He walked to the car, closing behind him the front doors, cast in concrete, with the indentation of the handles providing a smile and the two glass portholes – the eyes – completing the image of a smiling face. He walked through the first courtyard which housed the outdoor kitchen and fireplace and agave and cactus and aloe vera and the elephant tree with its dying-looking bark, all its health lying like a lie beneath the surface. A duplicitous tree.

All were shielded from the wind by the circular walls that encased the house, allowing the bougainvillea the protection to bloom in stillness.

In the outer courtyard was the guest house and the parking, as was tradition in Baja, reserved exclusively for the residents’ cars. The screening room was housed in an oval building on the left and then, through another set of gates to the further courtyard, was the caretaker’s casita. In effect the property was protected by three sets of gates. At the final gate was, a practical inclusion this time, a cattlegrid, to prevent the horned Criollo cows from meandering as slowly as they could onto the property, and eating bushes that looked to be dead – the forbs – before continuing their aimless trek.

This was the magnificence that was Casa Lomita.

He was on his way to see Lomita, who was in the newly built hospital in San José del Cabo behind the gathering of food stalls that were known under the collective title of the Mercado. Ever climbed into the Toyota F J Cruiser, sand-coloured and sand-covered, and left the area through the gates to the outside, the perimeter of the property dipping down onto the dust road, checking left and right before the drop and the two mile trip that led to the newly paved road.

The fifteen-mile journey to the edge of the town lay ahead: he played Lana Del Rey and found ‘The Blackest Day’ to be a repeat that he didn’t acknowledge as repetition but as necessity. The necessity of comfort with the lyrical clarification of his destiny. Deep, dark, and getting harder.

The mimosas, the ironwood and the cacti living for hundreds of years, placed the relevance of his short history into perspective. The same cacti would see generations pass from their same position without a change of opinion or condition during their life. A constancy of which the human has no comprehension. We, who wander, change and spill our lives in front of ourselves like vomit. It had been a long journey, literally, the events that unfolded; but now he was dealing with a deep and new sadness. He drove off the paved road into the newly developed outskirts of San José funded by Mr Navarro, the Corona Beer owner, over the newly constructed bridge, took a left turn to the Hotel Zoneria and then up along to the start of the Golden Corridor with the five-star deluxe hotels in the monolithic style of contemporary Mexican architecture.