TenAdolfo rose at noon.

Something woke him up, he didn’t know what. The vacuum cleaner, the blender, a plane, a police siren, the knife sharpener’s whistle, a truck coughing pestilent black smoke, the goddamned birds: he wanted to murder them all. It was Saturday, for fuck’s sake! He could not open his eyes, although before he went to bed, he had been prudent enough to rinse his nose with warm water and take two Alka-Seltzers. He felt like his throat was a canal of bubbling lava, his ears throbbed with a maddening itch. He moaned, and a whistle came out. He had lost his voice from smoking and yelling. His phlegm and saliva were pasted together; he had a hole in his stomach as if he had not had sustenance in months. Thin rays of sunlight seeped through the edges of the blackout drapes and stabbed his eyes.

He needed a bump, which unfortunately he no longer possessed, to start the painful road to recovery. He had sold most of what he got from the dealer, and, as usual, he went to town with the surplus. He had snorted the last line of coke at dawn, even though his teeth were squeaking, and a bitter bolus had settled between his throat and his septum. Now he didn’t even have the strength to call on the intercom for his chilaquiles and black coffee. He alternated between sweating under the covers and shaking with chills. He planned on taking a cold shower to get rid of the hangover, but he couldn’t find the guts. Under the embrace of a warm shower, he went over the events of the previous night with supreme satisfaction. The life of the party. Mountains of coke. A hot, delirious night with Luis. He got hard and his mind, perhaps inspired by the noises of the daily comings and goings, rambled all the way to the little driver, with his irresistible resentful eyes, whom he imagined washing his car, swirling the water hose in all directions like a Mexican rodeo artist twirling a lasso. Adolfo got in the car and Gabriel dropped the hose, sat next to him, and gave him oral pleasure in the garage. One can dream.

He felt so weak that his knees were shaking. He came down to breakfast in nothing but his bathrobe and shades. He asked Zenaida for very spicy chilaquiles and a cup of black coffee, no good morning, please, or thank you. He did not greet his sister, who also looked like a ghost, he assumed because she had been fucking the architect until late at night. He went out to the garage to see if he ran into Gabriel. He wanted to confirm that his infatuation wasn’t simply a temporary loss of his faculties because of a hangover. The idea of opening his robe and showing himself in all his splendor to the servant, the way God brought him to this earth, filled him with glee. Indeed, Gabriel, who was polishing one of the cars, was as delectable under the cold light of reality as he had been in his Technicolor fantasy. Adolfo considered taking him under his wing. He would show him what music to listen to, what clubs to patronize, what mezcal to drink, how to fuck like a king, and the finest quality coke.

“Why did you go to the garage if your car is at the shop?” Lucía asked him when he came back to the table.

“None of your business,” said Adolfo. “To see if you can lend me your car later.”

“I lent it to you yesterday. I need it today.”

Lucía went on scolding him, but Adolfo unplugged himself from her litany of complaints as if he had found a mute button. He lit a cigarette.

He had taken up smoking and refilling his father’s liquor bottles with water at the age of eleven, even before his voice had changed. Among the concerned parents of the boys of Trinity School, Adolfito Orozco was considered the embodiment of the term “bad company.” Handsome and charming, he had pocketed the admiration of all his classmates, except for the unfortunate nerds he mocked without mercy. Mediocre at sports, terrible at school, excellent at partying, and very successful with the girls, he was the ideal teenager, except for one small detail. He had kissed a couple of girls and cupped his hand over a breast or two with a frightening lack of enthusiasm, that at first, he ascribed to his own inexperience. His father never gave any indication of wanting to initiate him into the mysteries of sex, not by having a talk with him, nor by taking him to prostitutes, like other fathers did. Adolfo could imagine his father confessing his misery to his friends during one of those endless Friday lunches at a cantina: “My own son turned out to be a fag. . . me salió puñal!” he would bawl. His pals would clap his back in consolation, thinking that if they were in the same predicament, they would kill their own son on the spot.

At the age of fourteen, Adolfo joined an expedition with a small group of friends eager to try their luck at a whorehouse in the Cuahutémoc neighborhood, led by Román, the eldest brother of his friend Carlos Ascencio, who was eighteen and had a car. The deal cost about fifty dollars at the time. Luis loaned him part of the money and the rest he saved up from his allowance and scrounged from his mother, with the excuse of buying a birthday present for his girlfriend, Adrianita Lascuráin.

Adolfo had imagined a luxurious living room lit by red fringed lamps, purple velvet sofas and alabaster-skinned hookers with very straight black hair, very long legs, and very red lips, naked under their silk print kimonos, drinking tropical cocktails with little paper umbrellas, as he had once seen in a movie. A busty matron with thick fake eyelashes would show him the merchandise with elegance.

To his profound disillusionment, the brothel was in an apartment decorated like the reception area of a cheap medical office: everything was a peach color, and what was not peach, was mint green. They were received by a woman dressed in rayon who looked like a moody bureaucrat. To the general delight of the boys, she offered them cubas with alcohol. The girls appeared, their movement a combination of walking and sashaying: Yadira, Rocío, Malena, Zafiro, Yessica, Iris. Román had told the boys that for the price they were paying, the girls would be super-hot, and from a distance they looked the part, with dyed blonde and copper hair, but from up close Adolfo could see the gobs of makeup covering their wrinkles and pores as wide as volcanic stone. For the price they were paying, thought Adolfo, who was already an aesthete at his tender age, they could have at least worn better clothes. They looked like pretentious secretaries. Sitting with their legs crossed, the women showed the garter belts that hugged their laced pantyhose. One of them clearly held a high opinion of herself, in long musketeer boots that reached up to her thighs. Another one wore an anklet under her pantyhose, which for Adolfo was as unforgivable a fashion faux pas as wearing socks with sandals. It would not have been half bad if at least they had resembled the effervescent go-go girls from the Mauricio Garcés movies, who still pranced around on TV in washed-out technicolor, wearing babydoll dresses lined with ostrich feathers in million-peso mansions in Pedregal. Alas, everything in this apartment had the clinging funk of thwarted ambition.

