He took the examination at the State House in the company of a Nigerian, two men from Ireland and a covey of miserable, perspiring assorted Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans. It was the simplest of tests in the most basic medical principles and the English language, almost an insult to a man who had been graduated from the College magna cum.

According to American Medical Association regulations, he submitted his diploma from La Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de la Habana, accompanied by a certified Berlitz translation. On July 1, in whites and an intern again, he reported for duty at the hospital. He found that Longwood treated him the way he had treated the lepers along the Havana waterfront, politely but with a forced tolerance. He had no large laboratory; no one would have dreamed of buying him a centrifuge or anything else; he found that when he held a scalpel he still felt comfortable and unafraid, and he was confident that he would become better as time passed; he walked the polished brown linoleum of the corridors with long, happy strides, restraining his impulse to shout.

It was at the Massachusetts General Hospital. His mother was waiting in an office on the eighth floor of the Warren Building for her weekly examination and a fresh supply of time-buying steroids. He wandered into the coffee shop on the ground floor of Baker and ordered a cup of black from a girl in one of those blue smocks with the word Volunteer embroidered in red over the left breast. She was dark-blonde, attractive in a quietly sophisticated, heavy-lidded way that didn’t generally appeal to him, perhaps because it included exactly what turned Guillermo on about a woman, just a hint of past ruttishness.

He was half through with the coffee when the girl left the counter and came over to his table carrying a tray on which were a magazine, a cup of tea and a dessert plate with a danish pastry.

“May I?”

“Of course,” he said.

She made herself at home. It was a small table and her magazine was large. It jogged his saucer when she placed it on the table, causing sloshing but no spilling.

“I am sorry!”

“Nonsense, no harm done.”

He drank, staring out the glass walls into the corridor. She read, sipped, nibbled at her pastry. He was aware of a subtle, undoubtedly expensive perfume, musk and roses, he decided. Involuntarily he closed his eyes and simply breathed in. Next to him she turned a page.

He risked a quick sidelong glance and was caught at it—direct gray eyes, very powerful depths, a hint of crow’s-feet in the corners, grin lines or sin lines? Instead of looking away, to his embarrassment he didn’t move his head but slammed his eyelids down again like guilty trapdoors.

She laughed like a child.