Alcides Moreno plunged 47 stories that morning last month, clinging to his 3-foot-wide window washer’s platform as it shot down the dark glass face of an Upper East Side apartment building. His brother Edgar, who had been working with him on the platform, was killed. Somehow, Alcides Moreno survived.

He was given 24 pints of blood and 19 pints of plasma and underwent an operation to open his abdomen in the emergency room because, his doctor said, they did not want to risk moving him to an operating room. As December went on, he endured nine orthopaedic operations.

In his hospital room, his wife, Rosario Moreno, lifted his hand again and again to stroke her face and her hair, hoping against hope that a simple tactile sensation would remind him, would help bring him back.

Then on Christmas Day, Alcides Moreno reached out — and stroked the wrong face. “Apparently he tried to do it to one of the nurses,” Rosario Moreno said on Thursday, describing how she chided him, gently, when she was told what had happened. “I looked at him and said, ‘You’re not supposed to do that. I’m your wife, you touch your wife’.”

For the first time since the accident on December 7, he spoke.

Rosario Moreno told her story at a press conference at which medical professionals with years of experience in treating traumatic injuries used words like “miraculous” and “unprecedented” to describe something that seems remarkable: a man who fell nearly 500 feet into a Manhattan alleyway is now talking and, with a little more luck, a few more operations and some rehabilitation therapy, may well walk again.