He said nothing. I was sorry that I had raised the subject so directly. I gave the painter a key and told him that he could go ahead and I handed him the piece of paper on which Pablo had written the colors. I walked through the apartment with him and asked him to throw out various pieces of furniture, including my mother’s wardrobe and chest of drawers and the kitchen table and the dining room chairs. I thought of throwing out all of the furniture in my own bedroom, and I almost told the painter to get rid of everything, but I did not. I told Pablo nothing about this. Instead, I pictured us walking into the apartment and I saw him looking around in wonder and delight at the new paint and the missing furniture.

Doctor Cawley told Pablo that he could not be discharged from the hospital until the eye specialist had seen him. He could dress himself and pack his things if he wanted, but the room would be kept for him until the specialist had said that the CMV was no longer active. I turned up early that morning and I went with him in a taxi to the eye clinic. He was dazzled by the light of the warm spring day, and he was sure that the CMV was back again; he said he saw all these black shapes and floaters in front of his left eye. He could not face going back into the hospital, he said. He had been all right until the idea that he could leave was established and then he was desperate to go. We sat in the waiting room. Everyone else had glasses, or something visibly wrong with their eyes. They must have wondered why we were there.

The specialist was a mild, thin man. He called Pablo in and put drops in his eyes, and sent him back out. When he was called in again he stayed in the specialist’s room for about half an hour. I began to worry about work, and realized that I hadn’t even bothered to reply to various messages. I would go to the office in the morning and sort everything out, I decided. Pablo had not discussed with me where he would go if he was discharged from the hospital. I believed that he wanted to come home with me, but I knew that he did not want to talk about it.

When he came out he said nothing, but I knew that there was no bad news.

“He says that the spots and the floaters are a result of the infection, they are pieces of detached membrane,” he said when he got outside the door of the clinic. “He says that the disease is gone.”

“You’re a free man.”

“I’d love to go to a restaurant and have a big lunch.”