“It’s an infection of your conjunctiva, the thing that covers your eyes. We’re going to buy medicine for you. Use it three times a day and stay in your room. Don’t cook until it clears. Okenwa, make sure you don’t go near him. Apollo is very infectious."
This quote comes from the scene in which the reader—those who do not already know—learn the unexpected meaning of the story's title. Apollo is the name given to conjunctivitis. The narrator's mother is addressing his friend Raphael. The story is structured as a flashback. The first mention of Raphael has to do with his being a suspected criminal. To the narrator's mother, Raphael was just one of many houseboys the family had and she does not expect her son to remember any of them with distinction. Which says much about the social condition of the household in which Okenwa was raised. It is this mention of the problems the present-day Raphael is facing which wells up the memories of the time Raphael brought the Apollo into his home.
"But I remembered. Of course I remembered Raphael."
When the narrator's mother suggests that her son won't remember Raphael because there had been so many of them and he had been so young, this quote is how Okenwa not spoken out loud, but the reader is made privy to it. The thought is expressed as a separate paragraph of its own, thereby emphasizing its meaning. What exactly is meant by the narrator sharing the information that Raphael was a very special houseboy to him if not his parents is, of course, not indicate at this point. The answer to that mystery is what the meat of the story is all about.
"Why did you bring this thing to my house? Why?"
The parents make the effort to quarantine their son from exposure to Apollo. These protective measures extend even to banishing the houseboy to his room. When their boy does eventually catch the infectious condition, his father cannot help but wonder how it managed to travel from a door into a completely different room. The accusation here literally refers to the conjunctivitis, but by this point it becomes clear that Apollo is a metaphor something. The narrator's parents see the houseboy as potentially carrying a far great viral condition which could spread to their son. It is not necessarily the obvious possibility of what is going on between the two boys that they find to be a contamination. They have socio-political reasons for trying to quarantine their son against unwanted influence.
