She sits across from me—she doesn’t eat, she already had dinner—and watches me eat, which bothers me though I don’t say so.

She says, “I wanted you to come back.”

That’s reasonable and I have no response.

Then I ask whether she has a record player, any records. She says she doesn’t, what for.

Julia did have records.

I remember I never said goodbye to Julia, and what if it were to happen tonight . . .

Marcela wants to know whether I’m getting tired of her. I tell her I’m not the least bit tired of her, that’s never happened to me with her.

It’s the truth and it pleases her to hear it, and immediately she suggests we go to bed.

I find that strange, but the day is over.

•

The hot wind has us under siege. She wanted to open the windows but had to close them again.

It’s stifling in here and fatigue is grinding me to a fine powder.

I tell her I’ll sleep naked. Marcela has no problem with that, I’ve done it before.

I take another shower. I come back fresher and lie down beside her. She wants me to look at her, I was looking at the ceiling. I look at her and say, “You haven’t taken your clothes off, how can you stand it?” According to her, she can stand it.

Marcela strokes one of my arms and soon we’re kissing.

Afterward she stays in her universe, barely making her presence felt, and I’m already a little sleepy but she says my name and asks me if there’s something I never succeeded in doing however much I wanted to.

I ask when, and she says, “At any moment in your life.”

I say, “Direct movies, like Bergman.”

“You’d like to be Ingmar Bergman?”

I say, “Well . . .”

She says nothing more and I’m starting to fade, but I still have the presence of mind to ask what she would have wanted to be.

I think she answers, in a very gentle voice, “A passenger on an airplane that never lands,” and a wave of sleep engulfs me.

•

I come out of the night’s lethargy to find myself in daylight.

The calm is flawless, the sun still inoffensive.

Marcela has opened a window and left me there, a pagan who sleeps without modesty or shame.

I feel my body abandoned to softness and drowsing, nothing troubling its inner rhythms, the silent rush of blood.

There’s no tension, maybe because I slept well. Sleeping is good and I was lulled to sleep by Mauricio, who’s my brother.

Or maybe it’s other things that I’ve been unburdened of.

The punches I took still hurt a little, when I think about it.