I thought about taking a shower but decided to save it for when he got there. I spent a while straightening things up, and then I changed my shirt and went outside to wait. It was more than half an hour, and all I did the entire time was try to remember the first time we made love.

When he got out of the taxi he looked much thinner than he had the last time I'd seen him, vastly thinner and more worn down than in my memories, but he was still Luscious Skin and I was happy to see him. I held out my hand but he didn't take it, instead he hurled himself at me and hugged me. The rest was more or less the way I'd imagined it, the way I'd wished. There was nothing disappointing about it.

At three in the morning we got up and I made us a second supper, this time a cold one, and I poured us some whiskey. We were both hungry and thirsty. Then, as we were eating, Luscious Skin started to talk more about Ulises Lima's disappearance. He had a wild theory that didn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. According to him, Ulises was fleeing from an organization (or that's the way it sounded at first) that wanted to kill him, so when he ended up in Managua he decided not to come back. No matter how you looked at it, it was an unlikely story. Everything had begun, according to Luscious Skin, with a trip that Lima and his friend Belano took up north, at the beginning of 1976. After that trip they both went on the run. First they fled to Mexico City together, and then to Europe, separately. When I asked him what the founders of visceral realism were doing in Sonora, Luscious Skin said they'd gone to look for Cesárea Tinajero. After he'd spent several years in Europe, Lima had returned to Mexico. Maybe he thought the whole thing had been forgotten, but the killers showed up one night after a meeting where Lima had been trying to reunite the visceral realists, and he had to run away again. When I asked Luscious Skin why anyone would want to kill Lima, he said he didn't know. You didn't travel with him, did you? Luscious Skin said he hadn't. Then how do you know all this? Who told you this story? Lima? Luscious Skin said no, it was María Font who'd told him (he explained who María Font was), and she'd gotten it from her father. Then he told me that María Font's father was in an insane asylum. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have started to laugh right there, but when Luscious Skin told me that the person who'd started the rumor was a madman, a shiver ran up my spine. And I felt pity too, and I knew I was in love.

That night we talked until dawn. At eight in the morning I had to go to the university. I left Luscious Skin copies of the keys to the house and I asked him to wait till I came back. From the university I called Albertito Moore and asked him whether he remembered Ulises Lima. His reply was vague. He did and he didn't. Who was Ulises Lima? A lost lover? I said goodbye and hung up. Next I called Zarco and asked him the same question. This time the reply was much more emphatic: a lunatic, said Ismael Humberto. He's a poet, I said. More or less, said Zarco. He traveled to Managua with a delegation of Mexican writers and got lost, I said. It must have been the delegation of peasant poets, said Zarco. And he didn't come back with them, he disappeared, I said. That's the kind of thing that happens to these people, said Zarco. That's it? I said. Sure, said Zarco, there's nothing else to it. When I got home, Luscious Skin was sleeping. My latest book of poetry was open next to him. That night, as we ate dinner, I suggested that he stay with me for a few days. That's what I was planning to do, said Luscious Skin, but I wanted you to be the one who asked. A little later he brought over a suitcase with all his belongings in it. He had nothing: two shirts, a serape that he'd stolen from a musician, some socks, a portable radio, a notebook he used to keep a kind of diary, and not much else. So I gave him an old pair of pants that were maybe a little tight on him but that he loved, plus three new shirts that my mother had just bought me, and one night, on my way home from work, I went to a shoe store and bought him some boots.

