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in the hospital. My private practice was growing, and with some reluctance, but more and more often, I performed operations in private clinics. I caught myself appreciating those places, where the patients had to pay and where everything was clean, well organized, and silent. I was barely forty, and maybe I had already fallen out of love with my profession. When I was a young man, I was impetuous, always in motion. After my internship, my first years in practice were febrile, vigorous, like the time I punched a nurse because he hadn’t waited for the steam autoclave, which sterilizes the instruments, to complete its cycle correctly. Then, almost without my noticing, a veil of peacefulness, accompanied by a mild feeling of disenchantment, came over me. When I talked about it with your mother, she said that I was simply slipping into the habit of adult life, making a necessary and by and large agreeable transition. I was barely forty, and I’d given up taking offense some time ago. It wasn’t that I would have sold my soul to the devil; it was just that I hadn’t offered it to the gods. I’d kept it in my pocket, and there it was now, in the pocket of my lightweight summer suit, inside that ugly bar.
    The vodka gave me a spark of life. A tall young man, filthy with dust and mortar, glared at the fan and its motionless blades. As he headed for the Foosball table, followed by his stocky friend, he blurted out, “It’s hot! Turn on the fan!” With a brusque yank, he pulled the cylindrical handle on the table, and the balls started to roll in the wooden belly. The stocky boy threw in the first ball, dramatically letting it fall to the playing field from high above his head, apparently some kind of ritual, and then the game began. The two of them said little to each other. Their hands gripped the handles tightly as they flipped their wrists, striking hard, precise blows that made the metal rods vibrate. The bartender slouched out from behind the bar, drying his hands on his towel, and turned on the fan. As he was walking back, I handed him my glass and said, “Bring me another one, please.” The fan blades began moving, sluggishly stirring up the hot air in the bar. A napkin fluttered to the floor, and I bent over to retrieve it. I noticed a few revolting piles of sawdust and, a bit farther away, the legs of the two Foosball players. By the time I straightened up, my head was heavy with blood, and the sudden movement made my brain reel. The bartender brought the glass of vodka to my table. I drank the whole thing in one gulp. My eyes floated toward the jukebox. It was an old model, speckled blue in color, with a little window. When a song was playing, you could look into the jukebox and see the metal tonearm gliding across the record. I thought, I’d like to hear a song. Any song at all. That woman’s face came back into my mind. Wearing too much makeup, looking dazed and coarse, she was swaying in the light that came from the lower part of the music machine. A ball leaped off the Foosball table and rolled across the floor. On my way out, I left the young bartender a handsome tip. He laid aside the sponge he was using to wipe off the bar and gathered the money into his dripping hands.
    I walked back to the mechanic’s shop. In front of me, a group of half-naked children were laboriously hauling a cart containing a large plastic garbage bag filled with water and leaking from many holes. The mechanic had finally hoisted his rolling shutter, but only partway, and I had to duck to enter the shop. Inside, under the oiled breasts of a calendar girl, I found a powerfully built man of about my own age, wearing overalls too tight for him and black with grease. He and I climbed into an old Citroën Dyane with blazing hot seats and drove to where I’d left my car. It needed a new oil pump and a cylinder sleeve. We went back to the shop to pick up the required parts. The mechanic discharged me in front of the shop, tossed what he