From the way he laughed at that story, which was much more macabre than funny, I realized Stephen had taken acid. She moves once a year, he repeated, and then lit his marijuana pipe. While they talked and laughed, I thought that if immortality was really possible, I wanted to share it with them. Not with the old people. If only Juan could control the Darkness to get rid of the others.

The first weeks were beautiful. Stephen left the house to give us time alone, and Juan and I didn’t separate even for breakfast. We were together in bed and in the bath and in the beautiful winter garden, talking in low voices. Buying fruit and chocolates, the surprise of discovering he could sleep through the night without waking up coughing. The surgery had helped him a lot, especially with the dyspnoea; he wasn’t cyanotic anymore, his fingers weren’t blue, and he looked at them in astonishment and also studied his lips in the mirror every morning, as if he expected the color of death to return. I watched him sleep with his legs tangled in the sheets in our room, which stank of sex and salt. We spent whole days in bed and I caressed him in silence, the golden hair on his legs, his broad, mistreated chest, his sunken belly, the scars, the veins of his arms dark gray under his pale skin, his long hair that gave him the look not of a Viking or a rock and roller or a hippie, but rather of something that was only visiting in the present, something savage and desolate.

Graciela, Juan’s doctor, together with two bodyguards and some assistants, had moved into the house next door: the neighbors, who were renting, handed it over immediately thanks to an exorbitant cash offering. Still, we could ignore their presence. My uncle visited us too. My friends weren’t going to come until they were invited. Nothing interrupted our days of exploring and reading, of dancing naked in the kitchen in the light of the open refrigerator, or of telling secrets without fear of being overheard. I thought I had gotten pregnant during those weeks, and I cried when I found blood on the sheets. The mattress was bloodstained too, and Juan flipped it over.