But what did a poem have to do with all that? It occurred to me that I'd had too much to drink and hadn't eaten in hours, and I wondered whether the alcohol and hunger must be starting to disconnect me from reality. But then I decided it didn't matter. If I'm remembering right (though I wouldn't stake my life on it), it so happens that one of the visceral realists' basic poetry-writing tenets is a momentary disconnection from a certain kind of reality. Anyway, the bar had emptied out, so the other two waitresses drifted over to my table and then I was surrounded, in what seemed (and actually was) an innocent position but which to some uninformed spectator-a policeman, for example-might not have looked that way: a student sitting with three women standing around him, one of them brushing his left arm and shoulder with her right hip, the other two with their thighs pressed against the edge of the table (an edge that would surely leave a mark on those thighs), carrying on an innocent literary conversation, but a conversation that might look like something else entirely if you saw it from the doorway. Like a pimp in conference with his charges. Like a sex-crazed student refusing to be seduced.

I decided to get out while I still could, and doing my best to stand up, I paid, sent my regards to Brígida, and left. When I stepped outside the sun was blinding.

NOVEMBER 6

Cut class again today. I got up early and caught the UNAM bus, but I got off at an earlier stop and spent the rest of the morning wandering around downtown. First I went into the Librería del Sótano and bought a book by Pierre Louys, then I crossed Júarez, bought a ham sandwich, and went to read and eat on a bench in the Alameda. Reading Louys's story, plus looking at the illustrations, gave me a colossal hard-on.