Luis got up from the sofa and sat beside Gaspar to hug him, but he found that the scarred arm, extended as it was, kept him from getting close. That, and Gaspar’s eyes, which wanted no comfort. After a while, Luis spoke. He wanted details. He wanted to know how much of this Gaspar had told Isabel. He didn’t doubt his nephew. For Gaspar, the confession brought no relief. Quite the contrary. Now his scar was burning, and he could well imagine his father’s contemptuous expression as he called him lazy, and a traitor. Especially a traitor. He felt he had denounced his father.

Vicky liked that summer at the hospital, the first of her internships. She even preferred being at the hospital to going to school, despite the tension and the many sleepless hours and that fevered state of forced insomnia. Some of her colleagues took stimulants—amphetamines, most of them; coffee, everyone; cocaine, some—but she had learned that after a while the lack of sleep became a kind of burning pilot light: she was alert, she smoldered and conserved energy. There was no need to stoke the fire.

The hospital was short on gauze and gloves, its mattresses were old and many stank from the dampness of years, and some of its rooms had cracks and leaks. The staff worked well nonetheless, though on early Saturday mornings they sometimes had to make room for the drunks and knife-fight victims in the hallways, and they sometimes had to argue with patients’ friends and family whom no one controlled or stopped from barging in from the ER waiting room, sometimes violently. The head doctor was a young man, very arrogant and very attractive. Some months back, Vicky had caught his attention after a strange afternoon. A young woman had come in with a drooping eyelid, difficulty swallowing, and a numb face. One of her colleagues said it could be facial paralysis. The head doctor was leaning toward a cerebrovascular accident, when the girl added that she was hypertensive and her head sometimes hurt. Then Victoria had a certainty that was so clear she even raised her voice to argue in its favor. It’s myasthenia, she said. The others didn’t overrule her, but they did rule out starting the exploration there, because, said the head doctor, it was statistically the least likely possibility. It’s what she has, insisted Victoria, and she was emphatic. When she saw she was about to lose the argument, she asked the patient if she saw double. The girl said yes. That she’d thought she needed glasses, or maybe she was just tired. Vicky had a very simple idea. Let’s do a radiograph of her chest, she said. Myasthenia can be caused by a thymoma. If she has a thymoma, we’ll know I’m right. And it’s just a radiograph, two minutes, it’s routine.