Hospital Daze

“So write about the pain,” said Lady, who regards the lack of a blog post as a sort of betrayal. And does it matter that I can barely sit up? Of course not, because ever resourceful, she has the answer.

“You can just dictate into the phone, and it will record and format, and automatically upload to the blog, as well as any YouTube videos you want to include!”

I have no doubt that my cell phone can do this. But its user? The guy who couldn’t figure who the three missed calls were this morning? Yes, maybe on a good day I could do it, but not when I had a famished Hannibal Lecter salivating at the base of my spine.

But all that is beyond the point. Pain is another country, and to go beyond it, into the land of health, you first travel through the checkpoint of amnesia. And worse, you traverse the same checkpoint on entering.

Consider, for example, how I spent my days: reading, writing, playing my cello, and teaching. Was any of that worthwhile? What should I have done, that last day before all that taken from me?

I had been to the hospital and suffered through seven or eight hours of institutionalization, and had escaped it all by meeting a Puerto Marcus Welby, who instantly realized that the doctor treating me was either a quack (she wasn’t) or having a bad day (she was, but so was I). She had, in fact, come into my—well what was it? It was neither a room nor a cubicle—rather, it was a space containing four beds and four people. So she entered into what I began calling and “no man’s land” and addressed the IV bag. Like a fool, I thought I had priority, and asked whether she had seen the results of the CT scan.

I had spent two hours drinking barium, and then had promptly been taken off to get a scan of my abdomen. The very nice radiologist had told me that he would read it, and then deliver the results to the nurses’ station.

That had been three hours ago, during which I had frozen silly, since the ambient air temperature is a weird feature of all Puerto Rican hospitals. You readers up there in Wisconsin, on this January day? You ain’t felt nothin’….

So I was there, covered by—and could I make this up?—a large piece of paper, which yes, was in the shape (roughly) of a blanket, but there all the similarities ended. Oh, and since no one has invented a paper pillow, I was also getting a stiff  neck. Anyway, there were three other people in our corner of the ER, and then Raf came into the room. (He being Mr. Fernández, and also my husband, since I’ve gotten tired of writing “friend” on forms. Look, do I wash my friends’ underwear?)

So he gave me a look that I’ve seen on those horrible days at the vet, and that’s when I realized: I definitely wasn’t ready for my screen shot, Mr. DeMille. So we had chatted and held hands, and then we had agreed. The sensible thing to do was go home and feed the cats. Why hang around doing nothing? I was within spitting distance of discharge, I am a former nurse, I can play systems: didn’t I survive for seven years in corporate America?

And so he left, and oddly, seeing him go, I got tears in my eyes. He was living, you see, in that other world, where cats are important and a problem is that you forget to pick up the laundry.

So he left and I waited. And waited. And then—completely lacking in imagination, this time around—I waited some more. I waited for perhaps three hours, periodically checking to see if the doctor was in sight. Was she? Of course not. So I went back to the default mode, which of course was…waiting.

I’ve said it before: Puerto Rican doctors are excellent, but the hospitals? Well, my mother-in-law had spent three months in one of the best hospitals on the island, but what happened when she needed  an X-ray? Well, the doctor wrote the order, the nurses sent it down to radiology, and then the excuses began. Pedro (the X-ray guy) had an emergency. Then he had lunch. Then—and finally the truth finally emerged—Pedro was…well, nobody knew for sure.

The sisters were enraged. And no one can fault Mr. Fernández’s sisters for lack of energy or (especially) character—they embarked on a search for Pedro. Remember the search the Boston Bomber? That was a summer’s day picnic in comparison to the quest for Pedro. True, the sisters lacked high power weapons and helicopter support, but everything that could be done was. The sisters charged through doors marked “Authorized Personnel Only” They not only looked into dumpsters, they overturned them. They corralled staff and interrogated them, in an attempt to learn not where Pedro was, but where he lived or liked to drink. Finally, Pedro was found, and two sisters stayed with him to make the voyage to mother’s bed; the other went to bring the glad news to Mother.

Oh, and they were good enough to turn his pager back on!

I saw all of this, but did I remember it, as the hours passed in the ER? Of course not, and so I looked around, and began to get gloomy. I am still young, comparatively, but the when I get older? When being in doctor’s offices and hospital beds is less than an oddity but rather a parallel reality? How will I fare? Because it was not just I, waiting for Dr. Godot, we were all waiting for Godot. And with just the same results.

