The question arrives about once a week now. It arrives in English and in Spanish and, twice so far, in French. It comes from people who have found Movements on the internet and have looked at some or all of the posters and have then written to the address at the bottom of the page to ask whether the individual pieces are available for purchase.

Movements is a collection of twenty-four fictitious exhibition posters I made in Mexico City in 1982, at the age of twenty-three, for an audience I never reached. Each poster commemorates the small room, the one that locks only from the inside, where the body is alone with itself. The posters treat that room the way a serious museum would treat any other artistic subject, which is to say, with gravity, with historical apparatus, and without the apologetic humor the subject usually invites. Whether this constitutes art or a long joke is a question I have given up trying to answer.

The short answer to the question about purchase is yes. I will send you one from Mexico City, for the cost of shipping and whatever else you believe is fair. The long answer is a story for whoever is curious about how the posters came to exist at all, which is a more complicated matter than I would have believed if someone had told it to me at the age I was when I made them.

The idea for Movements arrived in a stall of the men's bathroom at a law firm. I was twenty-three. I worked as a legal clerk for a firm on the Paseo de la Reforma, where the senior partners wore suits from London and the junior associates drank their coffee from paper cups and were not introduced to clients. I filed documents. I translated letters. I had been taught, by the small humiliations of the job, that my time was less valuable than the paper I was handling, and I accepted this the way one accepts the weather. I believed, with the composure of a young man who has not yet failed at anything, that I would not be a clerk for long.

I must confess something about the stall. I spent a good deal of time in the stall that year, and the reasons were not the reasons the room was built for. I was twenty-three and I was lonely in a way I would not have admitted to anyone at the time, including myself. I had moved to the city from a smaller place, and in the city I knew almost no one except my two roommates, who were also clerks at other firms and who were also tired. At work I was the youngest person in the office by a decade. At home I was the quietest person in the apartment by the same decade. There was nowhere in my life where I was comfortably alone except for the stall at the end of the hallway on the fourth floor of the firm, where the door locked and the light was soft and nobody would knock. I went there most afternoons. Not because I needed to, usually, but because it was the one place in my life where the quiet was not suspicious. I took a book with me sometimes. Mostly I just sat. The sitting was the point. The wall was what I looked at while I sat.

I had memorized that wall without intending to. I could have drawn it from memory if anyone had asked, which nobody had. And then, on an afternoon I cannot date precisely but that I am sure was early in the year, I looked at the wall and realized: the wall had been given nothing to say for itself. Someone had built this small private room for the most private of human acts and had declined, at the last moment, to decorate it. I thought: there should be art here. Real art. Art that treats the room with the gravity that it deserves. I thought: there should be the art that would have been here if anyone had ever been willing to make it.

My plan, which developed fully within the confines of that small room, was to sell the art at La Lagunilla on a Sunday. La Lagunilla was, in those years, the Sunday market where the newly-rich of Mexico City came looking for objects that would make them appear more cultured than they were. Not the truly rich, who bought their art from dealers in Polanco who arrived at the house with a leather portfolio, but the almost-rich, the children of the old poor who had been given money and did not yet know what to do with it. These were the people who wanted to own a thing that signaled taste without requiring them to possess any. A Pompidou poster in a frame suggested, at a glance, that the owner had been to Paris. The buyers at the Lagunilla did not want paintings. They wanted advertisements for paintings, which were cheaper and, in their way, more useful, because the advertisement could be explained at a dinner party while the painting itself could not. I had understood this very clearly. I would make pieces to fit exactly into the space between the real and the signifier of the real. They were, I believed, going to sell beautifully.

I began that night.

For six months I bought every exhibition poster I could find at the librerías de viejo on Calle Donceles, where the used-book dealers have been selling old paper to each other since before my grandfather was born. I cut them apart on the kitchen table of the apartment I shared in the Colonia Roma, with a razor blade and a rubber cement that smelled of gasoline, and I worked after my roommates had gone to sleep so that I would not have to explain. I lifted the typography from one poster and the seated figure from another and the institutional calm from a third. The figures came from Manet and Picasso and a catalogue of Mexican modernism I had taken from the firm's library and not returned. I altered each one so that the posture implied the presence of a small room. The work was the work of a young man who did not know what he was doing but who knew, very clearly, what he wanted to do, which is the best condition to make anything in.

