longing for love. There are those who are devotion’s beggars: The woman he loved took everything and left him alone. There are boleros bursting with passion: They want to drink the honey in the woman’s mouth and, in passing, be enthralled by her skin. There are dominating boleros that impose the heat of their passion. Elvira Morales sang all these feelings but kept them in her bosom, which was why she communicated them with so much power. She avoided looking at the people who, night after night, listened to her sing in Aladdin’s Cave. She made one fortunate exception. Something magical, mysterious, must have guided her eyes as she sang “Two Souls” and stopped them at the man who looked back at her with eyes different from all the others. Accustomed to denying the correspondence between the words of the boleros and the presence of the men who listened to her, she felt this time that the song and the person magically coincided. “Two souls that God had joined in the world, two souls that loved, that’s what you and I were.” A tender man: That’s what the eyes of the spectator said as he was isolated in the nocturnal darkness of the cabaret by a spot just like the light that emphasized Elvira Morales’s moon face and bare round shoulders, and paused at the low neckline of the red sequined dress, leaving everything else in the penumbra of mystery. Why were just two faces illuminated that night, Elvira’s and the unknown man’s? Who but God, or an archangel on a divine mission, was operating the spotlights that night? The fact is that Elvira, for the first time since she left home and began to sing, felt that a man deserved her voice, understood her lyrics, incarnated her music. This lasted only an instant. When the song was over and the lights went on, Elvira Morales looked in vain for the man she had glimpsed as she sang. Could it have been an illusion, a strange projection of the bolero into reality? No. The place was there, but the seat was empty, and when the table was occupied by a couple who had just come in, she knew that the man who had captured her attention had been there before, and even if he had left, she would still be there, and he would know where to find her. If he really wanted to see her again.
THE DAUGHTER. From the moment she decided to seclude herself on the third floor of her father’s house, Alma Pagán had also decided on her new—and permanent—lifestyle. She felt revulsion when she remembered being as cold as a statue at conferences and charity benefits, or when she remembered being pawed, pinched, insulted on the Mexico City–Mexicali or Mexico City–Mérida flights. She didn’t blame anyone but herself. Her body was the offender. Good-looking, desirable, corruptible. She alone was responsible for inciting macho lust. She punished herself. She abandoned her flight uniform and adopted the style appropriate to internal exile. Keds, jeans, flip-flops, and sometimes sweatshirts from Indiana University Kokomo. A perpetual baseball cap from the ancient Jaibos of Tampico. Appearance wasn’t the important thing, though it was enough just to see her not to desire her. The important thing was that by isolating herself from a hostile, unpleasant world, Alma could enter completely into a world of action and excitement, of vicarious emotion, of endless accident, and all of it without physical consequences for her. The world of the reality show. She bought a subscription to receive periodically the best programs about these real-life situations in which young, vigorous men and women participate in daring adventures, constant competitions, select prizes. . . . Right now, in the middle of the story, Alma follows with almost strabismic attention the beginning of the adventure of a group of four couples who must compete for the first three places in a journey filled with obstacles. The odyssey begins in Ciudad Juárez and ends in Tapachula. That is to say, it starts at the border with the U.S.A. and ends at the border with Guatemala. The contestants have to compete, overcoming deterrents to reach the objective in first, second,