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.”