The errands I’d gone for completed, I found myself—for reasons that aren’t relevant—walking with two men. Two men with hairy chests. For me, chest hair is synonymous with a handsome man. Period. Maybe it has to do with the heartthrob from the Mexican telenovela La fiera that I watched with unrivaled passion and that sometimes, during my nighttime boredoms, I watched again on YouTube, feeling a nostalgia that had nothing to do with the soap but that filled me with the painful pleasure of longing. I was walking with those two men down Boyacá Street, looking for a store to buy a box of Clos de Pirque wine. No wine to be found, we bought a bottle of Caña Manabita and a bottle of water that we later emptied to fill with the liquor. They had to go back to work and couldn’t do so with a liquor bottle in hand. The two men were walking at my side, talking about a time when they got drunk every day. Then came a second premonition: I had a bad tendency to date drunkards. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when I was little, I’d keep my brother company during early mornings when, drunk, he’d get into my bed and talk about his sadness and I’d feel his alcoholic breath penetrate me, and that breath protected and aroused me. My brother died in an accident more than twenty years ago, he was driving drunk, I miss him with the vehemence of the starkest helplessness that has felt like a frozen cut that opens and closes in my chest, under my breasts ever since. It’s a pain that doesn’t abandon me. Luckily. One of the men I was walking with was a sculptor, the other a poet. I’m not going to get ahead of myself this time by saying I only fall in love with artists, it would be a lie, even more so with poets. It happens, but luckily it isn’t the rule. I was walking with them; the sculptor had a wide nose and a round face. Everything on the poet was more elegant. The sculptor, who was also a professor, was saying he worked with a nude model in his class. The poet was a beautiful man. Beautiful like Víctor Alfonso, the heartthrob from La fiera. Not only because of the hair on his chest. He had the look of a pioneer. The way he styled his hair. His beard. His glasses. By pioneer I mean the Mormon pioneers who arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century and built the railroad.

I lived in the United States surrounded by Amish communities, descendants of pioneers, always fascinated by the way they grew their hair out and looked at everything with naive unease. During a tourist visit to a pioneer museum, once my group had moved ahead through, I was able to clamber onto the statue and kiss the pioneer’s mouth. The poet was a soap opera pioneer heartthrob, and I was falling in love with everything he was, but I was also sure it would be impossible to kiss him, which was my only intention in that moment. I would have been too embarrassed to get naked in front of such a handsome man. But to return to the two men and that afternoon, we drank the liquor inside the university, in the sculptor’s class that did indeed have a nude model, an Andean butoh dancer who spent holidays in Guayaquil and posed for him. The sculptor molded, and the poet, drunk, wrote a verse on the blackboard. I thought it was fantastic and copied it into my notebook but seen in the light of sobriety the next day, back in another van, I realized it was bad. The poem ended with the phrase: wooden sea lion has only one eye / that like a pearl twinkles in the paramo dew.