Trap

I met Natalia one April night in Parque México in La Condesa. It hurts to remember how in love I was with her; it was love at first sight, she obsessed me. Only a few weeks after we began seeing each other, on a cool dawn on my apartment roof, we watched the sky and she told me why she behaved so strangely and engaged in mysterious activities. I should have run away then.

It was a time of many possibilities for me. Newly graduated, I got a job as a design draughtsman at the studio of an architect who was a friend of my parents, and rented my own flat on Avenida Amsterdam, a circuit which to me summarised the city’s architectural beauty both in its Art Nouveau-detailed houses and in the urban layout following the extinct racetrack that had once lent this neighbourhood a chic, novel personality. A layout devoid of functional sense, taken only from the whim of the past, as commonly happens in Mexico City: layers upon layers upon layers from other times. In general, though it pricks my pride to admit it, I felt I was only beginning to understand what being an adult was. For the first time I felt I could take the reins of my life and make myself a promising future.

I have always fallen easily in love. My last relationship with a young woman from Veracruz at the faculty ended after only a year. Despite her betrayal, I could never resent her. We shared special moments and, even with my heart scarred, after months I longed to hear her voice again, feel her long black hair against my face, or feel her lips on my neck once more. I am not the sort who gets over one nail with another, and I thought that eventually I would meet someone else who would make me forget my last relationship. It was precisely one night, while I walked through the park absorbed in those thoughts, that I saw Natalia for the first time. As I crossed a small bridge by the goose pond, I saw, in the half-light, the figure of a woman hiding among the bushes. I walked on, trying to imagine what I had just seen. Had I disturbed two furtive lovers? Was she a homeless woman, a madwoman? I went around the pond intending to pass there again, merely to satisfy morbid curiosity. When I crossed the little bridge again, I found her standing in the darkness. She looked suspicious, like someone hiding something. Nervously, she greeted me: “Good evening.” Without stopping, I replied, “Good evening. Be careful, people get mugged here.” She caught up with me and asked whether I would accompany her to the metro station. She was evasive when I asked what she was doing in the park at that hour. I noticed her hands were full of dirt, and the idea occurred to me that perhaps she had been burying something among the bushes. When we reached a better-lit street, my thoughts turned to her beauty. Natalia was roughly my height, slim and very fair, with black hair framing green, feline eyes, red, full lips, and a few freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her features formed a face that looked tender and vulnerable, and, along with her build, made her seem slight and harmless. Nothing could have been further from the truth. On the brief walk from the park to Chilpancingo station, we talked of superficial things. We shared a taste for the area’s architecture and the city’s old buildings. When we reached the steps down to the station, I wanted to say something, ask for her number or something, but I lost my nerve. I also told myself it was not gentlemanly to harass her if I had offered to walk her home as protection. I watched her go down the steps, turned around with my fists clenched in my jumper pockets, and thought: you are an idiot. I had taken barely three steps when Natalia called to me from halfway down the stairs. “Do you want to go to a party tomorrow?” she asked. My fate was sealed.

The party was in a flat a few blocks from Jardín Sullivan. We agreed to meet at the Monumento a la Madre and walk from there. I arrived about twenty minutes before ten, our arranged time, and was surprised to see her waiting so early; I took it as genuine interest in me. We walked a few blocks without saying anything important, merely talking about the weather and crime, the city dwellers’ casual conversation when there is nothing good to tell. The party, in a small four-storey building, was more a gathering. There were at most ten people, all peculiar. It looked as though the Chopo market had exploded over them. I found her friends pleasant, felt welcome, and in less than an hour they treated me as if I belonged to the group. After a few hours, only Natalia and I remained, along with the couple living in the flat and another friend who had smoked so much weed he could not stand. We were in the kitchen talking very close together when, without warning, she planted a kiss on me. I had fallen into the trap.