One of the twenty-four I remember more clearly than the others, because it was the one I was proudest of while I was making it and the one that disappointed me most afterwards. I had come across, in one of the shops on Donceles, an old catalogue-poster from a retrospective at the Van Gogh Museum, a show from 1973 or 1974, I forget exactly, featuring a self-portrait of Vincent seated. One of the famous angst-ridden ones, the eyes enormous and the face very carefully composed. He was sitting on a plain wooden chair. I took the chair out with a razor blade. I replaced it with the faintest suggestion of a porcelain rim and a metal lever — barely visible, so that if you did not look for it you would not see it, and if you did look for it you would wonder whether you were inventing it. I kept everything else. I called the piece De Stille Zitter — The Silent Sitter — in the Dutch of the institution the borrowed materials had come from, because I thought the name lent the work a little dignity.

I believed at the time that it would be my best seller. It combined the two things I thought I understood about my audience at the Lagunilla — the desire to own a famous name, and the desire to participate in a small transgression — and it seemed to me to be the perfect balance of both. A buyer could tell his friends he owned a Van Gogh. A buyer could also tell his friends where the Van Gogh hung. I was certain it would sell out first. I was wrong. Not because the Lagunilla ever had the chance to render its verdict, but because I had already, privately, rendered my own.

The problem with De Stille Zitter was the problem with every portrait, which I would not fully understand for another four decades. Van Gogh was looking at the viewer. He was looking at me as I cut him out of the chair he had been sitting in, and he was looking at whoever would eventually hang him on the wall of the small room, and a man in a small room does not want to be looked at. In the small room you look down or you look away. You do not engage. You do not perform. You do not meet the eye of the visitor. I realized this about a week after it was finished, when I hung the test print on the wall of my apartment's own small room and sat down in front of it and discovered, with the particular embarrassment of the young artist confronting the limits of his own intention, that I could not sit there with Vincent looking at me. I would have preferred a Modigliani — one of the long boneless nudes whose spines have given up — or a Hopper, one of those American solitaries who have the specific talent for being lonely without being interesting. Either would have been better, because either would look away.

When the first set was finished — twenty-four pieces, because twenty-four is the number of hours in the day and I wanted each hour to have its witness — I took them to a printer I had found on Calle Bolívar, in the Centro. His name was Don Rogelio and he was famous throughout the city for the quality of his work. His presses had been shipped from Europe — from Heidelberg, it was said, and from Milan — at a time when nobody else in Mexico was importing such machines. The serious museums sent their catalogue work to him. The private collectors sent their limited editions. A young man with no money and no connections could not normally have approached such a printer, but I went to him anyway, because I had heard he was also kind to beginners, and the rumor turned out to be true. He looked at my forged posters with the professional neutrality of a man who had reproduced every imaginable thing on paper, and he said that the work was unusual, and that he would give me a good price on a hundred copies because he could run them at night when his presses would otherwise be idle. He told me the work would find its audience. He shook my hand.

Don Rogelio was arrested in 1998, sixteen years after the afternoon I am describing. I will not give the precise reason, except to say that when the police searched the locked room at the back of the shop they found unspeakable photographs of unspeakable people doing unspeakable things, accumulated over decades. The quality of the prints, it is rumored, was impeccable.

I collected the posters from him on a Tuesday afternoon in April of 1982. I loaded them into my car, which was a dark green Volkswagen Sedan — a vocho — that I had bought used from a cousin for the equivalent of four months of my clerk's salary. The vocho had a Pioneer radio I had saved almost a year to buy, a radio that pulled in stations from as far as Querétaro on a clear night. I stacked the posters in the passenger seat in four careful towers, leaning against the glove box, and I drove them away from the shop feeling, for the first time in my life, that I had finished something. The feeling is rare and I have not often felt it since.

On the way home from Don Rogelio's shop I stopped at the corner of Mesones and República del Salvador to buy tamales from a woman who had been standing there since the Revolution. I was hungry and I was happy and I thought that on my first great afternoon I deserved to eat well. I bought two, one of rajas, one of mole, and I walked back to the vocho eating the first one, because I could not wait.

