Perla Avilés, Calle Leonardo da Vinci, Colonia Mixcoac, Mexico City DF, May 1976. I didn't have many friends in those days, but when I met him I didn't have a single friend. I'm talking about 1970, when the two of us were in school together at Porvenir. Not for long, really, which goes to show how relative memory is, like a language we think we know but we don't, that can stretch things or shrink them at will. That's what I used to tell him, but he hardly listened to me. Once I went home with him when he still lived near the school, and I met his sister. There was no one else there, just his sister, and we talked for a long time. Soon after that they moved, went to live in Colonia Nápoles, and he quit school for good. I used to say to him: don't you want to go to college? are you going to deny yourself the privilege of higher education? and he would laugh and tell me that in college he was sure he'd learn exactly what he'd learned in high school: nothing. But what are you going to do with your life? I'd say, what kind of work will you do? and he would answer that he had no idea and didn't care. One afternoon when I'd gone to see him at his house I asked him whether he did drugs. No, he said. Never? I said. And he said: I've smoked marijuana, but that was a long time ago. And nothing else? No, nothing else, he said, and then he started to laugh. He was laughing at me, but I didn't mind. In fact, I liked to see him laugh. Around that time he met a famous film and theater director. A fellow Chilean. Sometimes he would talk to me about him, telling me how he'd approached him at the door to the theater where one of the director's plays about Heracleitus or some other pre-Socratic philosopher was being performed, a loose adaptation of the philosopher's writings that caused quite a stir, Mexico being so straitlaced at the time, not because of anything in the play but because almost all the actors came onstage naked at some point. I was still in school at Porvenir, in the stench of Opus Dei, and I spent all my time studying and reading (I don't think I've ever read so much since), and my only entertainment, my greatest pleasure, was going to his house. I would visit him regularly, but not too often because I didn't want to be a bore or get in the way. I would come in the afternoon, or when it was already dark, and we would spend two or three hours talking, usually about literature, although he'd also tell me about his adventures with the director, it was clear he admired him greatly, I don't know whether he liked the theater, but he loved film, in fact now that I think about it, he didn't read very much back then, I was the one who talked about books, and I really did read a lot, literature, philosophy, political essays, but he didn't, he went to the movies and then every day or every third day, extremely often, really, he would go to the director's house, and once when I told him he had to read more, he said he'd already read everything that mattered to him. Such arrogance! Sometimes he would say things like that, I mean sometimes he was like a spoiled child, but I forgave him everything, whatever he did seemed fine to me. One day he told me that he'd fought with the director. I asked him why and he didn't want to tell me. Or rather, he said that it had to do with a difference in literary opinion and that was all. What I managed to get out of him was that the director had said that Neruda was shit and that Nicanor Parra was the greatest poet of the Spanish language. Something like that. Of course I could hardly believe that two people would fight about something so unimportant. Where I come from, he said, people fight about things like that all the time. Well, I said, in Mexico people kill each other for no good reason at all, but certainly not educated people. Oh, the ideas I had then about culture. A while later, I went to visit the director, armed with a little book by Empedocles. His wife ushered me in and shortly afterward the director in person came into the living room and we started to talk. The first thing he asked me was how I'd gotten his address. I said that my friend had given it to me. Oh, him, said the director, and right away he wanted to know how he was, what he was doing, why he never came to visit. I gave him the first answer that popped into my head, then we started to talk about other things. After that, I had two people to visit, the director and my friend, and suddenly I realized that my horizons were expanding imperceptibly and my life was being gradually enriched. Those were happy days. One afternoon, however, after the director asked about my friend again, he told me about their fight. The story he told me wasn't much different from what my friend had told me. The fight had been about Neruda and Parra, about the validity of their respective poetic visions, and yet there was a new element to the story that the director told (and I knew he was telling me the truth): when he fought with my friend and my friend couldn't come up with anything else to say in his desperate defense of Neruda, he started to cry. Right there in the director's living room, like a ten-year-old, without