I do not remember when precisely I began to go directly home after my day at the university. In those years you moved carefully; without knowing why, you watched out. It was something in the atmosphere, something unsaid and all-pervasive, rather than anything printed in the papers or broadcast over the radio. You did not want to be the lone figure in the street at night. But I often went for coffee with Jorge after the lesson, nonetheless. And I waited for some sign from him. I expected him to mention a girlfriend. I observed him when girls passed for some sign of desire or interest, but there was nothing. His clothes in those years were old-fashioned and formal. I liked that about him. I imagined him in one of those old-fashioned bathing costumes that covered the torso as well, and I thought of the shape of him, and that was exciting.

A few times I found pleasure in the city. It would always begin in the same way: a sharp glance at a stranger as he walked by, a turn of the head, and then the watching and waiting as he stopped to look into a shop window and I moved nonchalantly toward him. And then the approach, the discovering if he had a place to go to, and then the setting out, conspirators laden down with desire. Often, because I am tall and fair-skinned and blond with blue eyes, they would want to know where I was from, and I would say that I was half-English, and that would be a subject we could discuss as we made our way home.

I remember one such encounter not for the sex we had, but because of a sound that came into the room as we made love, the sound of car engines revving over and over. I asked my partner—I remember a dark-haired man in his thirties with white skin—what the noise was. He brought me to the window to show me the police station opposite and the cars outside, driverless, but still revving, with wires going from the engines to the basement of the building. They need power, he said, but I still did not understand. They need extra power for the cattle prods, he said. I still do not know if what he said was true, if that was one of the centers in the city to which people were taken, and if we fondled each other and came to orgasm within moments of each other to the sound of the revving of cars which gave power to the instruments of torture. It made no difference then, because I did not pay much attention to what he said, and I remember the pleasure of standing at the window with him, my hands running down his back, more than anything else.