I ask what’s wrong, and she must think I’ve imagined she’s suffering from some sort of incurable ailment—which is possible: cancer can affect even young people and especially women—because she clarifies, “No, it isn’t that I’m sick.”

She says this with a lot of feeling, very differently from the way she generally speaks, as if she pitied me and were trying to convince me there’s nothing to be upset about.

It’s the same thing I’ve pondered. I ask if she’ll go with me someplace where we can be alone.

She says she’d like to but doesn’t think she can.

I ask her whether she’s ever done it.

She answers that she was married.

It occurs to me to ask whether she’s interested in men.

She puts her finger on the heap of photographs on the table, every one of them featuring me, and says, Do you think I was taking pictures of a jasmine flower?

In that case why not, I argue, and she answers that it’s because of what she told me before.

“What?”

“That.”

“That you’re going to die? I assume everyone’s going to die.”

“This is not ‘like everyone.’ I’m going to help things along a bit.”

I say “Ah . . .” and feel a wing flapping inside me. But not for her, for me.

It passes, I think of Marcela and find her abandoned to her thoughts, until she repeats that she’d like to, and I persist with my why not then, and she pays no attention but asks whether I have many reasons to live.

I tell her I don’t but she could become one, which visibly annoys her and she tells me there’s no need to flatter her.

I realize I’ve been playing the seductive womanizer when, in fact, with Marcela something will become possible only if there’s an intelligent understanding between us. I feel as if I know her well enough for that now, and that’s the type of relationship that interests me.

I say all this to her, trying to be clear.

She says that yes, something like that is what she wants, too, which is why, before anything happens, she’d like me to tell her whether I would take my own life along with her.

She’s very serene and is obviously leaving me plenty of time so I don’t blurt out whatever first occurs to me.

I notice she’s asked me if I would kill myself with her, not if I would kill myself for her, and I think that’s because Marcela is different from other women.

Why does it surprise me to find myself confronted, here, now, with the question that continually besieges me? It must be because it’s coming out of someone else’s mouth. I feel my anxiety starting up again and I want to see things clearly. “And why would we do that, Marcela?”

“No particular reason . . . Is there a need for one? Life makes no sense.”