In there, Bengoa had a desk, two folding metal chairs, a cabinet with a glass door, and a framed poster of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son on the wall. It was a souvenir from the Prado, whose name was printed on its edge, which Bengoa had brought back from his only trip off the island. Argenis felt a bit dizzy and told Bengoa so, hoping he’d hurry the operation a bit. The doctor opened the cabinet with a skeleton key and pulled out two Temgesic vials. The afternoon was cool, and after the injection Bengoa invited Argenis to drink an orange juice in his courtyard next to the ruins of a stone fountain. He also proposed a game of Chinese checkers, which Argenis asked to put off to the next day, since Susana was expecting him.

On his way home, Goya’s hungry Saturn alternated in his head with images from the real world, like in those movies where they crosscut the principal character’s actions with fragments of some classical painting, zooming in and out to create suspense or even terror. He knew that painting like the back of his hand. What had the famous portrait of Father Time touched in him?

When he got back to his apartment, Susana was frying potatoes in the kitchen, and he told her what had happened. She took the potatoes out with a spatula and divided them equally between two plates already holding a fried egg each. As they ate, Susana told him that Goya had painted his Saturn on the wall of his dining room at the Quinta del Sordo, one of his last homes. Argenis could recall a bit about it but didn’t interrupt because Susana was telling it all with such a pleasing familiarity. “In the late nineteenth century they removed it, along with the other Black Paintings, and transferred them to canvas.” With her mouth full, she explained the process: “They used a very delicate glue to stick the painting from the wall onto Japanese silk paper, pulled off the layer with the picture, and transferred it onto the canvas.” Her words came out naturally, but with a distinctive tone, and Argenis intuited that she hadn’t read this in a book or on the internet but had received it from the lips of one of her teachers.

When Argenis was six years old, Tony Catrain, his father’s best friend, had given him a book called Myths and Legends. It was a huge yellow hardback with delicate watercolor illustrations of the Greek and Roman gods and heroes. That book accompanied him to the School of Fine Arts, where some cocksucker stole it from him along with his lunch bag. In it he’d read the story of Kronos, Saturn to the Romans, for the first time. Like most of the ancient gods and heroes, he receives a troublesome prophecy: that one of his children will dethrone him. To avoid this fate, he eats his children as soon as they are born. His wife, made desperate by the macabre barbecue, hides their sixth child (Zeus/Jupiter) on an island and in his place gives Kronos a rock for lunch. Later, the adult Zeus, with the help of a cosmic conspiracy, gives his father a medicine that induces vomiting, and all his siblings come out again, alive and well.