She had finished her philosophy degree. She was very cultured and elegant. I was sleeping in a seat at the faculty theater (a precarious institution to say the least) and dreaming of my childhood or of aliens. She sat down beside me. The theater, of course, was empty: on the stage a pitiful troupe was rehearsing a play by Garcia Lorca. At some point I woke up, and she said to me: You're Auxilio Lacouture, aren't you, in such a friendly way that I liked her immediately. She had a slightly hoarse voice, and black, not very long hair, combed back. Then she said something funny or maybe I did, and we started laughing, quietly, so the director wouldn't hear us; he'd been a friend of mine in '68, but had since become a bad director and he knew it, which made him indiscriminately bitter. We left together and went out into the streets of Mexico City.
Her name was Elena and she bought me a coffee. She said she had a lot of things to tell me. She said she had been wanting to meet me for a long time. As we were leaving the faculty I realized she had a limp. Elena the philosopher. She had a Volkswagen and she took me to a café on Insurgentes Sur. I had never been there before. It was a lovely place, very expensive, but Elena had money and she really wanted to talk to me, although in the end I did all the talking. She listened and laughed and seemed happy, but she didn't say much. When we went our separate ways, I thought: What did she have to tell me, what did she want to talk about?
From then on we used to meet fairly regularly, in the theater or the corridors of the faculty, usually in the evening, as night was falling over the university, a time when some people don't know where to go or what to do with themselves. I would meet Elena and she would invite me for a drink or a meal in a restaurant on Insurgentes Sur. Once she invited me to her house in Coyoacán, a gorgeous house, tiny but gorgeous, very feminine and very intellectual, full of books about philosophy and theater, because Elena thought that philosophy and theater were closely related. She told me about that once, although I hardly understood a word she said. For me, theater is closer to poetry, but for her it's linked to philosophy—each to her own. And then all of a sudden she wasn't around. I don't know how much time went by. Months, maybe. Naturally I asked the faculty secretaries what had happened to Elena. Was she sick or traveling? Did they have any news of her? But no one could give me a convincing answer. One afternoon I decided to go to her house, but I got lost. I never get lost! Or at least not since September 1968. Before that, I did occasionally, not very often, lose my way in the labyrinth of Mexico City. But not after 1968. So there I was, searching for Elena's house, in vain, and I said to myself, There's something funny going on here, Auxilio, my girl, open your eyes and keep them peeled, or you might overlook the key to this story.
So I did. I opened my eyes and wandered around Coyoacán until eleven thirty at night, feeling more and more lost, more and more blind, as if poor Elena were dead or had never existed.
Some time went by. I quit being the theater's official hanger-on. I went back to the poets and my life took a new turn, there's not much point explaining why. All I know for sure is that I gave up helping my director friend from '68, not because I thought his directing was bad, although it was, but because I was bored, I needed a change of air, a change of scene, my spirit was hungry for a different kind of restlessness.
And one day, when I was least expecting it, I ran into Elena again. In the faculty cafeteria. There I was, conducting an impromptu survey of beauty in the student body, when suddenly I saw her, at a table off in a corner, and she seemed the same as ever at first, but as I approached, taking my time, I don't know why, stopping at each table on the way for a brief and rather awkward chat, I noticed that something had changed