Estábamos en este bar, el domingo por la tarde, sentados en un rincón. La hora, nebulosa. Llevaba dos meses y medio en el país. Mi amiga Elis me había alojado en su casa, un apartamento de dos habitaciones en una isla al norte de Miami Beach.

Entré por el sur y pasé tres días cruzando Louisiana, Mississippi y parte de Alabama en autobús, antes de sumergirme en el embudo de Florida. Vi los cielos enfermizos. Vi las calles y los puestos de comida rápida y las gasolineras sin fondo de Estados Unidos. Si miras el mapa, estás viajando a través de la masa terrestre, de oeste a este, cuando de repente caes en este agujero.

Elis me esperó en Tampa, volvimos en su Toyota blanco. Ella fue mi vecina de la infancia y ahí estábamos, encerrados en un auto, conectados por una vida anterior. Veinte años después, había decidido ser fiel a eso.

“Puedes quedarte conmigo todo el tiempo que necesites”, dijo.

Dio un sorbo a su café y luego lo puso en un portavasos justo entre los asientos delanteros del coche. Vestía todo de negro y tenía profundas bolsas debajo de los ojos y un Swatch igualmente negro.

Teníamos el aire acondicionado a cero y las ventanillas bajadas.

“No quiero imponer,” dije. “Tan pronto como vuelva a la normalidad, buscaré trabajo”.

Me miró con recelo, como si alguien como yo no pudiera volver a encarrilarse o como si no existiera tal cosa. En realidad, ¿qué quiso decir con eso?

“Seguro”, dijo, “pero por ahora puedes quedarte en mi casa. Te van a encantar mis compañeros de cuarto.

Su amabilidad la hizo aún más extraña para mí. Quiero decir, ella no era alguien a quien realmente conociera en absoluto. Nos vimos por última vez hace veinte años, en la escuela primaria, por el barrio; nuestros padres debieron ayudarse mutuamente de alguna manera, eso es todo.

Me sentí incómodo en ese asiento, lejos de todos. Me sentí como si estuviera en una silla eléctrica, con una esponja goteando agua sobre mi cabeza antes de que la corriente quemara hasta el último músculo. El viento estaba en mi cara; Decidí concentrarme en eso. Voy a cerrar los ojos, voy a salir en busca del sueño, recité.

Elis tenía una mano en el volante y la otra en la taza de café. Ella era una hábil conductora. Se lo dije, luego no dije nada más por un tiempo.

“Es lo que más hago”, respondió ella. “Conducir.”

La carretera partía el horizonte en dos. El auto avanzó como un par de tijeras, cortando la tela que formaba la superficie del suelo.

Elis me despertó una vez que ya estábamos debajo de su edificio. Tomamos el ascensor hasta su apartamento en el tercer piso, a la mitad de un pasillo con paredes blancas y una escalera de emergencia al final.

La cocina estaba en la entrada, a la derecha. Un joven de nuestra edad estaba cortando verduras en una tabla de cortar, cerca del fregadero. Vino hacia nosotros, cuchillo en mano. Pensé que iba a saludarme, pero se detuvo en el refrigerador. Llevaba el pelo recogido en un moño apretado. Era un cabello espeso, negro y grasiento, con algunos mechones sueltos y ya salpicado de canas. Elis nos presentó y luego corrió al baño.

“¿Cómo te va?” dijo Eduardo.

“Bien.”

“Siéntete como en casa, hombre”.

Luego se limpió las manos en el delantal y se sonó la nariz sobre el fregadero.

Entré en la sala de estar. Dejé mi mochila en el suelo y me senté en la esquina de un sofá cama que se extendía a lo largo de la pared. Ahí era donde yo dormía y donde sigo durmiendo.

De pie en el balcón había otro tipo, de cara a la pared, recortado contra la luz naranja de la tarde de Miami. Estaba mirando algo.

Elis se me acercó y se subió la cremallera de los vaqueros. Me llevó al balcón y me presentó a Juan. Juan miraba, absorto, un mapa de Estados Unidos colgado de un clavo.

Still, he turned around for a second and gave me a hug. His body was stiff, as though he had a drill running through him and he couldn’t turn freely. He was tall and muscular, lumbering. I thought I was going to be crushed between his arms. He had thick fingers, like screws, and wild eyes, the edges of the irises clouded by a white film. Welcome, he said. A new friend, a new friend is always good. He smiled politely and went back to his business.

