I hear a car engine and automatically shut the laptop—I was searching for more information about Prinzhorn—as though I’d been looking at something illegal: but then I realize that the sound is of a car moving away, not approaching. It must be Argoitia leaving for the lunch I didn’t want to accompany him to. He didn’t say goodbye. Normally, he puts his head around the study door, or he might come in to give me a kiss, but things have been strained between us these last few days. First, because of the Jardín Borda. Argoitia spoke to the state’s minister of culture, who spoke to the director of the Jardín Borda about a date in June to première my piece. Obviously, I didn’t ask him to do that; I’m horrified by the idea of being given a space because I’m the partner of the “great painter Martín Argoitia, doyen of the arts in Morelos.” Had he wangled similar things for his previous partners? Most likely. He probably thinks he’s doing me a favor by getting the lakeside stage at the Borda, a horrendous place (fruit of the 1980s renovation that irreversibly ruined the last colonial-era garden in the republic) where they only ever present the state’s folkloric ballet troupe.

He turned up, thoroughly pleased with himself, bursting with his news. Time to get down to work, your première is in June, he said. Get down to work. As if I required his approval, his coaching, his good intentions. I’d been getting down to work since I was sixteen, I told him. And I’d never needed anyone else to organize my productions. He was offended.

That night we went to an opening and I saw him going to the restrooms with one of the students in his workshop to do coke. His doctor—a man of the same age, but more cheerful, whom he sometimes invites to barbecues in the garden—had advised him he wasn’t a youngster any longer, was overweight, and his heart wasn’t what it was when he was thirty or forty. Argoitia knows this. But he also knows that it annoys me when he does coke. It’s a crass drug, in my opinion, the sort bureaucrats and producers of TV commercials take; the drug of choice for people who jerk off with their socks on. Such was his small act of revenge that night: doing coke. His revenge for my not having thrown myself at his feet to thank him for having managed to get me a show on the fucking lakeside stage in the Jardín Borda. I went home early and left him to continue partying, to drown like an insecure teenager in his furious spite.

The next day he didn’t wake until three in the afternoon. While I was looking through the book of art brut in the study, I heard him shuffling erratically through the house, as if he didn’t know where he was. He eventually came to the study and put his head around the door. Along with the chilly air of the living room came the smell of poorly metabolized alcohol, something like acrylic paint mixed with repentance. I noticed that he was in his underwear—those white briefs with loose elastic he insists on wearing and that give him a tragic air, like a monarch who’s lost his throne and his wits. I was sitting in the same armchair I’m in now, from which I can see the stains on the rug—a lunar landscape, an abstract painting—and the bromeliads on the adobe wall. (My twelve bromeliads struggling to breathe under the ashen sky of this eternal drought.) In that hoarse, nasal voice Argoitia gets when he has a hangover, he asked: Do you want me to talk to my buddy and tell him to cancel the whole thing? It was a peace offering uttered between gritted teeth, but something in me softened a little. Argoitia is proud. Naturally, he had zero desire to talk to the minister, but was willing to do so if I gave the command. In a conciliatory tone, I replied: No, what’s done is done. I’ll come up with something and there’s still time to get the piece together, June’s a couple of months off. And I guess I can spill out into the area around the stage, or do something that involves the whole garden, if they’ll allow it.

Argoitia opened the door wide and came to sit by me on the floor on the disgusting rug. It gives me the giggles when he sits on the floor because he can’t bend his knees and looks so uncomfortable; an albatross on dry land. As he was still in his briefs, his vulnerability was more noticeable. He rested his head on my lap, just like a dog. I unwillingly ruffled his gray hair slightly and touched his face. He hadn’t shaved and the stubble had grown, but beneath that rough texture, his cheeks and double chin felt warm, as if he were running a temperature.

It’s not going to be easy to find dancers for the idea I’ve got, I told him, although in fact I was speaking to myself. Argoitia looked at me with his lopsided smile. He understood that I’d forgiven him, just a bit. You could talk to the students at CMA, he said. I didn’t reply because I didn’t want to discuss my choreography with him—I didn’t then and don’t yet want to discuss it with anybody—but it occurred to me that the students at the Centro Morelense de las Artes were exactly the sort of dancers who’d ruin the piece I had in mind—for which I’ve decided to keep this sort of diary.