My mother and I talked in the evening about guests in the hotel, where they were from and how long they were staying. We did not talk about my father or his family, or my aunt Matilda or what had happened to us in Molino. As I grew taller, she told me that I should start going out with friends, that I should join a club maybe. I said that I was okay, and slowly we got used to living with each other, the mother and her growing son. She was content at that time, I think, and full of hopes for my future.

WE LIVED TOGETHER and we grew close. My mother said that she could tell when I walked in the street below the apartment. She could tell when I was coming up the stairs. Sometimes, we did not speak to each other much; like an elderly couple we behaved as though a great deal could be taken as understood. Often, she became attached to a guest who stayed at the hotel for more than a few days; she relayed to me all the information she had elicited from whoever it was. And she felt sad when they left and went back to England or to some other part of Argentina. She began to view England as the place she most wanted to be, but it was, I think, an England somewhere in her mind.

In ways that she herself did not understand or appreciate she liked me being gay once I told her. I think she thought it meant that I would not leave her; that no other woman would claim me; that she had me all for herself. I think she would have liked me to be an engineer or an architect or a doctor; she would have enjoyed telling everyone who came to the hotel about me. Instead, I had gone to the university to study English. I had a real advantage there over everybody else in the department, including the academic staff, but, nonetheless, others always came ahead of me. I found it hard to study. I could look at something for a while, but soon I would get bored. I found it easy to read the set texts—I understood every word—but it was difficult afterward to write about or interpret the events and the characters in a novel or the tone and structure of a poem. Every sentence I wrote in those years at the university seemed to be only partly true.