On reflection, it is difficult to explain how I could have fallen so deeply and quickly in love. Perhaps it was my need to forget the previous relationship and feel desired again; perhaps it was the intense eroticism Natalia emanated at any hour of the day. The truth is that the following weeks were full of infatuation and bewilderment. Natalia seemed to come and go from my life as she pleased. Sometimes we did not part for two whole days, then she disappeared for three or four. She never gave me explanations, nor did I demand them much. Everything she did and all her behaviour were mysterious. During the first weeks, for example, she was evasive whenever I asked where she lived; she abruptly changed the subject when I said she would eventually have to give me her telephone number; sometimes, simply to silence my questions, she kissed me and began a torrent of caresses and affection that made me forget everything. I think I was afraid she would leave if I pressured her. In so little time, I had idealised her so much that any price seemed reasonable to keep her. I came to wonder whether she had another boyfriend or was even married. These thoughts sank me into frustration and powerlessness. I knew that if I asked directly she would silence me again with kisses, use her love-making to keep me dominated. It was better to keep quiet. I thought I even preferred sharing her to keeping her away from me. Perhaps that constant feeling that I could lose her at any moment was what bound me so tightly to her. Whenever I gave my friends details of the situation, they told me I was stupid, that I should confront her and define our relationship. I showed them the only photo of her I had on my phone, taken in a bar in the city centre, in which she looked aggressively beautiful and sensual, and that was generally enough for them to agree I could endure it that way a little longer.

