Six narrators give testimony from Mexico City between January and July 1976.

Amadeo Salvatierra’s January 1976 narration continues. The visitors report that the stridentist figures they have interviewed—Maples Arce, Arqueles Vela, and others—recall almost nothing of Cesárea Tinajero and possess none of her writing. List Arzubide directed them to Amadeo specifically because he had belonged to Cesárea’s original group, which bore the same name—the visceral realists—before he joined the stridentists.

Perla Avilés continues. Her Chilean friend (Belano) quit school and grew close to a well-known Chilean theater director. They fought over the relative merits of Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra, and the friend broke down crying during the argument and was too ashamed to return to school. When Perla confronted him, he refused to engage and dismissed her after she read him a poem. Their friendship ended. Years later, she learned from his sister that he had traveled across Latin America and been caught up in the Chilean coup.

Luscious Skin, a peripheral visceral realist, says that Belano always disliked him while Lima did not, attributing Belano’s hostility to his past involvement with Ernesto San Epifanio and incidents like the Priapo’s affair. He admits to stealing a sculpture from the Casa del Lago; Belano publicly denied any visceral realist could have done it, and when Lima told him the truth, Belano was furious. Despite the mistreatment, Luscious never retaliated because he respected Belano.

Laura Jáuregui adds only that she contrasts her purposeful biology studies with what she saw as the group’s immaturity.

Luis Sebastián Rosado recounts Luscious Skin tracking him down for a meeting that ended in a sexual encounter at a painter friend’s empty studio. Afterward, Luscious revealed that María Font gave him his nickname and claimed to have slept with every poet in Mexico, which left Luisito deflated.

Angélica Font, younger daughter of Joaquín Font and winner of the Laura Damián poetry prize, recalls a brief, painful first sexual relationship with Pancho Rodríguez and her frustration with her sister María’s multiple lovers. After discovering Luscious Skin in their shared room with María, she threw him out and comforted her sister. She distanced herself from the visceral realists; Ernesto San Epifanio remained her only connection to that circle.

Six narrators give testimony between August and December 1976.

Manuel Maples Arce, a founding figure of the stridentist movement, recalls Arturo Belano arriving to interview him with two boys and an American girl, Barbara Patterson. He declined a tape recorder and instead answered a written list of questions, leaving the package for Belano to collect via his maid. He hoped Belano would return as a protégé but never saw him again, concluding that this new generation of poets was destined for orphanhood.

Barbara Patterson, an American graduate student from California, angrily recounts the same visit, feeling condescended to by Maples. She came to Mexico to study Juan Rulfo, fell for Rafael Barrios, and has been financing their relationship while recognizing that Rafael stays with her for financial rather than romantic reasons.

Joaquín Font, father of María and Angélica Font, characterizes Belano as extroverted and socially capable and Lima as introverted and volatile with an unsettling odor. Both men still owe him money.

Jacinto Requena, a visceral realist poet, explains that Belano and Lima periodically left the city for unexplained supply runs, sharing their profits generously. He and his pregnant partner, Xóchitl, obsessively attended poetry workshops, where they first met the visceral realists. On a near-empty bus one night, Belano turned his full attention on Xóchitl; Jacinto watched anxiously, and afterward no one in the group approached her again. When Belano and Lima later leave for Europe, Jacinto is unmoved; Rafael Barrios calls him in distress about the movement’s future.

María Font reveals the current state of her family in December 1976. Her father, Joaquín, has been committed to a psychiatric clinic; her mother blames Belano and Lima for provoking his collapse, though María disagrees. She finds Belano and Lima at Café Quito, returned from Sonora, sitting with an unknown man in a white hat. They tell her Ulises is leaving for Paris and Arturo for Spain. She wants to sleep with both of them but says nothing.

Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who calls herself the mother of Mexican poetry, gives extended testimony about events in December 1976.

