I expected that some day the hotel would telephone to say that my mother had collapsed, or had fallen asleep at her desk, but that was not what happened. On a morning when I was about to go and do one of my final exams, she asked me to help her down the stairs, and I realized that her knees would not bend. I had to help her down each step and then go and get a taxi for her. That evening when she came back she rang the bell and I went down and helped her up the stairs. And that is the way it went each day. I told her that I would get a job soon and she could give up her work in the hotel, but she shook her head and said that she would carry on. I took her to the doctor, the same old man who had seen my father out of the world, and he gave her pills, but she was still stiff and weak. He told me that she needed to rest. I was careful not to look at him.

She was elated by the election of Mrs. Thatcher. Here is a woman, she said, who knows what is right and what is wrong. And that is what we need here, she said. She showed me Thatcher’s face in a magazine, pointed at her, and said how sorry she was not to be in England now. She wondered how the Queen and Mrs. Thatcher were getting along. They both, she said, looked so well in blue.

The people in the English Department were preparing a new course on spoken English, and they asked me to come into the language laboratory two hours a week to work with students on their pronunciation. I would make students ask questions so that I could correct their h sounds, which they were pronouncing harshly like the Spanish j. I saw English then as a language which was clear and cold, in which people said what they meant; and I saw the sounds which Spanish-speakers made as full of emotion and wrongheadedness. I corrected the students with icy precision and patience, and made them repeat and repeat and repeat until all the words had lost their meaning. If they learned to say have properly, then, I tried to imply, they would have learned other things too, such as some poise and decorum. But when the results of the finals appeared, it emerged that I had done badly in everything except basic competence in English, and especially badly in linguistics, so it was conveyed to me that I could work with the students for the moment, but soon I would be replaced, and there was no future for me here. I put off telling my mother this news.