I could not tell her that. I did not know.
I called Ernesto from my hospital room on the sixth day. I made the call while Lucía was in the corridor speaking with a nurse, because I did not want her to hear the conversation until I had thought through what I was asking. Ernesto is seventy-three, two years older than me, and has been both my lawyer and my friend for nearly thirty years. He is the kind of man whose presence in a situation makes the situation feel more manageable, not because he is optimistic but because he is thorough.
He answered on the second ring.
I told him I needed to be moved. Not discharged, not sent home, moved, transferred to another facility, somewhere the children could not find me immediately. I told him enough of what I had heard that he understood without my having to say everything twice. He was quiet for a moment, the way he is quiet when he is thinking rather than when he has nothing to say, and then he said he would come before dawn and that he would bring the car.
“Can you travel?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But I can try.”
I told the doctor that evening that I needed a transfer for personal reasons and that I was declining to disclose the destination. The doctor, a young woman named Dr. Fernández who had treated me with a directness I appreciated, said the transfer was medically possible if managed carefully and that she would arrange whatever was needed. She did not ask me to explain further. I think she had seen enough of human behavior in hospital rooms to understand that sometimes a patient needs to disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with their medical condition.
Ernesto arrived at five in the morning in his old Volvo, which he drives with the same unhurried confidence he brings to everything. The nursing staff helped me into a wheelchair, and a nurse whose name I did not catch but whose manner was kind gave Lucía a list of medications and instructions and a look that said she understood more than she was saying. By six we were on the road, the city still dark and quiet around us, the highways empty in the way that highways are empty in the very early morning before the day has properly committed to itself.
Lucía sat beside me in the back seat. She held my hand for most of the journey and said very little, which was right, because there was nothing that needed saying in those hours. Sometimes being present is the whole thing.
Ernesto’s country house is three and a half hours north of the city, in a region where the landscape is mostly hills and agricultural land and small towns that appear and disappear along the road without ceremony. The house itself is unpretentious, the kind of place a man builds when he wants somewhere to think rather than somewhere to impress. There is a large terrace facing a valley, a kitchen that smells permanently of wood and old stone, a garden that Ernesto tends himself and takes seriously. We had visited it perhaps a dozen times over the years.
