When the crying stopped I lay still for a long time. I began to drift in and out of sleep. My mind was like a withered balloon floating on the ceiling. Sometimes it felt as if I was floating and sometimes, often at night, as if I was falling. In the day, my senses were either muffled or hideously acute in isolation one from the other. The smell of cooking in the building made me sick, and the cries of young children outside in the schoolyard became as painful as gulls shrieking in my ear.

After some time I began to hallucinate. I saw the eyes on the roof of Jose's cave. They blinked slowly at me. I was Jose, lying in his cave. He had stopped eating. He wanted to die.

Our head was dry and shrinking and the pain was forcing our eyes shut. We were all body. Our stomach was hot and swollen and our mouth was bitter.