Che, I said, what's going on outside? but no one answered me, everyone using the bathroom had disappeared, I said che, isn't anyone there? knowing beforehand that no one would answer. Maybe you know the feeling. And then I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror, and I saw a tall, thin, blond figure, a face with a few wrinkles already, too many wrinkles, the female version of Don Quixote, as Pedro Garfias once said to me, and then I went out into the hallway, and it was there that I suddenly realized something was going on, the hallway was empty and the shouting coming from downstairs was the kind that strikes you dumb and makes history. What did I do then? I did what anyone would do. I went over to a window and looked down, and I saw soldiers, and then I looked out another window and I saw tanks, and then out another one, at the end of the hallway, and I saw vans into which the captive students and professors were being herded, like something from a World War II movie crossed with a María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz movie of the Mexican Revolution, a dark canvas peopled with little phosphorescent figures, the kind of thing they say crazy people see, or people in the throes of fear. And then I said to myself: Auxilio, stay here. Don't let yourself be taken prisoner, baby. Stay here, Auxilio. Baby, don't let them write you into their script. If they want you let them come and find you. And then I went back to the bathroom and it was the strangest thing, not only did I go back to the bathroom but I went back into the stall, the very one I'd been in before, and I sat down on the toilet again, with my skirt up again, I mean, and my underwear pulled down, although I felt no physiological urgency (they say it's precisely in cases like this that the bowels loosen, but it wasn't true for me), and with Pedro Garfias's book open and despite not wanting to read, I started to read slowly, word by word, line by line, and suddenly I heard sounds in the hallway, the sound of boots? the sound of hobnailed boots? but che, I said to myself, isn't this a coincidence? and then I heard a voice saying something like everything is in order, though maybe it said something else, and someone, maybe it was the same bastard who'd spoken, opened the bathroom door and came in and I lifted my feet like a Renoir ballerina, my underwear dangling down around my skinny ankles and snagging on a pair of shoes I had back then, the most comfortable yellow moccasins, and as I was waiting for the soldier to check the stalls one by one, preparing myself, if it came down to it, not to open the door, to defend UNAM's last redoubt of autonomy-I, a poor Uruguayan poetess, who loved Mexico as much as anyone-while I waited, as I say, a special silence fell, as if time had fractured and were running in several directions at once, a pure time, not verbal or made up of gestures or actions, and then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced into the mirror, the two of us still as statues in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Literature, and that was all, then I heard his footsteps fading away in the distance, I heard the door close, and my raised legs returned to their former position as if of their own accord. I must've sat there like that for three hours or so, I'd say. I know it was starting to get dark when I came out of the stall. This was a new situation, I admit, but I knew what to do. I knew my duty. So I went over to the only window in the bathroom and looked out. I saw a soldier far off in the distance. I saw the outline of an armored troop carrier or the shadow of an armored troop carrier. Like the portico of Latin literature, the portico of Greek literature. Oh, I adore Greek literature, from Pindar to George Seferis. I saw the wind sweeping the university as if it was delighting in the last light of day. And I knew what I had to do. I knew. I knew I had to resist. So I sat on the tiled floor of the women's bathroom and in the last rays of light I read three more poems by Pedro Garfias and then I closed the book and closed my eyes and said to myself: Auxilio Lacouture, citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, stand your ground. That was all. And then I started to think about my past the same way I'm thinking about my past now. I started to think about things that might not interest you in the same way as what I'm thinking now about Arturo Belano, the young Arturo Belano, whom I met when he was sixteen or seventeen, in 1970, when I was already the mother of the young Mexican poets and he was a kid who couldn't hold his liquor but felt proud that in his faraway Chile Salvador Allende had won the elections. I knew him. I met him in a noisy crowd of poets at the bar La Encrucijada Vera-cruzana, a ferret hole of a place where various promising young people and not-so-young people used to get together. I became friends with him. I think it was because we were the only two South Americans among all those Mexicans. I became friends with him despite the age difference, despite every conceivable difference! I taught him who T. S. Eliot was, who William Carlos Williams was, who Pound was. I took him home once, sick, drunk, his arms around my neck, his weight hanging from my narrow shoulders, and I became friends with his mother and his father and his very nice sister, all of them so nice. The first thing I said to his mother was: señora, I haven't slept with your son. And she said: of course not, Auxilio, but don't call me señora; we're practically the same age! I became friends with the family. A family of nomadic Chileans who had immigrated to Mexico in 1968. My year. I stayed as a guest at Arturo's mother's house for long stretches, once for a month, another time for two weeks, another time for a month and a half. This was because at the time I didn't have money to pay for a furnished room or a place on a roof. During the day I lived at the university doing this, that, and the other and at night I lived the bohemian life and I slept at friends' houses, leaving my meager belongings scattered everywhere, my clothes, my books, my magazines, my pictures, I was Remedios Varo, I was Leonora Carrington, I was Eunice Odio, I was Lilian Serpas (oh, poor Lilian Serpas), and if I didn't lose my mind it was because I always kept a sense of humor, I laughed at my skirts, my stovepipe pants, my tights with runs in them, my Prince Valiant haircut rapidly growing whiter than blonde, my blue eyes peering into the Mexico City night, my pink ears listening to the university stories, the rises and falls, the put-downs, the slights, the fawning, the flattery, the false praise, shivering beds that were disassembled and reassembled against the night sky of Mexico City, that sky I knew so well, that churning, unreachable sky like an Aztec cauldron under which I moved in perfect bliss, with all the poets of Mexico and Arturo Belano, who was sixteen or seventeen and who began to grow up as I watched and who in 1973 decided to return to his homeland to join the revolution. And I was the only one, besides his family, who went to see him off at the bus station, since he was traveling overland, a long journey, extremely long, plagued with dangers, the journey of initiation of all poor Latin American boys, crossing this absurd continent, and when Arturito Belano looked out the window of the bus to wave goodbye to us, it wasn't just his mother who cried, I cried too, and that night I slept at his family's house, more to keep his mother company than anything else, but the next morning I left, though I had nowhere to go except the same old bars and coffee shops, but still I went. I don't like to overstay my welcome. And when Arturo returned, in 1974, he was a different person. Allende had fallen and he had done his duty, or so his sister told me. Arturito had done his duty, and his conscience, the terrible conscience of a young Latin American male, had nothing with which to reproach itself. He had presented himself as a volunteer on September 11. He had mounted absurd guard in a deserted street. He had gone out at night; he had seen things. Then, days later, he had been arrested at a police checkpoint. They didn't torture him, but he was held captive for a few days and during that time he behaved like a man. Waiting for him in Mexico were his friends, the Mexico City night, the poets' life. But when he got back he wasn't the same. He started to go out with other, younger people, snot-nosed kids of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, he met Ulises Lima (a bad influence, I thought so from the first time I saw him), he started to make fun of all his old friends, look down on them, see everything as if he were Dante and he'd just returned from hell, or not Dante, I mean, but Virgil himself, such a sensitive boy, and he started to smoke marijuana, that vulgar weed, and deal substances I'd rather not even think about. But deep down he was still as nice as ever, I know he was. And so when we met (purely by chance, because we didn't see the same people anymore), he would say how are you Auxilio, or he'd shout help, help! help!! from the sidewalk on Avenida Bucareli, jumping around like a monkey with a taco or a piece of pizza in his hand, always with that Laura Jáuregui, who was gorgeous, though her heart was blacker than a black widow's heart, and Ulises Lima, and that other little Chilean, Felipe Müller, and sometimes I would even bring myself to join his group, but they spoke in