In the dining room, the trays are being taken away. It isn’t even ten; we ask an elderly lady wearing a hairnet why they close so early. She says that if we want to eat later we can go to a proper hotel. The menu: Spam with peas and perfectly elliptical schnitzels whose greasy coating conceals an agglomeration of minced chicken cuts. I only eat the peas. The Spam and the chicken are the same pale pink. “These schnitzels haven’t been cooked through,” comments Gerardo. At one of the tables the girl from the night before is chatting with seven boys; together they must compose the sum total of the students. They have finished their meal and are smoking, flicking the ash into a plastic cup; they then stub out their cigarettes in the remains of their food.

“I’m going to take a shower,” I announce as we enter our bedroom.

I extract my bathrobe and slippers from my bag, and am already at the door when Gerardo says:

“You can get undressed here. I promise not to touch.”

I turn my back and start to strip. I’m aware of his determination to be noticed; it’s a disagreeable weight at the back of my neck that causes me to get tangled up in my jeans and fall over. I get back to my feet and walk out the door in my bathrobe, still wearing my bra and T-shirt. The showerhead spits water in fits and starts, but I stand under it until the skin on my fingers goes wrinkly and the bathroom mirror is misted. I pace up and down, opening the doors of the other shower cubicles, where those black bugs that inhabit dark, shady places are scuttling around. I slam the doors, frightening away the bugs; eventually, a whole colony is flying around the mirror, from which a swarm of droplets falls. My feet are cold, and I decide to get in the shower again; but a plague of insects is crawling up the walls of the cubicle and I don’t have the courage to chase them out. I go back to the room. Gerardo is jacking off with his jeans around his knees. He doesn’t look at me. I quickly grab my clothes and, with the cord of the hairdryer trailing behind, leave the room before he ejaculates.

I take refuge in the bathroom, where the insects are now in the corners of the shower cubicles. I’m worried that there won’t be an outlet; but if not, I can always go to the lounge and dry my hair there. I imagine the high school students sprawling on the faux leather couches watching Big Brother 3; I’m surprised that I can’t visualize them watching any other program and—rationalizing this inability—I decide that it must have to do with my mood.