I went to Gómez Palacio during one of the worst periods of my life. I was twenty-three years old and I knew that my days in Mexico were numbered.

My friend Montero, who worked for the Arts Council, had found me a stint teaching a writing workshop in that town, with its hideous name. First, to warm up, I had to tour the other writing workshops the Arts Council had established throughout the region. A bit of a holiday in the north to start off, Montero said, then you can get down to work in Gómez Palacio and forget all your problems. I don’t know why I accepted. I knew that under no circumstances would I settle down in Gómez Palacio. I knew that I wouldn’t stick to running a writing workshop in some godforsaken town in northern Mexico.

I left Mexico City one morning on a bus packed to capacity and began my tour. I went to San Luis Potosí, Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, León—though probably not in that order. I can’t remember which town came first or how long I spent in each. Then Torreón and Saltillo. I went to Durango as well.

Finally, I arrived in Gómez Palacio and visited the Arts Council offices, where I met my future students. In spite of the heat, I couldn’t stop shivering. The director, a plump, middle-aged woman with bulging eyes, wearing a large print dress featuring almost all of the state’s native flowers, took me to my lodgings: a seedy motel on the edge of town, next to a highway leading nowhere.

She used to pick me up herself every morning. She had an enormous sky-blue car, which she drove perhaps too boldly, though generally speaking she wasn’t a bad driver. It was an automatic, and her feet barely reached the pedals. Invariably, the first thing we did was stop at a roadside restaurant that was visible in the distance from the motel, a reddish bump on the blue-and-yellow horizon. There we breakfasted on orange juice and Mexican-style eggs, followed by several cups of coffee, all paid for (I presume) with Arts Council vouchers—not cash, in any case.

Then she would lean back in her chair and talk about her life in that northern town; her poetry, which had been published by a small local press subsidized by the Arts Council; and her husband, who didn’t understand the poet’s calling or the suffering it entailed. Meanwhile, I chain-smoked Bali cigarettes and looked out the window at the highway, thinking about the disaster that was my life. Then we’d get back into her car and head off to the main office of the Arts Council, a two-story building whose only redeeming feature was an unpaved yard with three trees and an abandoned, or unfinished, garden, swarming with zombie-like adolescents, who were studying painting, music, or literature. The first time I was there, I hardly noticed the yard. The second time, it made me shudder. None of this makes any sense, I thought, but deep down I knew that it did make sense and that was what I found unbearably sad, to use a rather hyperbolic expression, though it seemed perfectly accurate at the time. Maybe I was confusing sense with necessity. Maybe I was just a nervous wreck.

I found it hard to get to sleep at night. I had nightmares. Before going to bed, I would make sure the door and the windows of my room were securely and tightly shut. My throat always felt dry, and the only solution was to drink water. I was continually getting up and going to the bathroom to refill my glass. Since I was up, I would check the door and the windows again to see that they were properly shut. Sometimes I forgot my fears and stayed at the window, looking at the desert stretching off into the dark. Then I went back to bed and closed my eyes, but having drunk so much water I soon had to get up again to urinate. And since I was up I would check all the locks and then stand listening to the distant sounds of the desert (the muffled hum of cars heading north or south) and looking out of the window at the night. And so on until dawn, when I could finally get some unbroken sleep, two or three hours at most.

On my last full day, while we were having breakfast, the director asked about my eyes. It’s because I don’t sleep much, I said. Yes, they’re bloodshot, she said, and changed the subject. That afternoon, as she was taking me back to the motel, she asked if I would like to drive for a bit. I don’t know how to drive, I said. She burst out laughing and pulled onto the shoulder. A white refrigerated truck went past. I managed to read what was written on the side in large blue letters: “the widow padilla’s meat.” The truck had Monterrey license plates and the driver stared at us with a curiosity that struck me as excessive. The director opened her door and got out. Get in the driver’s seat, she said. I obeyed. She got into the passenger seat and ordered me to go.

I drove along the gray strip of highway connecting Gómez Palacio and the motel. When I reached the motel, I didn’t stop. I looked over at the director: she was smiling—she didn’t mind if I drove a bit farther. Until then, both of us had stared at the highway in silence. But when the motel was behind us she started talking about her poetry, her work, and her insensitive husband. When she had said her piece, she turned on the cassette player and put in a tape: a woman singing rancheras. The singer had a sad voice that was always a couple of notes ahead of the orchestra. I’m her friend, the director said. What? I said. She’s a close friend of mine, the director said. Ah. She’s from Durango, she said. You’ve been there, haven’t you? Yes, I’ve been to Durango, I said. And what were the writing workshops like? Worse than the ones here, I replied, meaning it as a compliment, although she didn’t seem to take it that way. She’s from Durango, but she lives in Ciudad Juárez, she said. Sometimes, when she’s going back home to see her mother, she calls me up and I reorganize my schedule so I can go to Durango and spend a few days with her. That’s nice, I said, keeping my eyes on the road. I stay at her house—her mother’s house, actually, the director said. The two of us sleep in her room and spend hours talking and listening to records. Every now and then, one of us goes to the kitchen to make coffee. I usually take cookies with me, La Regalada cookies, her favorite. And we drink coffee and eat cookies. We’ve known each other since we were fifteen. She’s my best friend.

On the horizon I could see the highway disappearing into the hills. Night was beginning to approach from the east. Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering. One afternoon, at the writing workshop in Gómez Palacio, a boy asked me why I wrote poetry and how long I thought I would go on doing it. The director wasn’t present. There were five students in the workshop: four boys and a girl. You could tell from the way they dressed that two of them were very poor. The girl was short and thin and her clothes were garish. The boy who asked the question should have been studying at a university; instead, he was working in a soap factory, the biggest and probably the only soap factory in the state. Another boy was a waiter in an Italian restaurant, the other two were in college, and the girl was neither studying nor working.