Our life together was brief but happy. For thirty-five days we lived together and each night we made love and talked until late and ate meals that he cooked. Usually they were complicated or sometimes they were simple but they were always tasty. One night he told me that the first time he had sex he was ten years old. I didn't want him to tell me anything else. I remember looking away, at a Pérez Camarga print hanging on the wall, and I prayed that his first time had been with a teenager, or a kid, and that he hadn't been raped. Another night, or maybe the same night, he told me that he'd come to Mexico City when he was eighteen, with no money, no clothes, no friends to turn to, and that he'd had a rough time of it, until a journalist friend he'd had sex with let him sleep in El Nacional's paper warehouse. Since I was there, he said, I thought I was fated be a journalist, and for a while he tried to write articles that no one would publish. Then he lived with a woman and had a child and a long string of jobs, none of them permanent. He even worked as a street hawker around Azcapotzalco, but he ended up in a knife fight with his supplier and he quit. One night, when he was inside of me, I asked him whether he had ever killed anyone. I didn't mean to ask the question, I didn't want to hear his answer, whether it was true or a lie, and I bit my lips. He said that he had and thrust even harder, and I cried when I came.

During that time no one came to see me and I stopped visiting anyone, I told some people I didn't feel well, and others that I was working on something that required utter solitude and unbroken concentration. The truth is, I did write a little while Luscious Skin was living with me, five or six short poems. They aren't bad. I'll probably never publish them, but you never know. The visceral realists always appeared in the stories he told me and although at first it bothered me when he talked about them, little by little I got used to it and when he didn't happen to mention them, I was the one to ask: where were the Rodríguez brothers when you were in the house on Calzada Camarones? where did Rafael Barrios live when you lived in the Niño Perdido hotel? and then he would reshuffle the pieces of his story and talk to me about those shadowy figures, his occasional brothers-in-arms, the ghosts populating his vast freedom, his vast desolation.

One night he talked to me about Cesárea Tinajero again. I told him that Lima and Belano had probably made her up to justify their trip to Sonora. I remember that we were lying naked in bed, the window open to the skies of Coyoacán, and that Luscious Skin turned on his side and pulled me to him, my erect cock seeking his testicles, his scrotum, his still flaccid cock, and then Luscious Skin said ñero (he had never addressed me in that vulgar way before), he said ñero and grabbed me by the shoulders, and he said it wasn't like that, Cesárea Tinajero existed, she might still exist, and then he was quiet, but watching me, his eyes open in the dark as my erect penis lightly tapped his testicles. And then I asked him how Belano and Lima had heard of Cesárea Tinajero, a purely perfunctory question, and he said that it was in an interview, that in those days Belano and Lima didn't have any money and they started to do interviews for a magazine, a corrupt magazine under the sway of the peasant poets or soon to be under the sway of the peasant poets, but then as now, said Luscious Skin, there was no way not to be part of one of the two camps, what camps are you talking about? I whispered, my penis rising up his scrotum and its tip touching the base of his penis, which was beginning to swell, the peasant poets' camp or Octavio Paz's camp, he said, and just as he was saying "Octavio Paz's camp" his hand moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck, since there could be no doubt that I belonged to Octavio Paz's camp, although the scene was more nuanced than that, but at any rate, the visceral realists weren't part of any camp, not the neo-PRI-ists or the champions of otherness, the neo-Stalinists or the aesthetes, those who drew a government salary or those who lived off the university, the sellers or the buyers, those who clung to tradition or those who masked ignorance with arrogance, the whites or the blacks, the Latin Americanists or the cosmopolites. But what matters is that they did these interviews (was it for Plural? was it for Plural after Octavio Paz was forced out?), and although I asked how those two could need money when they made a living selling drugs, the point is that according to Luscious Skin they needed the money and they went to interview some old men who nobody remembered, the stridentists: Manuel Maples Arce, born in 1900 and died in 1981, Arqueles Vela, born in 1899 and died in 1977, and Germán List Arzubide, born in 1898 and probably died recently too, or maybe not, I have no idea, it's not as if it makes much difference to me, since from a literary point of view the stridentists were a contemptible group, comical without intending to be. And one of the stridentists, at some point in his interview, mentioned Cesárea Tinajero, and then I told Luscious Skin that I would find out what had happened to Cesárea Tinajero. Then we made love, but it was like doing it with someone who's there but isn't there, someone who's gently drifting away and whose gestures of farewell we aren't able to decipher.