Marcela agrees, and I tell her that this person continues, for me, to be that other, original person because I’ve never seen her again. I remember her as she was at seventeen.

Marcela tells me that I still love her. I acknowledge that may be, but maintain that it would disturb me if she, in turn, were still to love me, since I am another person, and not a better one, either inside or out, than when I was seventeen.

But in any case, this is an inadequate conversation because it is melancholy, even if I’m making Marcela aware that, in general, everything you believe to be fundamentally good for yourself is not possible. And that goes, as well, for my relationship with her, which is fundamentally good yet nevertheless has a time limit, I don’t know what it is, though I’m sure she’s established it.

Marcela falls silent and since we’re very close to each other in the darkness our bodies knot together in passion and afterward I tell her that whatever she wants to do with me I’ll do, but again she doesn’t answer, which humiliates me.

•

It’s Friday, the third Friday of the month. But that doesn’t matter, I pay no attention.

Except I’m unavoidably annoyed because I don’t manage to meet the person who was supposed to be waiting for me, and then an importuner cuts me off and traps me, and I flee from another notorious busybody, stumbling over people covered in fleas to clamber onto a bus that takes me away but the bus is a lethal cauldron or gas chamber, so I seek some air in a plaza and the cool waters of the fountain but there, from a bench, I’m assailed by the lamentable debris of a woman.

I pull myself together and seek beauty. It’s there, it exists, it’s all around. It abounds, almost. The slender bodies and high-held heads of youth, a face, a pair of eyes, the colors that spill down through the air onto people, a mature forehead, a delicate hand in flight . . . they emerge, pass by. . . and are lost in the torrent of human ugliness.

Some days are like that.

•

Evening has settled onto the neighborhood.

A man lying in his hammock along the sidewalk undoubtedly got up very early and has worked all day; he yawns. It sounds like a lion or a solitary wolf, I’m not sure which. His dog looks up at him but is used to it. I’m not, and I stop. Over there, a group of ladies are observing him discreetly from the corner of their eyes, they huddle closer to one another—they’re walking arm in arm—and quicken their step.

We ape men exist, too, that is known: horse men, amphibious men, men whose earlobes are unattached or free.

All of us, upon reaching a certain age, have the right to retire.

•

In a film or novel, if the protagonist kills himself, the story ends.