I began to think—can I grow old here? It was bad enough for my mother, up there in Wisconsin, whose only complaint of the hospital was the staff’s use of the expression, “go ahead?”

I asked about this.

“Well, everybody who enters the room says something like, ‘well, let me just go ahead and change your sheets. ‘ And it’s beginning to bug me. Why can’t they just say ‘may I change your sheets?”

Obviously, having been an editor for years, she had carried right on, and was practicing in the auditory realm. I will say, however, that after an hour’s time, it was bugging me.

The point—and my mother would have deleted that digression—is that having a problem with the use of “go ahead” is, well, not a problem. One could safely call it a quibble.

Some people—were they bribing the staff?—did manage to leave, and then, as quickly as the orderly was able to rip the paper off the gurney, other people arrived. And that was when the gods who rule over Puerto Rico intervened.

It was a gentleman who clearly wasn’t well; it was his wife who clearly was worried but also very practiced in the emergency room arts. Why, well she came with all the luggage of Edwardians embarking on a transatlantic cruise. Blankets? She had three. Pillows? Impossible to count. Oh, and the snacks? Had she held up Zabars?

(For those not familiar with Zabars, well, the cheese counter alone is as big as your average living room….)

So she was well travelled in this land, and she heard the terrible words of one who was not. That would be me, and that would be the doctor, just returned from her facial, pedicure, and deep Swedish massage—complete with heated stones from the mountains surrounding Uppsala, but I digress—she appeared, looking ten years younger. And we had not a conversation but a clash.

How did it happen? I don’t know, but I must have asked about the MRI, she must have responding brusquely, and I snapped.

“Listen, if the report doesn’t come soon, I’ll check out AMA.”

For doctors, AMA is their professional organization; for patients, AMA is “against medical advice.” A better writer could make something of this, but I am Pooh, not Owl.

And so my cellmate’s wife had heard these fatal words, as well as the doctors, hissed over her shoulder as she stomped out of the area: “Fine! Go right ahead! You’ve had excellent care!”

Here, the limitations of the written screen are glaring, because there should have been the sound of a thunderclap, or maybe French horns, or anything that the studio could rustle up to indicate an ominous sound. It was clear: I would never see that doctor again.

Yes, it was over, and so I was going to have to wait until her shift was over, and then start in on the next doctor. Here my fellow traveller stepped in, especially after seeing the radiologist, come to collect her husband and intercepted by me. What had he said?

“Oh, I left the report at the nurse’s station a couple hours ago!”

She was good enough to turn around, put a restraining hand on the radiologist, and tell me. “I’d go to the nurse’s station and gently inquire. Oh, and never go to the ER alone….”

She had reminded me: direct confrontation is impossible in Puerto Rico. What’s needed? The ay bendito, which is impossible to translate, but which you can read below.

I went to the nurses’ station and waited until someone made eye contact. This is important because, well, if they refuse to look at you, why would they help you? So an older man, looking very much like a doctor, looked up and greeted me. I returned the salute, inquired about his family, saw pictures of his latest grandchild and also some Paso Finos (he was a horse enthusiast) and then—after getting his address so I could send him a Christmas card –I started what I needed to do.

“Listen, I’m really sorry for the bother, and I know how busy you are, but I’m a little confused. You see, the radiologist told me that the MRI were at the nurses’ station, but the doctor says she hasn’t seen them. Could they have been misplaced?”

 It worked: the doctor found the lab results, read them, explained them, and told me he would discharge me at once. The ordeal was over.

I got a prescription for an antibiotic, paid the fifty-dollar deductible, and then called Raf and told him I was on my way. No problem—I would take a cab, since it was Condado, only 11:30 or so, and the place would be hopping. I mean, it’s a tourist area, and popular with the young crowd….

It wasn’t. Either the vogue changed, or the whole island was attending an AA meeting, but even the ghosts had deserted this town. So I walked the empty streets—I was hoping they were empty, because something told me that anybody I encountered on this street would make me long for the emergency room—until at last I hailed a cab. It was, thought, bad but over.

Wrong. It was starting, and about to get much worse

    

  

The Song of a Sickness, Part One

When it started I cannot tell you; nor can I tell you when—or even if—it will end.

Right—“it” may not be the word, unless you mean a three-month period of torrential pain, hospitalizations, emergency room visits, and terror. But perhaps “they” is the better word, since the whole ordeal began with stomach virus.

