The beginning of Valentin and Molina's intimate relationship is a shift from care offered under pressure to closeness that both men acknowledge and welcome. Valentin is ill and in pain; Molina tends to him in their cell, listens as he speaks about the people he fears losing, and offers help with washing when Valentin is too sick to manage safely alone. In the course of this care, a relationship previously shaped by political difference and guarded conversation becomes personal and physical.

Illness and the work of care

Valentin's condition gives the scene its immediate circumstances. He describes severe abdominal pain and recalls a comrade whose will was broken after being given drugs in the infirmary. For a political prisoner, he explains, becoming dependent on such treatment could threaten the resistance of an entire group: under interrogation, a weakened prisoner might be made to disclose anything. His fear is therefore not simply a private concern about being ill. It is tied to the discipline and risks of political imprisonment. When the pain intensifies, Molina proposes telling him a film story to distract him, carrying forward the storytelling that has become one of their ways of sharing the cell.

As Valentin's illness continues, he asks Molina to call a guard, then changes his mind. Molina helps clean him instead, reassuring him that there is enough water and using a clean piece of sheet. Later, Molina points out that a freezing shower could be dangerous in Valentin's condition and offers a safer arrangement: they can heat water in a pot, use two towels, and wash in turns, with Molina helping with Valentin's back. The intimacy that follows is not detached from this practical dependence. It grows in a setting where one man has to trust the other with ordinary, vulnerable tasks.

Confession and a change in attention

Their conversation becomes more candid as Valentin tries to explain what he is feeling. He says that he is frightened for his girlfriend because she is in danger, but distinguishes that concern from the person he longs to hear from and hold. The person he aches for is Marta; he imagines that her presence could revive him. This admission exposes the difference between responsibility and desire in Valentin's account: his fear for one woman does not erase his longing for another.

Molina listens rather than turning the confession into an argument. When he says that he wants to die, Valentin asks what is wrong and urges him to speak honestly, adding that his death would grieve his mother, friends, and Valentin himself. The exchange briefly reverses their usual positions. Valentin is sick and reliant on Molina's assistance, but he also tries to draw Molina out of despair; Molina, in turn, makes his own need for care visible. Their concern for one another is no longer confined to politeness or the routines required by the cell.

The turn toward mutual intimacy

The transition is gradual. Valentin asks whether a buddy can pat Molina's back, but Molina says the gesture makes him feel worse. When Valentin presses him to explain, the exchange becomes a more attentive negotiation: Valentin asks where to touch and whether he can massage him, and Molina confirms that the contact feels better. Molina says that Valentin does him a lot of good. Valentin suggests that helping Molina matters because he feels needed; Molina resists the impulse to explain everything, lightly calling him crazy. The scene gives care a reciprocal form: Molina has been tending to Valentin's illness, while Valentin's attention helps Molina feel less trapped in his own distress.

Molina then tells Valentin that he may do what he wants with him, making clear that this is something Molina wants, not merely an obligation of caregiving. The invitation marks the decisive change in their relationship. The passage does not dwell on sexual activity; it presents the shift through spoken willingness, pauses, and expressions of gratitude. Afterwards, they continue to attend to each other, and Valentin says that he is holding Molina in front of him even though the darkness prevents him from seeing him. The emphasis remains on proximity and trust rather than on describing the encounter.

Shared identity and significance

Afterward, Molina tries to describe a brief experience in which he felt he was neither in the cell nor anywhere outside it. He then says that, for a moment, it seemed as if Valentin were there alone, and as if Molina were no longer himself but had somehow become Valentin. The account does not establish a permanent change in either man's identity. It records instead how intense closeness momentarily unsettles the distinction between self and other, expressed in Molina's own uncertain terms.

The relationship's beginning is therefore represented less as a separate romantic declaration than as a sequence of acts: distraction during pain, cleaning and washing, listening to a confession, asking before touching, and explicitly welcoming intimacy. The political danger surrounding Valentin's illness remains present, as does his longing for Marta; the encounter does not resolve those circumstances. It does, however, alter what the two prisoners can acknowledge between them. Molina's final description of feeling as if he were Valentin gives that change a concise form: closeness has become not only something they do for one another, but a moment in which the boundary between them feels different.