María Font, Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF, December 1976. We had to put my father in an asylum (my mother corrects me and says psychiatric clinic, but there are words you can't gloss over: an asylum is an asylum) a little before Ulises and Arturo came back from Sonora. I don't know whether I've told you, but they left in my father's car. According to my mother, it was that act, which she describes as underhanded and even criminal, that triggered my father's collapse. I disagree. My father's relationship to his possessions, his house, his car, his art books, his bank account, was always distant and ambiguous, to say the least. It was as if my father were always unburdening himself, willingly or reluctantly, always getting rid of things, but with such bad luck (or so slowly) that he could never achieve the nakedness he longed for. And that, as you might imagine, ended up driving him crazy. But to get back to the matter of the car. When Ulises and Arturo came back and I saw them again, at Café Quito and almost by chance-although if I was at that horrible place, in the end it meant I was looking for them-when I saw them again, as I was saying, I almost didn't recognize them. They were with some guy I didn't know, a man dressed completely in white, with a straw hat on his sticklike head, and at first I thought they'd seen me but were pretending they hadn't. They were sitting in the corner by the window that looks onto Bucareli, next to the mirror and the sign that says "Roast Goat," but they weren't eating anything. They had two tall glasses of coffee in front of them and every once in a while they would take a few feeble sips, as if they were sick or exhausted, although the man in white was eating, not roast goat (every time I repeat the words roastgoat I feel sick) but enchiladas, Café Quito's famous cheap enchiladas, and there was a bottle of beer in front of him. And I thought: they're pretending they haven't seen me, there's no way they couldn't have seen me, they've changed a lot, but I haven't changed at all. They don't want to talk to me. Then I started to think about my father's Impala and I thought about what my mother said, that it was completely shameless the way they'd stolen that car from him, really incredible, and that the best thing would be to report it and try to get the car back, and I thought about my father, who would mumble incoherently whenever anyone said anything to him about the car. For God's sake, Quim, my mother would say, stop babbling, I'm tired of going back and forth by bus or taxi, because in the end all those trips are going to cost an arm and a leg. And when my mother said that, my poor father laughed and said be careful, you'll end up crippled. And my mother didn't see the humor in it, but I did. Told the way I'm telling it, it probably isn't funny at all, but the way my father came out with it all of a sudden, more confidently than usual, or at least in a more confident voice, it really was clever and witty. In any case what my mother wanted was to report the theft of the Impala so we could get the car back and what I wanted was not to report it, since it would come back on its own (that's funny too, isn't it?). We just had to wait and give Arturo and Ulises time to come back, to return it. And now there they were, talking to the man in white, back in Mexico City, and they didn't see me or were avoiding me, so I had plenty of time to watch them and think about what I should say to them, that my father was in an asylum and that they should give the car back, although as time went by, I don't know how long I was there, the tables around me emptied and were filled again, the man in white never took off his hat and his plate of enchiladas seemed eternal, everything began to tangle in my head, as if the words I had to say were plants and all of a sudden they'd begun to wither, fade, and die. And it did me no good to think of my father shut up in the asylum, suicidally depressed, or my mother brandishing the threat or refrain of the police like a UNAM cheerleader (which she actually had been in her student days, poor Mom), because suddenly I began to wither too, to fall apart, to think (or rather repeat to myself, like a tomtom) that nothing had any meaning, that I could sit at that table at Café Quito until the end of the world (when I was in high school we had a teacher who claimed to know exactly what he would do if World War III broke out: go back to his hometown, because nothing ever happened there, probably a joke, I don't know, but in a way he was right, when the whole civilized world disappears Mexico will keep existing, when the planet vaporizes or disintegrates, Mexico will still be Mexico) or until Ulises, Arturo, and the stranger in white got up and left. But none of that happened. Arturo saw me and got up, came over to my table, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then he asked whether I wanted to come and sit with them, or, better yet, wait for them where I was. I told him I would wait. All right, he said, and he went back to the man in white's table. I tried not to watch them and for a while I managed it, but finally I looked up. Ulises had his head bowed, his hair covering half his face, and he seemed about to fall asleep. Arturo had his eyes on the stranger and every once in a while he glanced at me, and both looks, the ones he gave the man in white and the ones directed at my table, were absent, or distant, as if he'd left Café Quito a long time ago and only his ghost was still there, restless. Later (how much later was it?) they got up and came to sit with me. The man in white was gone. The café had emptied. I didn't ask them about my father's car. Arturo told me that they were leaving. Going back to Sonora? I asked. Arturo laughed. His laugh was like a gob of spit. As if he were spitting on his own pants. No, he said, much farther. Ulises is off to Paris this week. How nice, I said, he'll be able to meet Michel Bulteau. And see the most famous river in the world, said Ulises. Very nice, I said. Yeah, not bad, said Ulises. And what about you? I said to Arturo. I'm leaving a little later, for Spain. And when do you plan to come back? I said. They shrugged their shoulders. Who knows, María, they said. I'd never seen them look so beautiful. I know it sounds silly to say, but they'd never seemed so beautiful, so seductive. Although they weren't trying to be. In fact, they were dirty, who knows how long it'd been since they'd showered, how long since they'd slept, they had circles under their eyes, and they needed to shave (not Ulises, because he never had to shave), but I would've kissed them both, I don't know why I didn't, I would've gone to bed with them both, fucked them until we passed out, then watched them sleep and afterward kept fucking. I thought: if we find a hotel, if we're in a dark room, if we have all the time in the world, if I undress them and they undress me, everything will be all right, my father's madness, the lost car, the sadness and energy I felt and that at moments seemed about to choke me. But I didn't say a word.