We managed to get an appointment with a dentist in Arrecife. Ismael was running a temperature and in the waiting room he had to clench his jaw to control the shivering. The dentist warned him that if he lanced the gum our vacation would be ruined. The best option would be to take antibiotics and go under the knife back in Madrid. Ismael still had lots of personal leave left; it would be no big deal if he took one or two more days. “The worst of it is the halitosis, but we can get by without kissing,” he said when we’d left the dentist’s office; I nodded just to make some response to that unabashed absurdity, as if our breath didn’t always smell in the mornings. Perhaps what was embarrassing him was the disruption in the harmony of our bodies: all that rolling around on the rocks, fucking, feeling like eighteen-year-olds in the full flush of youth when I was well past thirty and he was forty. The antibiotics brought his temperature down, but he still didn’t feel up to taking his sluggish jogs. In the following days he put on a brave face, and what he took to the beach was not the book about the brain, but his Kindle with his students’ doctoral theses. He bought a newspaper and, between writing notes on the theses, glanced at it like a devoted reader. Newspapers were chill-out in material form. It was only on Sundays or when we were on vacation that Ismael allowed himself the luxury of spending the whole morning reading both the opinion columns and news, without the need to comment or pontificate on anything, accompanied first by a cortado and then a small beer when he got to the inserts two hours later, usually at Plaza de las Comendadoras if the weather was good, or in Le Pain Quotidien in winter, ordering an americano because he liked to dunk his buttered roll in the bigger cup. During the work week, reading was an obligatory action, especially now that the university was going down the drain and he was still only an associate lecturer, with years of anxious waiting ahead of him before he could expect to get tenure. It was enough to put anyone’s nose out of joint. Despite having a PhD, I’d decided to retreat from university life before it was too late. I took my first steps into the world of cinema and one of my shorts won a prize in the Seville International Film Festival in the New Wave section. Ismael was unenthusiastic about the prize, and one night confessed that he didn’t like my short. But whatever…the thing was that he felt he had to punish himself for the state of his mouth, so he turned to the theses—his original plan had been to read them on our return from Lanzarote—and I was left prowling around his towel, his beach hat, his childish figure: prowls that were actually escapes into the water since I had no desire to look at the Kindle loaded with theses; I didn’t want them to be there but, at the same time, was grateful for them because—to be honest—I didn’t want Ismael in the waves with me either, surrounding the experience with his sick ritual, his gaze fixed on mile after mile of light and haze. We’d rented a car to make a few excursions and I had no intention of changing that plan, to spend the days taking naps that did nothing for my digestion. Given the state of his health, there was nothing to stop him from sleeping the hours away. I missed him a little when, on the third day after his gum had given up the battle, I got into the car to drive alone to Timanfaya, but the next day I wanted to watch him be in pain, nodding off or prodding his cheek, washing his mouth out with Oraldene without ever getting rid of the bad smell. He got edgy if I came too close; true, a little morning breath was nothing compared to the stink of the decomposing food in his gum. The antibiotics hadn’t restored the membrane to its proper state. In fact, the abscess had grown, and by then resembled a visor hanging over his tooth, around which were the visible remains of rotting food that Ismael removed with a Q-tip soaked in antiseptic. He never managed to clean it thoroughly, the swelling remained red. The dentist had told him not to poke at it, but he was convinced that his efforts could only improve the ulcerous appearance of his gum. But the fact was that all his poking around just made the stink worse. While I was driving to Timanfaya, I pictured his neurotic behavior. Ismael wasn’t going to count the hours I was absent because he would be using them to wash his mouth out with Oraldene and search the internet for worst case scenarios—an endless chain of stories about gums destroyed by tumors—rather than solutions to his problem. And exactly why had his gum swelled? Isn’t that a pretty weird occurrence only a medical doctor can discuss convincingly?