When neither Bengoa nor the medicine nor Susana had appeared by the seventh day after her previous visit, the landscape of Argenis’s placid routine filled with black clouds. He had one dose left, which is to say two vials of Temgesic, and on the other side of their consumption lay only the awful abyss. He wasn’t familiar with the ill effects of abstaining from Temgesic, but because of the similarities between the two drugs he imagined they’d be similar to those of heroin. He understood that Bengoa had given him the extra vials in case he couldn’t come, and Argenis, of course, had used all of them. He prayed for Bengoa’s return with an intense but disposable faith, the kind he always had when he knew he was fucked. He jabbed the needle in nervously, hurting himself a bit in the process, but not even the enforced tranquility of the chemical could settle his insides. Bengoa had left a number to call if anything was wrong, but he’d have to borrow a neighbor’s phone and he didn’t know how to explain to the doctor that he’d upped his dosage without asking.

Maybe this was his big opportunity. To quit Temgesic. Get clean. Suffer the withdrawal symptoms like a real macho. He wasn’t addicted to heroin anymore, but it was clear that a hand just as strong was now clenched around his will. Maybe he could get Temgesic on the street. Maybe if there wasn’t any Temgesic, he could get a little heroin. He had twenty bucks and a lot of experience asking strange questions in bad neighborhoods. He could already see himself heating up the spoon with blameless pleasure. Maybe it was destiny. After all, he’d never wanted to give up heroin. They had kidnapped him, made him do it. He was ready to go and ride it out, he was standing by the door, but then he saw the bottle of ketchup Etelvina had put in his suitcase, the one he used to flavor his lunches of plain rice, standing on the kitchen table.

When Argenis was little, that red sauce was the only thing that could get him to eat. It was the camouflage his mother used to hide the flavor of eggs, plantains, cabbage, beans. Back then he was a restless skeleton with a closed stomach, a kid who only really liked to eat sausage links and drink Nesquik. His brother Ernesto had their father’s appetite, and whenever Etelvina gave up on Argenis she would add his eternal and abundant leftovers to Ernesto’s plate.

The smell of his mother’s apartment in Santo Domingo reached all the way to Havana. It was the smell of a kitchen always in use, the smell of her students’ uncorrected papers, and the smell of Anaïs Anaïs she sprayed over her clothing before leaving for work. Like a red ink pen, the Baldom ketchup bottle had drawn a line straight back to those years, just before his parents’ divorce, when Etelvina was working like a dog both in and out of the house in order to pay the bills for Argenis, Ernesto, and José Alfredo, who was just about to take off with Genoveva.