The driver's window had been punched inward. Not shattered. Punched, the way a practiced hand punches a window, leaving a small neat ring of glass on the seat. The Pioneer was gone. The months of saving, the nights of listening to the signal from Querétaro — gone. The wires hung from the dashboard like cut veins. I stood on the sidewalk holding the uneaten tamal and I understood, within two seconds, that this was the ordinary cost of being alive in Mexico City in those years. I was not the first and not the last, and the radio was the radio and nothing more. My posters were still in the passenger seat. Four careful towers, untouched. The thieves had not known the posters were worth taking. I was relieved. I climbed through the window-side of the vocho and I drove to the police station on Victoria to file the report that every man with a stolen car radio in that city had filed before me.

The station was a small building from the nineteen-forties with a green tile floor and a woman behind a desk who had, by the look of her, filed ten thousand such reports that year and would file ten thousand more. I filled out the form. I gave the year of the Pioneer and the color of the vocho and the minute of the theft and the number of months I had saved for the radio, which she did not write down. I handed her the form. She looked at me and said, in the voice of a woman who had stopped being surprised by anything the city did, that she would file it.

When I came back out, the vocho had been broken into a second time.

I am not making this up. I am not compressing two events into one for the sake of the story. It happened exactly this way. While I had been inside filing the report of the first theft, someone had reached through the already-broken window and opened the glove compartment and taken my CD collection. The CD collection was two items. A José José album called Reencuentro that I had taken from my mother’s collection in order to impress the girlfriend prior to my current girlfriend. And a Sandro de América record I had bought used on Donceles, with a scratch across the second track. Two discs. That was the collection. The thieves had taken both. They had moved the posters to get at the glove compartment — the posters had shifted in their towers, a hand had touched them, examined them, and decided against them — and they had taken the CDs and left the posters where they had found them. A scratched Sandro was worth more to them than one hundred prints of the first project of my life. They were in a hurry and they were making choices and my project was one of the things they had chosen to leave.

I did not tell this story for forty years because I could not find the distance from which it would stop being an insult.

I drove home in silence. I carried the four towers of posters up to the apartment, and then, after some consideration, up one more flight to the attic storage space the building's superintendent had told me I could use. I placed them in a corner. I covered them with a tarp I had borrowed from the building's superintendent and never returned. I went downstairs. I did not mention the posters to my roommates because I did not want to explain. Not the project, not the robbery, not the particular way the second robbery had commented on the first. I lay on my bed and thought about the men in the hurry, and the scratched Sandro, and the calm professional assessment that had been passed on my work by a critic who did not know he was a critic. The project was over. I did not say this to myself in words. I felt it in my body, which is how the young give up on things.

The next morning I went back to the firm. I filed documents. I translated a letter from French. I became, in slow increments, a person who had been going to be an artist and then stopped.

In a country like this one, a profession accumulates around a man whether he is paying attention or not. I became an associate. Then a junior partner. Then, after many years, a senior partner, which is the profession I practice still. I did not make art for forty years. I thought about the vocho occasionally, because the vocho was discontinued in 2003 and the last one off the Puebla line was placed in a museum, which is a joke the country has made at its own expense. I thought about the Pioneer occasionally, because I wondered who had ended up listening to it. I did not think about the posters because I had made the decision, without noticing I had made it, not to.

Last winter my daughter insisted I clean out the attic. The building was being sold. I had to empty the storage space by the end of the month or it would be emptied for me by the new owners, who were not going to be careful about what they found.

I went up on a Saturday morning with a roll of garbage bags, a cup of coffee, and a pair of work gloves, and I began to throw away forty years of paper. Tax returns. Wedding photographs from a wedding that had not lasted. Law school notebooks. My daughter's school drawings. A lamp and a telephone, both broken. A set of encyclopedias in Spanish that no one had opened since the Berlin Wall came down. At the bottom, under the tarp I had borrowed from a superintendent who was now himself dead, I found the posters.

They had aged the way faces age. Some had yellowed. Some had mold. The rubber cement had dried out, and the edges of the seated figures had lifted slightly from their backgrounds, so that the seams of the compositions were now visible in a way they had not been when I made them. When I came back downstairs my daughter saw my face and did not ask what I had found, and later that evening, when I had told her, she said very gently: Papá, maybe put them on the internet.

My nephew, who is twenty-four and understands the internet the way my generation understood the telephone — as a machine you pick up and speak into without thinking about how it works — helped me scan and photograph them. He built me a website. He corrected my English. He explained to me that the project could have readers in places I had never been and could speak in languages I could not write.

