We check into a hotel, the Hotel Juárez, on Calle Juárez, Lupe taking one room and the three of us taking another. The only window in our room looks onto an alley. At the end of the alley, which runs into Calle Juárez, there's a gathering of shadowy figures who talk in low voices, although every so often someone curses or starts to shout for no reason, and after a prolonged period of observation, I see one of the shadows raise an arm and point at the window I'm watching from. At the other end of the alley, trash piles up, and it's even darker, if possible, although among the buildings one stands out, one that's a little more brightly lit. It's the back of the Hotel Santa Elena, with a tiny door that no one uses, except for a kitchen worker who comes out once with a trash can and stops beside the door when he goes back in, craning his neck to watch the traffic on Calle Juárez.

JANUARY 6

Belano and Lima spent all morning at the Municipal Registry Office, the census office, a few churches, the Santa Teresa Library, the university archives, and the archives of the only newspaper here, El Centinela de Santa Teresa. We met for lunch in the main square, next to an odd statue commemorating the victory of the locals over the French. In the afternoon, Belano and Lima are resuming their search. They have a meeting, they said, with the number one man in the literature department at the university, a jerk named Horacio Guerra, who is (surprise!) the spitting image of Octavio Paz, but in miniature, and that goes for his name too, if you think about it, said Belano, so tell me, García Madero, did Horace live in the same era as Caesar Augustus? I told him I didn't know. Let me think, I said. But they were in a rush and they started to talk about other things and when they went off I was left alone with Lupe again, and I thought about taking her to the movies, but since Lima and Belano had the money and I'd forgotten to ask them for some we couldn't go, and we had to settle for walking around Santa Teresa and window-shopping at the stores in the center and then going back to the hotel and watching television in a room off the lobby. There we met two little old ladies who, after staring at us for a while, asked us whether we were husband and wife. Lupe said yes. I had no choice but to play along, though the whole time I was thinking about what Belano and Lima had asked me, whether Horace had lived in the same era as Caesar Augustus, and I thought he had, my instinct would've been to say yes, but I also had the feeling that Horace wasn't exactly a champion of Augustus, and Lupe was talking to the old ladies, snoopy old ladies, as it turned out, and I don't know why but I kept thinking about Augustus and Horace and listening with my left ear to the soap opera that was on TV and with my right ear to Lupe and the old ladies talking, and suddenly my memory went plumph, like a soft wall collapsing, and I saw Horace fighting against Augustus or Octavian and for Brutus and Cassius, who had murdered Caesar and wanted to bring back the Republic, shit, it couldn't have been weirder if I had dropped acid, I saw Horace, twenty-four at Philippi, only a little older than Belano or Lima and just seven years older than me, and that bastard Horace, who was staring into the distance, suddenly turned around and looked at me! Hello, García Madero, he said in Latin, although I don't understand a fucking word of Latin, I'm Horace, born in Venusia in 65 B.C., son of a freed slave (the most loving father anyone could ask for), appointed tribune under Brutus, ready to march into battle, the Battle of Philippi, which we'll lose but which I'm destined to fight, the Battle of Philippi, where the fate of mankind is at stake, and then one of the old ladies touched my arm and asked me what had brought me to the city of Santa Teresa, and I saw Lupe's smiling eyes and the eyes of the other old lady, which were shooting sparks as she watched Lupe and me, and I answered that we were on our honeymoon, our honeymoon, ma'am, I said, and then I got up and told Lupe to follow me and we went to her room where we fucked like crazy or as if we were going to die the next morning, until it got dark and we heard the voices of Lima and Belano, who had come back to their room and were talking, talking, talking.

JANUARY 7

Now we know for sure: Cesárea Tinajero was here. There was no trace of her at the registry, or the university, or the parish archives, or the library, where for some reason the archives of the old Santa Teresa hospital, now called the General Sepúlveda Hospital after the Revolutionary hero, are stored. And yet, at the Centinela de Santa Teresa they let Belano and Lima comb through the morgue and in the news from 1928 there was a June 6 mention of a bullfighter named Pepe Avellaneda, who fought two bulls from Don José Forcat's stock in the Santa Teresa bullring with considerable success (two ears) and of whom there's a profile and interview in the June 11, 1928, issue, in which it says, among other things, that Pepe Avellaneda was traveling in the company of a woman named Cesárea Tinaja [sic], formerly of Mexico City. There are no photographs with the piece, but the local reporter describes her as "tall, attractive, and reserved," although I frankly have no idea what he could mean by that, unless he's saying it to emphasize the difference between the woman and the bullfighter she was accompanying, who is described, somewhat bluntly, as a little man, no more than five feet tall, very thin, with a big dented skull, a description that reminds Belano and Lima of a Hemingway bullfighter (Hemingway's an author I unfortunately haven't read), the typical brave and luckless Hemingway bullfighter, more sad than anything else, deathly sad, although I wouldn't dare say as much with so little to go on, and anyway Cesárea Tinajero is one thing and Cesárea Tinaja is another, which is something my friends refuse to admit, chalking it up it to a misprint, a bad transcription, or the reporter's faulty hearing, and maybe even an intentional slip on Cesárea Tinajero's part, saying her name wrong, a joke, a modest way of hiding a modest clue.

The rest of the article is unremarkable. Pepe Avellaneda talks about bullfighting, saying incomprehensible or incongruous things, but so mildly that he never sounds pedantic. A final clue: the July 10 issue of the Centinela de Santa Teresa announces the departure of the bullfighter (and presumably his companion) for Sonoyta, where he will share billing in the ring with Jesús Ortiz Pacheco, bullfighter from Monterrey. So Cesárea and Avellaneda were in Santa Teresa for about a month, evidently doing nothing, seeing the local sights or holed up in their hotel. In any case, according to Lima and Belano we now had someone who knew Cesárea, who knew her well, and who plausibly still lived in Sonora, although with bullfighters you never know. Their response to my argument that Avellaneda might be dead was that we would still have his family and friends. So now we were looking for Cesárea and the bullfighter. They told outrageous stories about Horacio Guerra. They said again that he was exactly like Octavio Paz. Considering the short time they'd spent with him I don't know how they could know so much about him, but they said that his acolytes in this lost corner of Sonora were carbon copies of Paz's acolytes. As if in this forgotten province, forgotten poets, essayists, and professors were simulating the mass-media actions of their idols.

At first, they said, Guerra was extremely interested in knowing who Cesárea Tinajero was, but his interest evaporated when Belano and Lima explained the avant-garde nature of her work, and how little of it there was.