And that night in 1989, in a Yugoslavia about to be chipped away like the bathroom tiles, in Belgrade, in the midst of an atmosphere that already smelled of debauchery, of ferocity, of cruelty, of war, of thousands of bodies, in a square that in his memory was confused with a basketball court and where later orphaned children will march and dead bodies will fall, he’ll get onstage and stand in front of young people who do and don’t look like socialists, excited and raging young people who, while he strums his guitar with that primitive gesture (the same one with which he masturbated, all his modesty let go in the only immodest expression he allowed himself), they aggressively rage against the fences protecting the stage. He’ll feel the possibilities of hell vibrate, finding that something in the evil excites him, the possibilities of everything to come, and he looms like a tower, the possibility the tower will fall, the possibility the war tanks will burst forth and the catastrophe will be three hundred thousand dead bodies, the possibility blood will run through the gutters and people will love and kill, hug and kick, that is metal or that city or, specifically, that court, or the world in that moment. All those probabilities, a crowd preparing for death, a horrible premonition that elevates his magnetic pull over the buzzed heads or long hair or the shrieks in that foreign language, he senses it and the pleasure is sad but potent. He and his band. His fingers playing the guitar, the same hands that touched the dew, that resisted the desire to squeeze Mila’s breasts, that grabbed his cock to piss in little basins that were chirimoya peels, that comb his daughter’s smooth hair with all the love in the world, and that now carefully peel grainy pieces of white yucca for our dinner. The heat in his chest that was combustion or more likely dissipation in both senses, as in dissolution and debauchery, takes hold of his body: the dissipation he found and that was his fingers overstepping, that was his fingers seducing and also giving in (while he told me all this, preparing the octopus and the yucca, he said that night I got up to play to be with my friends, that’s it, I played so they would love me or to be with them, that’s why I keep doing it, and what he tells me makes me smile and I think about M’s accurate statement on friendship). Fingers that at any moment could be dust and that I’d seen play the strings of a red guitar, flowing debauchery and fury—no one played the guitar like that, holy shit, no one—in a concert, in a square, in another time, years ago, and then, without knowing anything about him or having seen the moss or the cave (but having already sensed all of it in those fingers), I had begun, obsessive as I am, to love.