*
For the next eight years, Ferrol returned to the castle every single holiday. When other wealthy young men were spending their summers touring European capitals and North America or yachting in the Mediterranean, he remained devoted to his increasingly frail grandmother. At the age of twenty he was a busy medical student at the Autonomous University of Madrid, but while he studied, he monitored her health from afar. Izabel Gaytan’s medical issues were myriad in her last years. Arthritis limited her mobility. Atrial fibrillation led to heart failure. Dizziness led to falls and broken bones. She was a proud woman who wouldn’t consider going into a nursing home and fortunately, Ferrol had the resources to allow her to stay at the castle in relative safety. There were nurses around the clock, physical therapists, cooks, and cleaners. Ferrol even arranged for a hairdresser to come to her apartment and a semi-retired priest to say Mass for her. Her mental faculties were undiminished and the high point of her week was the Sunday afternoon phone conversation with her grandson.
Ferrol got the call he had been dreading while he was in the anatomy lab, dissecting the thigh of a cadaver. According to one of her nurses, his grandmother was deteriorating and didn’t have long. With the permission of his dean, he hopped in his Porsche and sped north.
When he arrived, she was propped upright on four pillows to ease her congested heart and receiving oxygen via a face mask. Her eyes were closed and sunken into her skeletal skull. He went to take her pulse at a wrist with skin as thin as rice paper. It was hard for him to feel the thready, irregular beats.
“Is she unconscious?” he asked the nurse.
“She’s sleeping. She’s been sleeping a lot. Per the doctor’s orders I’ve been giving her small injections of morphine every four hours to ease her heart. Only a milligram at a time. It makes her sleepy, but you can wake her.”
He moved his grip from her wrist to her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.
“Grandmother,” he said. “It’s Ferrol.”
She opened her gummy eyes and as the nurse dabbed at the secretions, she managed a smile. She tried to talk through her mask.
“I’m going to take it off,” he said.
When the nurse objected, he dismissed her. “Leave us. This is between me and my grandmother.”
With the mask gone, she said in a breathy rush, “Ferrol—”
“Yes, I came. Of course, I came.”
“Good. It’s good,” she said. “You came.”
He sat beside her and leaned in close. Feeling her limp hand in his, he began to cry.
In a halting cadence she said, “No. Don’t cry. It is—my time.”
“You’re all I have in this world.”
“I didn’t want—to die until you were—a man,” she wheezed. “You are—a man now.”
“I don’t want you to go,” he said. “I don’t want you to ever die.”
“We all die—dear boy.”
His voice was thin and dry. “I’ll be all alone.”
“But I want to die now.”
He dried his eyes with his free hand and shook his head.
“You say no,” she said. “I say yes. The syringe—there. All of it. Please.”
He let go of her hand and inspected the syringe. It was loaded with ten milligrams of morphine.
“If I inject all of it, you’ll go to sleep and you won’t wake up,” he said.
“It is—what I want. It is too hard—to live.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I am sure. Please.”
His hands shook as the needle neared the injection port of her intravenous line. He punctured the membrane and pushed the plunger to the hilt.
“Thank you,” she said, closing her eyes.
He kissed her cool forehead. “I love you, Grandmother. I’ll love you forever.”
“I love you too,” she said. “Do not be sad. You will have—a wonderful—”
He knew what her last word was going to be, but it never crossed her lips.
30
No one was surprised when Dr. Ferrol Gaytan was named the Director of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine at La Paz. There had been an air of inevitability about the promotion ever since the young, rising star turned down offer after offer of academic positions at other universities throughout Europe and the United States. “Madrid is my city,” he would say, “Spain is my country.”
By the time he was forty-five, his curriculum vitae was as thick as a novella with two hundred journal publications, countless plenary lectures, and a dozen chapters in medical textbooks. He employed thirty people in his lab and commanded millions of euros in sponsored research grants. Early in his career, he gravitated to the field of molecular genetics where the study of the function of chromosomes and genes at the molecular level promised treatment for genetic diseases. He threw himself into fundamental work on childhood conditions such as sickle cell anemia, beta thalassemia, and cystic fibrosis and conducted clinical trials on the pediatric ward.
His principal lab was a large, open-plan space with rows of benches and hoods, crammed with analytical instruments. However, some years after he took control of the institute, he awarded himself another smaller lab down the hall and plucked a single technician from the main lab to work there. The small lab quickly took on an air of mystery. The people in the main Gaytan lab had no idea what the new one was for and the young tech who moved over to staff it wasn’t talking. His reticence was especially remarkable because he was known as a gregarious motormouth, albeit a non-fluent one. Spanish wasn’t his native language and he butchered it in a genial sort of way. When his co-workers cornered him in the canteen or the toilets he smiled and said, “The general has sworn me to secrecy and I’m a good soldier.”
The lab quickly became known as the Gaytan skunkworks.
When Dr. Gaytan visited the wards to see one of his clinical trial patients, the female nurses noticed. He had a reputation. The handsome, wealthy bachelor was a notorious womanizer and because he seemed to
