In 1953 I met a young, active, and very committed Carlos Fuentes. He was twenty-three years old, and I was twenty-one. He died on 15 May 2012, four days before I turned eighty. Celia Chávez, the wife of the poet Jaime García Torres, who was Carlos Fuentes's editor for many years, was giving a dinner party that day at her home in Las Lomas, which Fuentes and his wife were to attend. At two o'clock that afternoon, the news hit like a thunderbolt and darkened our spirits. It wasn't possible that Carlos Fuentes could have died.