She arrived in Mexico City before 1967 and befriended the exiled Spanish poets León Felipe and Pedro Garfias, sustaining herself with informal jobs at UNAM’s Faculty of Literature. In 1968, when the army invaded the campus to arrest students and faculty members, she happened to be in a fourth-floor women’s bathroom and chose to stay hidden. A soldier searched the room but failed to find her. She remained there for roughly 10-15 days on tap water alone, reading and writing poems on toilet paper, which she flushed away. When a faculty secretary finally opened the door after the army’s withdrawal, Auxilio fainted. Her survival became campus legend, though repeated retellings altered the details beyond recognition.

She first met Arturo Belano in 1970, when he was 16, and grew close to his family of Chilean emigrants. She saw him off at the bus station in 1973 when he traveled to Chile to support Allende’s government. He returned in 1974 after Pinochet’s coup. His brief imprisonment had changed him as a person, making him harder, dismissive of former friends, and more drawn to younger people and to Ulises Lima. He founded visceral realism, moved through the city in a circle she found increasingly impenetrable, and eventually left Mexico.

Five narrators give testimony between January and March 1977.

Amadeo Salvatierra’s January 1976 narration continues. He earns a living as a scribe at Plaza Santo Domingo, writing letters for clients. He retrieves from his library a folder containing all that survives of Cesárea Tinajero and begins searching it for his single copy of Caborca.

Joaquín Font, now a patient at El Reposo clinic, argues that Belano and Lima were attempting to write a literature of desperation—work suited only for immature readers who will eventually exhaust themselves and turn to calmer, technically accomplished writing. He says he warned them, but they did not listen.

Joaquín Vázquez Amaral, a translator of Ezra Pound, recalls Belano and a large group of young poets attending his 1975 Mexico City book launch and taking him to a bar for a long discussion of poetry. At the end of the evening, the group repeatedly refused to let him pay the bill. In that moment, he realized quite how unlike his regular students they really were.

Lisandro Morales, a publisher, recounts how an Ecuadorean novelist named Vargas Pardo arranged a meeting with Arturo Belano, who had compiled an anthology of young Latin American poets. Morales found Belano’s haggard appearance deeply unsettling and felt certain the deal would bring bad luck. Vargas Pardo pressured him into signing a contract on the spot, arguing that Belano was leaving for Europe in two days. Morales signed against his instincts.

Laura Jáuregui narrates Belano’s visit to her home before his departure. Indifferent to his talk of traveling the world together, she heard him say he loved her—then he struck her. She fought back until his nose bled. He left, dropping a bloodied piece of toilet paper on the floor. Later, overcome with revulsion, she flushed away the bloodied tissue paper.

Four narrators give testimony from Mexico City and Barcelona between March and May 1977.

Rafael Barrios, a visceral realist, catalogs the experimental work the group pursued after Belano and Lima left for Europe: automatic writing, multilingual concrete poetry, parodies of numerous movements, group performance pieces, and a magazine. He concludes that none of it amounted to anything.

Joaquín Font, still at El Reposo clinic, describes recurring memory episodes involving the late poet Laura Damián—a young woman whose body was destroyed by a car—that visit him several times daily. He times their duration using a counting method his childhood friend, Dolores Pacheco, once devised for timing orgasms and waits each time until the image fades.

Amadeo Salvatierra’s January 1976 narration reaches its conclusion. Holding his copy of Caborca, he reads aloud from Manuel Maples Arce’s 1921 stridentist manifesto, Actual no. 1, including its sprawling, error-strewn international Directory of the Avant-Garde. When the reading ends, the three finish the last of the Los Suicidas mezcal in a toast to every name on the list, famous and forgotten alike.

Felipe Müller, Belano’s Chilean friend, narrates a story from a bar in Barcelona. Belano’s mother is living in the city in severe poverty, dangerously thin from hyperthyroidism, while his sister Carmen works as a cleaner. Felipe wrote repeatedly to Belano urging him to help. Belano eventually used a letter of introduction from Vargas Pardo to connect his mother with the Catalan writer Juan Marsé, who received her warmly and arranged a scholarship covering her studies in special education and basic living expenses. She subsequently received treatment for her thyroid. By the time Belano himself arrived in Barcelona, his mother was stable and self-sufficient.