30

THE POET WALKS next to me, and I feel like everything is safe and also like everything can change in such radical ways that the body can’t understand. I imagine there’s no pregnancy, I tell myself I’m here walking with this man and then I start to enjoy the heat and the strange complicity that exists between us. The sky is clear, I mention how pleasant the river feels, I say water always calms me (I don’t know why I tell this lie), and he tells me a story in which his brother saves him from drowning, and that leads us to a conversation about the future and about destiny and about death and about what he calls the little bright spots in life, and that phrase makes us laugh. We also talk about friendship and in that moment I feel a strange communion with the night and with this man. We hold hands, and I tell him that his poems are good, and I also tell him he looks just like the telenovela heartthrob, and we laugh a lot again. He suggests we go to a karaoke bar, I say OK, great, let’s go do karaoke, one song and I’m leaving. His friends are at the karaoke bar drinking, I get up the nerve to sing, I think one song and I’m leaving. I obviously choose a Daniela Romo song and sing it imagining I have her hair that goes all the way down to my waist. While the party continues, I grab my things, slip out, and start walking alone, now almost midnight, scared, but also with a strange ease, looking at the huge cockroaches and feeling an enormous tenderness for their bodies. There was a time when I was obsessed with killing cockroaches, they’d invaded our kitchen, and I’d turn on the light at midnight and work on killing them in as many ways as possible, I felt like I hated them, like I needed them and we were waging a war as much intimate as amorous: one day one, I don’t know how, got inside the microwave buttons and stayed there for years; anxiously looking at it, I understood it was the end. It had gotten there by running away from me, it had dug into the buttons and won. From that day on I didn’t kill any more cockroaches. And now, as I walk through downtown Guayaquil, thousands crawl back out, scuttling fearfully, and offer a strange protection and remembrance: how far-off childhood is, how painful. I walk with increasing urgency only to find out that my sister hasn’t come back to her apartment and that the pain I started feeling in my abdomen in the taxi has increased. I think maybe it’s a miscarriage, and the idea calms me, spontaneous is always better. What an idiotic thought, I immediately tell myself. I feel a pain in my abdomen that extends to my hips and legs, so I go into the restaurant on the ground floor of the building where my sister lives, but they say they’re about to close.