Conejo came over for a few beers this evening, taking advantage of Argoitia’s departure for San Miguel de Allende yesterday. I’m always trying to make plans that include them both, but they are having none of it: they can’t stand each other and are incapable of sharing a space without indulging in veiled attacks.

Conejo despises the figure Argoitia cuts: we’ve been seeing his name in the culture section of the city’s newspaper, in gallery programs, and among the teaching staff of cultural workshops since we were in our teens. For Conejo, Argoitia represents that local small-time mafia we used to make fun of between classes at the Arcadia, and that was why a number of our friends went to study and find jobs in Mexico City. For Argoitia, Conejo represents—even more than I do—an ungrateful generation that fails to recognize his importance, that doesn’t roll out the red carpet for his prizes or applaud his honorary mentions in the painting biennials he’s so laboriously managed to achieve in the course of his life. Conejo, for Argoitia, is the face of a lazy, patricidal generation that criticizes without producing anything itself, that doesn’t get its hands dirty but uses social media platforms to launch its barbs of so-called marginal purity. That’s how he explains it, but in more abusive language, although he does then repent because he’d prefer not to care, to enjoy the flattery that goes with power without worrying about what younger people think. But the truth is, he can’t.

Personally speaking, the rivalry between them doesn’t bother me and I don’t take sides. While I’m more inclined to understand the world from Conejo’s viewpoint, that perspective also seems to me a little stupid and I feel there’s no point in identifying too closely with the zeitgeist. I’m certain that in fifteen years, or even sooner, the younger generation will be looking down on me and mocking my artistic stance, and instead will believe that the tacky romanticism and technical refinement of Argoitia’s generation have been unjustly undervalued. Time is cyclical, and its only aim is to fuck us all up.

Conejo was armed with three large bottles of beer: It’s bad luck to drink in even numbers, he said. He’s full of odd tics and beliefs like that. If he’d lived in seventeenth-century Sweden, he’d have sworn that the witches took him to Blockula and made him dance backwards. If he’d lived in Strasbourg in 1518, Conejo would have been the sort of priest who carried out exorcisms on possessed dancers, to Paracelsus’s absolute despair.

He told me that his father was learning to read Braille. Conejo orders things online for him—simple books, for children and young adults—and Señor Bertini reads them alone in his study. Sometimes Conejo hears him laughing aloud, but when he comes out to make Turkish coffee, his expression is somber. I find it moving to imagine that pigheaded old man rediscovering his own laughter while reading “Little Red Riding Hood” with his fingers.

Conejo also informed me that Erre—the first boy I dated and a fellow student at the Arcadia—returned to Cuernavaca a while back. He made a real fanfare of it, calculating that the news would matter to me more than it did. I haven’t seen Erre for three years and haven’t spent more than half an hour talking to him in the last decade. True, there was a time when his love and his betrayal formed a kind of schism for me, a rite of passage for entering the world of heterosexual relationships, with their habitual dose of frustration and violence, but so many things have happened since then that, with the benefit of hindsight, I can only say it was an adolescent affair, with all the drama and intensity that implies.

I don’t bear Erre any grudges, but neither do I have tender feelings for him, above all because I perceive a discontinuity in my own life that means I find it very hard to identify with the person I was ten or fifteen years ago. (At times I even find it hard to identify with the person I was eight months ago, two weeks, ten minutes ago: my identity is a rodeo bull that bucks and jumps around the ring, throwing off anyone who tries to mount it.)

Conejo returned to the topic of my performance in the Jardín Borda. Sounding more serious than he had on the phone, he asked if I was thinking of doing something weird, spilling out of the assigned space to toy with the audience. He knows me, and is highly intuitive, although it isn’t a talent he generally makes much use of. I said I was thinking of a new-age dance, something related to trances, possession, episodes of collective hysteria, to rumor and the way it twists things out of shape. He attempted to get a few concrete details from me—Someone pisses on the stage? he asked—but I changed the subject and passed him a beer bottle to open with his teeth (as he always proudly does, even when he has a bottle opener in his hand).

