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Carrington, I, Eunice Odio, I, Lilian Serpas (ah, poor Lilian Serpas, I still have to tell you about her). And my friends, of course, would eventually get tired of me and ask me to leave. And I would leave. I would crack a joke and leave. I would try to make light of it and leave. I would hang my head and leave. I would give them a kiss on the cheek and say thanks and leave. Some spiteful people say that I wouldn't go. They're lying. I would leave as soon as I was asked. Maybe, on one occasion, I shut myself in the bathroom and shed a few tears. Some gossipmongers say that I had a weakness for bathrooms. They couldn't be further from the truth. Bathrooms were a nightmare for me, although since September 1968, I had grown accustomed to nightmares. You can get used to anything. I like bathrooms. I like my friends' bathrooms. I like to take a shower and face the day with a clean body, who doesn't? I also like to shower before going to bed. Arturito's mother used to say to me: Use the clean towel I've put out for you, Auxilio, but I never used towels. I preferred to get dressed while my skin was still wet and let my body warmth evaporate the droplets of water. People used to find that funny. I found it funny too. Although I could also have gone crazy.
    Five
    B ut one thing stopped me from going crazy: I never lost my sense of humor. I could laugh at my skirts, my stovepipe trousers, my stripy tights, my white socks, my page-boy hair going whiter by the day, my eyes scanning the nights of Mexico City, my pink ears attuned to all the university gossip: the rises and falls, who got put down, who got passed over, who was sucking up to whom, the stars of the day, the inflated reputations, rickety beds that were taken apart and reassembled under the convulsive sky of Mexico City, that sky I knew so well, that restless, unattainable sky, like an Aztec cooking pot, under which I came and went, happy just to be alive, with all the poets of Mexico City and Arturito Belano, who was seventeen years old, then eighteen, I could practically see him growing. They were all growing up under my watchful eye, not that it afforded them much protection. They were all growing up exposed to the storms of Mexico and the storms of Latin America, which are worse, if anything, because they are more divided and more desperate. And shimmering like moonlight in those storms, my gaze came to rest on the statues, the stunned figures, the groups of shadows, the silhouettes whose sole possession was a utopia of words, and fairly miserable words at that. Am I being unfair? No, it has to be admitted, their words were fairly miserable.
    And I was there with them because I had nothing either, except my memories.
    I could remember. I was still shut up in that women's bathroom in the faculty, lodged in the month of September 1968, and that was why I could be a dispassionate observer, although sometimes, thankfully, I did take part in the games of passion and love. Not all of my relationships were platonic. I slept with the poets. Not often, but from time to time I slept with one or the other. Despite appearances to the contrary, I was a woman and not a saint. And I did sleep with a number of them.
    Usually it was a one-night stand: some drunken youth I led off to a bed or an armchair in an unoccupied room, while barbaric music I would rather not recall went on booming next door. When, occasionally, against the odds, it lasted longer than a night or a weekend, I would end up being more a psychotherapist than a lover. But I'm not complaining. Once my teeth went I was timid about kissing and being kissed, and how long can love last without kisses? Even so, I was hungry for sex. A hunger, that's the only word for it. You can't make love without that hunger. You need an opportunity too. But the hunger is the main thing.
    Which reminds me of a story from those years that may be worth telling. I met a girl at the Faculty. It was during my theater phase. She was a charming girl.