The only movie theaters that were worth anything, said Charly Cruz, were the old ones, remember them? those huge theaters where your heart leaped when they turned out the lights. Those places were great, they were real movie theaters, more like churches than anything else, high ceilings, red curtains, pillars, aisles with worn carpeting, box seats, orchestra seats, balcony seats, theaters built at a time when going to the movies was still a religious experience, routine but religious, theaters that were gradually demolished to build banks or supermarkets or multiplexes. Today, said Charly Cruz, there are only a few left, today all movie theaters are multiplexes, with small screens, less space, comfortable seats. Seven of these smaller multiplex theaters would fit into one of the old theaters, the real ones. Or ten. Or even fifteen. And there's no sense of the abyss anymore, there's no vertigo before the movie begins, no one feels alone inside a multiplex. Then, Fate remembered, he began to talk about the end of the sacred.

What's sacred to me? thought Fate. The vague pain I feel at the passing of my mother? An understanding of what can't be fixed? Or the kind of pang in the stomach I feel when I look at this woman? And why do I feel a pang, if that's what it is, when she looks at me and not when her friend looks at me? Because her friend is nowhere near as beautiful, thought Fate. Which seems to suggest that what's sacred to me is beauty, a pretty girl with perfect features. And what if all of a sudden the most beautiful actress in Hollywood appeared in the middle of this big, repulsive restaurant, would I still feel a pang each time my eyes surreptitiously met this girl's or would the sudden appearance of a superior beauty, a beauty enhanced by recognition, relieve the pang, diminish her beauty to ordinary levels, the beauty of a slightly odd girl out to have a good time on a weekend night with three slightly peculiar men and a woman who basically seems like a hooker? And who am I to think that Rosita Mendez seems like a hooker? thought Fate. Do I really know enough about Mexican hookers to be able to recognize them at a glance? Do I know anything about innocence or pain? Do I know anything about women? I like to watch videos, thought Fate. I also like to go to the movies. I like to sleep with women. Right now I don't have a steady girlfriend, but I know what it's like to have one. Do I see the sacred anywhere? All I register is practical experiences, thought Fate. An emptiness to be filled, a hunger to be satisfied, people to talk to so I can finish my article and get paid. And why do I think the men Rosa Amalfitano is out with are peculiar'? What's peculiar about them? And why am I so sure that if a Hollywood actress appeared all of a sudden Rosa Amalfitano's beauty would fade? What if it didn't? What if it sped up? And what if everything began to accelerate from the instant a Hollywood actress crossed the threshold of El Rey del Taco?

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 never 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.

[...] as he was talking the whore yawned, not because she wasn't interested in what he was saying but because she was tired, which irritated Sergio and made him say, in exasperation, that in Santa Teresa they were killing whores, so why not show a little professional solidarity, to which the whore replied that he was wrong, in the story as he had told it the women dying were factory workers, not whores. Workers, workers, she said. And then Sergio apologized, and, as if a lightbulb had gone on over his head, he glimpsed an aspect of the situation that until now he'd overlooked.

[...] I started watching TV again, where some guy was saying that he stood in possession, those were his words, stood in possession, like somebody talking about medieval history or politics, of the record for most expulsions from the United States. Do you know how many times he had entered the United States illegally? Three hundred and forty-five! And three hundred and forty-five times he had been arrested and deported to Mexico. All within a span of four years. I admit that suddenly my interest was piqued. I imagined him on my show. I imagined the questions I would ask. I began to think about how to get in touch with him, because there's no denying it was a very interesting story. The guy from Tijuana TV asked a key question: where did he get the money to pay the coyotes to take him to the other side? Because considering the frantic rate at which he was expelled it was clear there was no way he had time to work and save up money in the United States. His answer was breathtaking. He said at first he paid what they asked, but later, maybe after the tenth deportation, he bargained and asked for discounts, and after the fiftieth deportation the pollens and coyotes brought him along out of friendship, and after the hundredth they probably felt sorry for him, he thought. Now, he said to the Tijuana talk show host, they brought him as a good-luck charm, because his presence in some way relieved the stress for everyone else: if anyone was caught that someone would be him, not the others, at least if they knew to steer clear of him once they had crossed the border. Put it this way: he had become the marked card, the marked bill, as he said himself. Then the host, who was bad, asked him one stupid question and one good question. The stupid question was whether he planned to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. The man didn't even know what the fuck he was talking about, he'd never heard of the Guinness Book of World Records. The good question was whether he was going to keep trying. Trying what? asked the man. Trying to get across, said the host. God willing, the man said, so long as he was in good health he would never give up on the idea of living in the United States. Aren't you tired? asked the host. Don't you want to go back to your village or look for a job here in Tijuana? The guy smiled like he was embarrassed and said that once he had an idea in his head he couldn't get rid of it. [...]

