I SAT DOWN TO WRITE but it started to rain. This immediately prompted a battle within me between what I imagined and what was taking place, for on paper the pensive trees in the forest of my story were darkened by shadows; and the imaginary poet who wandered among them was obliterated by the actual fact of the downpour, which fell in torrents on the roof and lopped off branches from the rosebushes in the garden.

Even afterwards, once it had stopped raining, my dusky-voiced trees were flooded and I didn’t feel like writing. In a different mood, I understood that the rain had prevailed not only over what was imagined but also over the person imagining.

I had made the dining room my study. Mornings I would sit down to write. My parents didn’t ask what I was doing shut up in there; they didn’t seem to notice.

One afternoon my brother, searching for a camera, opened a drawer and discovered my writings.

When I returned from a walk in the fields I found him sitting on a step, reading. When he saw me he waved the notebooks in the air and came towards me. He asked why I’d never told him before that I wrote. And he went to tell my parents I was a poet and that he was going to publish my books.

At the pool hall, words piled up inside me like rain clouds. But even when I wrote them down they didn’t stop bubbling up, and when I leaned over the green cloth I took crooked aim at the cue ball. A story was hatching before my eyes, one in which the friends around me at that moment became both more real and more remote; they now existed in sentences in my mental village.

Then, feeling the urgency to be alone to write, I told Juan, who was playing pool with me, that I had to do something right away at home, and I left.

On the street the poem churned in my head faster than the speed of my steps; each new verse made me want to walk more quickly, although I was already hurrying.

And so, while Juan talked, I became aware of the separation that exists between people at certain moments. For though we walked side by side down the street, as I sensed within me the imminence of a poem we began to go down different paths; his along the words he spoke and I through a silence that immersed me in myself, and then I would speak.

Confronted with the flash of lightning of every poem, I felt I could make a book be like a spiritual home within a landscape of the ephemeral. The objects in the book shimmered before my mind’s eye, similar to the apparitions a saint receives, which only he, even if surrounded by other people, can see.

And so it was that the hill, the church, the square, the playing field, the ash tree, and my parents were woven into a verbal embroidery with its own movements and colors.

The village looked different and yet the same when seen from the Plain of the Mules, from the school, and from the mill, its landscape varying according to the place from where it was beheld, as though through a multiple perspective that offers one’s eyes a different village each time.

At home, through the living room window, I watched the maid water the plants, close a door, put canary seed in the goldfinch’s cage, look at herself in the mirror, as if in a continuous flow of fiction into life.

Because all of a sudden, human beings had become poetizable. And through poetry, things revealed their infinitude. And the first line of a text was not only the beginning of an action towards a being, but also the first movement towards another form of my own existence. Joys and misfortunes, desires and memories converging into the moment of the poem.

During the days leading up to my move to Mexico City, I felt sad for my parents, who, whenever they saw me, said: “Don’t go, we’ll be all alone.” “Stay here, you can write in Contepec.” “I have to go,” I’d reply, feeling discouraged.

My brother was leaving too and was depressed. He spent a lot of time sitting alone in the living room, so quiet that if you didn’t see him you wouldn’t know he was there. When we met he stared at me with melancholy eyes.

Thus, not wanting to constantly think about leaving, I became upset each time I remembered. The atmosphere of the trip descended on me on the playing field, in the pool hall, and at home, as if I felt uncomfortable in my own body and the projects in mind had their expiry date the day we were to leave, with no possible future thereafter.

And so it was that on the day of our departure, sitting down to a final breakfast with my parents, I felt imprisoned by my body like the goldfinch in the cage by its bones. And I longed to fly out of myself, towards the free space of poetry, towards a life without fear or suffering. But, painfully watched by my parents, I realized that we cannot escape time, living as we do among the mortals from whom we have issued and alongside those with whom we will exist and next to whom we will be laid to rest.

And so, when I said goodbye to them I felt like a figure on a Greek stele, a son bidding his defunct parents farewell, the parting, which took place in time, revealing its spatial dimension, a kind of petrified desolation: the mute stone broadcasting the solitude of ghosts in bas-relief.

Then, with my books and my manuscripts in a box, my suitcase packed with clothes, and my brother dressed in the suit he always wore on the fifteenth of September for the Independence Day dance, we left my parents, feeling we were relinquishing the village the moment we departed but finding nothing before us. We were heading towards a city neither of us felt like heading towards. Yet we had to abandon the village because at our age it had grown too small, like a pair of trousers that no longer fits.