Something wasn’t right with him. Nothing’s right with anyone, of course, but with him things seemed to be much worse. He’s autistic, Elis told me later, in her room. She was sprawled on her bed. She wore shorts, a baggy shirt, and short socks. I was still standing; I’d been standing for more than an hour, even though Elis had told me to lie down too, if I wanted.

She had met both of them a few months before. A work friend introduced them. Everyone needed some extra help making the rent for an apartment on the beach. Prices had kept going up after the last wave of immigrants, and no one wanted to move to a less fun neighborhood.

Juan and Eduardo had also come from the south. Their parents brought them to Miami when they were really young, and both of them hit a rough patch starting in their teens. Now, Eduardo had an electronic ankle monitor; the police were monitoring him. He was a red dot blinking on some officer’s computer. He couldn’t leave a certain radius. And I don’t think would have left it either. With or without the ankle monitor, he had always lived on the beach, just like Juan. They became friends in the smoke shops on Normandy Island.

You could walk on the beach; there were sidewalks, sun. However, the sun that day seemed sickly to me. And all of the summer days that were to come would also come with their equally sickly suns. I asked Elis if her friends had any objections to my staying there. She said no. They were both good guys. She’d told them my situation and they agreed. But if she hadn’t told them anything, they still would’ve said yes, she said.

At that moment, nothing in the world seemed weirder to me than her. She was lying in her room, swallowed in the daylight, enveloped in the high of a cigarette that was half marijuana, half tobacco, and I there to witness it. I couldn’t see her silhouette anymore; I couldn’t make out where my friend began or ended.

She asked me if it bothered me that she’d told her friends. I said no. She asked if I was sad, if I wanted to talk about anything, and she told me that I didn’t have to answer now. I could talk about it whenever I wanted. If I didn’t want to, that was okay too.

What’s autism like? I said. Tell me more about that. You don’t know? Elis said. Well, yeah, I’ve heard a lot of things, but what’s Juan like. He’s not violent, but he gets worked up. He doesn’t drink anymore. He doesn’t drink at all; he’s as clean as a nun, and he can spend days on end on the same thing, without moving.

I was able to confirm that the next morning. I woke up on my sofa, and Juan was still in front of the United States map on the balcony. I went over to him.

“How’s it going, man?” he said.

“Okay.”

“We’ll do what it takes for you to feel good, bro. We’ll be good friends.”

I took that to mean he was speaking for himself and Eduardo.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Where?”

“In front of the map; you’ve been here for hours.”

“I’m looking for my treasure, friend. I’ve lost something in this country, but I can’t figure out what city it’s in.”

“We’ve all lost something,” I said. “I’m grateful I got here, after all.”

“Oh, yeah, man, you’re lucky,” he said. “I know that earthquake destroyed your house, but there are thousands of others who are also homeless, crowded together on the border.”

Juan talked without looking at me, his eyes fixed on the map. I stretched my muscles and loosened up my bones with slight movements. My knees cracked. I leaned on the iron railing of the balcony.

“Do you have any idea of where your treasure might be?”

“She moves around, man. Sometimes she goes north, sometimes west, like this. Now she could be in Arkansas or Wyoming.”

“What’s she doing there?”

“Haven’t the faintest idea. She just left one day, just like that. She got in a car, man, put on her sunglasses, and left. She was beautiful, man, really beautiful. You won’t see anyone like her in your lifetime.”

“Are you gonna go look for her?”

“Who?”

“Your treasure,” I said.

Juan took two seconds to turn around. He’s a robot, I said to myself.

“Can’t be done, man. No one can get out of Florida.”

“I want to move after a while.”

“That’s what everyone says, but you can’t escape Florida. You’re at the bottom of a pit, man. No one’s gonna throw you down a rope. You won’t get past Jacksonville.”

“Do you wanna go get a drink?” I said. “I’ll get cleaned up and we can go.”

“I’m clean, man. I haven’t had a drink in seven years.”

“Right, I’m sorry. Elis told me.”

“Elis likes to say a lot of things.”

“Is she your friend?”

“Yeah, she’s a nice girl. I can’t live with someone who isn’t my friend. We’re friends, right?”

“Yeah, we are.”

Juan held out his hand to me again.

“You’re not gonna want to leave Miami, you’ll see. Forget about it. This is the best city you’ll ever find, man.”

