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would have reached the size of a camel. Some people believed him to be a cross between a dog and a mare, and expected him to sprout wings and horns and acquire the sulfuric breath of a dragon, like the beasts Rosa was embroidering on her endless tablecloth. Tired of picking up broken china and hearing rumors of how he turned into a wolf when there was a full moon, Nana applied the same method she had used with the parrot, but the overdose of cod-liver oil did not kill the dog. It simply gave him a four-day case of diarrhea that covered the house from top to bottom and that she herself had to clean.
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    Those were difficult times. I was about twenty-five then, but I felt as if I had only a little life left ahead of me to build my future and attain the position that I wanted. I worked like a beast and the few times I sat down to rest, not by choice but forced by the tedium of Sunday afternoons, I felt as if I were losing precious moments of my life: each idle minute meant another century away from Rosa. I lived in the mine, in a wooden shack with a zinc roof that I built myself with the help of a few peons. It was just one square room, in which I had arranged all my belongings, with a crude window in each wall so that by day the stifling desert air would have a chance to circulate, and with shutters to keep out the glacial wind that blew at night. My furniture consisted of a chair, a cot, a rough table, a typewriter, and a heavy safe I had hauled across the desert on a mule, in which I kept the miners’ logbooks, a few papers, and a canvas pouch containing the few sparkling pieces of gold that were the only fruit of all my effort. It wasn’t very pleasant, but I was used to discomfort. I had never taken a hot bath, and my childhood memories were of cold, of loneliness, and of a perpetually empty stomach. There I ate, slept, and wrote for two long years, with no greater distraction than the handful of books I read and reread, a stack of old magazines, some English grammars, from which I pieced together the rudiments of that magnificent language, and a box with a key, in which I kept my correspondence with Rosa. I had got into the habit of typing all my letters to her, keeping a copy for myself that I filed along with the few letters I received from her. I ate the same food that was cooked for all the miners, and I had forbidden the drinking of alcoholic beverages within the mine. I kept none in my own house either, because I’ve always held that loneliness and boredom can lead a man to drink. It may have been the memory of my father—open-collared, his tie loosened and stained, his eyes clouded and his breath heavy, glass in hand—that made me a teetotaler. Besides, I don’t hold my liquor well. I get drunk in nothing flat. I discovered this at the age of sixteen and I’ve never forgotten it. My granddaughter once asked me how I managed to live alone for so long far removed from civilization. The truth is I don’t know. But it must have been easier for me than for most people, because I’ve never been particularly sociable; I have few friends and I don’t enjoy parties or festivities. I’m much happier when I’m alone. At that time I had never lived with a woman, so I could hardly miss something I hadn’t grown accustomed to. I wasn’t the type who’s always falling in love—I never have been. I’m the faithful type, though it’s true that all it takes is the shadow of an arm, the curve of a waist, or the crease of a female knee to put ideas into my head even now when I’m so old that I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I look like a twisted tree. I’m not trying to justify the sins of my youth by saying that I couldn’t control my instincts: nothing of the sort. By that point I was used to having dead-end relationships with easy women, since there was no possibility of any other kind. In my generation we