I pulled out of a trip to Comodoro Rivadavia, and canceled another trip to New York. I told the ministry that I was overworked, and they seemed to accept this. On the first morning he was in the hospital I woke when it was still dark, and I felt that my mother was in the room, alive and watching every moment, knowing everything, every detail, every thought in my head. She could see the battle going on in my body between the virus and the immune system; she watched as the virus wrote itself into each cell. She was full of pity and worry. I thought as I lay in a half-sleep that I could hear her sighing. I thought that if I reached out I would be able to touch her, but slowly I realized that there was no one in the room.

I bought the newspapers every morning and walked from the apartment to the hospital, which took me about half an hour. I brought flowers, or orange juice, or chocolate, or fruit, and I tried when I arrived to talk about the outside world, things I had seen or heard since yesterday, and not to ask him what was going on in the hospital. I knew that he was having trouble sleeping, he was on a mixture of two drugs—Foscarnet and Gancyclovir—and they seemed to make him sick. I began to name the two junior doctors, both slightly overweight and gruffly pompous in their mid-twenties, Foscarnet and Gancyclovir. One of the nurses, Patricia, thought that this was funny, but made clear to us that it was, perhaps, a joke we should keep to ourselves. Pablo often slept when I was there, and I tried to make sure that everything was quiet, that no one disturbed him. I loved sitting there beside him, guarding him, looking out for him, pulling the blankets up around his neck, or opening the window a small bit if the room became too warm.

He would wake and see me watching him and smile and try to sleep again. And then he would sit up and read the newspapers. A few times he almost broke down, and said that he could not believe that this was happening. I asked him if he knew how he had become infected, and he said he thought that he did: someone in San Francisco he had met casually a while before the real scare began, who died later. He had let the man fuck him, and the man had come inside him. They had done it a few times, and then not seen each other for years. He knew the man was dead; it had always worried him.

A few times in that first week Doctor Cawley did a round of the wards, accompanied by Foscarnet and Gancyclovir, who stood to attention in his presence, and two nurses, one of whom we called The Duck. I waited outside. After the second visit I asked Pablo if he had ever thought of fucking Doctor Cawley.