Woes of the True Policeman

her life was Óscar Amalfitano, who had been her philosophy professor at UNAM and with whom she had never gotten anywhere.
    Once Isabel Aguilar went to see him at his house, in Mexico City, prepared to confess her feelings for him, but when she knocked at the door it was opened by a woman so beautiful and with such a visible look of happiness and self-confidence that she almost turned and ran down the stairs.
    From that day on she became very good friends with Edith Lieberman, whom she admired and loved wholeheartedly, and she banished the love she felt for Amalfitano to the limbo of platonic affections. When Amalfitano and his family left for Canada their ties weren’t severed. Once a month, at least, Isabel wrote a letter telling them about her life and her professional advances and each month she got a letter, usually from Edith, updating her on the vicissitudes of the Amalfitano family.
    When Edith Lieberman died Isabel was truly sad, but deep down she thought that her day might have come. At the time she was living in Mexico City with the militant macrobiotic Trotskyite and for a few weeks she went so far as to dream of getting on a plane and leaving for a new life in Brazil, with Rosa (whom she planned to care for as if she were her own daughter) and Amalfitano. But her timidity and indecisiveness were insurmountable obstacles and for one reason or another in the end she never traveled to Rio.
    The letters, nevertheless, continued with even greater intensity than before. In them Isabel told Amalfitano things that she didn’t tell anyone else. When she separated from the Trotskyite he was her greatest source of support. Later, with the changes, they began to write less. Isabel fell in love with the truck driver and experienced a brief period of sexual fulfillment. It was for his sake that she went north, to Hermosillo, where she taught at the university. There she met Horacio Guerra, who at the time was putting together a new philosophy department at the University of Santa Teresa. When she broke up with the truck driver she didn’t think twice before accepting the offer that Horacio Guerra kept extending year after year.
    The first months in Santa Teresa were lonely. At some point Isabel Aguilar dreamed of a more active social life, the kind that because of the truck driver (or because of her faculty mates, who despised the truck driver) she hadn’t had during her time in Hermosillo, but she soon discovered that in Santa Teresa the philosophy professors didn’t associate with anyone and that the professors from the other departments shunned the members of the philosophy department as if they had the plague. This loneliness and her sexual proclivities (warped by her daily contact with the truck driver) led her almost without realizing it into the arms of the soccer fiend mechanic. When she was able to break up with him at last, she felt even lonelier than ever and she resumed with new vigor her correspondence with her former professor. At the same time—Isabel Aguilar would have had to be very dense not to notice it—her friendship with Horacio Guerra, after the interregnum of the mechanic, became closer, and at some point she even went so far as to think that after all they didn’t make such a bad pair.
    But Horacio Guerra, though far from avoiding Isabel’s presence, never seemed prepared to take the crucial step, to speak the precise words that would make Isabel, tired of sleeping with her intellectual inferiors, fall into his arms.
    Sometimes Isabel Aguilar thought that all her problems could simply be attributed to the fact that she had no luck with men.
    When Amalfitano arrived in Santa Teresa it was like a rebirth. For the first few days she was at his side almost constantly. She located a motel where he and Rosa could stay until they found a house. She helped them look for a house that was to Rosa’s liking. She drove them everywhere, like an absolutely loyal and selfless taxi driver. She took them to eat at local restaurants and showed them the city. To her surprise, Amalfitano and his daughter seemed not to appreciate any of her efforts. Rosa was in a perpetual bad mood and Amalfitano was lost in his own thoughts. One afternoon she decided that rather than being a help to the Amalfitanos, her presence had become an annoyance, and she stopped seeing them. She wasn’t capable, however, of distancing herself entirely, and on weekends they often got together. Isabel would pick up her car and