You really want to? And she: Absolutely! The only problem is that in Sacramento there aren’t any hotels, so we’ll have to do it in the hills. It will be beautiful. The desert wind will caress our skin. We should make love naked in the afternoon. I can’t wait. Nevertheless, the improbability, the demise of such an uncertain speculation, given that true (or enduring) love should be a battlefield. A feat or, rather, the expansion of a feat. A struggle so cruel and so prolonged that not just anybody … Then those words and the entire apocryphal scene falling onto the orange chairs, where those statuesque (now crushed) women were exposing the coarseness and wonder of their lower limbs, ready for … Extravagant payments. Nifty logic—eh? And Mireya: invisible, busy moving her own parts. She was taking her time because she was experiencing unprecedented pleasure—or not? Hence: another shot of rum? a perfectly good way to prolong one’s patience. But no! and: what a pity! He could always betake himself to the other dive, check out La Entretenida. Departing in defeat but with his curiosity swelling. He left. First he paid, looking miffed. The best part was that he was no longer thinking about Mireya and much less about Renata, both had now become rearguard fixations. Symbols to return to later, at the risk of going loopy … Evil, good, vile twisting: here unhappy, there dramatic. Now for something new—much more expensive! The cover charge: almost highway robbery, and the prime attraction: suggestive lighting in a brothel with an abundance of foreign beauties. He was approached by women who did not speak our language well or who spoke it with unfamiliar accents. An improvement? These women were more aggressive. They sat down at his table without asking leave. He was obliged to say: You, no … You neither. Go away! … I want to be alone … The policy of the place came to light the moment he spoke those last words. No, he couldn’t be alone. If he didn’t hook up with one of them—sorry! he’d have to leave. The third one told him as much and a skinny waiter repeated it, a very short waiter with an arabesque forelock, who casually informed him that the entire cover price would be refunded if he decided to leave at once. A boon. A relief. At least, and—out of there! To his lodgings. To imagine Renata as she so divinely was (a sacred being—gorgeous! descending from the heavens and alighting on her feet—gently—for him alone!). To carry on, but not before he made corrections to the letter. Foreseeable wakefulness.
Insomnia’s contribution: the risk of a hopeless muddle or the unlikely chance that all will flow brilliantly. It was difficult for Demetrio to find the point of deterrence, hour upon hour of toiling over praises as if he were trying to cram a square into a circle that was, in itself, imperfect; we must imagine the erasures, the sweats, the failure to descry any happy middle ground where he could assert his own importance and still strike a note of supplication where phrases such as “Really, believe me, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever met” or “What I wouldn’t give to kiss the back of your hand” wouldn’t demean him or, better stated, wouldn’t make him the butt of Renata’s perhaps concealed and scornful laughter. So as not to cram it full of lyrical treacle, the agronomist untangled the threads of his composition, written of course in such a stylized hand that it looked like a missive from another world, and set himself the task of recounting unusual anecdotes from his life, placing particular emphasis on his childhood longings and fantasies. He had once wanted to be a doctor: when he was young he played doctor with his friends; later, he dreamed of being a bullfighter and was enthralled by the idea, practicing alone with a bath towel while imagining an enormous bull approaching from a great distance. Oh, to describe the details of the snorting: the variety of noises the animal made: torrents of descriptive largesse, enough details to round out the tone and even a state of mind, and the diarrheic prosody of very long sentences. Albeit: effusive imbalance, to the extent that he filled both sides of ten pages and he still couldn’t, no, who knows when. Then the brilliant unleashing, full of niceties (some fictitious, some truthful), seemed unstoppable until he was swept away by the