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"Full of what?" asked Rosa Amalfitano, "full of
semen?" "No,
mana,
don't be disgusting, full of something
else, it's like you're fucking a mountain but you're fucking
inside
a
cave, know what I mean?" "In a cave?" asked Rosa Amalfitano.
"That's right," said Rosa Mendez.

"In other words it's like being fucked by a mountain in a
cave inside the mountain itself," said Rosa Amalfitano.
"Exactly," said Rosa Mendez. And then she said:

"I love how you
say foliar
for fuck; people
from
Spain
talk so pretty." "You're weird, you know," said Rosa Amalfitano.
"I always have been, ever since I was little," said Rosa Mendez. And
she added:

"Want me to tell you something else?" "What?"
asked Rosa Amalfitano.

"I've fucked
narcos.
I swear. Do you want to know what
it feels like? Well, it feels like being fucked by the air. That's exactly how
it feels."

"So fucking a policeman is like being fucked by a
mountain and fucking a
narco
is like being fucked by the air."

"Yes," said Rosa Mendez, "but not the air we
breathe or the air we feel when we go outside, but the desert air, a blast of
air, air that doesn't taste the same as the air here and doesn't smell like
nature or the country, air that smells the way it smells, that has its own
smell, a smell you can't explain, it's just air, pure air, so much air that
sometimes it's hard to breathe and you feel like you're going to
suffocate."

"So," concluded Rosa Amalfitano, "if a policeman
fucks you it's like being fucked by a mountain inside the mountain itself, and
if a
narco
fucks you it's like being fucked by the desert air."

"That's
right,
mana,
if a
narco
fucks you it's always out in the
open."

Around
that time, Rosa Amalfitano started to officially date Chucho Flores. He was the
first Mexican she slept with. At the university there had been two or three
boys who tried to flirt with her, but nothing happened. She did go to bed with
Chucho Flores, though. The courtship period wasn't long, but it lasted longer
than
Rosa
expected. When he came back from
Hermosillo
, Chucho Flores
brought her a pearl necklace. Alone, in front of the mirror,
Rosa
tried it on, and although the necklace had a certain appeal (and had probably
cost a lot), she couldn't imagine ever wearing it.
Rosa
had a long, beautiful neck, but that necklace required a different kind of
wardrobe. Other gifts followed: sometimes, as they walked along the streets
where the fashionable stores were, Chucho Flores would stop in front of a
window and point out something she should try on, telling her that if she liked
it he'd buy it for her. Usually
Rosa
would try
on the thing he'd suggested and then she'd try on other things and in the end
she'd end up with something to her taste. Chucho Flores also gave her art
books, since he'd once heard her talk about painting, and about painters whose
works she'd seen in famous European museums. Other times he gave her CDs,
mostly of classical music, although sometimes, like a tour guide with an eye
for local color, he mixed in music from the north of Mexico or Mexican folk
music, which later, alone at home, Rosa listened to distractedly as she washed
the dishes or loaded the dirty clothes in the washing machine.

At
night they would go out to eat at nice restaurants, where they invariably ran
into men and, less often, women, who knew Chucho Flores, and to whom Chucho
Flores introduced her as his friend, Miss Rosa Amalfitano, daughter of the
philosophy professor Oscar Amalfitano, my friend Rosa, Miss Amalfitano,
immediately prompting a paean to her beauty and elegance, and then commentary
on Spain and Barcelona, a city they had all visited as tourists, every one of
them, the distinguished citizens of Santa Teresa, and for which they had
nothing but words of praise and admiration. One night, instead of driving her
home, Chucho Flores asked her if she wanted to go for a ride with him.
Rosa
expected he would take her to his apartment, but
they headed west out of Santa Teresa, and after driving for half an hour along
a lonely highway they came to a motel where Chucho Flores got a room. The motel
was in the middle of the desert, just before a slight rise, and alongside the
highway there was only gray brush, sometimes with its wind-scoured roots
exposed. The room was big and in the bathroom there was a Jacuzzi like a small
pool. The bed was round and the mirrors on the walls and part of the ceiling
made it seem bigger. The carpet on the floor was thick, almost like a cushion.
Instead of a minibar there was a small real bar stocked with all kinds of
liquor and soft drinks. When Rosa asked him why he'd brought her to a place
like this, the kind of place rich men brought their whores, Chucho Flores
thought for a while and then he said it was for the mirrors. He sounded
apologetic. Then he undressed her and they fucked on the bed and on the carpet.

At first, Chucho Flores was more gentle than anything else, more
concerned about his partner's satisfaction than his own. Finally
Rosa
came and then Chucho Flores stopped fucking and took
a little metal box out of his jacket.
Rosa
thought it would be cocaine, but instead of white powder the box held tiny
yellow pills. Chucho Flores took out two pills and swallowed them with a little
bit of whiskey. For a while they talked, lying in bed, until he got on top of
her again. This time he wasn't gentle at all. Surprised,
Rosa
didn't protest or say anything. It seemed as if Chucho Flores would put her in
every possible position, and some of them—this
Rosa
realized later—she liked. When the sun came up they stopped fucking and left
the motel.

There were other cars in the courtyard parking lot, shielded from
the highway by a redbrick wall. The air was cool and dry and had a faintly
musky smell. The motel and everything around it seemed sealed in a pocket of
silence. As they walked through the parking lot to the car they heard a rooster
crow. The noise of the car doors opening, the engine starting, and the tires
crunching the gravel seemed to
Rosa
like the
sound of a drum. No trucks went by on the highway.

