The feel of salt in the breeze intensified to the point of dampening his shirt, his arm hair and his cheeks. The Atlantic placed its hand on him like a delicate lover, pulling him toward the street by the sea, the Malecón, toward the ends of the earth. When he arrived, he saw several couples sitting on the wall and sharing long kisses, always followed by a whispered secret or the meeting of foreheads, while on the other side of the wall, on the reef, a big-bellied man was fishing with a string tied to his index finger.

He felt like he was in his element. He felt, at least for a moment, grateful to life. Not to his father, whose attentions were always subtitled, but rather to life itself and to the opportunity he thought he still had, to free himself definitively from his opiate dependence. When would the treatment be over? He ought to ask Bengoa. Did Susana know he was an addict? What was her relationship to the doctor? Did she have a boyfriend? What did her relatives do? Did he have a shot with her? Question after question spilled from his guts with all the persistence of the waves’ ebb and flow. All of a sudden there were so many of them and they were so unending that he felt dizzy. He lay on the wall looking up and watched how the wind erased the clouds from the sky to leave a flaming yellow moon in its center.

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Susana would return in a few days, Argenis supposed, so in the meantime he naturally fell into a pleasant routine that made the waiting a little easier. After a breakfast of coffee and toast with mayonnaise, he would go out for a walk with the Asimov book in the back pocket of his jeans. It was an old paperback edition and he had to be careful when he pulled it out, so as not to drop any loose pages. The ad-free walls and signposts on the way to the Malecón surprised him. Aside from the government’s anachronistic propaganda, Havana was a naked city. The painted slogans and heroes found here and there seemed as rustic and naive as the tattoos etched by hand onto the arms and backs of prisoners. Although the paint was almost always recent and often even fresh, you could see from their outlines that the designs were old and the brushes had only been there to touch them up.

He wondered whether the unflagging permanence of those signs was inversely proportional to the faith people still put in them. What would his father, the José Alfredo Luna of today, think about all this? Time had extracted those slogans from his mouth like decaying molars, replacing them with the good teeth he and his party friends used to consume lobster and Black Label on a daily basis. When Argenis was little, his father had used those slogans to complete his thoughts and as greetings. Che Guevara’s “Hasta la victoria, siempre!” was his favorite. As well as the Revolutionary Dictionary, he had made Ernesto memorize Che’s farewell letter to Fidel, which was the source of that phrase, his most famous one. His brother would recite it with a practiced fervor, with which he milked his parents for years. José Alfredo didn’t have time to teach Argenis these things, nor did Argenis want to learn them. They seemed as boring, mysterious, and as completely foreign to him as the prayers to Archangel San Miguel his grandmother Consuelo would sing as she rested her hands on his head. Both were liturgies from a distant planet.