Erre had been a good-looking teenager, very good-looking, with the sort of beauty that, glimpsed casually, out of the corner of your eye, could seem like ugliness. He developed a severe case of acne at an early age, but it soon disappeared and left him with a pockmarked complexion that made him look older than he was and a little bit evil, somehow weathered. He had a cubist profile, long hair, and the shifty gaze of a fugitive. When he was sixteen, he decided he was going to be a movie director and carried a photographic camera around with him everywhere, although I think that was just for show: I never saw him take a single shot. His interventions in class tended to be slightly aloof, as though his aim was to demonstrate the teacher’s ignorance rather than his own progress or the breadth of his ideas. But even so, he’d sometimes astonish the rest of us. There was a mocking curl to his lips when he was debating something; he’d convert words into spangles that, in the artificial lighting of the classrooms, seemed like precious minerals.

That was my initial impression. When I began talking to him, however, I had the feeling that his intelligence was too literal and accumulative, that there was no mystery about him. I also thought that if his intelligence didn’t develop some form of sensibility, it was in danger of withering. Lots of men are like that; they seem brilliantly intelligent for a moment, and then you realize they are databases, learned formulas and cast-iron convictions that, like anything ferric, end up rusting on contact with life. Intelligence without self-doubt is about as much use as a chocolate coffee pot. I had a suspicion of all that back then, but the first rush of teenage hormones clouded my judgment.

We started dating in the second year of high school and soon decided to use the Easter vacation to go away somewhere together. Erre told his parents he was traveling to Acapulco with a friend and his family; I told my mom the truth (I was never much good at coming up with stories): I was going to Oaxaca with my boyfriend. At the downtown bus terminus, it suddenly occurred to us that we might not be allowed to travel without an adult, that we’d be asked for proof of age before boarding the bus. Erre was in much more of a flap than me, to the point of wanting to call off the trip. A little surprised by his lack of courage, I told him to do whatever he wanted, but I was going to Oaxaca. At the very last minute, he nervously boarded the bus with me, cursing under his breath.

My adolescence was very much like my childhood, but with the addition of libido: I enjoyed riling the boys, but then I’d repent because what I really wanted was to kiss them. On the bus to Oaxaca, I spent half an hour teasing Erre about his fear of lying to his parents and of coming away with me. I thought banter was our way of getting along, but I didn’t realize I was taking it too far: Erre burst into tears of pure rage. He yelled that I was an idiot, an accusation I’ve never forgiven. I was dumbstruck. These days, I’d slap the face of anyone who insulted me and cold-shoulder them from then on, but at that time, having grown up with an absent father, I wasn’t used to those angry put-downs from men. I tried to snuggle up to him, stroke his hair, kiss him on the lips, but Erre’s pride was hurt and he pushed me away, wiping his tears on the frayed sleeve of his denim jacket. After a period of silence, he closed his eyes and I thought he was asleep. I watched him as he dozed, frightened I’d messed up my first relationship before it had really begun. Luckily, Erre woke up in a calmer mood. He kissed my neck and acted like nothing had happened.

The trip to Oaxaca was an initiation. We lost our respective virginities in the metal bed of a very uncomfortable cheap hotel and Erre got so drunk on mezcal that he passed out on a bench (a kindly local brought him a mug of instant coffee and made him drink it). The experience brought us closer and, as one does, we swore undying love. We also swore loyalty to our chosen careers and made a pact that if either of us ended up working in an office instead of becoming an artist, the other would never talk to him (or her) again.

When we got back to Cuernavaca, it turned out that his parents had discovered his lie (that he wasn’t in Acapulco under the care of two responsible adults), with the result that I was branded a bad influence (which was true) and he was made to wash the family car once a week for four months. Before he’d completed his punishment, we’d split up. What happened was that Erre had gotten drunk and made out for half an hour with a girl from the year below us at a party I couldn’t attend because I’d just had my tonsils removed. As was to be expected, someone from the Arcadia told me and I broke things off over the phone—my voice doubly insecure due to the lemon ice cream that had frozen my tongue and the fact that it was the first time anything like that had happened to me.

We continued in the same class for a year until graduation. Erre moved to Mexico City and I stayed in Cuernavaca to study dance and collect bromeliads. As far as I know, Erre’s ambitions never bore fruit. His intelligence dried up, just as I’d predicted, and he gradually narrowed his horizons. He flunked the university entrance exam for film studies three times; then he had to start paying rent and found a job in a production company whose greatest success was a commercial for hemorrhoid cream. We hadn’t been in touch for ages by then, so there was no need to worry about our pact.