He had beautiful thick, black hair on his arm. I began to stroke it and play with it, and he looked down, half-amused, as though his arm did not quite belong to him. He lay back and made purring noises. When the doctor came with two nurses to put in the temporary line and start the treatment, I went out and stood in the corridor. I was more in love with Pablo than I had been in all the time we were together. I began to think about how much money I had, and how much he had, and how long we were likely to live, and how much it would cost us for medical treatment in San Francisco, and whether we should go there when Pablo had finished his treatment. I had to stop calculating, I had to promise myself that I would not mention anything to him. All I wanted now was to be with him, to spend the day here with him, to make things easier for him.

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.