I was in the taxi on my way home when I started to feel the pain in my waist and muscles. Later I learned that in such situations adrenaline acts as an anesthetic and it isn’t until the scare is over that you feel the effects of a hard hit. As I got undressed in my bedroom that night I saw I’d started bleeding. I didn’t want to wait until the next day to call the doctor. I took advantage of having his cell number and called him to find out how I could save the baby. Marisa’s gynecologist seemed worried at first, but he quickly recovered his paternal demeanor and told me, delicately, that it would be difficult to do something. He told me to be patient and come in the next morning for a thorough examination. Some people swear there is no such thing as an accident. I don’t fully agree with that. But still, I can’t say if my fall that evening was an accident or a Freudian slip. I am sure that it was not at all intentional. A team of scientists I met a few months later at Princeton University claim that if they put all our genetic information, education, and the most significant events in our lives into a computer and give us a hundred different dilemmas and make us choose for each one, the machine would figure out our responses before we could think them. In reality—so they say—we don’t make decisions. All of our choices are preconditioned. Anyway, in that instant I didn’t get to make a decision, and I don’t know if I would have wanted to know what such a computer would say about it.

The next day I went to the doctor’s office first thing, neglecting no small number of prior commitments. The gynecologist examined me as he’d said he would and confirmed the prognosis he’d given me the night before. Nothing could be done.

“You’re lucky it happened so early on,” he said with an incomprehensible optimism. “We won’t have to scrape your uterus to expel the residue.”