The site needed a name. My nephew told me this one evening in his apartment in the Condesa, while he was waiting for a set of scans to finish processing and drinking the terrible instant coffee he insists on keeping in his cupboard even though I have told him many times that a man of twenty-four can afford real coffee. I said the project already had a name — Movements, the name I had chosen in 1982 and had been carrying quietly for forty years in my own head. My nephew typed the word into the browser. He typed several variations of it. He typed movements.com and movimientos.com and movementsart.com and themovements.net and a dozen others, and each one came back with the message that the name was taken, or that the name was for sale but for a sum of money neither of us was willing to spend on a project that was already, in my private accounting, a failure.

My nephew explained that the internet was old now, older than I had realized, and that every short and beautiful word had been claimed long ago by people who had no use for it and were waiting to be paid to release it. He said that we would need to pick a name that was less obvious. I told him that in my profession, the names of things are dictated by statute and nobody has to invent anything.

He suggested that we should try the titles of the individual pieces, because one of them might be free. We went through the list. La Chambre Silencieuse was taken. Form and Silence was taken. Il Corpo Assente was taken. The Floating World at Rest was taken. Der Junge Bacchus was taken by a German gardening-supply company that had been using the name since 2004 for a line of ceramic planters shaped like chubby cherubs. We were both quiet for a moment, considering the kind of man who sells ceramic cherubs under the name of a Caravaggio painting. My nephew kept typing. Filosofo Sedente was taken. Al-Sākin was taken, which surprised me, and was apparently being used as the personal blog of a Lebanese poet who had not updated it since 2011. El Cuerpo Solitario was taken. Each refusal arrived in its pale red rectangle and each rectangle seemed to me to be the same refusal the thieves had delivered in 1982.

Then my nephew typed theheavyhour.com and the page came back white. The name was available. He said it with the small satisfaction of a man who had been working on a puzzle for an hour and had finally found the shape that fit the hole.

I want to be honest about the piece The Heavy Hour is named after. The Heavy Hour is not, in my opinion, the strongest piece in the collection. It is not the worst either. It is a seated figure in a register somewhere between Goya and the quieter Italian realists. The essay I later wrote for the collection makes the piece sound more deliberate than it was. The essay gives it a meaning it did not have in 1982. This is the privilege of the older writer, to retroactively endow his younger self with intentions the younger self had not gotten around to forming.

The name The Heavy Hour was chosen because it was the one title my nephew typed into the browser that did not come back in the pale red rectangle of refusal. That is the whole reason. Not the quality of the piece. Not the grandeur of the phrase. Not the suitability of the name to the project as a whole. It was simply the first title in the queue that nobody else had wanted, and my nephew clicked the button and paid eleven dollars for a year of it on a credit card that was not mine, and we had a domain, and the project had a name, and the name was the name of a piece I did not particularly love. I have since come to believe it was correct. The name does not need to describe the project. The name only needs to be the door, and any door will do. The name on the door is just the name on the door.

So: are the posters for sale. Yes. The ones I have are the originals from 1982 — the ones Don Rogelio printed before the second half of his life became known, the ones the thieves at the police station declined to take, the ones that spent forty years under a borrowed tarp in an attic in Roma. Some are in better condition than others. I will not try to make them look new because they are not new. If you want one, write to me. Tell me which piece you would like. I will wrap it in archival paper and mail it to you from the Palacio Postal downtown, the way one was taught to mail things in this country when mailing things still carried some small ceremony. You may send me whatever you believe the poster is worth. A centavo is acceptable. A thousand dollars is acceptable. I have been surprised by the world once already, by a man in a hurry who chose a scratched Sandro over my first completed work, and I have decided in my old age that the second surprise of my life does not need to be about money.

One last thing. When I found the posters in the attic I expected grief. I expected the reunion to be a confrontation between the young man I had been and the old man I had become, with the young man winning. It did not happen that way. What I felt instead was something closer to amusement — as if the young man had been waiting in the attic for forty years not to accuse me of abandoning him but to tell me that he had been all right up there, that the posters had been all right up there, that the work had continued to exist whether or not I was paying attention to it, and that the attention of the maker is perhaps not as important to the made thing as the maker believes it is while he is making it. The posters did not need me. They needed only to be made, which I had done, and then to be found, which had now also been done.

Write to me. I will send you a poster.

— El Autor / Ciudad de México