It was actually at a poetry workshop that we met Ulises Lima and Rafael Barrios and Luscious Skin. It was the first or second time we'd been there and the first time Ulises had showed up, and when the workshop was over we made friends and walked out together and then we took the bus together, and while Luscious Skin flirted with Xóchitl I listened to Ulises Lima and he listened to me, and Rafael nodded in agreement at what Ulises was saying and what I was saying, and it was honestly as if I'd found a soul mate, a real poet, a poet through and through, who could explain clearly what I'd only sensed and wished and dreamed, and that was one of the best nights of my life, and when we got home we couldn't sleep, Xóchitl and I, and we talked until four in the morning. Later I met Arturo Belano, Felipe Müller, María Font, Ernesto San Epifanio, and all the others, but none of them impressed me as much as Ulises. Of course, Luscious Skin wasn't the only one who tried to get Xóchitl into bed. Pancho and Moctezuma Rodríguez did their best too, and even Rafael Barrios. Sometimes I would say to Xóchitl: why don't you tell them you're pregnant? Maybe they'll give up and leave you alone. But she laughed and said she didn't mind being wooed. Fine, I said, it's up to you. I'm not the jealous type. But one night, I remember it clearly, it was Arturo Belano who tried to come on to Xóchitl, and that really did make me sad. I knew she wasn't going to sleep with anyone, but their attitude bothered me. It was basically as if they'd written me off because of the way I looked. It was as if they thought: this girl can't like that poor loser with the missing teeth. As if teeth have anything to do with love. But it was different with Arturo Belano. It amused Xóchitl to be courted, but this time it was different, it was much more than a diversion for her. We hadn't met Arturo Belano yet. This was the first time. We'd heard a lot about him before, but for one reason or another we still hadn't been introduced. And that night he was there and the whole group got on an empty bus in the early hours of the morning (a bus full of visceral realists!), heading to a party or a play or somebody's reading, I've forgotten now, and Belano sat next to Xóchitl on the bus and they spent the whole ride talking, and I could tell, I was sitting a few seats back, shaky, with Ulises Lima and the kid Bustamante, I could tell that Xóchitl's face looked different, that this time she really was enjoying herself, how to explain, that she was delighted that Belano was sitting there next to her, giving her one hundred percent of his attention, while everybody else, but especially everybody who'd already tried to get her into bed, watched what was going on out of the corners of their eyes, like me, still talking, still watching the semideserted streets and the door of the bus shut tight, like the door of a crematorium oven, still doing the things they'd been doing, I mean, but with every sense alert to what was happening in the seats where my Xóchitl and Arturo Belano were sitting. And at a certain moment the atmosphere became so fraught, everything on pins and needles, that I thought to myself these assholes must know something I don't, something strange is going on here, it isn't normal for the fucking bus to be circling the city like a ghost, it isn't normal that no one's getting on it, it isn't normal for me to start hallucinating for no reason. But I got a hold on myself, the way I always do, and in the end nothing happened. Then Rafael Barrios, the nerve of him, told me that Belano didn't know that Xóchitl was my partner. I answered that nothing had happened and that if anything had happened it was Xóchitl's business, Xóchitl lives with me, she's not my slave, I said. But now comes the strange part: after that night, the night Belano was all over Xóchitl on that lonely nocturnal journey (the only thing he didn't do was kiss her on the mouth), no one ever bothered her again. Absolutely nobody. As if the bastards had seen themselves reflected in their fucking leader and they didn't like what they saw. And something else I should add: Belano's flirtation only lasted the length of that interminable bus ride, in other words it was an innocent thing, so maybe he really didn't know that the gap-toothed guy a few seats back was the partner of the girl he was coming on to, but Xóchitl did, and the way she accepted the Chilean's flattery was different from the way she endured the flattery of Luscious Skin or Pancho Rodríguez, for example, by which I mean that with them you could see she was enjoying herself, having a good time, laughing, but with Belano her face, the angle of her face that I was able to see that night, betrayed very different emotions. And that night, at the hotel, it seemed to me that Xóchitl looked more pensive and distant than usual. But I didn't say anything. I thought I understood why. So I started to talk about other things: our child, the poems she and I would write; the future, essentially. And I didn't talk about Arturo Belano or any of the real problems in store for us, like me finding work or the two of us having enough money to rent a place and be able to support ourselves and our child. No, I talked about poetry, just as I did every night, about the creative act and about visceral realism, a literary movement that was a perfect match for my inner self and my sense of reality.

After that somehow disastrous night we started to see them almost every day. Wherever they went, we went. It was only a week later, I think, that they invited me to participate in one of the group's poetry readings. We didn't miss a single meeting. And the relationship between Belano and Xóchitl was frozen in polite ritual, not devoid of a certain mystery (a mystery that nevertheless cast no shadow over the steady growth of my partner's belly), but not going any farther. The truth is, Arturo never really saw Xóchitl. What happened that night, in the bus carrying only us along the vacant streets, the howling streets, of Mexico City? I don't know. Probably a girl whose pregnancy wasn't visible yet fell in love for a few hours with a sleepwalker. And that was all.

The rest of the story is fairly ordinary. Sometimes Ulises and Belano disappeared from Mexico City. Some people didn't like it. Others didn't care. I thought it was a good thing. Sometimes Ulises loaned me money. They had piles of money, more than enough, and I always needed it. I don't know where they got it from and I don't care. Belano never loaned me money. When they left for Sonora I had the sense that the group was about to fall apart. Kind of as if the joke had stopped being funny. It didn't seem like such a terrible thing to me. My son was about to be born and I'd finally found a job. One night Rafael called me and told me they were back, but that they were leaving again. Fine, I said, the money's theirs, let them do what they want with it. This time they're going to Europe, Rafael told me. Perfect, I said, that's what we should all do. But what about the movement? said Rafael. What movement? I said, watching Xóchitl as she slept. The room was dark and the hotel sign flickered through the window like something in a gangster movie. It was in these shadows that my son's grandfather had done his dirty business. What do you mean "what movement"? Visceral realism, said Rafael. What about visceral realism? I said. That's what I mean, said Rafael, what will happen to visceral realism? What will happen to the magazine we were going to publish, to all our projects? He sounded so pitiful that if Xóchitl hadn't been asleep I would've burst out laughing. We'll publish the magazine ourselves, I said, and we'll do the projects with them or without them. For a while, Rafael didn't say anything. We can't get off track, he murmured. Then he was quiet again. Thinking, I guess. I was quiet too. But I wasn't thinking. I knew perfectly well where I stood and what I wanted to do. And just as I knew what I wanted to do, what I planned to do from then on, I also knew that Rafael would end up finding his way. There's no point getting all upset, I told him when I got tired of standing there in the dark with the phone to my ear. I'm not upset, said Rafael. I think we should go too. I'm not leaving Mexico, I said.