[...] No, I don't feel offended or supplanted because I wasn't given the job. The Sonora authorities know me very well and they know I'm a man whose only god is Truth, said Professor Garcia Correa. In Mexico it takes frighteningly little to dazzle us. It makes me cringe when I see or hear or read certain adjectives in the press, certain praise that seems to have been spouted by a tribe of deranged monkeys, but there's nothing to be done, that's Mexico for you, and in time a person gets used to it, said Professor Garcia Correa. Being a criminologist in this country is like being a cryptographer at the North Pole. It's like being a child in a cell block of pedophiles. It's like being a beggar in the country of the deaf. It's like being a condom in the realm of the Amazons, said Professor Garcia Correa. If you're mistreated, you get used to it. If you're snubbed, you get used to it. If your life savings vanish, the money you were putting aside for retirement, you get used to it. If your son swindles you, you get used to it. If you have to keep working when by law you should be doing whatever you please, you get used to it. If on top of that your salary is cut, you get used to it. If you have to work for crooked lawyers and corrupt detectives to supplement your pay, you get used to it. But you'd better not put any of this in your articles, boys, because if you do, my job will be on the line, said Professor Garcia Correa. Mr. Albert Kessler, as I was saying, is a highly qualified investigator. [...]

At nineteen I began to take lovers. My sex life is legendary all over Mexico, but legends are always false, especially in this country. The first time I slept with a man it was out of curiosity. That's right. Not love or admiration or fear, the way it is for most women. I could have slept with him out of pity, because ultimately I pitied the kid I fucked that first time, but the honest truth is it was curiosity. After two months I left him and went off with someone else, an asshole who thought he was a revolutionary. Mexico has an abundance of these assholes. Hopelessly stupid, arrogant men, who lose their wits when they come across an Esquivel Plata, want to fuck her right away, as if the act of possessing a woman like me were the equivalent of storming the Winter Palace. The Winter Palace! They, who couldn't even cut the grass of the Summer Dacha! Well, I got rid of that one soon enough, too, and now he's a fairly well-known reporter who, every time he gets drunk, likes to talk about how he was my first love. My next lovers were chosen because they were good in bed or because I was bored and they were witty or entertaining or strange, so extravagantly strange that only I found them amusing. For a while, as I'm sure you know, I was someone with a certain stake in the university Leftist movement. I even visited Cuba. Then I got married, had my son. My husband, who was also on the Left, joined the PRI. I began to work in journalism. On Sundays I would go home, I mean to my old house, where my family was slowly rotting away, and I would wander the hallways, the garden, look at photo albums, read the diaries of unknown forebears, which were more like missals than diaries, sit quietly for hours next to the stone well in the courtyard, deep in an expectant silence, smoking one cigarette after another, not reading, not thinking, sometimes even unable to remember anything. The truth is I was bored. I wanted to do things, but I didn't know exactly what. Months later I got divorced. My marriage didn't last two years. [...]

[...] Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhechnikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.

In 1910 Ivanov was what is called a promising writer, of whom great things were expected, but Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov had been exhausted as templates, and Ivanov's artistic production came to a dead halt or, depending on one's perspective, a point of collapse, from which he couldn't extricate himself even with the new blend he tried in desperation: a combination of the Hoffmanian Odoevsky and the Walter Scott disciple Lazhechnikov with the rising star Gorky. His stories, he had to acknowledge, were no longer of interest to anyone, and this took its toll on his finances, and above all his self-regard. [...]

What was Ivanov afraid of? Ansky wondered in his notebooks. Not of harm to his person, since as a longtime Bolshevik he'd had many brushes with arrest, prison, and deportation, and although he couldn't be called a brave man, neither could it fairly be said that he was cowardly or spineless. Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers. Irrational fears, thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with semblances. As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming.