Even before I was fully awake, I heard the rain falling. My first thought was that it must be a quarter past six and I was due at the office, but I’d left my rubber-soled shoes at my mother’s and so I’d have to line the other ones, the every-day pair, with newspaper, because it bugs me to feel the dampness seeping in and chilling my feet and ankles. Then I thought, it’s Sunday, I can stay and snuggle between the sheets for a while. It always gives me a childish kick to know I can look forward to a holiday. To feel time’s at my disposal, as though it were free, instead of having to race two blocks, five mornings out of the week, to be able to punch the time-clock. To feel I can be serious for once, and think about things that matter: life, death, soccer, the war. During the week I’ve no time. When I reach the office there are fifty or sixty items to attend to: I have to enter them in the ledger, stamp them “posted as of current date,” and initial the stamp in green ink. By noon I’m about halfway through, and I run four blocks to grab a place on the bus platform. If I don’t run the four blocks I’m stuck and have to walk, and I get sick to my stomach if I have to walk too close to the streetcars. It doesn’t make me sick, actually, it makes me afraid, hideously afraid.

That doesn’t mean I think about death much, just that it disgusts me to picture myself lying with my skull bashed in or my guts spilling out, surrounded by a couple of hundred passers-by, all wrapped up in their own affairs, but still curious enough to stand on tiptoe for a good look, and be able to tell all about it next day over dessert after the family dinner. A family dinner like the one I polish off in twenty-five minutes, all alone, because Gloria has gone off to her shop a half-hour earlier, leaving everything ready for me over a low flame on the oil-stove: I’ve only to wash my hands, gulp down the soup, the veal chop, the omelet and the stewed fruit, glance at the paper, and make a second dash for the bus. When I get to the office, around two o’clock, I enter the twenty or thirty transactions that are still pending; and about five, notepad in hand, I hurry to answer the vice-president’s buzzer, so that he can dictate the half-dozen letters that have to go out, and which it’s up to me to deliver, translated into English or German, before seven.

Twice a week Gloria is waiting for me when I come out, so we can enjoy ourselves a bit, and we go to a movie where she cries her eyes out, while I maul my hat or chew on the program. The other nights she goes to visit her mother, and I do accounts for two bakeries, whose owners —two of them come from Galicia and one from Mallorca —do all right for themselves by using rotten eggs in their cakes, and still better by running furnished tenements in the most crowded section of the south side of town. So that by the time I get home she’s sound asleep, or—when we come home together—we have supper and fall into bed right afterwards, like tired animals. There are precious few nights that we’ve enough energy left over for the conjugal rites, and so, without even reading a book or exchanging what Gloria calls a bit of chit-chat about the arguments between my fellow-workers or her boss’s bullying (he himself says he has a heart of gold, but the girls in the shop call it a heart of stone), without sometimes, even saying goodnight, we fall asleep with the lights on, because she wanted to read the crime pages and I wanted to look at the sports section.

Chit-chat is saved up for Saturdays like this one. (Because actually it was a Saturday, the tag-end of a Saturday afternoon nap.) I get up at three-thirty and make the tea and bring it back to bed; and then she wakes up and reviews the week’s events and looks through my socks and catches up with her mending; then, at a quarter to five, she gets up to listen to the program of dance music. But there wouldn’t have been any chit-chat this Saturday, because the night before, after the movie, I’d gone overboard singing the praises of Margaret Sullavan, and Gloria, without a moment’s hesitation, started in pinching me, and when I wouldn’t budge she got back at me with something much worse, really underhanded, about this terrific guy in the shop, and that’s cheating, of course, because Margaret Sullavan is just a picture on a screen, and this creep at the shop is flesh and blood. The upshot of this nonsense was that we went to bed without speaking and then lay in the dark for a half-hour, each of us waiting for the other to make the first move to patch up the quarrel. I shouldn’t have minded making the first move, I’ve done it plenty of times, but in the midst of this sham hatred sleep overcame us, and peace was postponed till today, saved for the blank space of this Saturday afternoon.

And so when I saw it was raining I thought, so much the better, the bad weather would automatically bring us closer: we weren’t going to be such idiots as to sulk in silence through a rainy Saturday afternoon, in a two-room apartment where privacy simply doesn’t exist and you just have to live face to face. She moaned a little when she woke up, but I thought nothing of it. She always moans when she wakes up.

