At first he thought that the intellectual and emotional paralysis, that stupefied-lump-of-flesh state, was the product of illness, but then he read up on the side effects of the pills and started to wonder who his brother would be without all that chemically induced equanimity. It was something he’d have to work out for himself. Careful observation of his brother’s gestures and facial expressions led only to an understanding of the futility of observing a drugged patient. When they stayed for a meal at the clinic, Laurita, who had grown into a brash girl, treated Older Brother in a way he himself found humiliating; she’d wipe his face with a napkin, reprimand him when his peas rolled off the plate onto the table. He tried to act as if Older Brother’s brain wasn’t anesthetized by Haloperidol, attempting to find topics of conversation that would reactivate some connection in his brain. He still firmly believed that everything depended on finding some switch that would lead them to an understanding of him, and one day he concluded that it was the drugs that were causing the greatest harm. He wrongly assumed that this dire situation wouldn’t involve any other changes in their daily lives, but after a bout of depression, his mother began to act as though she’d never given birth to her older son. She moved the furniture around in his room and threw out all his belongings. They were living between Calle Isaac Peral and Paseo de Juan XXIII, in one of those detached, upper-class houses near the best schools, university buildings, and leafy parks from the Franco era; whenever he walked through the clump of trees that separated Isaac Peral from the school of medicine, he’d feel that Madrid’s wealthy Sierra Norte area began there, and that he could reach out and touch the peaks of the still densely forested mountains. The air in those mountains was so pure that it was recommended for tuberculosis sufferers. They had a swimming pool that was covered in winter, and that, by the time June came around, was a wriggling mass of scum and tadpoles. There was a garden with a pergola, rose beds, three chestnut trees, and cypress hedges that grew higher than the two-meter street wall. But despite all this, it had taken him a long time to recognize his privilege. First, because he only mixed with children of his own class, and then because he experienced the absence of his brother, his insanity, and his mother’s detachment as a sort of homelessness.

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