Lillian could not believe in the Doctor's death. She consoled the wife as if she were a child with an exaggerated sorrow. She heard the ambulance come, the one he had raised the funds to buy. She saw the doctors and the people around the car. She realized that it was his car's hitting the pole that had cut off the electric current for a moment. The wife now talked incoherently: "They shot him, they finally shot him... They shot him and the car went against the pole. I wanted to get him away from here. Who would be capable of killing such a man? Who? Tell me. Tell me."

Who would be capable of killing such a man? Who, thinking of the sick people who would need him and not find him, thinking how gently he took his short moments of pleasure without rebelling when they were interrupted. Thinking how deep his pleasure was in curing illness. Thinking how he had tried to control the drug traffic and refused to dispense dangerous forgetfulness. Thinking of his nights spent in studying drugs for remembrance, which were known to the Indians. As a port doctor, what underworld had he known which neither Lillian nor his wife could ever have known, but which his wife had sensed as dangerous.

Lillian was helping the wife up the hill, helping the woman who had hated the city he loved, and whose hatred was now justified by events.

"I have to prepare the children, but they are so young. What can I say to such young children about death?"

Lillian did not want to know whether he had bled, been cut by glass. It seemed to her that he alone knew how to bandage, how to stop bleeding, how to heal.

The siren of the ambulance grew fainter. People walked behind them in silence.

If it were true that what we practice on others is secretly what we wish practiced upon ourselves, then he had wanted, needed all the care he gave.

To the wife with her too-high heels, her coiled black hair, her dark and jealous eyes, her small hands and feet, what could he have confided when from the beginning she turned against the city and the sick people he loved?

Lillian did not believe in the death of Doctor Hernandez, and yet she heard the shot, she felt in her body the sound of the car hitting the pole, she knew the moment of death, as if all of them had happened to her.

He had something to say, which he had not said, and he had gone, taking with him his secrets.