You never know what you have until you lose it, Argenis thought. Lacking both money and Temgesic, his pockets were bursting with clichés. He took the boom box downstairs, planning to ask no fewer than twenty vials for it. They would let him endure another ten days, but after that, unless a miracle occurred, he’d have to get clean. He eyed the bronze bannister and calculated the force that would be needed to rip a piece of it off, like other desperate neighbors had already done.

He lit up a Popular to give himself something to do on the way. The city was looking particularly empty. The occasional slow-moving cars hardly made a sound, and from the enormous silence the squeaking of Chinese bicycles rose up like a witch’s cackle. No smell of food, no perfume, no fruit-scented cleaning product wafted through any open door that afternoon. Only the bony faces of older women in housedresses, cooling off in a breeze that blew ferociously in their minds.

Argenis had taken longer than necessary to decide. In the absence of other options, the boom box – and the CD still inside, the greatest hits of the Allman Brothers – had become an extremely important source of well-being. Susana cried when she saw him unplug it and he promised that soon, after he had talked to his parents, they would have a much better stereo.

In the Parque de la Fraternidad, at the exit from Chinatown, Argenis saw an old man sitting on a bench, using a toothpick to fish around in one of his molars for some bothersome residue, a bit of meat or a grain of rice. The scene took him back to the recurrent memory of Argenis’s grandmother Consuelo. She was cleaning the rice in a punch bowl, in the kitchen of the house where she’d worked her whole life. She took out the husks and the rotten grains and threw them away. Then she pulled out a rock with two fingers.

A rock had saved Zeus from being devoured by his father, a rock concealed in clothing, which Saturn ate thinking it was his son. His mother knew what José Alfredo was capable of and she had filled Argenis’s suitcases with rocks for Saturn. Bengoa was the mouth his father had used to chew him up. If Argenis remembered the legend right, someday he would manage to defeat him. He’d get the Titan to vomit up everything he had swallowed, starting with the boom box.

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It was the sort of toy car Santa Claus would bring you for Christmas when your parents couldn’t afford a remote-controlled one. A little sports car with a hole in the back, through which you had to stick a plastic strip that made the wheels go round when you pulled it out with the movement you’d use to start a boat motor. Then you’d put the car on the floor and it would move forward, losing speed until it stopped completely. Argenis could see the details of that car as if he held it in his hand. Red, with a black circle around an orange flame on each side. Neither the doors, nor the hood, nor the trunk would open, and through the glassless windows you could see, right where the seats should be, the rudimentary mechanism that made the thing go. A cheap toy, made in China, the kind they sold in the wholesale shops along Mella Avenue.