His friends laughed nervously, pretending that they were not petrified. Adolfo felt queasy. Rocío selected him. She was dark-skinned, with coppery hair, a decent smile and slender, yet firm, legs. The little flesh she had was concentrated in her breasts, round and hard like soccer balls. She was, as his pals would say, the hottest of them all. She took Adolfo by the hand and led him through a narrow hallway to an airless room, decorated with the now familiar pastel insistence. Dizzied by the stink of the air freshener and the busy print of the bedcover, Adolfo thought that when he dropped his pants, he would not be able to find his tiny little dick. However, because of her vast experience in initiating teens, Rocío was ready for that scenario. She took off her cheap red and black lace lingerie set, revealing a mound of jet-black pubic hair, incompatible with the reddish locks on her head. She got on her knees and helped him out with her mouth. Adolfo imagined that Rocío was slowly licking a delicious ice cream cone, sucking, nibbling, and covering her lips with vanilla. As soon as she noted a discernible erection, she strapped a condom on him and mounted him. She put Adolfo’s hands on her hard, bouncing breasts since he was too traumatized to do it himself. To her surprise, the kid did not come immediately but five seconds later, with the same terrified expression she had seen in all the others.

“Well done, papito,” she said to him. “You are going to be a good lover. Just remember to hold it in as long as possible. It’s not rocket science.”

On their way out, the friends made heroic efforts to brag that they had been tigers in bed, but their eyes were still full of fear. Adolfo could have sworn that Luis’s eyes were swollen, as if he had been crying.

The experience, intended to encourage him to pursue women, had the opposite effect. He already suspected that he was attracted to men. At recess, for instance, he’d sit in the schoolyard and preside over a fantasy contest of the most handsome boys in high school. This terrified him until he got turned on involuntarily by kissing Marina Ocampo at a party. After that, he convinced himself that he was not a faggot, or homosexual, as they were called scientifically, but that he had a fierce appetite for sex, regardless of gender. Moreover, in his fantasies his preference was to be the fucker, not the fucked, which led him to conclude that his masculinity was not only not in danger, but that he was even more of a man for having such a clever dick.

A few days after his deflowering, he realized he was being closely observed as he peed in the school restroom by the handsome Antonio Martínez de Hoyos, who was in senior high. With the excuse of searching for a lost contact lens, he pushed Adolfo into a stall, dropped him on his knees on the pee-encrusted floor, and opened his fly. Adolfo applied himself to the task by imitating Rocío’s maneuvers, his only reference. It did not taste like vanilla ice cream, but he had the spunk to ask his lover to return the favor and Antonio obliged, moved by Adolfito’s precocious gallantry and by his enormous green eyes. This earthly paradise continued over three weeks, during which Adolfo would meet his high school lover in the restroom during class hours, until one Friday Adolfo arrived promptly to the rendezvous, but his lover did not show up. The next day he saw him at the movies, holding hands with Lorena Bofill. Antonio shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “such is life.” Adolfo did not know what made him more bitter: being abandoned without explanation, being dumped for a woman, or realizing that the rest of the world found his romance repugnant. After that, he never allowed himself to fall in love with anyone again and he became an expert teller of faggot jokes. Years later, due to his affection for drugs and alcohol, his tendency to total cars, his cottage industry of narcotics distribution, and his sexual “confusion,” his father would tell him: “I don’t know who you take after. I should have sent you to rot in a military school, you are a disgrace to this family.”

“You are not even listening to me, Fito. What are you thinking about?” Lucía asked.

“Ah, my dearest sisterna. Among the twists and turns of my sad life, I was remembering the first time my heart was broken.”

“By whom?”

“By Lorena Bofill. I was crazy in love with her, but she never cared. She married that moron, Martínez de Hoyos.”

“Aw, poor Fito. As if you haven’t gotten even since then.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your girlfriends. Like poor Berenice. You promised you would marry her when you came back from Europe, and you left her high and dry.”

“Well, one matures on one’s long journey. I met much more worldly women than Bere and I realized I needed more than a boring wife.”

“You didn’t even have the decency to let her know.”

“Well, you party like crazy and no one says anything to you.”

“Because I am more discreet.”

“Because you are a hypocrite. If Dad only knew what you’re up to...”

“What do you mean?” Lucía asked, feigning shock.

“You know full well.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Ricardo?”

“Of course not, he’s only a front.”

“You are delusional.”

It was impossible for him to know about Gabriel. No one had seen them.

“I’m just saying that I am not the only one in this house who misbehaves.”

“You’ve been lucky, Fito, that it hasn’t gone worse for you,” said Lucía.

“And you’ve been lucky that I haven’t told my parents about all the gañanes you’ve been with.”

“Or you are, because I haven’t talked about all the drugs you sell. Or about your buddies.”

“What buddies?”

“Come on.”

“If you have something to say, say it, but do not threaten me, cabrona. Everyone has skeletons in their closet, including you.”