I learned to do layouts and edit, and sometimes I even chose the photographs. And everybody loved Franz too. Of course, I didn't make enough at the magazine to quit my job at Gigante, but even so it was nice for me, since while I was working at the supermarket, especially when the work was particularly annoying (Friday afternoons, for example, or Monday mornings), I would think about my next article, about the story I was planning to write on the peddlers of Coyoacán, or the fire-eaters of La Villa, or whatever it might be, and the time would fly. One day Fernando López Tapia asked me to write profiles of some low-level politicians, friends of his, I guess, or friends of friends, but I refused. I can only write about things I feel connected to, I said, and he replied: what's so interesting about the houses of the Colonia 10 de Mayo? I didn't know what to say, but I stood firm. One night Fernando López Tapia invited me out to dinner. I asked María to keep an eye on Franz and we went to a restaurant in Roma Sur. To be honest, I was expecting something better, more sophisticated, but I had lots of fun during dinner, although I hardly ate a thing. That night I slept with the publisher of Tamal. It'd been a long time since I'd had sex with anyone, and it wasn't exactly a pleasurable experience. We did it again a week later. And then the following week. Sometimes, to be honest, it was excruciating to stay up all night and then go to work early in the morning and spend hours stickering products like a sleepwalker. But I wanted to live my life. Deep down I knew that I had to live my life.
One night Fernando López Tapia showed up on Calle Montes. He said he wanted to see where I lived. I introduced him to María, who treated him coldly at first, as if she were a princess and poor Fernando were an illiterate peasant. Luckily, I don't think he even noticed how rude she was. He was always a perfect gentleman. I liked that. After a while María went up to her room and I was left alone with Franz and Fernando. Then Fernando told me that he'd come because he wanted to see me, and then he said now he had seen me but he wanted to keep on seeing me. It was silly, but I liked that he said it. Later I went up to get María and the four of us went out to dinner. We laughed a lot that night. A week later I took some of María's poems to Tamal, and they published them. If your friend writes, said Fernando López Tapia, tell her that the pages of our magazine are at her disposal. The problem, as I soon discovered, was that for all her college studies, María hardly knew how to write prose: properly punctuated, grammatically correct prose without poetic pretensions, I mean. So for several days she tried to write an article on dance, but no matter how hard she tried and how much I helped her, she couldn't do it. What she came up with in the end was a very good poem that she called "Dance in Mexico." After she gave it to me to read, she filed it away with her other poems and forgot all about it. María was a powerful poet, definitely better than me, for example, but she had no idea how to write prose. It was too bad, but that put an end to her chances of being a regular contributor to Tamal. I don't think it made much difference to her, in any case, since she turned up her nose at the magazine, as if it were beneath her. But that's María for you, and I love her the way she is.
My relationship with Fernando López Tapia lasted a while longer. He was married, as I suspected from the start, with two children, the older one twenty, and he wasn't about to separate from his wife (I wouldn't have let him, anyway). I went with him to business dinners now and then. He would introduce me as his most productive writer. I really tried to be that, and there were weeks when, with Gigante on the one hand and the magazine on the other, I barely averaged three hours of sleep a night. But I didn't care because things were going well for me, just the way I wanted them to go, and even though I didn't want to publish any more of my own poems in Tamal, what I did was literally take over the arts pages and publish poems by Jacinto and other friends who didn't have a venue for their work. And I learned a lot. I learned everything there is to learn about editing a magazine in Mexico City. I learned to lay out pages, negotiate with advertisers, deal with the printers, talk to people who were theoretically important. Of course, no one knew that I worked at Gigante. Everyone thought I lived on what Fernando López Tapia paid me or that I was a college student, I, who'd never been to college, who'd never even finished high school. And that had its appealing side. It was like living the Cinderella story, and even when I had to return to Gigante and turn back into a salesgirl or cashier, I didn't mind and somehow I found the strength to do both jobs well, the one at Tamal because I liked it and I was learning, and the one at Gigante because I had to take care of Franz, I had to buy him clothes and school supplies, and pay for our room on Calle Montes, because my father, poor man, was having a hard time and couldn't give me rent money anymore, and Jacinto didn't even have enough money for himself. The bottom line was, I had to work and bring up Franz all on my own. And that was what I was doing, and I was writing and learning too.
One day Fernando López Tapia told me he had to talk to me. When I went in to see him he said that he wanted us to live together. I thought he was kidding, because sometimes Fernando gets in these moods, wanting to live with everybody in the world, and I assumed we'd probably go to a hotel that night and make love and he would get over wanting to set me up in an apartment. But this time he was serious. Of course, he had no intention of leaving his wife, at least not all of a sudden, but gradually, in a series of done deeds, as he put it. For days we talked about the possibility. Or rather, Fernando talked to me, laying out the pros and cons, and I listened and thought carefully. When I told him no, he seemed crushed, and for a few days he was angry at me. By then I had started to send my pieces to other magazines. Most places turned them down, but a few accepted them. Things got worse with Fernando, I'm not sure why. He criticized everything I did and when we slept together he was even rough with me. Other times he would be sweet, giving me presents and crying at the least little thing, and by the end of the night he'd be dead drunk.
Seeing my name published in other magazines was a great thing. It gave me a feeling of security and I began to distance myself from Fernando López Tapia and Tamal. At first it wasn't easy, but I was already used to hardships and they didn't faze me. Then I found work as a copy editor at a newspaper and I quit Gigante. We celebrated my last day with a dinner attended by Jacinto, María, Franz, and me. That night, while we were eating, Fernando López Tapia came to see me but I wouldn't let him in. He was shouting in the street for a while and then he left. Franz and Jacinto watched him from the window and laughed. They're so alike. María and I didn't want to look and we pretended (though maybe we weren't quite pretending) to be in hysterics. What we were really doing was staring into each other's eyes and saying everything we had to say without speaking a word.