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curiosity, just the serene indifference of a hypnotic. Mesmerized, I shut my eyes. They didn’t open again until I was aroused by the sour notes of a funeral procession. The brightness was blinding. A figure stood above me, eclipsing the sun, and when I shaded my eyes I was astonished to see the living spirit of my own longing come to greet me: Ojitos Lindos. “What are you doing here?”
    â€œMy father,” she said, with a jerk of the head in the direction of the funeral. “He’s the one in the box.” Her soft voice betrayed no emotion, only the indifference of a child before the drama of death. “What about you?”
    I sat up and squinted at the sky. The sun had already risen above the tombs. I was embarrassed to admit I had been trying to see a ghost, so I said, “Visiting my mother.” It occurred to me that my mother and her father were both ghosts. They were alike, Mamá and Ojitos Lindos’s father. I stood up and flicked the straw from my hair. “I’m sorry I caused you such trouble in school.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œThey called you names.”
    â€œThey called you names too.” She looked hard at me. Burning, wishing I hadn’t reminded her, I looked away. “Well, don’t you want to see?” she said.
    â€œSee what?”
    â€œMy eyes.” I looked up and Ojitos Lindos glared back at me. Nobody had ever looked at me in quite that way. She was not staring at the mark. She looked at me and saw me, the real me, not La Mancha. With the big blemish on my cheek, people rarely looked me in the eye, but here in the necropolis with Ojitos Lindos nothing came between. I gazed straight through the light blue of her eyes to the brightening sky behind. The color was the same. “I have to go,” she said. “My mother will send my uncle searching for me.”
    When I returned to the house nobody asked where I had been. The block was buzzing with news of the occupation at the Peruvian embassy, and Aurora spent all day in front of the television. On Monday Ojitos Lindos wasn’t in school. Vacations were nearing, and her mother had arranged for her to stay at home in Oriente during their time of mourning. In the weeks after the fiasco at the Peruvian embassy, the port of Mariel became choked with boats from Florida picking up gusanos. A wealthy cousin sought Aurora out and took her to Miami to prove something, perhaps just that he had become wealthy. At the end of the school year, a neighbor took me to the bus terminal, where I was packed off to Pinar del Río to spend the summer with my father’s family.

1 August 1992
    W eekends at the policlínico are always busy, but on that Saturday a patient brought me coffee at lunchtime and I was feeling a little better when the girl came by in the afternoon. Outside the pediátrico the day before, she had seemed too modestly dressed for a jinetera. Now she wore the characteristic short skirt, tight T-shirt, and platform sandals of the girls who walk the Malecón. She was bajita, a little bigger than petite, and gordita, which is not to say fat, but shapely.
    I told her that HIV antibodies take anywhere between six weeks and six months to develop. “This test won’t detect any exposure to the virus that might have occurred in the past three months.”
    â€œI’d say it’s none of your business, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me: I’ve had a steady boyfriend for over a year.”
    I took her blood sample and attached a numerical label. “Hold on to this ticket; the number corresponds to your test.”
    â€œCan’t you give me the answer now?”
    â€œI have to take your sample to the lab at the pediatric hospital. But you can come back here to get the results after 5:30 on Monday. I live upstairs, the top buzzer.”
    â€œWhat will I owe you?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œSurely you’re taking a