I watered the bromeliads a while ago, when the chill morning wind from the mountains was still blowing through the neighborhood, one of the highest in Cuernavaca. The bromeliads are beautiful, but something more too. If that’s all they were, I wouldn’t shower so much attention on them: beauty is repose, or at least a form of stability, of balance, but with the bromeliads, I can sometimes discern a hint or forewarning of disorder, the imminence of disaster; it’s as if they are always on the verge of changing. There’s an uneasy tension about them, like mountain goats with their hooves perched on the edge of a precipice. Some bromeliads look like monsters; delicate dragons, carnal, carnivorous, animal flowers. Counting the one I found in the forest not so long ago, I now have a dozen different varieties. That’s not many; I’d like to have an example of each of the three thousand or so species in existence; to collect them the way you do coins or stamps. I imagine them on an endless terrace with red clay tiles, spaced out at the regulation distance. Soldiers in an implausible, extraterrestrial army; dancers in a ballet company composed of three thousand soloists, standing poised in the spotlights—the two suns of their strange planet—awaiting a signal from me to move.

I discovered the last one lying on a path, as though it were waiting for me there. I sometimes imagine things that way: that plants are waiting for me, that they are destined for me in some dark, subterranean way I can’t quite figure out. (In general, the world seems like a system of allusions and signs, like Baudelaire’s forest of symbols but with treeless areas; a Morse code of objects and people that is only partly legible; a book chewed to shreds by a furious dog.) The trunk that the roots of the bromeliad were attached to had snapped, maybe because the trees are getting too little water, far too little water. I rap on some of the trunks, like knocking on a door, and they seem almost hollow: the carcasses of trees erected on a stage, waiting for the entrance of the lead character: fire. There’s been no rain for several months; wildfires have been spreading throughout the state like an insidious rumor, decimating the woodland. Argoitia warned me that right now isn’t a good time to go hiking in the forest; fire might be lying in wait for me at a turn of the path, like the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” But I’m less afraid of it than of men, and since the wildfires began, I haven’t met a single person during my walks. But I do have to tie a scarf around the lower part of my face—as though I were crossing the Sahara—to prevent the invisible ash entering my lungs and lodging there.

The bromeliad on the path in El Tepeite—the hillside not far from the house—is less monstrous than the others, it has an air of fragility. It’s a Tillandsia, commonly known as the “carnation of the air.” I recognized the genus almost immediately, because it’s native to this part of the world, but I still checked it out on the internet when I got home to confirm my conjecture. I’d never pull a bromeliad from its branch, but this one, having fallen onto the path, asphyxiated by the drought, like a fish out of water, was begging me to pick it up. Its leaves are so long and fine they almost seem like stamens; the plants’ extremities. They—Tillandsia—are like restless fairies. Bats pollinate them with a kiss, and there is, in fact, something bat-like about them: the one I found is dark, the color of certain two-day-old bruises. When I picked it up and brought it home, I felt like I was rescuing a young bird that had fallen from its nest. It seemed exhausted. It had probably been asphyxiated by the smoke from the fires, was suffering from lack of rainwater and the rising temperatures of the endless summer that is desiccating the whole region. I’d almost swear that the Tillandsia was having palpitations—rapid, headlong palpitations, close to giving up—but it was more likely my heart that was pounding, the blood beating in the arteries of my wrists. I used wire to attach my chance find to a piece of the decomposing eucalyptus that Argoitia had had dumped at the far end of the garden—a half-wild area where we’ve allowed the weeds to flourish—and that I had relocated to the terrace. That way, it will be able to wheedle its roots into the dead tree. I wonder if it would do the same in my head. I could fix the Tillandsia there with wire, like one of those exotic sunhats women used to wear in the 1920s, so the plant could sink its roots between the sutures of my skull, separating the frontal and parietal bones like someone digging their fingers into sand, until my skull was fully open and it could drink the liquid in which my brain floats, until it knew everything I know—and would one day like to forget—and think about the things I think of, the things I can’t stop thinking of.

