Angélica.

"He's my love," said San Epifanio.

"Oh. And who's she?"

"His older sister."

By about picture number twenty, the blond boy had begun to dress in his sister's clothes. The girl, who was darker and a little chubby, was making obscene gestures at the unknown person who was photographing them. San Epifanio, meanwhile, remained in control of himself, at least in the first pictures, which showed him smiling but serious, sitting in a leatherette armchair or on the edge of the bed. All of this, however, was only an illusion, because by picture number thirty or thirty-five, San Epifanio had taken off his clothes too (his body, with its long legs and long arms, seemed excessively thin and bony, much thinner than in real life). The next pictures showed San Epifanio kissing the blond boy's neck, his lips, his eyes, his back, his cock at half-mast, his erect cock (a remarkable cock too, for such a delicate-looking boy), under the always vigilant gaze of the sister, who sometimes appeared in full and sometimes in part (an arm and a half, her hand, some fingers, one side of her face), and sometimes just as a shadow on the wall. I have to confess that I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Naturally, no one had warned me that San Epifanio was gay. (Only Lupe, but Lupe also said that I was gay.) So I tried not to show my feelings (which were confused, to say the least) and kept looking. As I feared, the next pictures showed the Brian Patten reader fucking the blond boy. I felt myself turn red and I suddenly realized that I didn't know how I was going to face the Fonts and San Epifanio when I had finished looking through the pictures. The face of the boy being fucked was twisted in a grimace that I assumed was an expression of mingled pain and pleasure. (Or fake emotion, but that only occurred to me later.) San Epifanio's face seemed to sharpen at moments, like an intensely lit razor blade or knife. And every possible expression crossed the watching sister's face, from violent joy to deepest melancholy. The last pictures showed the three of them in bed, in different poses, pretending to sleep or smiling at the photographer.

"Poor kid, it looks like someone was forcing him to be there," I said to annoy San Epifanio.

"Forcing him to be there? It was his idea. He's a little pervert."

"But you love him with all your heart," said Angélica.

"I love him with all my heart, but there are too many things that come between us."

"Like what?" said Angélica.

"Money, for example. I'm poor and he's a spoiled rich kid, used to luxury and travel and having everything he wants."

"Well, he doesn't look rich or spoiled here. Some of these pictures are really brutal," I said in a burst of sincerity.

"His family has lots of money," said San Epifanio.

"Then you could have gone to a nicer hotel. The lighting looks like something from a Santo movie."

"He's the son of the Honduran ambassador," said San Epifanio, shooting me a gloomy look. "But don't tell anybody that," he added, regretting having confessed his secret to me.

I returned the stack of pictures, which San Epifanio put in his pocket. Less than an inch from my left arm was Angélica's bare arm. I gathered up my courage and looked her in the face. She was looking at me too, and I think I blushed a little. I felt happy. Then right away I ruined it.

"Pancho hasn't come today?" I asked, like an idiot.

"Not yet," said Angélica. "What do you think of the pictures?"

"Hard-core," I said.

"Hard-core? That's all?" San Epifanio got up and sat in the wooden chair where I had been. From there he watched me with one of his knife-blade smiles.

"Well, there's a kind of poetry to them. But if I told you that they only struck me as poetic, I'd be lying. They're strange pictures. I'd call them pornographic. Not in a negative sense, but definitely pornographic."

"Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio. "Did the pictures turn you on?"

"No," I said emphatically, although the truth is I wasn't sure. "They didn't turn me on, but they didn't disgust me either."

"Then it isn't pornography. Not for you, at least."

"But I liked them," I admitted.

"Then just say that: you liked them and you don't know why you liked them, which doesn't matter much anyway, period."

"Who's the photographer?" said María.

San Epifanio looked at Angélica and laughed.

"That really is a secret. The person made me swear I wouldn't tell anybody."

"But if it was Billy's idea, who cares who the photographer was?" said Angélica.

So the name of the Honduran ambassador's son was Billy; very appropriate, I thought.

And then, don't ask me why, I got the idea that it was Ulises Lima who had taken the pictures. And next I immediately thought about the interesting (to me) news that Belano was from Chile. And then I watched Angélica. Not in an obvious way, mostly when she wasn't looking at me, her head in a book of poetry (Les Lieux de la douleur, by Eugène Savitzkaya) from which she looked up every now and then to contribute to the conversation that María and San Epifanio were having about erotic art. And all over again I started thinking about the possibility that Ulises Lima had taken the pictures, and I also remembered what I'd heard at Café Quito, that Lima was a drug dealer, and if he was a drug dealer, I thought, then he almost definitely dealt in other things. And that was as far as I'd gotten when Barrios showed up arm in arm with a very nice American girl (she was always smiling) whose name was Barbara Patterson and a poetess I didn't know, called Silvia Moreno, and then we all started to smoke marijuana.