I was sixteen when I first saw Argoitia. At that time, he was a handsome, tormented forty-something. My dance class in the basement of the CMA had just finished and I was walking along the upper corridors of the center—a hospital in a previous incarnation—peeking into the rooms as I passed. I saw him through the half-open door of one of the workshops. Argoitia was standing over a huge white canvas that had been spread on the floor. At his feet, five students were painting different areas of the cloth and the scene made me think of a feudal lord overseeing the sowing of crops on his land in the early spring. Argoitia spotted me in the doorway and stared, almost reprovingly. I ran off.

He claims not to recall that first meeting, or the second, a few weeks later, in the Cine Morelos. The main salon was in a former theater, the sort where the stalls are huge, and it was so poorly maintained that a family of bats had taken up residence in an area of the ceiling. At times, halfway through the movie, you’d see the flapping wings of an errant bat cross the screen, and, inevitably, a woman would scream. But for the regular clientele of the Cine Morelos, those animals were part of the attraction.

That day, Erre and I had gone to see an entry in the International Film Festival and Argoitia was in the row ahead of us with the girl he was dating just then. I don’t remember what the movie was. Erre was focused on the screen. My attention was elsewhere; I’d recognized Argoitia and was spying on him; on him and his companion. In the bluish dark of the salon, I was able to make out that they were touching each other, or rather Argoitia had his hand under the woman’s skirt, while she sat there, apparently unperturbed. In those days, my sex life was limited to those necking sessions with Erre—slightly clumsy, almost always at my place, with my mother watching a movie in the next room. Seeing Argoitia secretly feeling up a woman in public was a disturbingly contradictory experience. I can’t say that I was exactly aroused, but I later dreamed—repeatedly, and in a nightmarish kind of way—that I was the one Argoitia was feeling up in that gloomy theater, with a thousand bats flying around us.

After that, I didn’t see him again for a few years. Shortly after the episode in the movie theater came the trip to Oaxaca and then I split up with Erre. The following year, I graduated from high school and began the dance diploma in the same building as I’d studied classical and contemporary ballet: the Centro Morelense de las Artes. But by then, Argoitia had stopped teaching there (due to some political in-fighting, as I later learned): he’d holed up in his house, this house, to paint a series of large-format oils that fleetingly gave fresh life to his career—they were exhibited in Monterrey and in a collective show at the Museo de la Estampa in Mexico City.

During those years, my love life entered a phase that I still sometimes miss: I had occasional lovers (a pseudo musician, a charlatan who used to say he was trying to find himself, a small-time criminal) and earned a reputation for being weird and wicked in the spineless circles of local culture, where anyone who cries in public is branded crazy.

Dawn finally broke. I made more coffee and returned to the study. When I haven’t slept all night, I often feel vulnerable, but also receptive, as though I were tuning in more clearly to that radio frequency of pink noise that some people like to call inspiration. But this time I was quite simply feeling tired. I spent two hours on Wikipedia while outside it rained ash.

I read about bromeliads. The largest species, Puya raimondii, can reach over fifty feet in height; from a distance, it could be mistaken for some species of agave. It is found only in the Andes, at about ten thousand feet above sea level. In contrast to the Tillandsia that I recently found in the forest, the puya—also known as the Titanka raimondii (a name I’d give my daughter if I had one)—grows in earth. It is a monocarpic plant: the male of the species dies after a single reproductive event. A puya can live more than a hundred years, which suggests that some pass a whole century waiting to have sex; then they blossom, scatter their seeds, and die.