The final section of the novel consists of diary entries written by Juan García Madero, covering January 1 through February 15, 1976. The four travelers—García Madero, Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, and Lupe, a young sex worker they are protecting—are fleeing Mexico City in a Quim’s white Impala.

While the car speeds through the night, García Madero quizzes Belano and Lima on obscure poetic terminology to ease the tension. Belano and Lima know almost none of the answers, but the game serves as a distraction. Lupe is nervous and keeps watching out the back window, convinced that her former pimp, Alberto, is trailing them. Belano and Lima laugh off her fears, though García Madero notices headlights behind them. The quiz shifts when Lupe tests the others on Mexican street slang for drugs, the police, jail, and sexual violence, ending with a phrase meaning to be inextricably caught up in a problem—which she confirms applies to them. García Madero resumes the poetry quiz; Belano correctly identifies Horace as the poet who introduced the alcaic stanza into Latin. Before falling asleep, García Madero listens to Belano recite a poem by the Greek mercenary poet Archilochus and explain his defiant philosophy to Lupe. García Madero drifts off and dreams of a naked, faceless figure crossing a field of bones.

On January 3, the group stops for breakfast near Culiacán and continues north. By January 4, they are deep in Sonora. In the Hermosillo municipal library, Belano and Lima search for any trace of Cesárea Tinajero but find nothing. Returning to the car, they discover two men masturbating while watching the sleeping Lupe through the window. Belano chases them off. The group then drives to Caborca—the namesake of Cesárea’s magazine—but again turns up nothing. The next morning, they drive to Pitiquito on a hunch.

January 5 is a long day of driving through remote Sonoran towns. García Madero stays in the car with Lupe while the others search. A friendly patrolman gives them directions to Santa Teresa. The group gets badly lost on dirt roads and arrives in Santa Teresa overnight, checking into the Hotel Juárez.

On January 6, Belano and Lima spend the morning combing Santa Teresa’s archives, churches, and libraries, then meet with Horacio Guerra, a literature professor who, Belano notes, resembles a miniature Octavio Paz in both appearance and intellectual manner. Left behind without money, García Madero and Lupe watch television in the hotel lobby with two elderly women who assume they are married. Lupe plays along. García Madero experiences a vivid, hallucinatory vision of the Roman poet Horace and snaps out of it only when one of the old women touches his arm. He tells her they are on their honeymoon, then takes Lupe upstairs and they have sex until they hear Belano and Lima return.

On January 7, Belano and Lima bring a significant lead: A 1928 issue of the Centinela de Santa Teresa mentions the bullfighter Pepe Avellaneda traveling with a woman named Cesárea Tinaja—which they are convinced is a misprint of Tinajero. A local reporter described her as tall, attractive, and reserved. Guerra, they add, quickly lost interest in the search once he understood how little of Cesárea’s work existed. The January 8 search for Avellaneda in Sonoyta and Caborca yields nothing, but Hermosillo newspaper archives contain an obituary: Avellaneda was gored to death in the Agua Prieta bullring in May 1930. Another bullfighter, Jesús Ortiz Pacheco, is mentioned repeatedly alongside him. At a bullfighting bar, an elderly regular named Jesús Pintado remembers Avellaneda fondly and confirms that Ortiz Pacheco is still alive and owns a ranch called La Buena Vida near the town of El Cuatro.

On January 9, García Madero passes the time drawing humorous visual riddles for the group, with Lupe proving the most adept at solving them. January 10 is consumed by a difficult, circular journey through the desert before they finally locate El Cuatro and find La Buena Vida. Ortiz Pacheco, a 79-year-old former matador with a sharp memory, confirms he knew both Avellaneda and Cesárea. He remembers Cesárea as educated, reserved, and influential. The night before Avellaneda was killed, he says, the bullfighter spoke obsessively to Ortiz Pacheco about Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the first Mexicans—an idea Ortiz Pacheco attributes entirely to Cesárea. At Avellaneda’s burial in Agua Prieta, Cesárea stood apart and did not weep or speak publicly, but she commissioned a mason to carve an epitaph on the grave—strange words, Ortiz Pacheco says, though he cannot remember them. The group spends the night at the ranch.

On January 11, they drive to the Agua Prieta cemetery. In a coffee shop beforehand, they hear two sardonic folk tales about executions, including one about Colonel Guadalupe Sánchez of Agua Prieta, who smokes a cigar before a firing squad with such composure that the ash never falls. At the cemetery, the veteran gravedigger is away, and they cannot locate the grave. During a January 13 phone call to Mexico City, the Impala’s owner, Quim, confirms Lupe’s fears, telling Belano that Alberto knows their location and is coming after them. On January 16, Belano buys a knife.

