So suddenly there we were, the three of us, sunk in timid or sullen silence, and María Font wouldn't even look at Pancho and me, although sometimes I looked at her or the watercolor (or to be more precise, stole glances at her and the watercolor), and Pancho Rodríguez, who seemed completely unaffected by María's hostility or her father's, was looking at the books, whistling a song that as far as I could tell had nothing to do with what Billie Holiday was singing, until at last Angélica appeared, and then I understood Pancho (he was one of the men who wanted to deflower Angélica!), and I almost understood Mr. Font, although to be honest, virginity doesn't mean much to me. (I'm a virgin myself, after all, unless Brígida's fellatio interrupta is considered a deflowering. But is that making love with a woman? Wouldn't I have had to simultaneously lick her pussy to say that we'd actually made love? To stop being a virgin, does it only count if a man sticks his dick into a woman's vagina, not her mouth, her ass, or her armpit? To say that I've really made love, do I have to have ejaculated? It's all so complicated.)

But as I was saying, Angélica appeared, and to judge by the way she greeted Pancho, it was clear (to me at least) that he had some romantic possibilities with the prize-winning poet. As soon as he introduced me, I was ignored again.

The two of them set up a screen that divided the room in two, and then they sat on the bed and I could hear them whispering to each other.

I went over to María and said a few things about how good her watercolor was. She didn't even look up. I tried another tactic: I talked about visceral realism and Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. I also analyzed (intrepidly: the whispers on the other side of the screen were making me more and more nervous) the watercolor before me as a visceral realist work. María Font looked at me for the first time and smiled: