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plenty of teasing and a bit of remorse,deforming exquisite Italian shoes with hammer blows so that his swollen feet will fit and even find some consolation under that pile of blubber.
    So pervasive was the anti-dictatorial chaos in Upsalón U, so predictable the daily rallies, muggings, knifings, and gunfights, and so precarious and early-morning the formal medical schooling, that sawbones-in-training would come by the dozen to the mouse-infested grotto Isidro had built in his own home so that he could share, with those willing to pay, his Frenchified skills in the pestilent art of dissection.
    At sundown in the homespun lecture theater, wearing starched white lab coats and exhibiting the manners of unctuous bishops (“Medicine is a priesthood”), they received the anatomical rudiments that years later would earn them a license to heal.
    Armed with a pointer, a series of colored slides, and a memorized translation of Testut’s Anatomie , duly peppered with apothegms from Mesmerian electricism, the tub of lard projected diagrams of the alternating current that secretly joins the pylorus to the cardiac orifice, the voltaic arc that leads from auricles to ventricles, or the intermittent magnetism that simultaneously communicates and divides the two hemispheres of the brain. He had sketched these intensities on the transparencies as perfectdiscontinuous curves, like those made by iron filings between two magnets or under the rotation of a cone-shaped pendulum.
    In the kitchen beside the amphitheater – between the two rooms, a beaded curtain clicked and quivered from the obsessive pacing of a mangy dog – an oniony and in her own way anatomical woman from Galicia, hair in a double bun and frying pan in hand, slaughtered chickens, fried up shrimp in red sauce, and baked biscuits with butter for the frugal meal of the man in flip-flops.
    When he tired of the Galician’s coarse dishes, or on Sundays, which she spent on the outskirts of town on the other side of the bay visiting her Dositheus (she would take him a wicker basket with a bottle of papaya wine and two chicken livers with raisins), Isidro would wash up at El Floridita.
    â€œLet me have,” the adipose figure would grunt as he seated himself, panting from the marathon it was for him to get from the entrance to the table, “that drink that carries the nickname of Mary Queen of England and of Ireland who did not hesitate to martyrize Protestants or execute her rival for the throne, plus an archbishop and another three hundred people . . .”
    After his first salty sip, the gourmand would concentrate, not so much on the lobster in garlic sauce or the roast suckling pig with guava leaves swimming in cassava, as on the generouslyopen décolletage of the young Zerlina of a waitress who, ever since his first visit, served him with wheedling chortles and pretended to understand his alcoholic riddles, which for her were boorish allusions to her bust and behind.
    At the base of her cleavage, between the two nascent pearly spheres, bulging with bluish reflections à la Rubens, he could spy the diminutive slender lace of her brassiere. When the waitress came by to serve him, the fat man tried to breathe deeply to catch the aroma of her breasts, which he presumed to be tawny and musky, but the insistent odor of the shrimp’s orange sauce blocked his way.
    Isidro’s purely electromagnetic conception of all phenomena had led him to practice radiesthesia: he was adept at the copper pendulum, which he swung over the unclothed bodies of patients, seeking the spot where it shifted or abruptly changed the direction of its rotation.
    The pendulum also swung over, who could say why, his deepest fantasies. The fourth bloody mary, which by then he called for without circumlocutions, and the ever more confounding proximity of the waitress, led him without fail to his dominical nirvana: he saw her before him serving his cocktail and at the same time