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the feeling, as if you were in a horror movie, not the sort that has stupid women characters, but a film in which the women are intelligent and brave, or there is at least one brave, intelligent woman who suddenly finds herself alone, who suddenly walks into an empty building or an abandoned house and calls out (because she doesn't know the place is empty) to check if anyone is there; she raises her voice and asks the question, although her tone leaves no doubt as to the answer, but she asks anyway. Why? Well, basically because she was brought up, like me, to be polite in all circumstances. She stands there quietly or perhaps takes a few steps and asks if anyone is there and of course no one replies. I felt like that woman, although I don't know if I realized it at the time or if I'm only realizing it now, and, like her, I took a few steps as if I were walking on an enormous expanse of ice. Then I washed my hands, looked at myself in the mirror, saw a tall thin figure with a face that was already showing a few wrinkles, too many, a female Don Quixote as Pedro Garfias called me, and then I went out into the corridor, and there I realized right away that something was going on: the corridor was empty, nothing but faded shades of cream, and up the stairwell came a sound of shouting, a petrifying, history-making sound.
    What did I do then? What anyone would have done: I went to a window and looked down and saw the soldiers, then I went to another window and saw tanks, and then to another, the one at the end of the corridor (I bounded down that corridor like a woman raised from the dead) and there I saw trucks, and the riot police and some plainclothes cops bundling the students and professors they'd arrested into the trucks, like something from a movie about the Second World War crossed with one about the Mexican Revolution starring Maria Felix and Pedro Armendáriz, a scene fading to black, but with little phosphorescent figures, like the ones some people see when they go crazy or have a sudden panic attack. I saw a group of secretaries, and I thought I could recognize some of my friends among them (in fact I thought I could recognize them all!), coming out in single file, tidying their clothes, with their handbags in their hands or over their shoulders, and then I saw a group of professors also coming out in an orderly fashion, or at least as orderly as the situation allowed, I saw people with books in their hands, people with folders and typed pages spilling onto the ground, bending down to pick them up, and I saw people being dragged out of the faculty building or coming out covering their noses with white handkerchiefs, which were rapidly darkening with blood. And then I said to myself: You stay here, Auxilio. Don't let them take you prisoner, my girl. Stay here, Auxilio, you don't have to be in that movie; if they want to make you play a role, they can damn well come and find you.
    And then I went back to the bathroom, and this is the really strange part, not only did I go back to the bathroom, I went back to the stall, the very same stall I was in before, and I sat down on the toilet again, I mean, with my skirt hitched up again and my underpants down, although I felt no pressing physiological need (this is precisely the sort of situation that loosens the bowels, so they say, but that certainly wasn't the case with me), and the book of poems by Pedro Garfias open again on my lap, and although I didn't feel like reading I began to read, slowly at first, word by word and verse by verse, but then my reading started to speed up and soon it sped out of control, the verses flying past so quickly I could hardly take anything in, the words were sticking to one another, or something, in any case the poetry of Pedro Garfias could not withstand that free-fall reading (some poets and poems can withstand any kind of reading, but they are rare exceptions; most can't), and that's how I was occupied when I heard a sound in the corridor. A