One night we went to the roof of my flat to look at the stars. Wrapped in a blanket and leaning against the base of some water tanks, we watched the sky. We had spent the whole day together and, for the first time, I felt she was opening up to me a little. Something I have forgotten to describe is that Natalia had a dark side which emerged intermittently in our conversations or any irrelevant remark. She often used the word stupid to speak of others, expressing herself with aggression and a note of contempt that seemed baseless to me. When we discussed news or recent events, she appeared to delight in other people’s misfortunes. I did not pay much attention to this behaviour, simply told myself she was cynical. There was another part of her dark side that did unsettle me: an inhuman coldness. At times, one minute she could be affectionate and the next ignore me, cold as ice, making me feel as if she could not see me, as if I were not there, absorbed in her own thoughts or muttering unintelligible things which she said were nothing when I asked what she was saying. In spite of everything, I was in love. Exasperated, I sometimes thought there was no point being with someone who did not want to share her life and herself with me, but memories of her came to me: her rare smiles, her lying beside me with her thin, cold feet against mine. I told myself that perhaps, without knowing it, I was controlling and asking for too much intimacy too quickly. That night on the roof I felt for the first time that there could be a future. She had been in a good mood all day, we had spent the night together, we could not sleep while talking about things, and she had had the idea of going up in the middle of the night to look at the stars. I confronted her as softly and subtly as I could. I asked her to explain why she disappeared for days, why she did not give me her number or address, why she was so evasive with my questions, why she never told me about her life, where she had studied, who her parents were, and so on. The most she had let me into her life was that party by Jardín Sullivan to which she had invited me nearly two months earlier. Natalia sighed and grew thoughtful, perhaps weighing the possibility of evading me again, perhaps weighing how much she cared about seeing me. After a few seconds, she gave an explanation: “The reason I don’t want to let you into my life much is that, when you know what I am really like, what I truly want and think, you will leave me, so there is no point. I invited you to that party because I wanted to spend that night with you and thought we would not see each other after that, but I liked you and wanted to keep seeing you even though I know that, when I tell you about my beliefs, you will want to stop seeing me. This has happened to me before.” I assured her that nothing she could say would make me leave, a stupid promise. I told her it would be better to bring the secret she was so afraid to tell into the open and get it out of our relationship at once, that I liked her and truly wanted to be properly with her. She looked at me as at a child, with the tenderness with which one looks at a small boy saying things he does not understand. “I am a Satanist,” she said. She went on to explain that in the last years of her adolescence she had renounced the beliefs of her evangelical family, about whom she did not want to speak then—and never did—and began first to take an interest in meditation and then in the New Age interpretation of spirituality. In a way, she had become agnostic because she believed a higher being existed, nature, time, or God, call it what you like, she told me, but she did not feel any common religion correctly interpreted communion with that higher force. After meeting a group of Wiccans, she joined them and for a time adopted Wicca as her religion. “Well-bred girls from Las Lomas,” she told me. “You wouldn’t imagine them naked in the middle of La Marquesa forest tuning themselves to the earth, but yes, we met for rituals at full moons, equinoxes, or eclipses. I was with them for two years, but I felt increasingly dissatisfied. They seemed hypocritical to me, as if Wicca were fashion for them and they did not truly adopt that way of life. The priestess is a painter living in Coyoacán, whose parents apparently left her money, and she does nothing but paint and practise her religion. I respected her, but the rest struck me as false. She introduced me to Sebastian, a Satanist priest. He brought me into a new way of seeing and understanding our connection to the universe. I began to spend time with his group and have been with them for the last three years, almost four. He is our guide, he knows a great deal. He lived around ten years in France, where he belonged to a Satanic church, and returned to Mexico to form his own church. We are few: six or seven who always meet, and some others who sometimes join, sometimes do not.” As Natalia told me all this, I was a little frightened, not because I believed in witchcraft, Satanic rites, and such things, but because I did not know whether I could be with someone who did believe in them. I had always found religions quite naïve, and this way of believing in some fellow who had learned I knew not what in France and gathered to do I knew not what with six other people sounded very stupid. But reasoning it through, I told myself her personal beliefs should not cause problems between us. After all, I would never try to impose mine on anyone, so each person could believe what they liked. Something troubled me, however: the word Satanist made me uneasy. “I respect having a religion and personal beliefs, but why worship a being who is the villain of other religions?” I asked. “Isn’t he supposed to be a being who wants to see us suffer?” She replied that religions had always interpreted everything as it suited them; any alternative way of thinking was “of the devil,” she said. Every religion attracts adherents with false promises and illusions, fairy tales of eternal life and happiness. Satanism was different, at least as taught by the church Sebastian had attended in France. Satanism venerates our lord, a father who does not tell stories to attract his children. Satan teaches us that pain and suffering are the natural conditions of humanity, and that it is easier to live by accepting that condition than in constant disappointment at a better future that will never come. At that moment Natalia fell silent for a few seconds, then suddenly grew cold, as she sometimes did; her gaze was lost on a horizon impossible to see in the night’s gloom. She hunched over and lowered her voice, making it higher, almost a whisper. “Satan wants his children to accept pain and suffering,” she continued. “True redemption lies in knowing the reality of the human condition and accepting it. True power lies in making one’s own the ultimate destiny that awaits us all: an eternal night, infinite darkness, unavoidable silence, the destruction of all things, the negation of oneself, the non-existence to which we are all condemned. Satan does not lie to his children, does not sell illusions. He shows us the true path, takes us by the hand into that dark night.” She paused. “Do not think of Satan as a person, but as a promise.” “A promise of what?” I asked. She answered: “The truth.”

The following months radically changed my way of life. I learned to accept Natalia’s eccentric beliefs, in a way to ignore them, after all she had opened up more. Sometimes we spent the night in her little flat in Colonia Agrícola, an old three-storey house converted into individual flats which looked as if it were collapsing from decay. On Natalia’s floor, the third, there was only one room that served as sitting room, dining room, and kitchen; a small bedroom; and a bathroom that was simultaneously toilet and shower, without a basin. I had grown accustomed to her disorder, to seeing her clothes thrown everywhere, to dirty, dusty corners full of old books. At first I did not like her flat, but I had learned to accept it just as I had learned to accept Natalia’s strange ideas. Religion did not arise very often, but whenever it did it was because she told me some “very intelligent” or “very profound” thing Sebastian had said. I did not want to admit it and made a great effort to conceal it, but I was jealous. I thought that for a man in his forties, the leader of a religious sect, it could not be too difficult to manipulate a young woman in her twenties like Natalia, beautiful and submissive, prepared to obey the master’s teachings. Images came to me of them having sex. I did not even know him, but I could picture him, sweating over her, drooling on her face. I filled with rage and took it out on her, shouted at her over any stupid thing, and returned angry to my flat. These jealous thoughts began to become an obsession. Natalia had alienated me from the rest of the world, made me stop seeing my friends and family. She was now all I had, and I could think only of what she did at the group’s meetings, who she was with, what they did, whether they stripped in their stupid rituals, who saw her that way. Natalia vulnerable in my imagination, Natalia naked and bathed in blood: the images appeared unceasingly in my mind. I had to get into her circle. I had to be part of her group to watch her. I asked Natalia to invite me.