But when she was fully awake and I got a good look at her, I saw she was really ill and in pain, you could tell by the circles around her eyes. Forgetting that we weren’t speaking, I asked what was the matter. She had a pain in her side. It hurt badly, and she was scared.

I said I’d go call the doctor, and she said yes, call her right away. She was trying to smile but, looking at her sunken eyes, I was of two minds whether to stay with her or go make the telephone call. Then I thought that if I didn’t go she’d be even more frightened, and I went downstairs and called the doctor.

The guy who answered said she was out. I don’t know why it occurred to me that he might be lying, and I said that wasn’t true, I’d seen her going in. Then he asked me to hold on a second, and after five minutes he came back to the telephone with some fishy story about how I was in luck, she’d come in this very moment. I said well, isn’t that just dandy, had him take down the address, said it was urgent.

When I got back Gloria was being nauseated, and the pain was much worse, I didn’t know what to do. I put a hot-water bottle on her, and then an ice-pack. Nothing seemed to soothe her, and I gave her an aspirin. At six o’clock the doctor still hadn’t come, and I was in no state to buck anyone up. I told three or four stories, trying to sound cheerful, but it made me mad to see the face she pulled when she tried to smile, because I could tell she didn’t want to dishearten me. I took a glass of milk, nothing more, because my stomach was tied up in knots. At half-past six the doctor came, finally. An enormous cow of a woman, too big for our tiny apartment. She produced a couple of titters that were meant to be encouraging, and then set about kneading Gloria’s belly, digging her nails in and then suddenly letting go. Gloria bit her lips, saying yes, it hurt there, and in that place a bit more even, and farther on worse still. It kept on hurting worse and worse.

The cow went on, digging her nails in and then letting go. When she stood up there was fright in her eyes too, and she asked for alcohol to disinfect herself. Out in the hallway she told me it was peritonitis, they’d have to operate at once. I told her we belonged to a health plan, and she promised to have a word with the surgeon.

I went down in the elevator with her and telephoned the taxi stand and Gloria’s mother. I had to walk back up, someone on the fifth floor had left the elevator door open. Gloria was twisted up into a ball, and though her eyes were dry I could tell she had been crying. I helped her put on my overcoat and scarf, and it brought back memories of a Sunday when she’d worn some country clothes and a pair of my pants, and how we’d laughed at the way her behind stuck out, the thoroughly unmasculine outline of her hips.

But now, wearing my clothes, she was only a travesty of that afternoon, and we had to move fast, not stopping to think. As we were leaving, her mother arrived; poor darling, she said, for heaven’s sake, wrap yourself up. Then Gloria seemed to realize she’d have to be strong, and made up her mind to put up a front. In the taxi she joked a couple of times about how the shop would be forced to give her leave of absence and how I’d have no socks for Monday, and, seeing her mother weeping buckets, she said do you think this is some episode out of a soap opera? I knew the pain was getting worse every minute, and she knew I knew, and huddled closer against me.

By the time we got to the hospital, all she could do was moan. They left us in a little waiting-room, and after a while the surgeon came. Tall, with a kindly, absent-minded expression, wearing a coat that was unbuttoned and none too clean. He asked us to step outside and closed the door. Gloria’s mother sat down in a low chair, crying harder and harder. I stared out at the street: it had stopped raining. I didn’t even have the comfort of a smoke. Even back in high school, I was the only one out of thirty-eight who had never even tried a cigarette. That was when I first met Gloria: she wore her dark hair in braids and couldn’t get through geography. There were two ways to get closer to Gloria: either I could teach her geography myself, or we could study it together. I took the second way, and of course we both flunked.

Then the doctor came out and asked was I the brother or the husband. The husband, I told him, and he gave a wheezing kind of cough. “It’s not peritonitis,” he said, “the doctor’s an ass.” “Oh?” “It’s something else. We’ll know better in the morning.” In the morning. That is: “We’ll know better if she gets through the night. If we operate now, she’s done for. It’s serious all right, but if she gets through the day I think she’ll pull through.” I thanked him—I’ve no idea what for—and he added: “It’s against regulations, but you can stay with her tonight.”

First a nurse came along with my overcoat and scarf. Then Gloria passed by, on a stretcher, with her eyes closed, unconscious.

