María Font, Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF, February 1981. When Ulises came back to Mexico, I had just moved in here. I was in love with a guy who taught high school math. Things between us had been rocky at first because he was married and I thought he would never leave his wife, but one day he called me at my parents' house and told me to find a place where we could live together. He couldn't stand his wife anymore and they were about to separate. He was married and had two children, and he said his wife used the children to blackmail him. The conversation we had wasn't especially reassuring-in fact quite the contrary-but the next morning I really did start looking for a place where the two of us could live, even if it was only temporary.
Of course, money was a problem. He had his salary but he had to keep paying rent on the house where his children lived and contribute money each month to pay for their keep, tuition, etc. And I didn't have a job and all I could count on was an allowance that one of my mother's sisters was giving me to finish my studies in dance and painting. So I had to dip into my savings, borrow from my mother, and not look for anything too expensive. After three days, Xóchitl told me that there was a vacant room in the hotel where she and Requena lived. I moved in right away.
The room was big, with a bathroom and a kitchen, and it was right above Xóchitl and Requena's room.
That very night the math teacher came to see me and we made love until dawn. The next day, however, he didn't show up, and even when I tried calling him a few times at school, I couldn't reach him. Two days later I saw him again and I accepted all the explanations he was willing to give me. That was more or less how things went during the first and then the second week of my new life on Calle Montes. The math teacher would show up every four days, more or less, and we would be together until dawn and the start of a new workday. Then he would disappear.
Naturally, we didn't only make love. We talked too. He would tell me things about his children. Once, talking to me about the littlest girl, he started to cry, and finally he said that he didn't understand any of it. What's to understand? I said. He looked at me as if I'd said something idiotic, as if I were too young to know what he meant, and didn't answer. Otherwise, my life was more or less the same as it had always been. I went to class, found a (miserably paid) job as a proofreader at a publishing house, saw my friends, and took long walks around the city. Xóchitl and I grew closer, in large part because we were now neighbors. In the evenings, when the math teacher wasn't around, I would go down to her room and we would talk or play with the little boy. Requena was almost never there (although he, at least, came home every night) and Xóchitl and I would talk about the things that mattered to us, women's things, unconstrained by the presence of men. As was only natural, the subject of our first conversations was the math teacher and his strange ideas about how a new relationship should work. According to Xóchitl, the guy was ultimately a gutless jerk who was afraid to leave his wife. In my opinion, it had much more to do with his sensitivity, his desire not to hurt anyone unnecessarily, than with real fear. Privately, I was surprised how firmly Xóchitl took my side, and not the side of the math teacher's wife.
Sometimes we would go to the park with little Franz. One night when the math teacher was there, I invited them to dinner. The math teacher wanted us to be alone, but Xóchitl had asked to be introduced to him, and I thought this was the perfect occasion. It was the first dinner I had given in what I now thought of as my new home, and although the meal itself was simple, a big salad, cheeses, and wine, Requena and Xóchitl showed up punctually and Xóchitl was wearing her best dress. The math teacher was trying to be nice, which I appreciated, but I don't know whether it was the meagerness of the food (in those days I was into low-calorie eating) or the abundance of wine, but the dinner was a disaster. When my friends left, the math teacher called them parasites, saying that they were the kind of element that paralyzes society and keeps a country from ever making any progress. I said that I was just like them and he replied that it wasn't true, that I studied and worked whereas they didn't do anything. They're poets, I argued. The math teacher looked me in the eyes and repeated the word poet several times. Lazy slobs is what they are, he said, and bad parents. Who goes out to eat and leaves their child alone at home? That night, as we were making love, I thought about little Franz sleeping in the room downstairs as his parents drank wine and ate cheese in my room, and I felt empty and irresponsible. Not much later, maybe a day or two afterward, Requena told me that Ulises Lima had come back to Mexico.
One afternoon, as I was reading, I heard Xóchitl calling me, banging on her ceiling with a broomstick. I leaned out the window. Ulises is here, said Xóchitl, do you want to come down? I went downstairs. There was Ulises. I wasn't especially thrilled to see him. Everything he and Belano had meant to me was too remote now. He talked about his travels. I thought there was too much literature in his telling of them. As he was talking I started to play with little Franz. Then Ulises said he had to go see the Rodríguez brothers and asked whether we wanted to go with him. Xóchitl and I looked at each other. If you want to go, I'll watch the kid, I said. Before I left, Ulises asked me about Angélica. She's home, I said, call her. I can't say why, but my attitude was generally hostile. When they left, Xóchitl winked at me. That night the math teacher didn't come. I fed little Franz in my room and then I took him downstairs, got him into his pajamas, and put him to bed, where he soon fell asleep. I chose a book from the shelf and sat reading beside the window, watching the headlights of the cars going by on Calle Montes. I read and thought.