I asked her to read me a poem.

"Don't be a drag, García Madero," she said.

I don't know why, but her saying that made me sad. I think I had a physical need to hear one of her poems from her own lips. But maybe it wasn't the place; Café Quito was loud with talk, shouts, shrieks of laughter. I gave her back the Lautréamont.

"You read it already?" said María.

"Of course," I said. "I stayed up all night reading. I read Lee Harvey Oswald too. What a great magazine, it's such a shame they had to fold. I loved your things."

"So you haven't been to bed yet?"

"Not yet, but I feel good. I'm wide awake."

María Font looked me in the eyes and smiled. A waitress came over and asked what she wanted to drink. Nothing, said María, we were just leaving. Outside, I asked whether she had somewhere to go, and she said no, she just wasn't in the mood for Café Quito. We went walking along Bucareli toward Reforma, then crossed Reforma and headed up Avenida Guerrero.

"This is where the whores are," said María.

"I didn't realize," I said.

"Give me your arm so nobody gets the wrong idea."

The truth is, at first I didn't see anything to suggest that the street was any different from those we had just been on. The traffic was heavy here too, and the people crowding the sidewalks were no different from the people streaming along Bucareli. But then (maybe because of what María had said) I started to notice some differences. To start with, the lighting. The streetlights on Bucareli are white, but on Avenida Guerrero they had more of an amber tone. The cars: on Bucareli it's unusual to find a car parked on the street; on Guerrero there were plenty. On Bucareli, the bars and coffee shops are open and bright; on Guerrero, although there were lots of bars, they seemed turned in on themselves, secret or discreet, with no big windows looking out. And finally, the music. On Bucareli there wasn't any. All the noise came from people or cars. On Guerrero, the farther in you got, especially on the corners of Violeta and Magnolia, the music took over the street, coming from bars, parked cars, and portable radios, and drifting from the lighted windows of dark buildings.