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enormous bulging eyes and a hoarse voice who carried in her hand a tray full of medications.
    “Good evening,” she greeted us with a friendly manner, heading rapidly toward Daniel. Since the side table was occupied by my laptop and my cell phone, she left the tray on the bed. “It’s time for his medication.”
    My sister-in-law and I returned the greeting, and, like the audience at a play watching theactors on stage, we stayed in our seats and followed her with our gaze. We knew the ritual from having seen it the night before. After making my brother ingest the chlorpromazine tablet and the thioridazine drops, with much effort due to his lack of cooperation, she put the mercury thermometer under one of his arms, and around the other, she wrapped the blood-pressure cuff. All of this she did with agility and skill, without error, moving with the dexterity that comes from many years of experience. Having concluded this first phase, she moved on to a second that we did not know:
    “Do you want to go for a walk, Daniel?” she asked in a loud coarse voice, literally putting her face against my brother’s, who now had his eyes open again.
    “How can I want to if I’m dead?” he responded, loyal to his new creed.
    “Would you rather we sat you in a chair?”
    “If only I knew what a chair was!”
    “I’ll help him up,” I said, getting up. I couldn’t take any more of that absurd conversation.
    “Don’t bother,” the nurse told me, lowering her voice and gesturing me not to move. “I have to ask him these questions. We have to test his progress.”
    “It doesn’t seem as though there is any….” murmured Ona, sadly.
    The nurse gave a sympathetic smile. “There will be. It’s still early. Tomorrow he will be much better.” Later, turning back to me as she released the cuff from my brother’s arm and collected the thermometer and the rest of her things, she said: “Insist on asking him if he wants to take a walk. Do it every time you put the drops in his eyes. He has to move around.”
    “I don’t have a body anymore.” Daniel declared, looking at the ceiling.
    “Yes, you do, dear, and a very nice one!” she exclaimed happily as she went out the door.
    Ona and I looked at each other, trying to contain our laughter. At least someone was in a good mood in that dreadful place. My sister-in-law’s face, however, changed quickly:
    “The drops!” she said guiltily.
    I nodded and picked them up from the bedside table, handing them to her. My laptop had turned itself completely off and my phone had automatically disconnected from the internet.
    Talking to him, saying a continuous stream of sweet things to him, Ona put the fake tears in my brother’s violet eyes. I observed them intently, reaffirming for the thousandth time my unbreakable decision never to be part of an emotional community of two. I couldn’t take the idea of tying my life to that of another person, even for a short time, and if, dragged by circumstance, at some time I had been crazy enough to do it, I always ended up tired of putting up with nonsense and desperate to get back my space, my time, and my supposed solitude, in which I was very comfortable and very free to do whatever I felt like. Like the title of that old Manuel Gómez Pereira movie, I always asked myself why they called it love when they meant sex. My brother had fallen in love with Ona and was happy living with her and their son; I simply liked my life exactly as it was and I didn’t contemplate the need to be happy, something that seemed to me like an aspiration foreign to reality and an unfounded fiction. I contented myself with not being miserable and with enjoying the temporary pleasures that life offered. That the world made sense through happiness sounded to me like a cheap excuse not to confront life head-on.
    When Ona returned to her chair, I went back to the business of
quipus
. Something told me that some knots had to be untied.
    “You were telling me before