“Eat,” adjured Mr. Fernández, my husband, “you have to eat!”

It had become well past annoying. I had lost any appetite for fried—however lightly—food: the smell of it was nauseating. And much of the meat we eat is lightly sautéed in whatever the healthy oil of the month is. So mealtimes became agonizing: I would pick at my food, arrange wine bottles strategically in front of my plate, invent excuses of eating late lunches.

The loss of appetite was the one mentionable symptom of the virus, which I must have had for years. In fact, in those years of working at the home office of Walmart, I had assumed that I—like every other middle manager—had irritable bowel syndrome. It was almost a badge of honor—like working until they closed the building, or sending emails from home at 3 AM. After the weekly bloodbath on Friday morning—that was when the complete team would assemble—there would be a stampede for the bathrooms, and it was always the stalls, never the urinals, that were needed.

So my stomach was bad, and my guts were contorted but guess what? That was the price you paid. But why, six months ago, did everything get worse?

It’s one of the mysteries of the virus, Helicobacter pylori, which apparently lives contentedly in the guts for years, before it gets uppity, goes on a rampage, and decides to kill its host. And so for months I suffered every indignity the gastric system could devise, until one Monday I could bear it no longer: I called my doctor. When she heard about the various eruptions from all orifices, she told me what any sensible practitioner would: go to the emergency room.

Going to the emergency room is a code term for submitting yourself into a different world—one in which your neither know the landscape nor the language. Though in fact I did, since I had worked for ten years as a nurse. That, however, had been in serene Wisconsin, and then later in more dicey Chicago. But in Puerto Rico? How would I fare here?

I arrived at noon, I sat for an hour in the waiting room, until I was called into triage: this in itself was a bit alarming. Granted, I wasn’t spewing blood all over the furniture, but how did they know I was having a heart attack? Were they that good, that they could diagnose at mere glance?

Finally I was called, and learned two things: by blood pressure was seriously low—90 over 60—and my weight had dropped fifteen pounds in the last two months. So then it was time to sit for another hour in the hallway of the emergency room itself—all the better so that I could imagine from the groans, and sighs of the patients lucky enough to have beds what was happening behind their curtains. My companion in all of this was a woman suffering what must have been pneumonia. I had once either read or imagined that the velocity of a sneeze is around ninety miles an hour: my companion’s cough was easily twice that. So it was clear: however effective the cure for my guts might be, I’d still end up here in two weeks time, for a malady one system north. The Walmart manager in me began to admire the business model: the emergency room was clearly curing one disease even as it was incubating the next one. And so after I was afflicted with and then cured of the pneumonia, what would the next malady be? Strep throat? Migraine? And would it always travel upward? If not, were ingrown toenails contagious?

Worse, I began to see what the daily rag had been saying all these many months, since virtually everybody was over 80: I, in my late fifties, was at last once again the spring chicken. So there was no lack of patients—indeed, it was the Christmas story of no room at the inn—but where were the doctors? Easy—three thousand miles northwest in the states, where they can make a decent living.

Here, it’s time to say that Puerto Rican doctors are—in general—much better than their gringo counterparts. Why? I’ve no idea, but they are both better prepared academically and spend more time more caringly than other doctors. That said, the doctor who admitted me was the complete exception.

We started off well enough: I told her my symptoms, she asked the right questions, and then prodded the four quadrants of my abdomen. Since I didn’t scream and hit the ceiling, we both knew it wasn’t appendicitis. So that left the other diagnosis: the rioting virus that would put me on the path to peritonitis, which, untreated, would lead me straight to the undertaker.

“Can we do this on an outpatient basis?” I asked, and it was here that the relationship began to plummet. She outlined how precarious my health was, suggested that I might not even make it to the pharmacy before the grim reaper scythed me in my path, and then pointed at me, and told the chilling words: “I own you.”

It was clear: she had major control issues. But by then it was two or three in the afternoon, I had wasted the day, and why not get it over with, if I could? I found myself—at last—on a bed. The blood was drawn, the IV inserted, and then the drugs were given. All of this was done with the least interaction possible. It was clear: I was less a person than a collection of disorderly veins and guts. So I found out for myself what medicines were dripping into me, and remembered them from nursing days long past: Cipro and Flagyl. In fact, they were utterly the right medicines to give me.

They also proved nearly fatal….   