At eight o’clock I was able to go into the little private room where they’d put her. It had a table and a chair, in addition to the bed. I sat down straddling the seat of the chair, with my elbows resting on the back. My eyelids smarted, as though I’d been straining my eyes, forcing them to stay wide open. I couldn’t leave off staring at her. The sheet was no whiter than her pallid face, and her forehead was glittering and waxen. It was a joy to listen to her breathing, even like this, with her eyes closed. I pretended she wasn’t speaking to me because I had a crush on Margaret Sullavan, that I wasn’t speaking to her because she had a yen for that guy in the shop. But deep down I knew the truth, and I felt as though I were dangling in midair, as though this forced insomnia was something pitiful and unreal demanded of me by this momentary tension, a tension that at any minute might come to an end.

As each eternity passed a clock ticked somewhere far off, and only an hour had gone by. Once I stood up, went out to the corridor, and paced back and forth a few times. A fellow came up to me, chewing on a cigarette, his mouth twisted in a joyful grin. “So you’re waiting too?” Yes, I said, I was waiting too. “It’s the first,” he went on, “she seems to be having a hard time.” Then I could feel myself going limp, and I went back to the room and sat down again, astride the chair. I began to count the floor tiles, playing superstitious games, trying to kid myself. I looked at the tiles and made a rough guess at how many there were in each row, and told myself if it was an odd number she’d pull through. And it was an odd number. And she would pull through if the clock chimed before I had counted to ten. And the clock chimed when I was counting five or six. Suddenly I caught myself thinking, “If she gets through today. . . .” and panic gripped me. I had to assure the future, visualize it at all cost. I had to build a future if I was to snatch her away from this death that was growing up all around her. And I started planning: that when vacation time came, we’d go to Floresta, that next Sunday—because this future I was scheming had to be just around the comer—we’d have dinner with my brother and his wife, and we’d all laugh about what a scare my mother-in-law had had, that I would make a public statement announcing that I had formally broken with Margaret Sullavan, that Gloria and I would have a child, two children, four, and each time I would settle down to wait impatiently in the corridor.

Then a nurse came in and sent me outside while she gave Gloria an injection. Then I came back in and went on to outline that facile, transparent future. But she shook her head and muttered something or other. That was all. And then there was nothing but Gloria fighting for life, only the two of us and the threat of death, only me hanging on, watching her nostrils flutter as they continued, thank Christ, to open and close, only this tiny room, and the clock ticking.

Then I took out my notepad and started to write this, so that I could read it to her when we were back home again, read it to myself when we were back home again. Back home. How good that sounded. But at the same time it sounded far away, as far away as the first woman when you’re eleven years old, or rheumatism when you’re twenty, or death itself only yesterday. Suddenly my mind started wandering: I thought about today’s game, had it been called off on account of rain, about the English umpire who would be appearing in the stadium for the first time, the entries I’ll be making in the ledger tomorrow. But then the sight of her filled me up again, with her glittering, waxen forehead, her parched lips twitching with fever, and I felt utterly lost, a stranger in this Saturday which was to have been mine.

Half-past eleven now. I thought of God, of my old hope that perhaps he really did exist. Out of strict honesty, I refused to pray. You pray only to something you really believe in. And I couldn’t believe in Him really. All I have is the hope that He exists. Then I realized that I was not praying only to see if my honesty might touch Him perhaps. And then I prayed. A savage prayer, full of qualms, a prayer meant to crush, to leave no doubt that I would not and could not worship Him, a prayer like a mailed fist. I listened to this silent prayer as I stammered it out, but all I could really hear was her breathing, hard and labored. Another eternity, and twelve o’clock struck. If she gets through today. And she’d done it. The day was behind her at last, and she was still breathing. The two of us kept on breathing, and I fell asleep. I had no dreams.

Someone shook my arm; it was ten past four. She was not there. Then the surgeon came in and asked the nurse, had she told me yet. Yes, I yelled—though it wasn’t true— and he was a son-of-a-bitch, worse than the doctor even, because he’d said if she got through today, and then after all… I yelled, I think in my frenzy I even spit at him, and he looked at me with his kindly, hatefully understanding face, and I knew I was wrong, that it was all my fault, for going to sleep, for letting her go without one single last look, without the future I had schemed for her, without my insulting, punished prayer.

Then I asked them where I could see her. Some dull curiosity drove me to watch her as she slipped away, taking with her my children, my holidays, and all the spiritless fondness I felt for God.