Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

"Ernesto's."

"The pornographic pictures?"

"Yes."

The two of us shuddered in unison. Our faces were glued together. We could talk, vocalize, thanks to the space made by our noses, but even so I could feel her lips move against mine.

"Do you want to do it again?"

"Yes," said María.

"Well," I said, a little queasy, "if you change your mind at the last minute, let me know."

"Change my mind about what?" said María.

The insides of her thighs were drenched in my semen. I felt cold and I couldn't help sighing deeply at the moment I penetrated her again.

María whimpered and I started to move with increasing enthusiasm.

"Try not to make too much noise, I don't want Angélica to hear us."

"You try not to make noise," I said, and I added: "What did you give Angélica to make her sleep like that?"

The two of us laughed quietly, me against her neck and her burying her face in the pillows. When I finished, I didn't even have the energy to ask her if she'd enjoyed herself, and the only thing I wanted was to gradually drift off to sleep with María in my arms. But she got up and made me get dressed and follow her to the bathroom in the big house. When we went out into the courtyard I realized that the sun was already coming up. For the first time that night I could see my lover a little more clearly. María was wearing a white nightgown with red embroidery on the sleeves, and her hair was pulled back with a ribbon or a piece of braided leather.

After we dried ourselves I thought about calling home, but María said that my aunt and uncle would surely be asleep and I could do it later.

"And now what?" I said.

"Now let's sleep a little," said María, putting her arm around my waist.

But the night or day held a last surprise for me. Huddled in a corner of the little house, I discovered Barrios and his American friend. The two of them were snoring. I would've liked to wake them with a kiss.

We all had breakfast together: Quim Font, Mrs. Font, María and Angélica, Jorgito Font, Barrios, Barbara Patterson, and me. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, slices of fried ham, bread, mango jam, strawberry jam, butter, salmon pâté, and coffee. Jorgito drank a glass of milk. Mrs. Font (she kissed me on the cheek when she saw me!) made something that she called crèpes but that were nothing like crèpes. The rest of breakfast was prepared by the servant (whose name I don't know or can't remember, which is inexcusable). Barrios and I washed the dishes.

Afterward, when Quim went off to work and Mrs. Font began to plan her day (she works, so she told me, as a writer for a new Mexican family magazine), I finally decided to call home. My aunt Martita was the only one there, and when she heard my voice she started to scream like a crazy woman, then cry. After an uninterrupted series of prayers to the Virgin, appeals to duty, fragmented accounts of the night I had "put my uncle through," warnings in a tone more complicitous than recriminatory about the impending punishment that my uncle was surely pondering that very morning, I finally broke in and assured her that I was fine, that I'd spent the night with some friends and I wouldn't be home until "after dark" since I planned to head straight for the university. My aunt promised that she would call my uncle at work herself, and she made me swear that as long as I lived I would call home when I decided to spend the night out. For a few seconds I considered whether it might be a good idea to call my uncle myself, but in the end I decided that it wasn't necessary.

I fell into an armchair with no idea what to do. I had the rest of the morning and day at my disposal, which is to say, I was conscious that they were at my disposal and in that sense they struck me as different from other mornings and other days (when I was a lost soul, wandering around the university or in the grips of my virginity), but here at the first sign of change I didn't know what to do. I had so many possibilities to choose from.

The consumption of food-I ate like a wolf while Mrs. Font and Barbara Patterson talked about museums and Mexican families-had made me slightly sleepy and at the same time had reawakened my desire to have sex with María (whom I had avoided looking at during breakfast, trying when I did to adapt my gaze to the notions of brotherly love or disinterested camaraderie that I imagined were harbored by her father, who incidentally didn't seem the least bit surprised to see me at his table at such an early hour), but María was getting ready to go out, Angélica was getting ready to go out, Jorgito Font had already left, Barbara Patterson was in the shower, and only Barrios and the maid were wandering around the big library of the main house like the last survivors of a terrible shipwreck, so to stay out of their way and in a faint desire for symmetry, I crossed the courtyard for the millionth time and made myself comfortable in the sisters' little house, where the beds were still unmade (which was a clear sign that it was the maid or servant or cleaning lady-or the naca of steel, as Jorgito called her-who did the work, a detail that increased my attraction to María rather than lessening it, tainting her pleasantly with frivolousness and indifference), contemplating the still-damp scene of my gateway to glory, and even though I ought to have wept or prayed, what I did was lie down on one of the unmade beds (Angélica's, as I found out later, not María's) and fall asleep.

I was woken by Pancho Rodríguez hitting me (I think he may have been kicking me too, though I'm not sure). Only good manners prevented me from greeting him with a punch in the jaw. After saying good morning I went out into the courtyard and washed my face in the fountain (proof that I was still asleep), with Pancho behind me muttering unintelligibly.

"There's no one home," he said. "I had to hop the wall to get in. What are you doing here?"

I told him that I had spent the night there (I played it down, since I didn't like the way Pancho's nostrils were quivering, by adding that Barrios and Barbara Patterson had spent the night too), then we tried to get into the big house by the back door, the kitchen door, and the front door, but they were all locked tight.

"If a neighbor sees us and calls the police," I said, "how will we explain that we're not breaking in?"

"I don't give a shit. Sometimes I like to nose around my girlfriends' houses," said Pancho.

"And also," I said, ignoring Pancho's remark, "I think I saw a curtain move in the house next door. If the police come…"

"Did you have sex with Angélica, asshole?" asked Pancho suddenly, turning his eyes away from the front windows of the Fonts' house.

"Of course not," I assured him.

I don't know whether he believed me or not. But the two of us hopped the wall again and beat a retreat from Colonia Condesa.

As we walked (in silence, through the Parque España, down Parras, through the Parque San Martín, and along Teotihuacán, where the only people out at that time of day were housewives, maids, and bums), I thought about what María had said about love and about the suffering that love would bring down on Pancho's head. By the time we got to Insurgentes, Pancho was in a better mood, talking about literature and recommending authors to me, trying to forget about Angélica. Then we headed down Manzanillo, turned onto Aguascalientes, and turned south again onto Medellín, walking until we reached Calle Tepeji. We stopped in front of a five-story building and Pancho invited me to have lunch with his family.

We took the elevator up to the top floor.

There, instead of going into one of the apartments, as I had expected, we climbed the stairs to the roof. A gray sky, but bright as if there had been a nuclear attack, welcomed us in the middle of a vibrant profusion of flowerpots and plants spilling into the passageways and laundry space.