Anger, Channeled through Texas

Let me tell you the official story: Montalvo committed a crime, and under law, he must either be punished or corrected, since the call that I received came not from a prison but rather a “correction facility.”

But there was something odd about it, and for that oddity I had been prepared by Lady, since it was first she who had received the call.

“It was from some ‘713’ area code, so I looked that up, and it turned out it was Texas somewhere. So I must have gotten like 40 calls from them, and I kept ignoring them. But finally I got tired of it, and I picked up. That’s when I was told that the call was from Montalvo, and from the Bayamón Regional Facility. So I sighed and entered my credit card information, and that’s when I finally got connected to Montalvo.”

So I was prepared, a day or two later, when I got the call from the 713 area code. What wasn’t I prepared to do? Pick it up, since I had no idea what to say to this kid. Anyway, I was doing other things—such as walking to the grocery store—and they seemed of far more urgency than talking to a son in prison.

Sorry, correctional facility.

This morning, in the café, I was ready, but though I picked up, I kept falling out of the branches of the telephone tree.

“You will be charged $2.98 for a fifteen minute call, plus a $5.95 processing fee. For example, a ten-minute call will cost 8 dollars. Press pound if you accept the charges.”

Well, that presented certain problems, since I can never remember what the pound key is. So I have to go through a thought process as contorted as the inner ear—or maybe the maze at Hampton Court—which goes something like this: “well, it’s obviously the button that is not the star key, which anyway is not the star key but an asterisk, but that’s what they call it, but then who decided that the number symbol should be called the pound key?”

So I pressed the pound key—wondering as I did whether I shouldn’t pound it—only to be informed that I had been timed out.

So that left me to my imagination, since the phone did not ring in another forty minutes. So that meant that clearly there was a whole group of prisoners—hey, let’s call them “correctees”—who were talking to their loved ones. In the meantime, I received a separate call from the business that was the intermediary—telephonically speaking—between my son and me. Did I want to establish an account, of which the best option was ninety dollars for 200 hours of time? If so, please have my credit card ready….

Well, that seemed like a good idea, since twenty minutes after the “establish an account” call—any guesses what I chose to do?—I got another call from Montalvo.

Right, so I had my credit card ready, though I did have to wonder—what about people who have no credit cards? Let’s be blunt: The criminals of the financial and ruling classes—and you know who you are, and shame on you!—have plenty of lovely credit cards. Presumably, their only difficulty is choosing with what precious metal to pay: Gold? Platinum? Uranium? Following this analogy, I might well have reached for my Tin Visa to connect with my son.

So everything was going swimmingly, until I got to entering the four-digital expiration date, and pressed 0 instead of 1. Right, so shouldn’t there be a back key on my telephone pad? I look all over for it, but it isn’t there, so I hit a button that has no function, so maybe it’s a wise and omniscient button, which will know exactly what to do. Guess what?

I got disconnected.

So then I had plenty of time to wait for all of the other correctees to finish their calls with their technically savvier relatives—and don’t I have a Master’s degree from a major land grant Midwestern University? Oh wait, that’s Raf—but very occasionally I can trip him up on a date or fact or two, and so I can’t be entirely stupid. Or am I being classist? Sorry—being a prisoner’s relative is a road I haven’t gone down before.

Now what was I saying?

Oh yes, I had time to bump into Lady, who was explaining the history and philosophy of the Poet’s Passage to two new employees, since the gift shop operates as a kind of front for the vice and or crime of poetry. But Lady takes the time to tell me that she had gone to see Montalvo yesterday, and she had told him that that would be the last time she would do so.

Well, I knew what she had gone through, since a fellow worker at the café had told me. How did he know? His son had been in the prison, and so had he, since the cops had picked him up for buying a nickel bag of marijuana.

“It’s not easy: they gotta a dress code for visitors, and sometimes they give people a break, but sometimes they got the big shots from home office, so they gotta do everything by the book. So no sandals, no jeans, they frisk you, they run their fingers through your hair and then they got this dog….”

That was what appalled Lady, since apparently the dog sniffed regions of the body that no Victorian ever dreamt existed. Her word for the experience? Violated.

So at last the call came through again, and at this time I had memorized my credit card number, and had sat studiously practicing telephony 101. “Pound,” I told myself, and hovered my finger over the number signal. “Asterisk,” I told myself, and realized that I was committing the first sin of pedagogy: confusing the student.

