In February 2022, I received a phone call that would radically change my life: the New York Public Library had awarded me a grant to write a book. I would have to move to the city by the end of August.

At that point I had been married to Sofía for seven years and our relationship was going through a rough patch, the severity of which I did not want to admit. We were going to couple therapy once a week and I had moved to Cuernavaca, an hour south of Mexico City, to give each other more space. My friends told me the time had come to accept defeat and split up, but instead I doubled down and asked Sofía to move to New York with me. She accepted. The two of us could live off the grant, which was just for nine months: enough time to get to know the city in depth without growing to hate it. We started arranging our visas, dreaming about the neighbourhoods where we would live.

Sofía told me that before moving to New York she wanted to go to Buenos Aires to visit her family, so one morning I took her to Mexico City International Airport. We said our goodbyes with a casual kiss in the car, without any fuss, thinking we would only be apart for three weeks, but that was actually the last time we saw each other.

A few minutes later, in her flight departure lounge, Sofía met a man she immediately hit it off with. By the time they landed in Buenos Aires, they were already in love.

Two weeks later, in a video call with poor connection and our couple therapist sitting in, Sofía told me she would be staying in Buenos Aires for good, and that she wanted a divorce. With a faltering voice, I told her I understood and wished her the best. The next day I packed her stuff up in cardboard boxes and put them in storage.

I spent the next month in a daze, crying a lot and eating very little. The next four months were still a daze, but I felt lighter, enjoying Mexico City as I only do when I know I am about to leave for somewhere else.

Furthermore, during those months I finished translating the Francisco Goldman novel from which I took the epigraph of this text. On translating that paragraph into Spanish I suddenly knew everything was going to be fine, or at least I realised that a future existed, that New York would open up for me like a promise of redemption.

It was midday on a Wednesday when I arrived in New York. On Thursday I met Catherine. We talked about our respective divorces while I drank a beer and she a glass of wine. After four hours chatting she asked me if I had any plans for Sunday; she wanted to try LSD, which she had never taken, in a girlfriend’s apartment in the Village, where she was temporarily staying. She invited me to share a tab of acid with her. I accepted.

That first day, moreover, an editor I met invited me to take part in the dramatised reading of a theatrical farce during the launch of a magazine. I also accepted. My approach was to say yes to everything, to move forward without fear, to let the city itself set the pace. New York demands you give yourself up to her without ceremony. Better to ride the city than get trampled by it.

That Sunday I took the subway from Queens, where I was staying at my cousin’s, to the Village. As I arrived with time to spare I went to the legendary bookshop The Strand and spent a while leafing through old books. Just before four, I crossed Broadway and walked along East 11th, following the rising numbers until a voice from above brought me to a stop. It was Catherine, who was sitting on the fire escape of an old building.

The apartment was unsettlingly beautiful. High vaulted ceilings, built-in white bookshelves, heavy velvet curtains, antique toys. Reds and greens with silver details and patina. It looked like the set for an Almodóvar film if Almodóvar were to make a film in New York. Catherine hugged me, offered me half the LSD and led me to the fire escape where there were two deck chairs and a little table. We spent an hour there talking, then lay down on the apartment floor, next to the windows, bathed in the late summer light. We talked a lot.

At around seven we went out for a walk. We held hands as we strolled, almost floating, in the direction of the river, and Catherine said: ‘Right now we’re the most unbearable couple in Manhattan.’ We sat down opposite the Hudson and I thought about other cities with rivers which, in one way or another, had left their mark on my life: Madrid and its sad Manzanares, Buenos Aires and its River Plate, the Mapocho in Santiago and Geneva’s Rhône.

That night I stayed over at Catherine’s friend’s apartment on East 11th, and the next morning, now free of the effects of the drug, I realised I was in love.

Everyone warns you that New York is a strange city, that it can lay waste to your ambitions and spit you out like rubbish, but it can also seduce you, hold on to you and change your life completely.

The nine months I was going to spend in the city turned into two years, perhaps more. I went back to the apartment several times, for dinner parties and to drink martinis with strangers of all ages and professions. And 636 days after our first lysergic date, Catherine and I got married right there, in the apartment on East 11th, reading our vows in two languages in the presence of friends and family.

[...]