I wake during the night in a sweat, feeling I can’t breathe. The pain has now moved to my left elbow, like an off-center heart. I’m probably mutating, I think. I’ll probably wake up converted into some disgusting insect stuck on the blotch on the ceiling I’ve been keeping such a careful watch over for almost a whole lifetime. Or, more likely, I may have some form of cancer, or an undiagnosed autoimmune condition: my body attacking itself. Anticipating the onslaught of a nonexistent enemy, my white blood cells fabricate opponents in the tissues of my joints and attack them without mercy. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. I recognize that procedure in many things I do: I invent adversaries and even whole plots to do away with me, but I then discover they are—invariably—projections of self-inflicted contempt. And just the same is happening inside me, in the viscous darkness of the blood—unknown territory; my personal verdant jungle; a wild country where everything is decided, despite the fact that it pretends just the opposite.

I wake during the night in pain. No animal is making a sound. The air in the room seems stale, heavier than usual. The heat makes me think the wildfires have finally reached the city. Shopping malls in flames. Beer warehouses, botaneras, seafood restaurants, stands selling tacos acorazados, pretentious restaurants with European names—the Vivaldi, the Café Vienés—the four mezcal bars that have opened in the last two years…All lit from within by the forked tongues of fire licking the walls until the paint blisters. Everything except this house: this besieged bastion, stronghold, bunker, protected by the air of my own childhood—the blotch on the ceiling, the very same bed. My parents will be eating papaya when the wildfire knocks at the door: “Don’t answer it, my dear. Let’s finish breakfast.” And they will go on as normal, while the world gives way like a burned-out roof beam and the last surviving insects—those roaring sparks, those ascending flames, aspiring to be bright stars—crackle and buzz over the ashes of a planet with beautiful rubble and ruins.

One pill taken orally, a half snorted. Just to see if the elbow sorts itself out—it looks red, swollen, and fragile.

Yesterday, after her rehearsal, Natalia and I walked for a while downtown, like when we were kids. Without saying a word, we strolled along the same streets and both knew that, at heart, we were looking out for Conejo, who might appear at any moment, smiling cheerfully after stealing a piece of animalprint cloth from the fabric store: What’s up, guys? How about a beer?

One of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s models used to live in this house, Natalia said unexpectedly as we passed a front door like any other. Doña María Asúnsolo, she added; who was in fact Dolores del Río’s cousin. She lived here with her iguanas until 1999, sunbathing nude in the garden of the house and scandalizing the neighbors, who could see her from their windows: a bronzed hide on a lounger, a straw hat, a straight tequila on a table at her side. How do you know that? I asked with a smile. Conejo told me, he had it from his father; as you’re well aware, Señor Bertini knows every miserable corner of the city and has a story for all of them. And then, in a mocking tone, as if winding me up, she added: Those of us who have stayed here know a great many things. She takes pleasure in needling me for going to the capital. For going there and then coming back. I guess that circle is a little risible: there’s something epic or mysterious about the ones who leave never to return, whereas those of us who do come back—the same people, only worse—inspire nothing but laughter.

Even so, Natalia knows there’s also something sad and a little comical about having stayed. Always here, in Cuernavaca, like you’re waiting for an opportunity that never appears.

She went on: Learning those ridiculous details is the only means we have of avoiding suicide; you have to unearth the stories this small town hides behind its walls. If we made do with what we can see, we wouldn’t survive the week.

After that, we passed the CMA and I asked Natalia if she remembered the time we hid there to fuck in the basement. That building was a hospital in the nineteenth century, and what is now the basement used to be the morgue. When she went there for her dance classes and I went to photography, people used to tell horror stories about that part of the building: women appearing with their dresses bathed in blood, the sound of dogs barking behind walls…On that particular occasion, Natalia and I jerked each other off among piles of junk, canvases, easels, and folding chairs. But she said she didn’t remember, and that made me doubt if the episode really had happened as I recalled it. Most likely it was a memory I invented years later; a recurring fantasy of a glorious past in a provincial city, while my bosses were bullying me or my wife was asking me to try harder to talk about my feelings. An invented episode, but nonetheless important—a yardstick, shall we say, or geological evidence of a private Pangea: that longpast time when the psyche was one, not a bunch of pieces scattered on the rug, like a jigsaw puzzle after an attack by a cat.

I suggested to Natalia that we could sleep together, get a room in the hotel in Under the Volcano or walk to the forest near where she lived and camp out there, as we used to when we were kids. There are wildfires all over the place, Erre, she said. And don’t take it personally, but I have no intention of dying in your arms, and having us found the next day covered in ash, like a cheap imitation of the lovers of Pompeii. I accompanied her until she hailed a passing cab and then continued walking alone for quite a time in the direction of Conejo’s.

Señor Bertini told me that Conejo wasn’t home, but he invited me in for a drink. I’ve only got rum, he apologized, and there should be a bottle of cane liquor somewhere, but that makes you blind, he added with a sinister laugh. Señor Bertini’s eyes sometimes open a little wider than usual and you can see that dense fog clouding the black of his iris.

He served me a cuba libre (I hope you don’t mind, he said, but I added the ice with my own hands) and sat at the dinner table with an air of debauchery, as though we’d arranged to meet in some seriously seedy botanera. I guessed he’d already had a few.

So, tell me, he began, why did you come back to Cuernavaca? Conejo said you’re divorced. Is that right? I glanced at him and took a swig of my drink, which was too strong. Yes. Can you believe it? Seven years of marriage, and then I’m out on my ass. Señor Bertini laughed again, with that coarse laugh, just like his son’s. Ay, Erre, they gave it to you good, but look on the bright side: you’re still young and more or less in one piece; I was left wrinkled, blind, and alone. Not alone, I replied, you have Conejo. Señor Bertini raised his glass to his lips and, just before taking a sip, muttered: All the worse, my boy. All the worse.