So I had prepared: I was well up for the challenge of accepting a call from a company in Texas! I entered all the numbers correctly; I pounded and starred with aplomb, and then I got to the final challenge—my zip code.

Should be easy, right? But somehow, though the bill is sent to my mailbox—whose zip code is 00902—the account is registered in my physical zip code. And that’s 00901.

Or was it the other way around?

There were several anxious moments. Then, the machine announced: the transaction had been successfully completed.

Oh yeah? Because I was far from sure whether this transaction—these weekly dinners, these going to the operas, these coachings on poetic meter and rhyme schemes and enjambment had been successfully completed.

“How are you, Papa Dukes?”

“Very, very angry.”

And I know how to use long silences too. You count silently at approximately 60 MM (Maezel’s Metronome—and see the value of a musical training?) and then when you get to 30 you say the next thing. OK, I chose 30 over 60—which I would greatly have preferred—but remember the $2.98 charge and the $5.95 processing fee, plus all of the other applicable state, local, and federal taxes and surcharges that might apply? Silence was certainly golden—but for the company, not for me!

Next statement.

“And I am deeply, deeply disappointed….”

Then it occurred to me, how anemic our society has become! Because my father would have said much more, and he would have struggled to keep what once had been his heart but was now only a plastic-wrapped piece of ground meat—ground prisoner’s father’s heart, 99 cents per pound, expiration…--in his chest. And not out there on the table between us.

There would have been an explosion of moral rectitude, and the words “disgrace” and “shame” and “how-the-hell-could-you-do-this-to-me-and-your-mother?” But to tell Montalvo that, or that my stomach has been bad for a week now, and I vomited a couple of days ago, and Raf is insisting I go to the doctor? To tell Montalvo all that? That would be unthinkable or unproductive, and Montalvo was left to say the only thing left to say. So I hear it: “I’m sorry, Dad, I completely fucked up.”

And I am left to say the only thing I can say, which is, “OK, so going forward?”

Dwelling in the past, as Montalvo told me—and as I very much suspect his therapist taught him—was futile.

Yeah?

My father wouldn’t have thought so. Or my mother, when she sent me to my room for hitting a completely defenseless though absolutely annoying kid who was younger and smaller than I. What did she say?

“You just go to your room, and you think about what you did, and don’t you dare come out until your good and sorry!”

Somehow, I knew that if one sliver of contrition was lacking, my mother would sniff it out—read “blood-hound it out”—instantly.

So we talked, which we had to do, and now a company in Texas is smacking its lips in preparation of charging me half a month’s wages for a five-minute call. And you know, I haven’t had long distance service for years, since I have a cell phone so that means that having to pay, let’s see, what was it? Three cents a minute? Or in the end, did it get down to one cent a minute? So that call to my errant son would have cost me maybe 30 cents—in those quaint days when people used to have land lines. But now, we have figured out a way of capitalizing on criminality, and on the loved ones of criminality, and the politicians have privatized our prison system, and you know what?

I may have reined in my father’s anger at Montalvo, but for the people who have viciously and very avariciously overturned a fundamental structure of our society? I can accept casting away the notion of “correction” and agreeing to a nice, vindictive punishment. But this is criminalizing the poor, corrupting the judicial system, rigging the rules, and figuring out how to squeeze the last dime out of the poorest of the poor. Oh, and charging the taxpayers outrageous sums to do it.

Let me put it more succinctly. I can forgive a kid who smokes dope and steals a parrot and is stupid enough to smoke more dope when he has to piss in bottles. But to the politicians and the capitalists who cooked up these crimes?

Throw away the keys!   

 

     

And So?

And so this young man went to prison—well, what of it?

He smoked a drug that makes some people feel good, and makes others act irrationally. Which was certainly the case with him, since the theft of a rare blue macaw requires either a profound if quirky criminality, or a very heady stew of chemicals swirling through the cerebellum. And so this young man, Montalvo, has ended up at last in prison, to be confined there for several weeks.

Again I ask—what of it?

His misfortune was to be young, imprudent, poor, and slightly darker in skin tone than the ruling class. And all of that condemned him. But was it any different for him than for me? Because I too was thrust into jail, in the year 1717, and for reasons every bit as inane as the reasons that catapulted Montalvo into prison.

My crime?

