I have to be careful with this, he thought one morning. I can’t let things end up the way they did with the grant.

Three years ago he had received a grant from some gallery owners on the north coast. All he had to do was paint and accept the advice of a famous curator who had been contracted to guide him and two other Dominican artists along the ambiguous path of contemporary art. Argenis had just gotten divorced and was trying to give up cocaine. Still immature, he thought he was the next Goya. He started playing around with the idea that in another life he had been a buccaneer. He imagined his days in that life, with ample details, and then painted them. It was a very intense and attractive process, but what began as a creative game ended as a psychotic breakdown, and he was committed to the mental health wing of the UCE for several weeks. Not even his mother had come to see him, and he didn’t blame her. Back then she was fed up with his nonsense, his insomnia, his obsessions. Argenis couldn’t make anything work, despite not wanting for opportunities. He hadn’t been born on a sugarcane plantation like his father, nor had they confiscated his paintings, tortured, and deported him, as had happened with half of his parents’ friends in the seventies. What the hell was wrong with him?

‌

The second time Susana came to clean, she came alone, and Bengoa sent twelve vials of Temgesic along with her. Argenis didn’t know if he’d done it out of negligence or an excess of confidence, because he’d only been in the apartment for a week and he was supposed to take one a day. In any case, it was perfect. He’d been taking the double dose for a couple of days and had only two left, which with the twelve Susana brought added up to the fourteen needed to square off the happy weekly mathematics of his consumption.

It was about ten a.m. and he was still in bed, since the dose from the day before had helped him to sleep late. Susana had a copy of Bengoa’s key, and she peeked into the bedroom with a bucket in her hand. Argenis had just gotten up, having heard the front door open, and he rubbed his eyes with an intense feeling of grogginess. “Good morning, Mr. Luna,” she said, and he told her to call him Argenis as he scratched his balls on his way to the bathroom and breathed in the baby cologne she used by way of perfume.

“You want coffee?” she asked from the kitchen, and he remembered the coffees his ex-wife Mirta had brought him years ago before she left for work in the morning. They had agreed that while she was working he would prepare his first solo show. Instead he would snort a half gram of coke while watching videos of black men with barely legal white women and make a few scribbles in a sketch book an hour before she came home, just to have something to show her – the sketches for a supposed future “monumental” piece.