Sebastian was a tall, heavily built man. The first thing I thought on meeting him was that he could easily dominate me physically. He had long, greying hair always worn loose, a full beard, and dressed always in white linen and cotton garments, like a true hippie. He was somewhat charismatic, yet like Natalia, at times his charisma was consumed by a dark side, a coldness that made one think his essence had left the room and someone else, from a remote place, was speaking through him. He explained that one took the path of his church through levels. If I was truly interested in learning the teachings transmitted to him and those who came before him from times farther back than history documents, it was necessary to start at the first level. At first I would not be allowed to attend their sessions, but would confine myself to some tasks they assigned. I could see it in my mind: the grey hairs of his chest against Natalia’s white back, his great hands on her waist. As Sebastian spoke, obsession took over my thoughts. I felt more determined to do whatever was necessary to be inside the circle, never to have to be apart from Natalia, to be able to look after her. The tasks first assigned were simple: buying odd things at the witchcraft stalls of Mercado Sonora—Stars of David and ocote crosses to burn, incense, candles, and herbs; providing food and drink for some sessions. Then things became strange. They assigned increasingly eccentric missions that made me wonder whether they were tests. Some were relatively simple, such as getting hair from six people—which I managed at a hairdresser’s—while others were more difficult. Once, for example, they asked me to obtain an umbilical cord, for which I had to bribe a nurse at the IMSS. Sebastian told me I was getting ever closer to initiation. I could see him in my mind tearing Natalia’s blouse off, removing her boots, kissing her feet. I had to continue if I wanted to be sure of keeping Natalia by my side. Over time they asked for other things I am not proud of, things I do not even wish to leave as testimony; remembering them now shames me: torturing animals, stealing things. The missions they gave me began to change me. I moved further away from those outside the circle, lost my job and my flat, changed everything because I had to continue, had to protect her. Once they tasked me with burying something on top of a grave. It was a small old book in French, more than a hundred years old. I had to enter a cemetery with a small gardening spade to fulfil the task. The most incredible thing is that most tasks they asked at that point were things they could not check, things they could not know whether I did or not, but I did them anyway. I felt compelled. I felt my will was no longer mine. I served the group, a purpose larger than I was, something I could not understand but which bound me.

Finally the moment of my initiation arrived. It consisted of six meditations guided by Sebastian. The first two were private, only he and I, as he led me to a state of relaxation and made me feel connected to the cosmos. Then came another two, in which Sebastian thought it convenient for one person from the group, chosen by me, to be present. Naturally, I chose Natalia. Those two meditations explored my own fears and traumas. He made me reflect on the things that had hurt me most, old resentments and conflicts: Natalia riding him, the two of them laughing at me, her hands turning into monstrous claws. Ever worse images came to my mind. Sebastian explained that the final two meditations would actually be two parts of one meditation. “The aim is that you accept within yourself the teachings and revelations Satan wishes to share with you,” he told me. “If you are not sure you want to go on, you have the right to stop and leave the group. But if you truly want to be part of us, you must understand there will be no turning back. In the second meditation Satan will give you a gift. He will reveal a truth to you, and truths once known cannot be forgotten or hidden. It is important that you do not begin something you will be unable to finish. If you decide to do it, tomorrow we will go to my house in Tepoztlán for the first meditation, and the day after tomorrow we will finish with the second.”