I nodded.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” I said.

“Okay. There’s stuff to eat in the fridge. Make whatever you want.”

“Thanks.”

“No rush to make money. You’ll be helping us out soon enough.”

I thanked him again. I opened the sliding door and went into the living room. Juan seemed inclined to continue in front of the map for a while.

I had no idea where Arkansas or Wyoming was. His map outlined the states, but it didn’t have their names.

The United States was a vast and unknown territory that unfolded before the eyes of an autistic man. An untitled oil painting under the gaze of a madman.

“One more thing, friend,” he said,

“Yeah?” I said.

“Find yourself a new treasure. I know it’s hard, but you can find it.”

“You think so?”

“For sure, friend. You’ll know it when you see it. In this country, there’s a treasure for everyone.”

I went out to look for work in the next few days. Juan was the only one in the apartment who never went out; the government gave him a pension. Although in the afternoon, he did go out with Eduardo, one or two afternoons a week. They would come home in the evening, drop their backpacks. They’d eat  salads, lots of vegetables. Chard, tomatoes, and radishes with olive oil and cheese.

“You can’t keep doing that,” Eduardo was saying to Juan.

Eduardo was one of those people who was born high.

“You don’t have to tell me what I have to do. Are we clear on that?”

I found a few things. I washed cars in southwest Miami, but the guy paid me seven dollars for the day. I could’ve hit him with an iron rod I had close by. I could’ve done it. I felt like nothing was stopping me from bashing in his head. The rod was in the bed of a Ford pick-up and I looked at it out of the corner of my eye, while the owner of the business gave me a five-dollar bill and two one-dollar bills. I thought, there are worse things.

You can’t kill someone for paying you seven dollars a day, even when you’ve washed sixty cars. On the list of despicable acts, everyone would consider it ridiculous. Don’t ruin your life over this, I told myself. They’ll say he didn’t deserve it.

The man wished me good luck. He even told me that he hoped to see me again. I walked back to the beach, several miles, alongside the expressway. I don’t think anyone had ever walked along there before, a desert in the middle of freeway. One of those highways that runs along the entire East Coast, all the way up to New York, and if you stay on it, you can get to Michigan or Ohio.

Seven dollars in my pocket. I touched them with my fingertips. I had to do something with my anger. You can’t keep those moments inside. They’re like a lion that you adopt as a cub. The smell of gasoline, the pus of those sickly suns dripping into the city’s mouth. I couldn’t buy anything with those bills, I just couldn’t.

I had to start over again. Some days are tests, I told myself. Days of training before an empty stadium. I made it to one of the bridges to Miami Beach and I leaned on the railing. My tired body, my spirit gliding along the waters of the bay, between the second-rate 25-foot yachts. I stayed that way until a bigger ship approached, and I realized I was on a drawbridge. A police officer told me to move.

Don’t be so sore all the time, I told myself. Be normal. But I was sad, genuinely devastated. The earthquake had destroyed my building. All of my things were buried under the rubble. Clothes, dishes, artwork, and my youth too, in a way. And my fiancée. I was going to get married.

I managed to open the gate of the building, and I swear I kept hearing her voice and feeling her body behind me. In the street, I could still hear her and see her by my side and I kept talking to her for a while during the commotion and the hysteria. Although I think I didn’t talk, instead, she talked to me. She even said she’d stayed inside. I stayed in the house, I’m gonna stay here, she said.

I can’t exactly say how long ago it happened. We’d been engaged for three years. She was a nice girl. She was always trying to find reasons to get made up or dance in the living room or make a new dish for dinner. She didn’t want to come to the United States, enter this map. Not that country, she used to say. Not New York, not anywhere.

I called her by name and she used to breathe in my scent and I called her my love. She had white skin and was only a inch or two shorter than me. She didn’t keep her nails long. She had a silver piercing in her right nostril and the wide eyes of an eight or nine-month-old baby.

She wanted to cover her arms in tattoos. She was going to get the first one the week after the earthquake. An alebrije of a multi-colored dragon. Anyone would say she would have done it. She was full of energy. She didn’t weigh more than 120 pounds. She could have escaped from almost anything. And she never got high. She suffered such severe depression that the only thing that got her thought it was her depression.

I kept walking toward the apartment with my hands in my pockets. I got rid of two of the bills and I was left with one of the dollars. I planned to keep it on me it forever. From then on everything was lighter.

