He spent most of his spare time at the hospital, reinforcing his reputation for competent earnestness and insuring that he would be selected for a residency in the following year, but refusing to live there formally because he didn’t wish to acknowledge to himself that he had need of a refuge.

Spring caught him vulnerable and unaware. He forgot to get his hair cut; brooded about the possibility of an after-life and decided in his wisdom that nothing lay beyond; considered psychoanalysis until he read in an article by Anna Freud that the individual was beyond the analyst’s reach when in mourning and when falling in love.

The invasion of the Bay of Pigs shook him out of his lethargy, unpleasantly. He first heard the news over a portable radio in the women’s side of the ward. The report was optimistic about the success of the invasion but was sketchy and gave very few facts, save that the landing had occurred in the Bay of Pigs.

Rafe remembered it well, a seaside resort area where sometimes his parents had taken him when he was a little boy. Along the shore each morning while their parents slept, he and Guillermo had collected great piles of sea-treasure that stank by evening, and small, smooth white stones like petrified bird’s eggs.

With each new report the news got worse.

He tried calling Guillermo person-to-person in Miami without success but finally reached Uncle Erneido.

“There is no way to tell where he is. He is somewhere there, with the others. It appears to be very bad. This goddam country, which was supposed to be our friend . . .”

The old man could not continue.

“Let me know as soon as you hear something,” Rafe said.

In a very few days it was possible to reconstruct part of the terrible picture and guess the rest: the enormity of the defeat, the magnitude of the attacking Brigade’s unpreparedness, the obsolescence of the equipment, the absence of air support, the arrogant bungling of the CIA, the obvious anguish of the young American President, the invisibility of the United States Marines when they were so desperately required.

Rafe spent a lot of time imagining what it must have been like, the sea at their backs, the swamp and Fidel Castro’s Soviet-armed militia everywhere else. The dead, the paucity of facilities to treat the wounded.

Walking slowly through the hospital, he saw certain things for the first time.

A resuscitator, a pacemaker.

A suction machine.

Beds offering warmth and rest for patients in shock.

The fantastic operating room suites, the teams of people.

God, the blood bank. All the Meomartinos were rare blood types.

He had never made a secret of the fact that he was a Cuban; a number of staff members and a few of the patients muttered words of sympathy, but most avoided the subject. On several occasions conversation ground to a sudden guilty halt when he entered a group.