trying to hide it, although he was seventeen and had been for a while. According to the director, it was the tears that had come between them, that were keeping my friend away, since he must be ashamed (according to the director) of his reaction to what was otherwise a completely trivial and circumstantial disagreement. Tell him to come visit me, the director said that afternoon when I left his house. I spent the next two days thinking about what he'd said and about the kind of person my friend was and the reasons he might have had for not telling me the full story. When I went to see him I found him in bed. He had a fever and he was reading a book on the Templars, the mystery of the Gothic cathedrals, that kind of thing, I really don't know how he could read such trash, although to be honest it wasn't the first time I'd surprised him with books like that, sometimes it was thrillers, other times junk science, anyway, the only good thing about the books he read was that he never tried to get me to read them too, whereas whenever I read a good book, I immediately passed it on to him and sometimes I waited whole weeks for him to finish reading it so we could discuss it. He was in bed, he was reading the Templars book, and the minute I stepped into his room I started to shake. For a while we talked about things I've forgotten now. Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stretched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost in the country at night, just listening to the sound of horses. I could've sat there like that for the rest of the day, for the rest of my life. But I spoke. I told him about my latest visit to the director's house, I relayed the director's message, that he should go see him, that he was expected, and he said: then he'd better wait sitting down because I'm not going back. Then he started to pick up his Templars book again. I argued that just because Neruda's poetry was good it didn't mean that Parra's couldn't be. I was stunned by his reply. He said: I don't give a shit about Neruda's poetry or Parra's poetry. So why the big argument, then, why the fight? I managed to ask, and he didn't answer. Then I made a mistake. I came a little closer, sitting down beside him on the bed, and I took a book out of my pocket, a book of poetry, and I read him a few lines. He listened in silence. It was a poem about Narcissus and a nearly endless forest inhabited by hermaphrodites. When I finished he didn't say anything. What do you think? I asked. I don't know, he said, what do you think? Then I told him that I thought poets were hermaphrodites and that they could only be understood by each other. Poets, I said. What I would have liked to say was: we poets. But he looked at me as if the flesh had been stripped from my face and it was just a skull, he looked at me with a smile and said: don't be corny, Perla. That was all. I turned pale and flinched, only managing to move a little bit away, and I tried to get up but I couldn't, and all that time he sat there motionless, looking at me and smiling, as if all the skin, muscles, fat, and blood had slid off my face, leaving only the yellow or white bone. At first I was unable to speak. Then I said or whispered that it was late and I had to go. I stood up, said goodbye, and left. He didn't even look up from his book. When I crossed the empty living room, the empty hallway, I thought I would never see him again. A little while later I started college and my life took a ninety-degree turn. Years later, purely by chance, I ran into his sister handing out Trotskyist propaganda at the Faculty of Literature. I bought a pamphlet from her and we went to have coffee. By then I'd stopped seeing the director, I was about to finish my degree, and I was writing poems that almost no one read. Naturally, I asked about him. Then his sister gave me a detailed account of his latest adventures. He had traveled all over Latin America, returned to his native country, suffered through a coup. All I could bring myself to say was: what bad luck. Yes, said his sister, he was planning to stay there to live and a few weeks after he got there the military decides to stage a coup, pretty rotten luck. For a while we couldn't think of anything else to say to each other. I imagined him lost in a white space, a virgin space that kept getting dirtier and more soiled despite his best efforts, and even the face I remembered grew distorted, as if while I was talking to his sister his features melded with what she was describing, ridiculous tests of strength, terrifying, pointless rites of passage into adulthood, so distant from what I once thought would become of him, and even his sister's voice talking about the Latin American revolution and the defeats and victories and deaths that it would bring began to sound strange and then I couldn't sit there a second longer and I told her I had to go to class and we'd see each other some other time. I remember that for two or three nights I dreamed of him. In my dreams he was thin, all skin and bones, sitting under a tree, his hair long, his clothes ragged, his shoes ruined, unable to get up and walk.