This section is narrated through the diary of Juan García Madero, a 17-year-old law student in Mexico City who joins the visceral realists on November 2, 1975. An orphan raised by his aunt and uncle, García Madero enrolled in Julio César Álamo’s university poetry workshop against his family’s wishes. At the workshop’s fifth session, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano crash the class and challenge Álamo’s authority. Most students defend Álamo, but García Madero sides with the newcomers, pointedly exposing Álamo’s ignorance of obscure poetic forms. After Lima reads a poem that astonishes García Madero, Belano invites those present to contribute to a new magazine. After class, García Madero joins the two poets at a bar on Calle Bucareli, where they talk until dawn about poetry, a defunct visceral realist movement that supposedly vanished in the Sonoran Desert, and a poet named Cesárea Tinajero. Lima describes the group’s philosophy as walking backward, away from a fixed point and toward the unknown. By morning, García Madero is formally welcomed into their movement.

For several days, he haunts the Encrucijada Veracruzana, the Bucareli bar, without finding the visceral realists. There, he meets two waitresses: Brígida, who reads his palm and predicts he will go far but lose his way, and Rosario, who cheerfully presses him to write her a poem on the spot. He eventually locates the group and learns their meeting places, including the homes of María Font and a painter named Catalina O’Hara. That same night, Brígida leads him to a storage room and performs oral sex on him until another waitress interrupts. He flees into the restroom, where he finds Lima and Belano smoking marijuana. They persuade him not to intervene when they hear Brígida being struck by her boss, and the three leave together.

Over subsequent days, he meets the wider group: At Lima’s rooftop room he meets Rafael Barrios, Jacinto Requena, and Felipe Müller; at Café Quito he meets Pancho Rodríguez, who explains that Lima financed the group’s magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, by selling marijuana, and that Arturo Belano arrived from Chile after the Pinochet coup.

Pancho takes García Madero to the Font family house in Colonia Condesa, warning that the father, Quim Font, recently suffered a mental health episode. María Font is found reading, painting, and listening to records at once. Angélica Font, who won the Laura Damián poetry prize at 16, arrives and retreats behind a screen with Pancho. Over subsequent visits, María reveals that Ulises Lima’s real name is Alfredo Martínez, a name given to him by Laura Damián—a student who died at 20 after being struck by a car in 1972, and whose parents fund the annual prize in her memory. Lima was so close to Laura that after her death he fell into a mysterious illness from which he barely recovered. María loans García Madero copies of Lee Harvey Oswald and Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror, and in a late-night conversation asks whether he is a virgin; he lies.

María takes him to Avenida Guerrero, where they encounter Lupe, a teenage sex worker and acquaintance from a dance school. Lupe’s account of her pimp, Alberto—his violence, his large knife, and his obsession with measuring the length of his penis with the knife—makes a strong impression on García Madero. Back at the Font house, he finds María, Angélica, and the gay poet Ernesto San Epifanio sharing explicit photographs. Later that night, after the group smokes marijuana, García Madero wanders the dark house and eventually makes his way to the sisters’ outbuilding, where María lets him in and they have sex for the first time.

Pancho takes García Madero to his family’s rooftop apartment, where he meets a neighbor poet called Luscious Skin. Luscious Skin recounts how Mrs. Font walked in on a sadomasochistic encounter between him and María during a house party, resulting in his permanent ban from the property. Feeling jealous of María’s sexual encounters, García Madero returns to the Fonts’ that night and has sex with María in the garden and again inside. A diary entry on November 20 lists the political affiliations of group members, including María, Angélica, and Belano’s ex-girlfriend Laura Jáuregui, all formerly in a radical feminist organization.

At a party at Catalina O’Hara’s house, García Madero meets Jáuregui and Sofía Gálvez, referred to as Lima’s lost love. He later recalls San Epifanio’s drunken literary taxonomy: an elaborate system classifying poets into various types of sexual proclivity, assigning poets from Whitman to Paz to specific categories. When someone asks about Cesárea Tinajero, San Epifanio calls her a terrifying figure. Earlier that day, García Madero had visited a disheveled, trembling Quim Font, who showed him a chaotic layout for the forthcoming visceral realist magazine, then gave him money and a shirt. When García Madero tells María about the money, she erupts and accuses him of treating her like a sex worker. After an Octavio Paz lecture, she publicly humiliates him at dinner and leaves with dance students; he shouts after her that he earned her father’s money.

García Madero drifts into a relationship with Rosario and moves into her tenement apartment. Meanwhile, Belano announces a series of purges from the visceral realists, apparently expelling Pancho Rodríguez, Luscious Skin, and others, then Angélica Font, Laura Jáuregui, and Sofía Gálvez. Lima and Belano later reveal to García Madero that the purges are a joke, a fact unknown to the expelled members. García Madero searches for Lima and Belano in used bookstores, stealing books throughout the process. He befriends two booksellers: Rebeca Nodier, a blind elderly woman, and Crispín Zamora, an old Spanish exile who awkwardly propositions him one afternoon before apologizing in embarrassment.

On November 30, after fleeing a loud argument between Rosario and Brígida, García Madero encounters a frantic Quim Font pulling Lupe through the streets—her pimp Alberto has tried to kill her for wanting to quit and enroll in dance classes. They find her a room at a hotel called the Media Luna. A phone call to the Fonts’ house later rattles García Madero: a woman claiming to be Angélica sounds entirely wrong. He collapses on the street shortly afterward, and when he regains consciousness Lima and Belano tell him he was almost certainly speaking to Quim impersonating his daughter. García Madero falls ill with fever; Rosario nurses him. Visiting friends report that Lima and Belano are building toward something significant before possibly leaving for Europe.

On December 30, García Madero and a dispirited Pancho go to the Font house to find it under siege: Alberto and associates sit outside in a yellow Camaro, their watch tolerated by what the Fonts believe to be complicit and corrupt police. Mrs. Font is afraid to leave; both sisters have been harassed on previous attempts to go out. Pancho confronts Alberto and is beaten. García Madero stays the night in the sisters’ outbuilding, hoping to have sex with María. Instead, Lupe finds him and they have sex.

On New Year’s Eve, Álvaro Damián—the bereaved father of Laura Damián, who visits the Font family each year—arrives bearing red roses. Before midnight, Lima and Belano appear. Álvaro Damián writes checks to finance a plan: Lima and Belano will drive Lupe north in Quim’s white Ford Impala, lifting the siege on the house. As the car pulls out, Alberto attacks it on foot. García Madero punches him down and jumps into the moving car. As they accelerate north out of Mexico City, a sound that may be a gunshot echoes behind them.