The journey to Tepoztlán was silent. We travelled in two cars because the whole group had to participate in this last part of the initiation. Sebastian’s country house was not in the town but outside it, reached by a dirt road twisting between hills and constantly dividing into several paths. I paid little attention to how we got there because, from climbing into the car in the city to getting out in the countryside, I felt in a state of deep relaxation. This must be what accepting death feels like, I thought. The jealous images that obsessed me stopped, ceased to distract me. I felt a kind of peace—or rather than peace, a sense of resignation. It is as Satan teaches: if you stop fighting your condition, you will let pain, suffering, and despair flow through you. We ate in silence. Everyone appeared to be in the same state of relaxation as I was; we all seemed pieces of the same puzzle. After lunch, Sebastian told me to withdraw to one of the rooms while they prepared for the session. “Empty your mind,” he said. When night came, someone opened the room’s door. It was Natalia, wearing a black, loose cotton gown and barefoot. She held out a gown like hers and instructed me to remove all my clothes and put it on, then join them in the sitting room. Her attitude was completely cold, mechanical, as though moved by a will foreign to her. Although I made eye contact with her, I could not see her; she was not there. When I went down the house stairs, which led directly into the sitting room, I saw them. They were all naked, forming a circle. The lights were off and a few candles gave off the faint light that made them all look like silhouettes. I made an effort to adjust to the darkness as I approached and managed to recognise Natalia. She stood beside Sebastian. He came to me and, taking my hand, led me to the circle’s centre. He removed my gown and asked me to lie down. As soon as I lay on the sitting-room rug in the middle of the circle, I heard Sebastian’s voice guiding the meditation.

“Close your eyes. I want you to focus all your attention on my words. You have come to us to discover the truth, and today, among your brothers and sisters, your path begins. I want you to imagine everything I tell you, to feel it as if it were true, because it is true. Today our lord Satan is here with us, and there is nothing he cannot make real. You are at the edge of a forest. It is night. Feel the cool breeze on your face, smell the pines around you, the sounds of crickets and other animals inviting you farther among the trees. There is a path before you. Take it into the forest; walk decisively, knowing that the lord awaits you in his home. As you advance, I want you to see the trees around you. The only light guiding your way is that of the full moon. I want you to see all those trees at the sides of the path, their long trunks, their long, dark trunks.” “They are people,” I cried. I saw it clearly: hundreds and hundreds of people who looked like trees around me, still, inert, dark.

“Continue and reach a river. Pay attention to the water, which is dark, entirely black, infinitely deep, cold. It is the only thing that can stop you, but you see a bridge. To one side, in the distance, you see an old wooden bridge. Do you want to cross it?”

“Yes,” I answered, almost voiceless, almost as if it were not I who answered.

“Go to the bridge. I want you to climb onto it and stop halfway. Now that you are halfway, look down at the river. I want you to see the moving water, hear the current. Something is passing through the water, the current is carrying something away. Can you see what it is?” “They are bodies,” I replied, “the bodies of people, the river is carrying them away. They are my parents, my sisters, my friends, my teachers, my neighbours.” My heart sank. Suddenly I was afraid. The vision in my mind was so real that I could not get out of it. I wanted to open my eyes and leave the trance, but a force prevented me. I felt terror, but at the same time I felt resigned, subdued by a force that came from me but was not me, and compelled me to continue.

“Say goodbye to them. You will not see them again. Those are all the people who have held you back, the burdens that have kept you from taking your path. They deceived you with false beliefs and empty promises. The river carries them away and they will no longer stop or impede you. I want you to go down from the bridge and continue. Keep walking, keep focused on my voice. Nothing exists except you and that path. In the distance you can see a hill and a castle upon it. Go there. Keep walking until you reach the hill and discover a staircase winding up around it. Take it. Climb the stairs, keep climbing, keep climbing. You have reached the entrance to the castle. Before you is an enormous iron door. It is open. The cold wind coming from the castle invites you inside. Do you want to enter the castle?” “Yes,” I answered, now in a dreamlike state. I no longer knew whether reality was the castle on the hill or the house in Tepoztlán, whether the voice guiding me was Sebastian’s or someone else’s.

