The story of how I came to live in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, is a fascinating one, fascinating. It is not, however, it should be noted, right up front, a story that I am in any way well-equipped to tell, in the sense, in the very real sense, in the I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you sense, that I myself have no idea how I came to live in Guanajuato. In some such sense of the word, I found myself one day, living in Guanajuato, as though I'd picked up a curious object while walking a mountain trail, with no conception whatsoever of how I'd come to be living here, apparently some time ago, no recollection of whatever chain of events I was myself at the end of, and no sense at all of having led a prior life. I certainly had a prior life; I am, after all, in all probability, somewhere in my mid-fifties, and no one comes to be living somewhere in his mid-fifties without having had a prior life; it takes time in any case to become of a certain age, time in which events would no doubt have taken place, even if one can't recall them, and these events would have made up what amounts to my prior life, so I had no doubt that I had one, whatever it had amounted to. The fine lines and wrinkles that appear on one's face, with the passage of time and exposure to sunlight and the gradual accumulation of certain habitual facial expressions, don't just appear out of nowhere one day, and assume their positions around the downturned mouth, or the worry-furrowed eyebrow, or the scrutinizing eyes; I had no doubt that time, and the pressure of events, and the long narrative chain of time-sensitive circumstance, had produced these lines and wrinkles I could read on my own face, even if I myself was unable to recreate them. Somewhere along the way, however, the narrative chain had come unlinked, the chain of cause and effect by which one set of circumstances gives rise to the next set of circumstances. I myself was a link that was both the end of one chain, one I had no recollection of, and the beginning of another chain, of whatever would happen next. While I don't doubt for a moment that my story must be a fascinating one, I, to put it bluntly, do not know a word of it; I found myself one day, like finding a link of anchor chain in the mountains of central Mexico, and not only was this chain link me, but I had no way on earth of explaining how I'd come to be here; as far as I could tell, as I stood there trailside, I might as well have appeared out of thin mountain air.

I woke up one morning in a room, as it would soon turn out, in a small hotel, with no clue at all as to my identity or whereabouts. I showered, shaved, dressed, using clothing I found lying in a comfortable-looking chair, went down to what was recognizably a hotel lobby, and was told by the desk clerk, a man almost certainly of Indian and perhaps Spanish descent, that the town I was in was called Guanajuato. I looked around the room, at its warm terracotta flooring tiles, covered with blue, yellow, magenta, purple, and white woven rugs, at its rough-hewn wooden seating, its paintings, of wildly colored mythic birds, hung somewhat erratically on whitewashed plaster walls, its glassed-in display cases of hand-painted ceramic plates, its front door facing a narrow cobblestone street, a street I almost certainly must have walked upon previously, and found nothing at all that I recognized, nothing that served to trigger even the faintest of memories, of drinking too late, say, at a local bar, of a wild night of revelry, of buying one too many rounds for newfound companions who were enjoying my company, of discovering to my amazement the lateness of the hour, my state of inebriation, my need for a good night's sleep, and having to seek therefore shelter from the cool air of the night. Nothing, as they say, came back to me. There was nothing whatsoever here in this room, however warm and authentic it appeared to be when I looked around at the room's belongings, which reminded me of anything of a personal nature; as far as personal reminders go, the room might as well have been empty. The room itself, however, far from being empty, held beautiful weavings and hand-painted ceramics and rough-hewn wooden furniture and wild mythic birds, things that I could see with my own two eyes, or perhaps I should say the eyes that, for the sake of simplicity, would need be thought of as my very own two eyes.

To be clear, it's not that these objects lacked associations; they were not in any way cut off from the rest of history and somehow stranded here. I knew, for example, that one of the painted mythic birds was Quetzalcoatl, sacred god of the Aztecs, god of sky and creation, patron of the priesthood, of learning and knowledge, this bird had lost nothing of its history and associations, but this had nothing to do with me, there was nothing about the bird that I could associate with personally, it was the same bird to me that it would have been to any other man, any man with a knowledge of Quetzalcoatl, except that any other man would find, in addition to his knowledge, a connection to himself, a set of associations he took personally and therefore regarded as properly his. These associations did not, in any sense, belong to me; they belonged, properly, to the bird. I don't want to convey the impression that I was uninformed or ignorant. To the contrary, I seemed to know quite a lot of things, it's just that none of the things I knew belonged to me; my own knowledge was not in any way a personal possession, it could just as well have belonged to anyone. I knew, to give another example, simply by looking at them, that the colorful rugs on the square-tiled floor were hand-woven on a loom, as was indicated by the manner in which they lay on the floor, not quite flat, with small bubbles and waves caused by the uneven weaving, an effect that is not normally produced by a machine. I also knew that they were, in all likelihood, colored with natural dyes, indigo from the Anil plant, deep magenta from the cochineal insect, the yellow of rock moss, the sea snail purple, the very sea snail, purpura pansa, from the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca that was so prized by the Europeans after their invasion of the New World, these were all things I knew, I just didn't know them personally, they could just as well have been known by someone else. I had knowledge, in other words, I was clearly the sort of man in possession of a set of facts, but there are, after all, all sorts of men in possession of facts, so what sort of man was I? I had no idea.

I left the front desk, climbed the stairs back up to my room on the third floor, used the key that I had somehow acquired to enter the room, and made a conscious decision to take a good look around. The room itself was spacious and light-filled, once I'd opened the shutters, situated as it was at the front of the building, with two tall windows sunk deep into thick whitewashed walls, overlooking what appeared to be a large town or small city, set between steep hillsides in an undulating ravine, filled with church spires topped with crosses and weathervanes, and the basilica domes of nearby cathedrals, and closer to the earth, a winding maze of narrow streets. From my perspective, on first sight, I mean really and truly on first sight, since I had no impressions at all that would have preceded these first impressions, I appeared to be situated on a hillside just above the center of the city, a conclusion I drew no doubt tentatively from the evidence gathered by...