I went all over the beach that week. I found a job in the kitchen of a Peruvian restaurant, on the corner of Collins and 73^rd. Twelve hours a day and some good money. Not too much, but enough for a newcomer.

When I’d leave the restaurant, at ten or eleven, I wouldn’t know exactly what to do. I mean, I had a body and I didn’t have the faintest idea where to put it so that that body would settle in a bit and relax a minute, as if reality were an airplane seat and I was shifting around in that reduced space, with no chance of peace and quiet.

I didn’t want to get high. I didn’t want to go back to the apartment. I tried talking a little with another girl in the kitchen, an Ecuadorian, but that wasn’t very promising. On several nights, I ended up in a go-go bar two blocks down. I would exchange the ten-and twenty-dollar bills and I’d leave with fat rolls of ones. I’d touch a few asses and some tits and tuck the bills into the dental floss and that was enough for me.

Sometimes a gigantic cartoon robot would come out from the back of the bar and walk among the different stages firing a laser gun and foaming and frothing and making a noise like the end of the world. I didn’t get what that had to do with all those naked women dancing around a pole, but the robot caught my attention.

There was one that I liked. I never could’ve approached her and I didn’t force it. I wasn’t expecting to find my treasure in a go-go bar, after all.

They fired me from the kitchen after ten days. The police had been asking questions. I didn’t have work papers. The authorization was going to take between three and four months and I couldn’t waste that time away as if I were in my parents’ house instead of the apartment of a drug addict, an autistic person and a guy who hung around with an autistic person.

Eduardo worked in a veterinary clinic. He told me that it was impossible to get a job there. The boss, a crotchety Republican, didn’t want anything to do with the post-earthquake migrants. There they check, look after, and prescribe medication to pets. They put them down if they’re terminally ill. Eduardo’s weirdness is that of someone who feels more affection for animals than for people. I think he also sees Juan a bit like an animal.

Finally, Elis managed to get me in at the snack bar of her hotel. She’s the head waiter in the buffet. Now I have to make a bunch of summery cocktails and take them to the pool. The hotel is full of South Americans, especially Argentines and Chileans, but there are also French and Italian people. They all have houses to go home to.

Around five in the afternoon, things begin to slow down. I make a mojito. I lie in a deck chair, and when night falls, I stick my feet in the pool, I drift off. The water is lukewarm. She didn’t want to come to the United States, but she would’ve liked the pool and the mojito.

When I think a bit, I bring her here with me; I pull her out of the wreckage and I make her a drink. I make her swim, and in my mind she can go from one end of the pool to the other. And she can dive in, if she wants. Or get out and dry off. Or get up and look out towards the beach, but when I start to take her from the hotel, and bring her with me to the apartment, the thought doesn’t come to me anymore.

She vanishes. I’m afraid my roomies won’t accept her. I’m afraid they’ll tell me that she has to stay outside, and then I’ll have to make a choice, and I won’t make the right one. That I’ll choose to stay in the house and leave her to spend the night alone on the eerie streets of Miami Beach. Then I think I don’t wanna risk it, and I go up to the pool, and I cut it off there or end it or something, and that something is what lets me go on.

Sometimes Eduardo and Juan drop by here. They’re friends with some of the workers. They talk and make plans and things happen behind my back that I’m not part of. I know how it is. Elis joins in too.

Sometimes they go up to one of the rooms and come back down really late, and I can hear their voices from the pool. Sometimes their shadows appear behind the windows of the snack bar and I can make out Juan, at the back of the group, slower, stiffer, like dead tissue.

The hotel is called Casa Blanca; it’s pretty seedy, very eighties. The front of the building is white. The sign with the name is red, a few incomprehensible metal cursive letters on the roof of the lobby. It looks like we’re on the set of a B movie.

Finally this week comes and Elis invites me to the jazz club on Sunday. We’re on our way to Walgreens, to buy pills and a pair of razors. I don’t know whether or not to say yes.

“You’ll have fun,” Elis says. “Unless you prefer to keep hiding out at night.”

“I’ll think about it,” I say. “I’ve got until Sunday.”

In the end, I accept. Juan is ecstatic. Eduardo doesn’t say anything. We take the white Toyota to Brickell. I hadn’t left the beach again since I walked back from South West, dragging myself along the asphalt.