“Enter the castle. You are now in a great vestibule, its walls of stone. You can feel the cold of the wind moving through the construction. Before you stand two great staircases that meet and rise to a second level. Take one and climb. Feel the cold numbing your face. Keep climbing. You have reached the second level and see corridors surrounding the main vestibule. They lead directly to the opposite side from where you are; there is an entrance there. Walk towards it. Keep walking while you hear the murmurs of the wind around you. Keep walking. The door leads to a spiral staircase that rises to the highest tower of the castle. Climb it. It is narrow; you feel the frozen rocks of which the castle is made as you touch them. There are great vertical windows. Keep climbing, keep climbing. Stop at one window and look outside the tower, into the night. You see the edge of the forest where your journey began, see the dense trees through which you passed and that brought you to the river, see the dark waters now empty, without bodies. They are gone. No one hinders you now. You see what remains of the bridge you crossed, its rotten wood broken, making it impossible to cross. There is no return. Keep climbing, keep climbing. You have reached the top of the tower. You are now before a great wooden door with ironwork. There is a handle to open it. It is incandescent, glowing red. This is the last door, the final obstacle between you and truth, the final barrier between you and the gift our lord Satan has prepared. Do you want to open the door? Do you want to know the truth?”

“Yes,” I answered in total surrender and submission, intrigued by what lay behind that final door. What truth would Satan reveal to me? What would be his gift?

“Put your hand on the incandescent handle. Feel the intense burning in your palm. Feel how it burns you, marks you, incinerates your skin. See the steam coming from your hand, the moisture of your skin evaporating. Hear the sound of flesh charring. Smell your burned skin. Experience the pain. Experience the desperation of your hand stuck to burning metal. Feel the horror. Feel it invade you, take possession of you.”

“Wake up,” Sebastian said, shaking my shoulders. “Wake up.” I returned to the sitting room of the Tepoztlán house, as though I had woken from a dream hundreds of years long. My entire body was numb. With Sebastian’s help, I straightened up and tried to stand; my movements were clumsy, my legs lacked strength. “What is behind the door?” I asked Sebastian. “Tomorrow,” he said, “tomorrow you will be able to open it.”

I shared the room with Natalia and another couple from the group. I could not sleep all night. My feelings and emotions were out of control; I felt fear, sadness, then anger. I felt I was in a long, endless fall, plunging into a void yet strangely at peace. I had the sense that I was no longer master of my will, that I was not driving but a passenger in my own life. I could not think clearly. Only one question occupied my mind: what was behind the door? The next day passed with little activity. Everyone appeared contemplative. Natalia barely spoke to me a few times all day, on practical matters; she was in her cold state, absorbed and silent like the others. The hours became long. I was aware that I too was withdrawn. My mind was a blurred darkness, with only one light at its centre, my only thought: the door, what lay behind it, Satan’s gift, the truth. At last, that night we began the session. As on the previous night, we were all naked, the others standing in a circle and I lying in the middle. I saw Natalia and felt an incomprehensible nostalgia, as if I were going to say goodbye to her. In the gloom I saw her body, thin long limbs, tiny breasts, long neck, dark hair, full lips, her green eyes, now no longer feline. Somehow they had lost their light; they were reptilian, windows on a void. Sebastian asked me to close my eyes to begin. I turned to him and asked, “Are we going to open the door now?” “Yes,” he said with a perverse smile. I closed my eyes.

