The first time, there were dark circles under the boy’s eyes, as now, as always. Bradford had just finished his specialization in cardiovascular surgery and had joined the most prestigious team in the country at the Italian Hospital. It was 1957 when they brought the boy to him, a patient at the hospital whose parents couldn’t afford to continue his medical treatment. He was five years old and Bradford decided not to wait to operate. It would be his first surgery on a congenital heart disease, Tetralogy of Fallot. The child had been unforgettable from the first: he was dying, and yet he stared at Bradford defiantly, sitting up despite the urging from his parents, who, if they hadn’t been so hunched over and servile, would have looked like reincarnations of Thor and Freya, but as they were, snivelling and whining about their poor little boy, how they just didn’t have the money, how he’s going to die, Doctor, my sister had heart problems, too—Bradford hated that vulgarity, he saw them as a couple of peasants who deserved every bit of their humiliation. Not the boy, though. His skin was blue, his lips violet, he could no longer walk. He didn’t even notice his parents’ degradation, he seemed focused on breathing, on living, with a will that Bradford found monstrous and that gave him the courage to operate using methods that were the most complex of the time, for both the patient and the surgeons. He relives those methods in his head now, kneeling while the Darkness extends over his head—this happened the last time too, Darkness invading the sky—and they say his power is lessening? It doesn’t feel like it on this night of unbearable heat. Bradford remembers as he waits: horizontal incision from the sternum under the armpit to the third intercostal space, division of second and third cartilage, entrance into the pleural cavity, left lung apparently normal . . . and then he interrupts his own reminiscences, far removed from what is happening around him, the moans and the scribes’ frenetic scribbling—Bradford has never heard the voice of the Darkness before—and he tells himself that is a lie, the boy had never seemed normal inside, it was beautiful in there, beautiful to touch his cold body—the theatre was kept so cool back then that an operation was like an autopsy or an anatomy lesson, except that the organs moved, breathed, bled, throbbed—the boy was abnormal not only because of the heart defect that, once he was opened, proved to be even more intricate than his cardiologists had thought, with several other defects in addition to the Tetralogy—an interatrial communication of some ten millimeters and a quite significant anomaly in the right acute marginal branch of the coronary artery that was going to make surgical correction of the pulmonary stenosis very difficult—how had he even made it to the operating table alive? No, he wasn’t normal, he was beautiful inside, and the experience of touching his laboring, hypertrophic heart had been for Bradford like discovering a nymph in a sacred forest, seeing a golden sunrise or being surprised by a flower blooming at night. The colors of the boy’s insides were more intense, his blood smelled of an unknown, salty metal, his arteries were shaded with grays and blues and reds. Right pulmonary artery identified and cut. Superior vena cava, too small, left subclavian artery identified and cut, transposition of vertebral artery to thyrocervical trunk. Clip on subclavian artery at the distal point to its origin at the aorta. Two clips on left pulmonary artery, the first at the origin, the second at the entrance to the lung. Transverse incision in the wall of the pulmonary artery. Anastomosis performed with silk thread between the end of the left subclavian artery and the side of the left pulmonary artery. Almost no bleeding when the clips are removed.