One morning I was going down the stairs of my apartment building when I noticed painters at work through the open door of Señora Belucci’s apartment on the first floor. I had walked about a block from the building when it struck me that I should go back and ask them to come and paint my apartment. The chief painter was standing at the door in overalls, he was a stocky man in his fifties, soft-spoken with calm blue eyes. I liked him immediately and asked him if he would come up with me now to look at the apartment and give me an estimate for how much it would cost to have it all painted. He said that he would leave the estimate under my door. I read it when I came back that night. He wrote that he would be able to start immediately, and the work would take about a week. He also said that the estimate included wages, the cost of materials, and a small profit, and he could not do it for less. I thought it was high, but I trusted him, or at least I felt that he was not the sort of man who would want to cheat, and the following morning I asked him to do the job.

He wanted me to decide on the colors there and then, but I told him I would let him know the following morning. He gave me a book of colors and I brought it to the hospital. Pablo was low that day, depressed about the line in his chest and the feeling that this was only the beginning of his problems. He had asked Doctor Cawley about KS, and could not stop thinking about huge bruises appearing on his face and all over his body. I showed him the book of colors and slowly he became interested and animated. White was a cop-out, he said, he wanted rooms painted in red and blue. He began to write out a list of the rooms and a list of colors from the book. I felt that he was thinking about the apartment as though he himself had some stake in it. I sat and watched him and argued that the colors were too bright. I wanted everything to be white; he agreed that the hall could be white, but the bedroom had to be pale blue, and my mother’s bedroom red, and the sitting room a steely gray. And you should throw out all the furniture, he said, everything.

“If I threw out all the furniture, would you come and live there?” I asked.

“I prefer the other house,” he said.

“It’s too expensive,” I said. “But we could go there for a while.”