Susana’s mythological knowledge was less rudimentary than that of Argenis, and she described Saturn’s symbolic attribute, the sickle, for him as they drank coffee on the balcony. In the background “I’m Your Captain” by Grand Funk Railroad was playing, which Argenis had put on that morning and which she had asked him to play again. “Saturn castrated his father, the Sky, with the sickle. The sickle represents time, which defines our dimension, our mastery of the planetary movements, according to which we plan our harvests here on Earth.” Her words were no longer a copy of some teacher’s, nor were they lines she’d memorized from a book – they were her own, improvised out of a talent for poetry that Argenis attributed not only to her personal abilities but also to the geographic coordinates of her birthplace. A few days later, he asked her to bring her things over and she showed up with a very old beige fabric suitcase, which, once emptied, he installed as decoration in the room that would someday be his studio.

During those first weeks, Argenis could feel the tiny seeds of good in him reaching up toward Susana’s sun. He loved talking to her as much as he enjoyed fucking her and they did both things each morning, since in the evening, thanks to the Temgesic, his penis wasn’t good for much. After sex they’d go out for a walk and Susana would fill him up with historical and aesthetic details about their surroundings, about the exuberant colonial edifices and the unfeeling revolutionary monuments, about the age of the mahogany trees, about witchcraft in wartime, the reasons for the name of a plaza or the title of a hundred-year-old piece of son music. Susana took a sentimental X-ray of the city and Argenis tried to make out the spots of the cancer of disillusionment on it. One day, as they prepared a plantain stew, Argenis asked, “Why don’t they just kill Castro?” She went pale, as if Castro himself had overheard and was on his way to eat them alive. Sitting down on the living room sofa she said, very softly, “We don’t know what to believe anymore.” She sat there with watery eyes, looking at the coffee table until the stew was ready, and Argenis regretted having opened that door. He felt frivolous and ignorant, like those American tourists who say “ándale, ándale” like Speedy Gonzales whenever they get drunk in Latin America.

After lunch, she would read him bits from Lezama Lima’s Paradiso in bed and he would descend those motley steps into an hour-long nap. Sometimes he would dream of Santo Domingo with all its noise and trash, or that Rambo the pusher had come to Havana all dressed in red and brought him some Afghani heroin with serious balls, or that Susana had given birth to blond twins with scary-looking eyes clouded by glaucoma.

In the afternoons he’d visit Bengoa and play a round of Chinese checkers with him in the room with the vinyl records. The Beethoven LP continued to wait silently inside the record player and Argenis didn’t dare ask its owner if it was because he liked it a lot or because he was too lazy to return it to its sleeve. Bengoa never made an effort to put on music. Instead he would whistle Silvio Rodríguez songs, tell dirty jokes, and confess how hard it was to support his two daughters, even as a doctor with a degree. Argenis wanted to believe he was sharing his economic woes with him to justify the fact that, beyond the rent for the apartment and the boxes of oatmeal and potatoes, he never saw a cent of the 500 dollars José Alfredo sent every month, money that Susana said would allow them to live like royalty.