When the pain came on like that, I was scared. The flow had a strength that opened holes in the ground and made me look down from the shame and pleasure. This time everything could be worse, exacerbated by the immense landscape, open, incapable of containing anything. I thought about grabbing my things and running away. I was used to running. I didn’t run. With the tears pouring out in seas with the same force as the blood and hail, I woke María, who was sleeping in the next bed, and a grimace formed on my lips. I think it was the expression of a scream or horror because she grabbed my arm and said let’s go to the river. We walked and upon stepping into the wildness of the northwestern jungle wearing shorts and boots that slid uncontrollably in the wet mud, because on top of everything, it was raining, I thought about thousands of things, again the maddening wandering thoughts, spraying images, feeling my knees shake and a spiral forming in my throat, slipping and getting up, accumulating the past like an inevitable future. The desolation on the tips of my hard nipples, the fear mounting in my coccyx. We reached the bank, and I stripped, covering my chest with my hands and crying about something so serious I could barely think about it, something so serious it became neutral, something that wasn’t still or moving and had always existed. This pain precedes me, I thought. And that thought was immediately followed by another—it’s the women—but the image of the neutral prevailed again. It wasn’t a man or a woman or me. This pain is a monster, I thought. I tried to name it again, but the incessant repetition returned. This pain precedes me, again, like a mantra, this pain precedes me, and while I tried to think to reach some sort of calm in the origin of that evil, I was met with the image of a nucleus splitting open in a pebble touching the crest of a wave that, in the moment, formed in the river, coming from who knows where. María grabbed my hand and put me in the freezing water, washing the snot and tears that streamed down my naked body and poured from my holes, I knelt down, balancing on a rock, and María’s hands grabbed the soap and started on my back while saying words like a slow song and caressed my buttocks with a piece of soap or with her hand, maybe it was her hand with a leaf or maybe it was just her hand with mud. She moved down my thighs and stopped, we both looked at the blood, and then she gently touched my pubic hair and continued over my breasts, softly moving aside my hand, she touched my nipples and then my neck and continued over my hair, my long, knotted hair between her fingers, untangling leaves lodged in it. Me, crying even harder and grabbing my vagina, she, saying strange little words, the blood like a distant tributary painting the water, stones, wet leaves.