Argoitia returned from his lunch at around nine in the evening. He was less drunk than I expected, in good humor, making jokes about the other diners. He sometimes puts a lot of effort into making me laugh and I do laugh, because his good humor is infectious—his witticisms, on the other hand, aren’t particularly good. I asked if he wanted to watch a movie and he agreed, so long as it wasn’t from Romania.

The Romanian cinema thing is a sort of private joke: when we started dating, I invited him to the Cine Morelos to see a Romanian movie I was interested in. He accepted the invitation; at the beginning of a relationship, you try to seem flexible. It wasn’t a good movie, but not that bad either. There were a lot of explicit sex scenes between two men and Argoitia began to get edgy, wriggling in his seat like a child in a waiting room. As we were just beginning to get to know each other, I asked if he wanted to leave. Nowadays, I’d never suggest leaving a theater because he didn’t like the movie, but there we are. We went to a nearby mezcal bar and later to his house. It was the first time I spent the night with him here in this house, which is partially my house now, or at least the home of my twelve bromeliads.

But all that about watching or not watching Romanian cinema is wearing thin. One more stain with a backstory, like the multitude of others on the rug in the study. A relationship can at times take the form of a modern city constructed on the vestiges of extinct civilizations: there are still traces, names, stones belonging to that idyllic past, but your focus is mainly on the unbearable traffic of the present, on the brownish clouds from nearby fires.

I told Argoitia to put on anything he wanted, because I knew he’d drop off in no time at all—he didn’t sleep last night—and then I could watch something else.

When I’m working on a project, everything seems to fall into line: coincidental connections begin to appear in my memories, in what I’m reading, my conversations, and the movies I watch, allusions that are added to the system of false starts and intuitions I’m constructing in this notebook. It’s so exciting to read the first four lines of a book and immediately know it’s exactly the book you need to read at that precise moment. The world ceases to be the hostile place it almost always is, filled with bad, ignorant people, and becomes an endless meadow, like the island of Blockula, where I can move around at will, surrounded by crab-women. Paths open up before me like ripe mangos trickling the sweet syrup of Truth, and I can eat and get my face and hands dirty, like a rosy-cheeked child having the time of her life.

Argoitia fell asleep and I closed the ridiculous blockbuster he’d chosen and put on a German, or maybe Austrian movie. Here’s the plot: a woman of around forty is traveling by intercity train to a business meeting. She’s sitting by the window with the tray table down, underlining a document.

At some point, the train goes through a tunnel and the woman looks up from her papers as the interior lights haven’t been switched on; it’s dark and she can’t go on reading. On the window, the reflection of the inside of the car is superimposed on the cement walls of the tunnel on the other side of the glass. The woman sees her own reflection, but the movement of the train and the artificial lighting distort the image and she sees something else in the window that she can’t quite locate inside or outside: a person falling like a newly felled tree. Startled, the woman turns around but can’t see anything inside the car and so attributes the event to some sort of optical illusion. The train leaves the tunnel and the woman starts working again, but it’s clear that the image of the falling body is still on her mind, that she can’t quite shrug it off, so she puts away her papers and walks to the dining car. She takes a seat opposite a man who immediately asks if she’s going to Vienna. The woman gives an evasive answer, she obviously has no desire to get into conversation with a stranger. But the man returns to the attack with fresh questions. She stands rather brusquely, excuses herself, and returns to her seat, where the swaying of the train rocks her to sleep. When she wakes, the train is quiet and she looks out the window to see what station they are in, but finds they have stopped in the middle of the countryside. A number of rumors circulate among the passengers in her car about what has happened; apparently, they have been there for ten minutes. Some are saying that there’s been an attack, others that it’s a problem on the track. Finally, one rumor gains prominence: there’s been some kind of accident. The woman goes to the bathroom to splash water on her face because she’s had a disturbing dream that still seems to be gummed to her eyelids. On her way, she finds one of the train doors open and, almost automatically, decides to go outside. She walks toward the front of the train and discovers that there is a body lying by the tracks. She looks on from a prudent distance and realizes that it’s the man who was asking her questions in the dining car.

I don’t remember the rest of the movie in much detail.

Coincidences are like oysters opening simultaneously, a choir of bivalves intoning the song of meaning. The first coincidence opens, offers up its pearl; the others don’t want to be left behind.

This morning Argoitia fell in the shower and broke his arm. He squealed like a pig subjected to the cruel practices of the meat industry and I remembered that I’d only ever seen him cry once, and that was before I moved in with him. We’d had sex three times that day—a miracle at his age—and he’d told me he’d never felt so alive. I knew that was an exaggeration or a lie, something he’d said many times before, but I still liked the fact that he said it, because things can be false and true at the same time, and, in his tears, I saw that it was true too.

Still wailing from the fall, with his arm hanging at an impossible angle, Argoitia asked me to drive him to the hospital, but I haven’t driven for years and was too frightened to try, so I called a cab. While we were waiting for it to arrive, Argoitia downed half a bottle of tequila in a couple of gulps, even though I told him it wasn’t a good idea to have alcohol in his bloodstream in case he needed medication.

On the whole, I react badly to other people’s crises. The energy needed to pay so much attention to their dramas is totally draining and puts me in a foul mood. At the hospital, I was distant and eventually told Argoitia that I’d go home while they were taking the X-rays. He gave me a reproachful look but, as was his custom, didn’t say anything (he’d make me pay for it in his own way later). When I got back to the house, what I wanted to do was water the bromeliads and sit a while with them, but the wind had changed direction and the smoke from the fires felt more than usually heavy in my lungs, so I made do with looking at them from the study window.

I suspect that Olof Bromelius died without ever seeing the plants named after him. His specialty was the flora of Gothenburg, while bromeliads are to be found on the American continent. It was his compatriot Carl Linnaeus, born two years after Olof’s death, who paid tribute to him when outlining the features of bromeliads in his Species Plantarum. The first bromeliad Linnaeus describes is the pineapple, which, he says, is native to Nueva España and Suriname.

For his part, Olof amassed some of the most impressive collections of his day: an incomparable assemblage of coins and another of botanical specimens. On his death, his son Magnus Bromelius inherited the collections and continued to enlarge them. Father and son shared a fascination for coins but, in contrast to Olof, Magnus preferred rocks to plants. His collection of minerals was greatly admired throughout Sweden and, possibly to keep his father’s memory alive without neglecting his own interests, Magnus included plant fossils in his research. Bromellite, an oxide mineral discovered in Sweden in 1925, owes its name to him.

I’d like to have bromellites too. Bromeliads and bromellites: plants and oxides whose forms I can admire while the fire moves closer.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the book on the future city I inherited from my father when he left. If I had to invent a fictional city, an absurd machine-city where the space was organized in function of chance and surplus, the basic movement of bodies in that city would be falling, stumbling, the vertical descent traced out by the bromeliad I found in the forest.

“He who stumbles but doesn’t fall, gains ground,” is one of the adages my mom heard from my grandmother and loves repeating (without always understanding their possible meanings). But the person who stumbles and falls gains nothing: the impetus is wasted.

Falling, stumbling, vanishing: bodies that return to earth when least expected. Did the woman on the train in the Austrian movie get a glimpse of the future when she saw the reflection of someone falling onto the track? And had Argoitia in some way foreseen his fall—his slide down in the shower—before breaking his arm?