Tell me, Mr. President

• My friend Walter.
• Tell me, Mr. President.
• You have to be strong.
• Yes, sir.
• Mr. Artemio Cruz has just become a boy.
• That can't be, Mr. President, I contradicted him.
• It's an order, said the president, and you have to keep this hat. Mr. Cruz left it with him, and it belonged to one of his thousands of great-great-grandfathers.
  I remember and also wrote down about the black color of one eye and the black of the other, of General Villa and the eyes of Emperor Maximilian.
  But I didn't insist on comparing the hat any further. I would have to compare María with the thousands of Marías that exist and with the one from Guadalupe and the one from San Salvador and with an M when you draw a point A and a point B to determine a plane. Here I intend to reproduce María's inverse triangle.

Maria liked to contradict everything.
“Did you buy the shoes?” she asked.
“Haven't you seen my electrocardiogram?”
“They must be expensive shoes.”
“I could swear I left the paper on the bookshelf.”
“Cheap shoes give me allergies.”
“Are you sick?” I asked without interest.

My heart was like boiling soup full of microorganisms. Maria, naked, whistled a melody or an entire piano concerto while I watched her through the bathroom mirror.
I could die, I would inject amphetamines into my brain. In another century, to solve so many problems, I would make incisions in my skin until I bled to death. Before that, I would cut the jugular of pure María. The refined María of petroleum. My intermittent beloved in the stained glass windows of the Cathedral of San Francisco. Invented for a street, invented to lie us down on the cobblestones and manure, to remain scattered, like a stain on the canvas of a Van Gogh painting. Nothing to suspect, only her anguish. I assured her that my life was not mine, it belonged to that hat (I pointed to it listlessly).

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