Often in the late afternoon there would be a tentative scratching at the door. “Sssst. Let’s go out tonight and change our luck,” Guillermo would say in a voice already whiskey-hoarse. It was an invitation he tendered often, one which Rafe refused with what he hoped was brotherly affection. Could Pasteur have founded microbiology, could Semmelweis have put the skids to puerperal fever, could Hippocrates have written the goddam oath, if they were all the time screwing off to get laid? He spent his evenings in the laboratory, puttering, practicing, breaking glass retorts, growing molds, looking at his eyelashes in the microscope mirror.

Paula came to Havana one afternoon from the small village in the Sierra Maestra where she was stationed as a health officer.

“What are you working on?” she asked.

“Leprosy,” he said, making up his mind.

She smiled at him skeptically. “I will not be back in Havana for a long time,” she said.

He understood that she was saying goodbye. “Are there so many sick people depending on you?” The idea filled him with envy.

“It isn’t that, it’s a personal thing.”

Personal? What was personal? They discussed her monthly periods like baseball scores. The only personal thing in her life was politics. Fidel Castro was somewhere in those mountains raising periodic hell. “Don’t get into trouble,” he said, reaching out a hand to touch her hair.

“You’d care?” Her eyes surprised him with their tears.

“Of course,” he said. Two days later she was out of his life. He was not to think seriously of her again until the single remaining time he would hear her voice.

Having told her that he was working on leprosy, he spent a lot of time poring through Index Medicus, drew up long lists of source material, gathered fresh stacks of journals from the library and settled down for more reading.

It led him to nothing.

He simply sat in his expensive laboratory, watching dust-motes float in the beam of sun which slanted in through the somewhat-dirty windows, trying to think of a program of research.

If he had been able to think of something bad, he would not have been so frightened.

He came up with nothing at all.

Finally he exorcised all fright. He gazed at his reflection in the mirror, critically but honestly, admitting for the first time that what he saw was not a researcher.