I have my dollar in my pocket. Juan has a small map in his wallet. Elis is wearing her Swatch, her bag of weed below the seat and her Starbucks coffee cup on the side. I’ve shaved my body, but not my face.

Eduardo is wearing a white T-shirt with black letters that say This is Miami and on his right arm he has one of those dark tattoos that you can’t see well from far away. But I’m right next to him in the backseat. It’s a vacant lot, that’s sinking into the horizon, as if the tattoo were traveling inward, past his skin, as if it were settling into his muscles and, in the middle, the skeleton of an iron ship, a crooked frame, had been mounted in the bones themselves.

Above, the storm clouds seem to travel at the speed of a cruise ship.

“What is it?” I say.

Eduardo looks at me sympathetically.

“It’s today.”

I tilt my head back. Juan is in front, next to Elis, and I can see part of his face in the rearview mirror. His laser-like stare bounces back and locks directly on me.

“It is, man, we’re in that tattoo.”

“It changes on him,” Elis says. “Some days it’s got something else and some days it doesn’t have anything.”

At the jazz club, I order a beer. Some people are still showing up. We sit around a large table. Before I realize it, there are already more than ten of us in the group. I have to think about how I’m going to act. I go outside to a patio behind us. The musicians are smoking before going onstage and they offer me a bong. I smoke awhile with them.

“You come here a lot?” the leader asks me, a tall man, mulato, with a black shirt with pink flowers and square glasses with plastic frames.

He has a clear, pleasant voice.

“First time,” I say.

“It’s our first time performing, too,” he responds eagerly.

“We’re hoping we do well so we can stay here,” says a fat guy who’s with him.

There’s also a woman with them, and two other younger guys. She’s grabbed the bong. They are really nervous. They have to take advantage of this opportunity. If something goes badly, tomorrow they could be back to washing cars or working without a permit in the kitchens of Peruvian restaurants.

I walk away; I don’t want to be a part of their misfortune or their success. The woman tells me to at least say thanks for the weed. I think she’s on the verge of panicking.

At the table, Eduardo is explaining the documentary that he’s been filming with Juan for a few months, about the South American barra bravas, those soccer hooligans that come to blows and get into shouting matches when teams like Boca Juniors or River Plate or Peñarol or Medellín National play.

“Why would they film a thing like that?” I ask.

“Juan was a barra brava,” Elis says.

“For which team?”

“An old team, man. You don’t know it.”

“A really old one,” Eduardo says.

“Me and him rooted for the same team, man,” Juan tells me.

“An old frayed jersey.”

“We’ve all got our demons, man.”

“But you’ve gotta let them go,” Eduardo says.

“Let yours go, man. You haven’t let them all go; we know they’re still there.”

A girl walks over from the bathroom and sits next to Elis. She says hi to me.

“Gloria,” Eduardo says, “explain it to Juan, since you get it.”

Gloria smiles. She’s not tall, has shoulder-length hair, big black eyes. She’s wearing shorts up to her waist, a tucked-in blouse and pair of tennis shoes anchored to the floor.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Juan says.

“What things?” Gloria says.

The jazz musicians bust into a song. The rest of our group, about five or six people that I don’t know, are still doing their own thing.

“Tell him he can’t be digging into the plate of fries when we’re interviewing someone.”

“Don’t be a fucking pig,” Juan yells.

“I know he gets hungry, but he’s gotta wait. I’ve told him that.”

“I’ve never done that, you son of a bitch.”

“And that he can’t always be on camera. He shows up in all the shots,” Eduardo continues, calm. He takes a drink from his glass of beer.

“This is why you’ve got an ankle monitor.”

“And that he can’t be hugging all the barra bravas he meets.”

Gloria reaches out a hand and strokes Juan. Then she brings that same hand to her head. She doesn’t shave. I see the black moss of her armpits. It comes out of her sleeves.

I don’t want to look. She goes to the bathroom, takes a few minutes, returns. She looks like a woman who survived a sudden bombing, the one who appears among the ruins before the movie credits run.

“And who are you?” she asks me.

“This is my friend, from the earthquake,” Elis says.

“Ah, I’ve heard a lot about you,” Gloria says to me.

“I’ve heard a lot about you too,” I say.

Reality unloads on me for a moment, until the intensity and pain of it all wears out and goes away again.

We all start moving to the beat of the jazz, even Juan.

