Sal’s dysentery in Mexico City and Dean’s departure mark the breakdown of their shared Mexican journey: illness immobilizes Sal just as Dean’s marital life calls him back north. The episode turns an adventure defined by movement into a scene of dependence and separation. Sal cannot travel with Dean, and Dean leaves despite his friend’s condition, offering sympathy but no promise that can make the parting temporary.

Causes and Background

The illness follows a journey through Mexico in which Sal, Dean, and Stan have continued moving together. Their travel has already brought them into contact with ordinary medical care: in San Antonio, Stan’s swollen arm led the group to a hospital clinic, where he waited an hour for an intern and received penicillin. That earlier stop offers a practical contrast to Sal’s later illness. In Mexico City, Sal’s fever is severe enough to leave him delirious and unconscious, and the narration identifies the disease as dysentery.

Dean’s reason for leaving is bound up with the recurring instability of his marriages. He tells Sal that he has obtained a divorce from Camille in Mexico and plans to drive back to Inez in New York. His return is not a straightforward resolution: after reaching New York, he marries Inez, then soon sets out again for California to rejoin Camille and their two young daughters. The later account makes clear that the obligations drawing him away from Sal are part of a continuing cycle of departures and returns, not a settled domestic life.

Illness and Departure

Sal experiences the illness from within a fevered, confused state. He describes himself as being on a bed high above sea level, while his mind seems to contain a whole life and many other lives. The altered sense of time and self gives way to a concrete sight: Dean bending over a kitchen table several nights later, already preparing to leave Mexico City. Sal asks what he is doing, and Dean explains that Sal has become ill, that Stan will look after him, and that he must return to Inez.

Dean speaks of wishing he could stay, but insists that he has to get back to his life. Sal, doubled over by cramps, cannot meaningfully answer or follow him. When he looks up again, Dean is standing with his old broken trunk, then pulls the blanket over Sal’s shoulders before saying goodbye. The gesture preserves a measure of care within the departure, but it does not alter its consequence: Dean goes, leaving Sal in the care of Stan.

Delayed Recognition and Aftermath

The separation does not register fully at the moment it happens. Sal says that he did not recognize Dean any longer, and that Dean understood this and responded with sympathy. Twelve hours pass before Sal, still feverish, finally understands that Dean is gone. The physical distance is already growing: Dean is driving alone through the mountains on his way north while Sal remains ill in Mexico City.

Once recovered, Sal calls Dean a rat, a judgment that registers the abandonment before giving way to a more complicated understanding. He recognizes that Dean’s life is entangled in what he calls wives and woes, and resolves to say nothing. The sequence therefore refuses both easy absolution and a simple final condemnation. Dean has left a sick friend, but Sal also sees how the competing demands of Dean’s life repeatedly pull him away from the relationships he has just promised to honor.

Significance in the Narrative

The episode reverses the journey’s usual arrangement. Until now, travel has been the condition of the companions’ closeness; here, the road carries Dean away while illness fixes Sal in place. Their friendship remains emotionally present in Dean’s concern and Sal’s grief, but it no longer guarantees shared movement. The departure makes visible the difference between Dean’s declarations of attachment and the actions required by his shifting domestic commitments.

The narration also makes the parting arrive in two stages: Dean physically leaves first, and Sal understands the loss only later. That delay is shaped by the fever, but it also gives the separation its emotional force. The journey’s apparent continuation becomes, for Sal, an ending discovered after the decisive moment has passed. Dean’s subsequent return to New York and then California confirms the pattern already exposed here: he moves between marriages and households, while the friendship that carried him and Sal across Mexico cannot keep him at Sal’s bedside.