My twelve bromeliads are arranged along the length of an adobe wall—together with stone, adobe is the main material used in the construction of this house. Some hang from trunks while others, the ones requiring soil, are planted in pots at the foot of the wall. I use a mister to water them, as if I were going to style their hair afterward. I never had dolls as a child but imagine that my friends used to play with theirs that way. The difference is that my dolls are alive. I sometimes feel they are stretching, that the water wakes them and they slowly stretch out to the light filtering through the branches of the avocado tree.

I’m tired. I slept badly: it was one of those nights when I tossed and turned and then woke feeling all hot and guilty, like I’d committed incest or broken a Greek amphora in my sleep.

Argoitia wants me to accompany him to a lunch at Las Mañanitas, where the other guests will be insufferable people of his generation and circle—male writers in ties who like to be called “sir,” ladies who wear pantyhose despite the awful heat, politicians who keep pet zebras—but I’m going to say I can’t go, that I have work to do here in the study.

This morning, when he asked me, I didn’t give a straight answer. When I say, “this morning,” it was in fact already past midday: Argoitia gets up at noon or one. He has breakfast at the wrought-iron table on the terrace, unless the wind has blown from the east of the city during the night, bringing with it smoke and ash. There are clear signs of rust beneath the flaked white paint of the table and the heavy chairs, but Argoitia insists on leaving them that way and having breakfast outdoors whenever possible. I sometimes spy on him from the study; he looks fragile, bewildered, wrapped in his cotton bathrobe, a plate of fruit before him, fat and badly shaved, his thinning hair uncombed and too long at the back. Before donning his lynx expression, before drinking his coffee and regaining the conviction that he deserves everything he has—this adobe-and-stone house, the garden, his position as permanent consultant to the Ministry of Culture, the Carlos Mérida painting in the living room—Argoitia is a sad, aging man who silently eats fruit and listens to the birdsong. That’s when I start to find him attractive all over again.

From around seven in the morning—when I usually wake—to noon, I have the house to myself. It’s the only period when I feel completely comfortable within these walls. I water the bromeliads with the mister, put food out for the cat, and sometimes read. I do very little work during that time; instead, I tend to just be there, occupying the space. Then, when Argoitia wakes, I shut myself in the study to work, to do everything I didn’t do the whole morning.

It’s not so much that I’m avoiding Argoitia, I just prefer to use my solitude to do nothing, to sit in this armchair and observe the long wall of bromeliads. During my working hours, I read books and make notes, watch videos on the internet and make notes, flip through art catalogues and make notes. That’s all I do, and at the moment no one is paying me to do it.

I sometimes think moving in with Argoitia was a mistake. In a kind of pained stupor, I think of the women who lived here before me, who slept in the bed I sleep in and ate at the table I eat at, who tried to persuade him—unsuccessfully—to paint the wrought-iron chairs in the garden, who stroked the cat I stroke with the same combination of affection and respect, wary of being scratched. For Argoitia, as well as for the cat, there’s a continuity: a series of replaceable women, passing one after the other more or less naturally—a succession of almost identical, respectful strokings, silences, noises, and smells—like when I was a girl and my dog died or went missing and my mom would bring me another that she’d rescued from the streets of Tepoztlán or was given by a neighbor.

One of those dogs, Capone, bit my calf one evening. Capone was a mid-size dog with a reddish coat, not unlike a fox in appearance. Mom had found him tied up with a cable near a soccer pitch and had set him free; Capone followed her home across the whole town. Thunderclaps used to drive him crazy, as if they were reminders of some partially repressed past. The moment a storm broke, the dog would start running around the house, toppling everything in his path, his tongue hanging out and his eyes bulging. After a while he’d crouch under the table and stay there motionless, whining in anguish.

But that evening, he didn’t stay there quietly. There was a particularly heavy storm, the sort we haven’t experienced for a long time. Capone broke a terra-cotta plant pot and when I tried to pat his coat to calm him, he bit me. It was a serious bite, not just a scratch. I remember being surprised that my blood was so dark, as thick as the resin that flows from pine branches on campfires.

I still have the scar: a plump, twisty worm that rounds my ankle and ascends my calf. The skin of the scar is pinker and more sensitive than the soft surrounding flesh, and I can’t bear anyone to touch it. For years I was even embarrassed about it being seen; I hid it from lovers and strangers alike, took to wearing pants and knee-high boots, even on the hottest days.