After
that, things with Chucho Flores got stranger and stranger. There were days when
it seemed he couldn't live without her, and other days when he treated her like
his slave. Some nights they slept at his apartment and when she woke up in the
morning he'd be gone, because there were times he got up very early to do a
live radio show called
Good Morning, Sonora,
or
Good Morning,
Friends,
she wasn't sure because she
n
ever heard it from the beginning, a show for truck drivers
crossing the border in either direction and bus drivers carrying workers to the
factories and anyone who had to get up early in Santa Teresa. When
Rosa
got up she made herself breakfast, usually a glass
of orange juice and a piece of toast or a cookie, and then she washed the
plate, the glass, the juicer, and left. Other times she stayed for a while,
looking out the windows at the sprawl of the city under the cobalt-blue sky, and
then she made the bed and wandered around the apartment, with nothing to do
except think about her life and the strange Mexican she was involved with. She
wondered whether he loved her, whether what he felt for her was love, whether
she loved him herself, or whether she was just attracted to him, whether she
felt anything for him at all, and whether this was all she could expect from
being with another person.

Some
afternoons they got in his car and sped east to a mountain overlook from which
Santa Teresa was visible in the distance, the first lights of the city, the
enormous black parachute that dropped gradually over the desert. Each time they
went, after silently watching day change to night, Chucho Flores would unzip
his pants and push her head down to his crotch. Then
Rosa
would take his penis in her mouth, barely sucking it until it got hard, and
then she would begin to run her tongue over it. When Chucho Flores was about to
come, she could tell by the pressure of his hand on her head, forcing her down.
Rosa would stop moving her tongue and be still, as if having his whole penis in
her mouth had choked her, until she felt the spurt of semen in her throat, and
even then she didn't move, although she could hear her lover's moans and his
exclamations, often bizarre, because he liked to say crude things and swear as
he came, not at her but at unspecified people, ghosts who appeared for just a
moment and were as quickly lost in the night. Then, with a salty, bitter taste
still in her mouth, she would light a cigarette as Chucho Flores took a folded
cigarette paper out of his silver cigarette case, tipping the cocaine it held
onto the inner lid of the case, the outside of which was engraved with bucolic
ranching motifs, and then, in no hurry, he would cut three lines with one of
his credit cards and snort them with a business card, one that read Chucho
Flores, reporter and radio correspondent, and then the address of the radio
station.

One
of those evenings, without having been asked (since Chucho had never once
offered to share his coke with her),
Rosa
told
him to leave her the last line as she wiped a few drops of semen from her lips
with the palm of her hand. Chucho Flores asked whether she was sure, and then,
with a gesture of indifference but also of deference, he handed her the
cigarette case and a fresh business card.
Rosa
snorted all the cocaine that was left and then lay back in her seat and looked
up at the black clouds, indistinguishable from the black sky.

That night, when she got home, she went out into the yard and saw
her father talking to the book that for some time had been hanging from the
clothesline in the backyard. Then, before her father noticed she was there, she
shut herself in her room to read a novel and think about her relationship with
the Mexican.

Of course, the Mexican and her father had met. Chucho
Flores came away from this meeting with a positive feeling, although
Rosa
thought he was lying, since it didn't make sense for
a person to like anyone who looked at him the way her father had looked at
Chucho Flores. That night Amalfitano asked the Mexican three questions. The
first was what he thought of hexagons. The second was whether he knew how to
construct a hexagon. The third was what he thought about the killings of women
in Santa Teresa. Chucho Flores's reply to the first question was that he didn't
think anything. The second question he answered with an honest no. In response
to the third question, he said that it was regrettable, but the police were
catching the killers one by one.
Rosa
's father
didn't ask any more questions and sat motionless in his chair as his daughter
walked Chucho Flores to the door. When
Rosa
came back in, and before the sound of her boyfriend's car engine had faded in
the distance, Oscar Amalfitano told his daughter to be careful, he had a bad
feeling about that man, offering no further explanation.

"So what you mean is," said
Rosa
from the kitchen, laughing, "I should dump him."

"Dump him," said Oscar Amalfitano.

"Oh, Dad, you just keep getting crazier," said
Rosa
.

"It's true," said Oscar Amalfitano.

"So what are we going to do? What can we do?"

"You: leave that ignorant, lying piece of shit. Me: I don't
know, maybe when we get back to
Europe
I'll
check into the Clfnico for an electroshock treatment."

The second time Chucho Flores and Oscar Amalfitano met
face-to-face, Chucho Flores had come to drop
Rosa
off at home, along with Charly Cruz and Rosa Mendez. Actually, Oscar Amalfitano
should have been at the university teaching classes, but that afternoon he had
pleaded illness and come home much earlier than usual. It was a brief
encounter, since Rosa made sure her friends left as soon as possible, but her
father happened to be unusually sociable, and a conversation was struck up
between him and Charly Cruz, which if not pleasant at least wasn't boring, and
in fact, as the days went by, in Rosa's memory the conversation between her
father and Charly began to take on sharper outlines, as if time, in the classic
embodiment of an old man, were blowing incessantly on a flat gray stone covered
in dust, until the black grooves of the letters carved into the stone were
perfectly legible.

Everything
began, Rosa guessed—since at the time she was in the kitchen, not the living
room, pouring four glasses of mango juice— with one of the mischievous
questions her father often sprang on guests, her guests, of course, not his own
guests, or maybe it all began with some declaration of principles by innocent
Rosa Mendez, since her voice seemed to dominate the conversation in the living
room in the first few moments. Maybe Rosa Mendez was talking about how much she
loved movies and then Oscar Amalfitano asked her if she knew what apparent
movement was. Rut inevitably it was Charly Cruz, not Rosa Mendez, who answered,
saying that apparent movement was the illusion of movement caused by the
persistence of images on the retina.

"Exactly,"
said Oscar Amalfitano, "images linger on the retina for a fraction of a
second."