“It’s going to die,” I tell her.

“It won’t die,” she says.

“I have experience of these things,” I warn, but that doesn’t mean much to her; she has experiences of her own. “I gave it food,” she explains, as if to remind me reproachfully that whoever has enough to eat will live. That’s where she’s mistaken.

A few days are enough to erase the unfortunate flare-up of symptoms. The doctor authorizes Mauricio to get out of bed, though not to leave his room. If he takes care of himself—and he will—there will be no fearful aftereffects from the sudden malady.

Mauricio is pious about devotion to one’s work, and my desertion of the agency, brief as it’s been, weighs him down with guilt, though even as he tries to convince me that he no longer needs me, I can tell how much the thought of dispensing with my steadfast nearness hurts him.

Perhaps he senses what I’ve been noticing, as well: that our feelings are as pure and solid as they once were, but our time is allocated differently now, which means that once the alarm bells have stopped ringing and we leave this refuge, the disconnections will recur.

But what is this time—I wonder, and the question now has meaning only for me—that I think “we have allocated to us”? Is it the hours of the day? The days of our life? An extremely minor event follows, with its consequences, almost like an answer, to be deciphered.

I’ve given Mauricio every reassurance that from this afternoon on I’ll neglect neither him nor my work.

At midday I notice Mariana’s cage has no bird inside and try to get her to tell me why. I simply ask whether it flew away. She shouts, “Bad man!” runs away, and refuses to eat lunch.

To improve the situation, I try to help her understand that she’s behaving like the bird; that is, she’s upset and won’t eat. I make the blunder of threatening: “You’ll see what happens if you don’t eat.”

She weeps and grows desperate. She escapes to the top of the bedroom stairs and won’t let us come up, neither me nor her grandmother, under threat of throwing her mother’s big mirror on the floor if we so much as try to lay a hand on her.

She puts up strong resistance until Susana rescues her. The girl hurls accusations at me like daggers. I wanted to hit her, I wanted to frighten her to death, I told her she’d die just like the bird.