On January 17, they return and find the gravedigger, who leads them to Avellaneda’s niche. Belano boosts Lima up to read the plaque, which gives the matador’s full name as José Avellaneda Tinajero—the shared surname raising immediate questions about Cesárea’s relationship to the dead bullfighter. On January 19, they speculate about the meaning of the inscription but reach no conclusions.

On January 20, they spot Alberto driving a yellow Camaro through Nogales with his companion, a policeman. Belano refuses to treat the sighting as a threat and insists on going to the library. On January 22, a clue in the Nogales newspaper sends them to El Cubo, where a schoolteacher introduces them to an elderly Pápago woman who remembers Cesárea as a kind, educated person who lived in the village for a time, grew extremely thin after her companion left or died, and eventually departed. On January 23, while trying to access old teacher registration records in Hermosillo, Belano is confronted about his undocumented status as a Chilean national and threatened with deportation. They flee before police arrive. The next day, García Madero poses as a magazine reporter and retrieves the records himself, discovering that Cesárea taught in Sonora from 1930 to 1936, moving through several towns before disappearing from official records.

On January 29, in Santa Teresa, they interview Flora Castañeda, a retired teacher who was Cesárea’s close friend. Flora recounts how Cesárea quit teaching, worked at a factory, and lived alone in poverty, spending her free time writing in black notebooks. Flora visited Cesárea’s room and found a switchblade, a detailed hand-drawn map of the factory annotated in capital letters and exclamation marks, and stacks of notebooks. When asked about the knife, Cesárea said she was under threat of death and laughed. She told Flora she was writing about Hypatia—an Alexandrian philosopher killed by Christians in 415 AD—and spoke cryptically of events that would unfold around the year 2600. Years later, Flora saw Cesárea at a local fair selling medicinal herbs, enormously overweight and largely unrecognizable. Cesárea told her she lived sometimes in Villaviciosa and sometimes in El Palito, Arizona. They never met again. After the interview, the group agrees to head to Villaviciosa next. Crossing into the US is not an option for any of them. Lupe refuses to return to Mexico City.

On the night of January 30, Alberto finds them at the Hotel Juárez. Lima alerts García Madero and Lupe, and the three escape through a back door. Circling the block in the Impala, they see Belano talking calmly with Alberto in the hotel bar. They signal him; Belano runs for the car as Alberto grabs him and Alberto’s companion draws a gun. Belano breaks free and they escape into the night, heading toward Villaviciosa.

On January 31, they find Villaviciosa—a near-deserted town of adobe houses—and locate Cesárea Tinajero at the town’s stone washing troughs. They go to her house, where García Madero sleeps. Later, all five leave together in the Impala. Just outside town, Alberto’s Camaro blocks the road, and he and his companion step out with guns drawn.

On February 1, Belano, Lima, and Cesárea get out of the car, leaving García Madero and Lupe inside on Cesárea’s instruction. As Alberto moves toward the Impala to retrieve Lupe, Belano attacks him, pinning his gun arm and driving his knife into Alberto’s chest. Lima tackles the policeman. A shot is fired. The policeman gains the upper hand over Lima, but Cesárea throws herself onto them; two more shots ring out. When García Madero gets out of the car, he finds Alberto dead, Cesárea dead from a bullet to the chest, the policeman badly wounded in the abdomen, and Lima with a minor arm injury. Belano is bloodied but standing. The group drives both cars into the desert; the wounded policeman dies. They load the three bodies into the Camaro. At dawn, Belano and Lima tell García Madero and Lupe to keep the Impala and the remaining money. They will take the Camaro, bury the bodies in the desert, and travel back to Mexico City by bus. The two cars drive off in opposite directions.

The final diary entries are brief and increasingly sparse. On February 2, García Madero describes what has happened as their threnody. On February 3, Lupe says they are the last visceral realists in Mexico. On February 4, they return to Villaviciosa and sleep in Cesárea’s house; García Madero finds her notebooks but decides against mailing them to his friends, reasoning that the police must be searching for Belano and Lima. On February 9, they leave Villaviciosa. The diary entries for February 10-12 contain only lists of Sonoran town names. The final entries are a series of visual poems which pose a question about what is outside the window. The answers progress from a star to a sheet, and finally—on February 15—to a completely blank page.