When Capone bit me, my mother took me to the community health center, but there were no doctors on duty so a nurse had to do the stitches; I guess it must have been her first time, and maybe her last. Mom made me look away, but at some point I turned my head. What is stamped on my memory isn’t the suture, but the expression of the nurse’s face as she sewed: a look of concentration that could also have been panic. I owe the worm on my lower leg to that anonymous and possibly poorly qualified woman. And to Capone, of course; my mom wanted to have him put down the next day, but the dog’s pleading eyes were too much for the veterinarian and he adopted Capone. A few months later, during another storm, Capone also attacked his savior and that’s when his luck ran out. But I know now that it wasn’t Capone’s fault. Whichever way you look at it, the culprit was the imbecile who had systematically mistreated him, tied him up with a cable and left him there in the rainy season until Mom gave him a home.

Naturally, Capone is the dog I remember best. The others form a list of indistinguishable pets (Pontífice, Basura, Vlady…) who spent a while with us before joining one of the packs of strays that roamed the town, fed by everyone but answering to no one—free and feral, as dogs ought to be, revered and feared by the townsfolk, spoiled by butchers; a howling mob that used to raise the bristles of the night.

I always remember negative things more clearly: the day my mom forgot to pick me up from school glows in my memory with an intensity that eclipses the many years she turned up punctually. The same goes for Capone: on the rare occasions when we have a storm sufficiently heavy to evoke my childhood ones, I recall his spastic movements, his bulging eyes, the white slaver drooling from his mouth, and then, with a fingertip moistened with saliva, I stroke the scar on my calf.

With Argoitia, I’m going to be the dog that bites, even if that bite takes the twisted form of all human things. I’m not going to be replaced by some student of his ten years younger than me, because I’m going to leave him without so much as a word before that happens, and he’ll never ever forget me, just like in a ranchera song. He’ll have a photo of me in his wallet the day he falls victim to a heart attack or respiratory failure under the brownish skies of the forest fires, in the courtyard of the Centro Morelense de las Artes, watched with astonishment by a score of people (pale secretaries, visibly moved drama students, dumbstruck parents). They’ll call me from the hospital because I’ll still be listed as his emergency contact, and I’ll quite simply say nothing, listening to the perplexed voice of the nurse, with the ECG beeping too slowly, too weakly in the background. That’s a fantasy I return to from time to time with a sort of morbid pleasure. Not from malevolence or cunning, I just enjoy reproducing in my head the movie of the possible events: the thousand and one bifurcations that could make up the tree—split by lightning—of my biography.

But even if I do amuse myself considering that possibility, the truth is that, for the moment, I’m fine here in Argoitia’s house with my twelve bromeliads. All things considered, he lets me work in peace, he’s quite sweet to me, and makes an effort to understand me (although I don’t think he has what it takes to do that). There are times when he even seems handsome, in a decadent kind of way; when he’s gazing at the wild part of the garden while having breakfast at his wrought-iron table with peeling paint, wrapped in his cotton bathrobe, the silly smile on his face gives me a warm feeling and makes me want to kiss him. If the two of us are alone and there’s no one to show off to, if he isn’t in lecturer mode—speaking about the current in-vogue topic, his lips damp with wine—Argoitia lets his guard down a little and can even manage to laugh at himself. Or he recounts episodes from his childhood, when he used to climb onto the goods trains in the shunting yard of the railroad station, just by the Casino de la Selva. Stories about a city that no longer exists: a Cuernavaca with Hollywood stars and Communists. At times he makes an effort to adapt to the zeitgeist, like a bow to “us”: he accompanies me to exhibitions that he invariably hates, searches the internet for new recipes to make me a dinner that doesn’t include pork—I don’t eat it—or grudgingly agrees to read some book I press on him: minor details that seem quite normal to me but for him are the heroic sacrifices of an enraptured lover.

Anyhow, I couldn’t leave his house right now: my bromeliads love the adobe wall, the heat of the sun trap. This is the only part of the city that’s still relatively humid. The wildfires are coming closer, but there’s still a trickle of water in a gulley not far away and I believe the bromeliads know this, can smell it; they have an intuition that this is the only place where they are safe, misted with water like living dolls about to have their hair styled.