I had grown weary of the bickering that lead to a feud between two powerful dukes: William Ernest and his nephew Ernest August. And however bitter it might have been, was there any question of who would win? Even before Ernest August became one of the two dukes ruling Weimar, William Ernest had seized all the power, as well as the purse strings.

And so there were two competing households, and the musicians of one were forbidden to make music, or indeed even to befriend, the musicians of the other. That might have been endured, but soon the politicking grew even more heated. For the enfeebled Kapellmeister, whose work I had mostly done for some years, at last succumbed and died.

Had I been happy in Weimar?

Yes, reasonably so. Because while the rulers of the small nations and duchies all warred to gain ascendency over each other, I was left to my own devices. Yes, I had many duties, but it was in those years that I composed most of my organ works, and a great deal of my secular works. The Brandenburg Concerti, the cello suites, the violin sonatas and partitas—all stemmed from those years.

Nor was Weimar in any way a backwater: it attracted some of the best minds and thinkers of the era. Here, I could meet the great scholar Johann Matthias Gesner; here also I was exposed to the Italian style of composition, in particular the works of Vivaldi. And so I was able, by in large, to ignore the rift between the two reigning dukes; all that, however, was to change with the death of the Kapellmeister.

The letter that I wrote was polite, almost fawning, since my beloved María Barbara had flatly insisted: the original letter, she felt, was far too demanding.

“How can you say, Sebastian, that you have no doubt that the appointment is to be yours? And to ask what pay you will receive? That will infuriate the duke!”

“But it is the truth. I have undertaken the work of the doddering old fool for years now, without a single pfennig being given to me! Isn’t it just that I now be given the appointment, and that at last I be compensated for the work I have done, and am to do?”

“Yes, Sebastian, but will the duke see that? Won’t he feel that you are demanding—presumptuous, even? Do you expect the duke to take orders from one of his servants?”

I protested, of course, since who but I was more qualified for the position? Had I not proved myself? Throughout Europe, my fame as an organist, and especially as an improviser, had grown; once, visiting Dresden, I had been invited to compete against the greatest French organist of the day, Louis Marchand. And what had he done? He had crept into the church as I was playing, and then promptly left town! My position was solidified: was it not right that I should be given this title of Kapellmeister?

We argued and argued, and at last compromised, but what did the Duke do? He chose to appoint the son of the old Kapellmeister to his father’s old post, and I was left with the humiliation of being cast aside.

Would any man of spirit accept such a stinging insult? Was I to go like a kicked dog through the streets, through the halls of the castle, only to hear the whispers and the jeers behind my back? For I well knew my worth, and never did I fail to let the world know it. The “musicians” who sawed and tooted and warbled away—did I fail to note their deficiencies? Of course not, why should I? I had struggled, I had done the work, I had made myself the greatest musician of my time. Must I bow down or curtsey to those lesser than I?

Yes, I had done what this young man, Montalvo, had not. For I don’t understand these children, who think that fame and fortune are as easy to obtain as plucking an apple from the tree! Not a day went by when I hadn’t striven to improve myself, no nightfall arrived without my repairing to bed exhausted! I worked until I could work no more, and even then on most days I pushed myself further. But this boy, now in a savage prison, ruled by brutes and peopled with brutes? Has he done the work?

We had, perhaps, the drugs that were good for us: a hearty beer and a pipeful of tobacco. Yes, we knew of the opium takers of the Turks and their neighbors, but it would only be a century later that the drug would be given to our own women to calm their nerves. But all we had was beer, and we may have been better off for it.

And it was over a beer that I approached my other employer, Duke Ernest August, and it was through him that I learned that the position of Kapellmeister was available at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen. And it was then that the Duke William Ernest revealed how petty and despicable he could be. Yes, for nearly a month, I was jailed in the ducal prison for having “too insistently pressed for his release from service!”

My friends—the few men of worth who could appreciate who I was—rallied in my defense. But for long weeks I stared at the bars, and wondered at my fate. But very soon I realized: I could compose anywhere. I began to compose what would be the greatest treatise on tuning, and some of the greatest music ever composed: The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Like everywhere else, I put my time to work, as had so many others before me. For prison can be a sort of freedom, if there are pen and paper at hand, and the time to use them. The great Cervantes, after all, wrote the first modern novel, Don Quixote, from a prison cell.

But how different things are now! Will Montalvo do as I did? Will he be given the chance? And when he comes out, in nearly as many days as I spent, will he be changed?