Absorbed in her work beneath the muted glow of the red light bulb, Marcela stoops over the basins while I hold back in the shadows.

I imagine the enormous dog’s terrible imprisonment between four walls of white tiles, the oblivious light slowly expanding across them in all its implacable monotony.

The dog can do nothing but wait (not even expect, or hope: only wait).

He doesn’t know that death could end it, nor would he know how to kill himself.

It’s a privilege of the absurd human condition, the ability to destroy oneself.

A phone rings in the darkness. Marcela must know what corner of the room it’s in.

She leaves the glow of the red lamp and is lost to me.

Her words emerge from somewhere; she says it’s for me, a woman. I ask her, in low tones, to rescue me.

I hear her trying to do that, then lose her again.

She reappears to speak low in my ear. She murmurs that the woman is insisting, that it’s my sister-in-law. As she says this her body lightly touches mine.

I take her in my arms, draw her to me, and bury my head against her. I don’t kiss her, I don’t run my hands over her. Something serious begins between us.

“She’s waiting,” she whispers and guides me over to where, through the receiver, a voice I recognize says, “This afternoon Mauricio had an attack.”

Second Part

TRIALS BY ORDEAL AND THE PACT

SUSANA, the wife, shoots out of the little room where my brother is lying as if she’d been fired from a gun, leans against the wall, and gazes upward until only the whites of her eyes are showing.

She makes me nervous but I stifle it and remain firmly in my seat. This is the third of her spectacular exits in the past hour; they do not, in fact, correspond to any change in Mauricio’s condition. Susana holds on in there until she can’t take another moment of suffering and comes outside to catch her breath.

Then she pulls herself together and goes back in.

I open the door a crack and lean through. Mauricio is asleep under the nurse’s care; there’s no need for me to go in there or for Susana to stay in there with him, the doctor said so.

I can’t do much, only comfort Mamá, who’s home watching the grandchildren and is stricken, as was inevitable.

The doctor comes back, recognizes me, and nods without opening his mouth; Susana emerges, no doubt against her will; the door closes behind her and she stays outside. Common sense says I can’t help her, and I don’t think I should intervene.