“It’s funny. When Mart was here we thought he was different from us, but he wasn’t.”

“Do you mind if we don’t make love?” he asked.

“No, I don’t mind. I just need you to hold me.”

He went home that night and told his parents that he had been left money by a friend in San Francisco and had to go there personally to sign the papers. His father wanted to drive him to the airport, but Pablo told him that he had to go into the city center to collect a parcel to take with him to San Francisco for another friend. His mother quizzed him at length about the parcel, where he was collecting it, and to whom he was taking it, and how he was to make sure it did not contain drugs. He was sorry he had not made up a better excuse. He arrived at my apartment the following morning with a small suitcase which his mother had packed for him.

“I hate going into this hospital,” he said. “I’d do anything to put it off.”

“Let’s lie down for a while.”

When one o’clock came I said that it was time that we set off for the hospital.

“My eye is doing really funny things,” he said. “There’s a dark shadow in one entire corner.”

“Do they operate on the eye?”

“No, they just fill you full of drugs all day and night.”

I waited in the hospital corridor while he changed into his pajamas. He was in a room three doors down from where I had been. I stood with him then while he filled in the admission form. He gave my name as his next of kin, and gave my address and phone number to be used in case of emergency. He got into bed; the nurse told him that the doctor would be along soon and put a line into his wrist, and then the treatment could begin. She left us alone in the room.

“If this was San Francisco,” he went on, “everyone on the ward would be getting the same treatment, and some of the doctors and nurses would be gay. It might be easier.”

He had beautiful thick, black hair on his arm. I began to stroke it and play with it, and he looked down, half-amused, as though his arm did not quite belong to him. He lay back and made purring noises. When the doctor came with two nurses to put in the temporary line and start the treatment, I went out and stood in the corridor. I was more in love with Pablo than I had been in all the time we were together. I began to think about how much money I had, and how much he had, and how long we were likely to live, and how much it would cost us for medical treatment in San Francisco, and whether we should go there when Pablo had finished his treatment. I had to stop calculating, I had to promise myself that I would not mention anything to him. All I wanted now was to be with him, to spend the day here with him, to make things easier for him.