“The music’s good,” Gloria says.

“They’re my friends,” I say, pointing at the band.

Her armpits flashing. They vanish and reappear amid the club’s ambiance. Then she stands still. I just want her to keep raising her arms and to swing her hips. The singer, the man in the black shirt with pink and green flowers, points at me in the crowd. We’ll keep drinking for a while. Juan, Elis, and Eduardo embrace.

Our bodies move around the place, but Gloria’s body moves the most. She doesn’t seem to stand still under anyone’s stare; she slips from one place to the next, nobody can pin her down.

If she were a prisoner, or a target, and they had paid you to take her out, you would’ve misfired or you would’ve gone to her and told her to flee; that they wanted to kill her, that they’d hired you to do it but you decided to spare her. That she run, disappear and never return.

A series of movements follow. It seems like nothing to me. It all happens so fast. They throng together, someone yells. I start to get nervous. What could it be? I grind my teeth; the calcium begins to coat my mouth like dust.

Juan grabs Gloria by the shoulder, his locked hand. I see his fingers. I don’t think that there’s anyone who could open those fingers right now, make them give way. They try to push him aside. I get Juan. He moves her around forcefully. Careful, they tell him. They act like Juan is a wild animal and Gloria has fallen into his pit. Stay still, they tell her.

Juan doesn’t even listen to Eduardo. He lets out some sound but the music carries his words away and drowns them. I want to dive into the depths of the music to pull out whatever it is that Juan is saying; I can sense him starting to suffocate under the melody.

The jazz is leaving him with oxygen. Until someone’s fist comes down on his chin and Juan begins to collapse and, in the fall, drags Gloria down with him. I don’t exactly know if we’re going to keep going or if everything is going to stay that way, frozen. They carry Juan to a bench on the patio, they bring him around.

Elis dampens his neck and sprinkles water on his face. The color slowly returns to his cheeks. Eduardo strokes him. He says he’s sorry, gestures for us to follow him.

“I want something,” I say to Gloria.

She doesn’t seem to hear me. Her mouth is fierce and vivid amidst her refined features. She grabs my arm and leads me to the bathroom. Her extremely pale fingers. She cuts two lines on the toilet bowl cover. Outside we can hear steps, voices.

She’s tilted her head back. She looks at me with an expression on her mouth that seems like a boast. The cocaine is running out, her nostril swallows the line like a black hole.

“Thanks for what you did,” she says.

She thinks it was me who punched Juan. That’s what I’m afraid of. But it wasn’t me; she’s wrong.

“You don’t shave,” I say.

“You’ve noticed.”

“I like it.”

I feel my soul creak and crack apart. I can smell her; she has a natural scent.

“Ancient women didn’t shave,” she says.

Ancient? How ancient? A thousand years ago ancient? Two centuries ago ancient?

She has marks on her forearm. We’ll probably stay here for the rest of our lives, I think. It’s a one in a million possibility, but it could happen. Without moving forward or backward.

“Are you ancient?” I ask.

She snorts. She takes her time responding.

“In a way, yes. I am.”

The voices, the music, Miami just outside the door. A trace of cocaine on her nose, white blood.

“We’re going to get through this,” she tells me.

I don’t know what she’s talking about. But I act like I do. There comes a time when there’s nothing else to do but act as though something more is happening than what really is. She’s gonna leave, I think.

“Doesn’t it scare you?”

“What?”

“Not shaving.”

“No, not anymore.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s a risk, but it’s worth it. You forget all about it and you let it grow.”

I roll down the wall, I sit down, I close my eyes. Her thighs and her cool skin. Both of us in a corner, together, misshapen.

“Do you have a car?” I ask.

“Yeah, I do. A silver Audi.” she says.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

“I can give you a ride if you want.”

We’re gonna be pretty late.

“Take me home,” I ask later.

“I’ll take you home.”

“You’re gonna take me home?”

“Te llevaré a casa”, dice generosamente.

Los demás ya se han ido. Mi amiga Elis, mis amigos Eduardo y Juan. Me enfermaría si tuviera que caminar por la ciudad ahora, dar un paso.

Quiero decirle que la amo, pero no puedes decirle eso a una mujer que acabas de conocer, porque después de todo, ni siquiera es verdad. Se sentía como si estuviéramos dibujados en una hoja de papel cuya esquina había sido incendiada.

Traducido por Raquel Echeto