She hugged me and we sank into the water, me touching her wavy hair, she squeezing my waist, feeling her firm buttocks, resting my arms on her back, surrounding our bodies in water, calming my blood and me with her, everything coming together far from thought. Immense, the sky. What bodies do together when they touch, when fingers slide through holes and caress creased, fragile textures, volumes, and stains, moistening the reddest parts with white fingertips. The pleasure of touch. The water flowing in my holes along with those fingers to soften my organs. That afternoon, after one of the retreat’s collective therapy sessions, we returned to the river, this time farther away from camp, where the tributary formed a waterfall. The two of us went back with a Frenchman who had a silent beauty concentrated in his eyes. When beauty is silent, when it doesn’t manifest itself but is always hiding, the gleam seeps in and bursts out in swift, sudden flashes; this makes me dizzy and then nervously laugh. The three of us went to the river. Laughing with the same thickness with which I’d cried that morning, I thought about getting in the water again, but I was so embarrassed by the blood that I stayed on the bank while they submerged themselves and swam to the waterfall and felt the velocity of the vertical water on their heads. Their bodies moved between laughs that multiplied and were thousands of laughs, they were the laughs of everything, they were the laughs of the rocks I was sitting on and whose vibration aroused and moved me and those two incompatible sensations accelerated my legs that were entering the water, far from the other two, vibrating, because sensation is always vibration, the man from the cave had told me when he explained rhythm and got lost in the depths of a musical thought in which breath, that’s what he called it, gave origin to all forms of movement. María’s body was bony and long and coincided with the roundness of the Frenchman’s body, it coincided in opposition (or in synchronicity, I don’t know). They were different but coinciding bodies. I pictured their mouths kissing and everything made perfect sense, especially in terms of rhythm. The jealousy I had felt toward her for years, for the carelessness with which she carried her beauty (especially her hair), became admiration. I did everything for her to love me and then, when my hair was something like her hair and her fingers also donned big rings like mine, I already loved her and she loved me and I could no longer distinguish what was mine and what was hers and that later led us to hatred and luckily back to love, but this story isn’t relevant right now. In that moment she and the Frenchman were also me in the river. I remembered then what that morning, amid the desolation, in that slow litany, she had asked me to observe: the disorder of everything, that’s what she’d said, observe the forms, please, their disordered appearance, and she named them one by one: