What the gesture meant or what it had done to them didn’t matter. All that mattered was its power, and their desire to feel it again. They ate their ice cream at a little table much like the wrought-iron one in La Pradera. Mentioning that resemblance allowed Argenis to fill the crater their joined hands had left in the conversation with insipid facts about his hospital stay, facts he let fly without raising his eyes from the ice cream. It went down his esophagus like razor blades due to the approaching hour of his dosage, his habitual anxiety intensified by the possibility of a close encounter with Susana. He watched her put her spoon in her mouth and taste the residue on it, the bowl now empty, and he knew that he would do whatever it took to fuck her. “Shall we go?” she asked, reading his mind, and he didn’t even try to bargain with the taxi driver when he asked for Argenis’s last ten bucks to take them back to the apartment.

“Women with sugary cunts,” the old painters in the Cafetería El Conde had called them during the conversations about art, sex, and politics they had had every day after Argenis came out of art school. “Women who turn your cock into a tongue that can taste their exquisite honey.” The first time he penetrated Susana there on the kitchen table, Argenis prayed to those honorable sages, who, now that he had met that woman, had been elevated to the category of prophets.

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Bengoa’s house in Habana Vieja was a smallish nineteenthcentury mansion whose furniture had been new in the fifties. He had hung up a few unframed still lifes by some mediocre student in the family, cheapening the neoclassic style of the home. From the living room ceiling hung a crystal chandelier from which bits of rust and flakes of paint constantly rained down. Bengoa was divorced and when his daughters weren’t around dirty plates stacked up in the sink. His only efforts at cleanliness were devoted to his car and the little hair that remained on his head, which he perfumed excessively.

On his first visit, Bengoa gave Argenis a tour of his home. The living room and dining room were enormous, with fifteen-foot ceilings and floors of creole tiles in green and yellow geometric patterns. Two blue, poorly painted Ionic columns held up the arch that separated the two spaces. Another set of arch-topped columns led from the main room to another living room with a Persian rug and Arabic-style suite that sat in front of a beautiful mahogany case filled with a huge collection of classical music on vinyl. Although the LPs looked as dusty as the rest of the furnishings, Argenis guessed Bengoa did listen to them, since the record player’s cover was open and inside sat a record of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

A long hallway led to three bedrooms with enormous carved wooden doors Bengoa didn’t bother to open. At the end was an interior courtyard leading to a separate room Bengoa called his office, which had been the servants’ quarters in the house’s youth.