One day, when I had been teaching Jorge for more than a year, his mother telephoned my mother to say that he was about to go to Barcelona in Spain for a vacation with a friend, but the friend had pulled out. The tickets were bought, she said, and the pensión was already paid for; they could possibly get a refund, but they were student tickets. She did not want Jorge to travel on his own, as there had been riots and political ferment in Spain due to the death of Franco the previous year. She wondered if I could go, and they would pay for the tickets and for the pensión. My mother was disturbed by this. She did not want me to feel that I was traveling as Jorge’s servant, or his paid companion. She also was uneasy about letting me too far out of her sight. She told Jorge’s mother that I was not in the apartment right now, but she would speak to me when I came in and phone her back. She walked into the kitchen, where I was making coffee. She looked worried and depressed. She would much prefer if I went to England, she said. But if I wanted to go she would give me money and I could use some of the money I had earned from teaching Jorge. However, I had to promise her to be careful. I could pick up all sorts of diseases in Spain, she said. But it would be a good vacation for me. Did Jorge know about me, she asked. I said that he did. He was the only one who did. She shook her head in a mixture of worry and wonder and went back to the telephone and phoned Jorge’s mother to say that I would be delighted to go to Barcelona.

She prepared for my trip as though she were going too. It would be the winter in Barcelona, so she made me buy a leather jacket and a woollen pullover. She ironed and folded shirts. She worried about what shoes I would wear. We were going for only three weeks, yet for the weeks before we went she worried whether I would have the right clothes to wear, whether I would have enough money. She did not want Jorge’s family to feel that they had to collect me and take me to the airport. She arranged with the general manager of one of the big hotels that I would be taken to Ezeiza free on the hotel’s courtesy bus. I would arrive there about an hour too early, but that would be no harm, she said.