Alice was more than an obsession, she was the damn bet of the whole neighborhood; someone would be the first. Which I could understand. To be with her, you had to have a house, money, or a car, and without a decent house and car... She is young and full of dreams, dreams as impossible as mine. By the time I had the money, nothing about her was interesting anymore. Her breasts weren't as imagined or painted. Her skin was damaged by the sun and the lack of products that didn't arrive on time or were missing. Her mermaid smile had been replaced by a comedic mask. When she came to my room, it was more the illusion, the thousands of encounters in the night and the rain (in my illusion) were recovered from every angle, from every smell and taste. She, like a cornered animal, sat on the edge of the bed and waited patiently. I went to get a glass of water or rum, I don't remember. She scanned the entire wall. Some stains that stubbornly persisted, and which, despite being half a century old, were my family album. She wanted to speak, but I put my index finger on her mouth, touching her lips with a faded color for the first time. I could remember the opening of the cinema in our town by the Lumière brothers and a film about card games. I remember the grays without sound, the popcorn sold at the entrance. The truth is that it was a projection of a projection to infinity. Then they showed the Greta Garbo film, Mata Hari. It was exciting to see the woman in action. Being able to compare her lips with Alice's, I placed them as if a thin blanket of light and latex separated us. Alice sucked my fingers as if they were smeared with honey and undressed on the table, which was a fraction of a second away from exploding from the effort. I looked into her eyes as if she were a daguerreotype from the end of the war. A yellow girl surrounded by daisies and an insignificant flower-planting shovel, a hand-knitted scarf, which I suppose was red and blue, but appeared green and gray, and a wooden house shrinking. Rearranging time and the fields. On that leaden, stormy afternoon, the willows stood in rows from the entrance, with cobblestones. All the same size and facing the same direction, contrary to the trees that served as a curtain. Despite the poor condition of the photo, they looked lush.

I was able to catch my breath, and before giving her the money, she looked at my nakedness and said with a grunt, “You owe me nothing. It has been special,” and she left me like the flesh of men burned at the stake and served with exotic seasonings. I realized that I could have had her much earlier without money, and I watched her walk away slowly, turning my life into a tornado that, like some words, cuts and cuts.