“What money are you talking about, Argenis?” the doctor asked with his head at an angle, like a dog trying to understand human speech, and Argenis explained he was talking about the money his father sent every month.

Bengoa stood, walked over to the dusty record player, turned it on, and put the needle down on Beethoven’s Pastoral.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked in a tone of voice that was new for him.

“It’s Beethoven,” Argenis replied. “Symphony no. 6.”

“No.” And he lowered the volume before sitting down in front of the checkers again. “It’s the sound of greed.”

The joyful notes from the opening of the Pastoral grated against the doctor’s short tone. “This house you see here, Fidel gave it to me. Fidel himself. He gave it to me in one piece in 1962, just the way the gusanos had left it when they fled the revolution, when they ran away from justice, like the worms they were. I left this room just the way it was given to me. I’ve never taken the record from its place. It was the last thing those rats heard. It reminds me that people like you exist, people who believe they deserve it all.”

Bengoa stood again and informed him: “José Alfredo hasn’t sent anything for a month and a half. I’ve been taking care of everything – the apartment, the medicine, everything.”

Argenis was suffocating, soaking in sweat. He wanted to die. Bengoa went over to the record player and took the needle off the Beethoven. Argenis followed him to the door in silence, and there he concluded: “You can stay in the apartment one more month, because I have great respect for Comrade Luna. But you’ll have to find a way to pay for the medicine, because I can’t keep taking it from the clinic for free.”

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Two vials for a pair of socks. One for a used T-shirt. Six for the pack of Fruit of the Loom underwear. He had already taken Bengoa the cans of tuna and beans, a pack of Santo Domingo coffee, a towel, and a bar of Protex soap, along with the Bic razor blades, a pair of jeans, and two Tommy Hilfiger polo shirts. He didn’t want the belt because he was a lot bigger than Argenis and it didn’t fit. One good day, he’d gotten three vials for a container of baby powder and four for the half-bottle of Old Spice aftershave.

Each day at noon, Argenis would stand in front of the suitcases and select the next currency to be exchanged. Susana cursed Bengoa and tried to convince him that quitting the Temgesic would be a lot more productive. She didn’t know what withdrawal was, and Argenis had no intention of explaining it to her. She had stayed with him in spite of the fact that Bengoa was no longer paying her, and that every day took them further and further from the life they had been planning with those 500 dollars, a sum of money that was as imaginary as his studio and his career as an artist. They ate whatever she brought from her mother’s house, because everything Argenis’s mother had sent was now sitting in Bengoa’s pantry. When he gave Susana the Case Logic full of CDs to exchange for money to call his father from the Hotel Nacional, she came back with canned ham, five pounds of rice, and a box of plums. The only thing they had left was the boom box.