At ten o’clock I decide to walk around the downtown area, following the same route of seven or eight streets I used to take when I was a teenager and looking for Conejo or Natalia. It was a sort of courtship ritual. The three of us would set out on random paths through that quadrant and, when we happened to meet, we’d take a few more turns through the streets before going our separate ways again. Sometimes it was just Natalia and me, at others Conejo found her first and they walked together. Whenever we were a threesome, one of us would feel excluded and decide to split off. We never spoke during those strange holding patterns that united and separated our routes. Our ritual was a fact of life, as real as the walls or the cars around us. The world presented itself to us as finished, a place we couldn’t modify very much.

While remembering all that, I pass the Museo Brady. Its collection of masks, which I glimpse from the street, reminds me of my own grimaces of pain. I tell myself that I’m the jaguar-man when I have a stabbing pain in my shoulder; the eagle-warrior when I wake in the middle of the night with my jaw stinging; I’m that devil with the twisted smile after snorting Permutal. And I momentarily repent not having stayed home until I’d taken the last of the pills, happily sedated in the shade of the tulip tree.

I continue walking through the streets—only partially recognizing them—as though I were an earlier version of myself who, on every corner, relived a three-way relationship I then completely forgot.

When I notice that the Jardín Borda is open, I decide to go in and rest for a while by one of the fountains. And there, on the billboard beside the ticket office where performances are listed—while I feel the sun on the back of my neck, a bead of sweat trickling down my rib cage, a stab of pain in my jaw—a familiar face smiles out at me among the announcements posted by the Ministry of Culture: The Great Noise. A dance choreographed by Natalia Ahumada. Thursday, June 21, 7 p.m. Lakeside Stage. The day after tomorrow. I’ll take a ticket for the dance too, I tell the assistant, who hasn’t yet looked at me: she’s staring through me at some vague spot in space, at something behind my head, perhaps my ghost. I put the ticket in one of the pockets of my backpack and continue into the garden. There’s a spindly night-blooming jasmine growing by the veranda of the main house.

The garden is unrecognizable: the plants withering, some of them uprooted from the planters; the pond that—in exaggeration—is known as the lake has been drained and all that can be seen there now are the slimy bed and a few islands of accumulated trash: plastic bags, a worn-out shoe, generalized filth. Even the trees seem to have admitted defeat: a stunted Mexican cypress leans against a section of wall that was never repaired after the earthquake two years ago. A gardener is collecting dead plants and putting them in a large garbage bag; he has a gravedigger air, as though, during the drought, his job has become sinister and marginalized, blighted. I stop to pass the time of day with him. He tells me they have had no water for three weeks; the city council has asked them to use the water in the pond for the plants, but now the pond is empty and there’s little else to be done. He says all this almost robotically, in a resigned tone, devoid of sentimentality. Then he confirms my suspicion that the cypress had been in danger of falling since the earthquake, but with the earth now so dry, it had finally perished.

I nod my head in farewell, walk on to a fountain—it isn’t running—and sit down. From here I can see the structure of the garden’s museum, which has an exhibition of lousy drawings by amateur artists on the theme of Maximilian of Hapsburg (or Mexico). It must be in one of the museum’s rooms or the small auditorium where Natalia holds her rehearsals, putting the final touches to The Great Noise. It will be a depressing spectacle, I think, with the dancers wearing face masks to protect themselves from the ash floating in the air, performed behind a pond full of flies, Coca-Cola bottles, and dead algae. But then it occurs to me that’s exactly the kind of setting Natalia would want: anything that throws light on the unbearable pretension and tedious poverty of the municipal middle class to which we belong.

From the fountain, I can just make out an aluminum sign nailed up in one of the arid gardens next to a swooning flamboyant tree. “This garden belongs to you. If you like it, don’t let your children destroy it.” I read it several times, with the sensation of having seen those words somewhere else. Perhaps there was a similar sign in Chapultepec, where I used to go every morning for years to run two or three kilometers, when I was happily resident in Mexico City—happily married, with no pain, no Permutal, and a steady job: a combination that now, months later, seems highly unlikely, imaginary, something nobody is capable of having all at once. And then, suddenly, I remember; the sign in my dream: “This garden belongs to us all, but only those with a clear-cut vision can enter.”

The pain has made me way too conscious of my own body. I observe myself as though under a microscope, with the magnifying lens of the conscience. Sitting here, amid the dead plants and crumbling walls of the Jardín Borda, my eyes closed, I run a check on my whole body in search of some symptom, some sign, a vanquished region. An enemy.

In my right elbow, I detect a slight inflammation that might worsen at any moment. At the back of my neck, the tension of vertebrae digging into the brain continues. And in my gut, the leaden weight of constipation that modifies the force the Earth exercises on me. My leg is trembling.

I swallow an ibuprofen without water, just in case, and regret not having brought the Permutal. If I were able to take a couple of pills right now, in fifteen minutes life would be much simpler. The gardener would come across me semi-comatose among the dry leaves of the Jardín Borda with an infantile grin on my face.

The thought of that placidity makes me anxious and I begin walking around the garden without making any decision. I remember a Japanese restaurant somewhere nearby that I used to visit regularly as a teenager; it had a small private room, almost always free, where you sat on the floor to eat at a low table. I usually just ordered lemonade because I didn’t have money for sushi. The room was littered with cushions and the waiters would let me nap there while I waited for Natalia to come find me or Conejo to invite me to his house, where he and I sometimes made out with a sort of desperation or urgency, but never going further than kissing, as if exploring that form of nonverbal communication was enough for us.

I decide to go to the Japanese restaurant—if it still exists—but as I’m leaving the garden, I pass an open door to one of the salons and, out of the corner of my eye, notice a strange movement. Hidden by the door frame, I peep inside. Bodies abruptly falling onto floorboards, sudden leaps, sonorous exhalations, and contortions on the ground. And moving among the bodies, again—forever—Natalia.