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. [...]