I woke in the flat in Colonia Agrícola, utterly confused. More than waking from a dream, it was like reviving from death. I once heard that human beings are the story we tell ourselves every day on waking, as though every day one woke as a blank sheet and in an instant remembered one’s whole life and knew who one was. For me, that instant lasted several minutes on that occasion. At first I woke like a baby who does not know how to speak or walk. My body was completely numb, limbs almost inert. I must have taken a couple of minutes to manage to sit on the bed without understanding anything. It sounds strange, but in truth, during the first minutes I did not know who I was, did not know where I was, and did not remember my own name. As I contemplated the disorder around me, memories and words slowly came back. Everything that had happened in the preceding months returned to me: the journey to Tepoztlán, and finally the one memory I had, closing my eyes on the night of the last session. What had happened? Did I open the door? What was behind it? Did I receive my gift, receive the truth? I began walking through the room, looking into the bathroom, going out to the sitting room looking for Natalia, still confused. How had I arrived there? When did we return? How had I entered the flat? I was afraid. I could not remember anything that happened after closing my eyes. I found my phone on the kitchen counter; it was out of charge. I waited five long minutes for it to charge enough to turn on, trying to remember, wondering where Natalia was. When I finally turned it on, I was first surprised at the time. I thought it was morning, but it was half past six in the evening. Had I slept all day? Then, in terror, I read and reread the date again and again. Six days had passed since the last night I remembered in Tepoztlán. It could not be right. I searched the date on Google, did everything I could think of, and however much I did not want to believe it, it was true: six days had been erased from my memory. I was frightened, angry, desperate. I needed to speak with Natalia, tell her what was happening, ask what happened in the final session. I called her, and her phone began to ring inside the wardrobe. Had she been there all this time, hiding from me? Was she afraid of me? What had I done? What happened? I opened the wardrobe and found her phone abandoned on a shelf.

I never learned anything of Natalia or anyone from the group again. For a couple of weeks I looked for her, even reported her missing. All her clothes, all her things, her books, everything remained in the flat. It was not as if she had escaped, but as if she had simply disappeared. I asked the neighbours who owned the flats and managed to contact him, hoping he had some information about Natalia that I did not, such as the address of a guarantor, a reference, something. The owner did not know any Natalia. He had rented the flat to a man who paid a year in advance—which, incidentally, expired in three weeks, he told me. He described him as a man in his forties, tall and big. The only place left to seek a clue to Natalia was the flat where that party had taken place when we started seeing each other. I had no luck. A middle-aged couple and their teenage son now lived there. They had lived there for months and knew nothing of the previous tenant; they would not give me the owner’s details. I travelled to Tepoztlán trying to find Sebastian’s house. I did not even know how we had got there, but I thought I could ask in town whether anyone knew him or the house’s location. I looked for two days and found nothing, not a trace or clue. Desperate, I considered my situation. In a couple of weeks I could no longer remain in Natalia’s flat—was that her real name? I had no job, and I had sold my car months earlier to have money, but it had nearly run out. I had not spoken to my friends for months, rejecting their calls whenever my phone rang. Their calls became increasingly scarce until they stopped. The same happened with my family, but they would have to accept me; surely they would be happy to hear from me after months without contact. I had to return to my parents’ house in Querétaro.

I have reflected greatly in these last months. I remember Natalia with pain and rage. I am convinced she never loved me; she was only a lure. I feel like an idiot. Mechanically, driven more by my parents than anything, I have been rebuilding my life. I found a job, reconnected with some friends in Querétaro, and am trying to make a new life here. Behind this process of change is a reality that no one seems to perceive. I live in a numbed state, emotional and intellectual lethargy, as if submerged in water; as when underwater sounds are distorted, images blurred, and the world is perceived with less brightness. I live as if in a world inside my head and everything else were a grey cloud. Sometimes I feel I am not the one who does or says things, that I am a spectator of what happens to me and someone else moves my body, moves my lips for me. There are often whole days I cannot remember; I do not know what I did or where I was. At the same time I feel I have nothing to worry about if I am not the one doing or deciding anything. I simply let myself go, let this presence that resolves everything flow through me. I know I opened that door and received my gift. I know the truth was revealed to me, but I am too limited to understand it. I know I now belong to him.