Lacking energy, he ran through the operation in his mind. Barefoot and dressed in jean shorts and the tattered Police T-shirt, he would go up to the roof, burning his feet on bricks that were hot enough to fry an egg. He would slither to the edge of the eaves overhanging his neighbor’s balcony and lean his head and torso over, holding on with both hands, hanging there for a second like a bat on the darkening Havana horizon. He would enter the transvestite’s house, listening to his own pulse hammering against the walls of reinforced concrete. When he got to the bedroom he would be surprised by the cleanliness with which Vantroi countered the deterioration of the furniture. He would open the wardrobe and find women’s high-heeled shoes and men’s moccasins. He would not find the Adidas, now that they were part of the Janet Jackson costume, but rather Vantroi’s stinking Reebok Classics.

They were the same model of Reebok Classics Argenis had asked Santa for when he was eight. Half of the boys in his class at the Nuevo Amanecer school already had them, while he was still wearing “kukiká” sneakers, which is what his classmates called cheap, fake, or Chinese brands. His parents were still together back then, and when his mother had seen the yellow report card with his improved grades that December of 1985, she had said to Argenis, while winking at his father, that Santa would certainly be bringing him the sneakers he wanted so badly.

That Saturday José Alfredo had taken him along to sell the Vanguard of the People, the newspaper of the Dominican Liberation Party, an organization to which he dedicated all his spare time and whose ascent he would preach throughout the barrios of Santo Domingo in his cream-colored guayabera and the dated bell-bottom pants which embarrassed Argenis whenever he came to pick him up from school. In some of the houses they were welcomed with coffee and cookies, dulce de leche, or buttery caramels with which Argenis would fill his pockets. But on that day, when they reached the driveway of Tony Catrain, his dad’s best friend, the man, dressed in a modern sports suit, greeted them without a glance and carelessly tossed the ten newspapers José Alfredo had brought him into the back seat of his SUV.

José Alfredo didn’t open his mouth in the concho the whole way to Ciudad Nueva, or as they walked along El Conde while black, white, and red Reeboks smiled through the shop windows of Los Muchachos and Calzados Lama. He took little Argenis to a colmado, a corner store where four men were smacking their dominoes down onto a square table, with sardine cans and Brugal bottles lined up on shelves behind them like sailors in the February 27 parade. They sat on a bench and his father ordered a small bottle of Ron Macorix and a Pepsi. He opened the rum and gave the Pepsi to Argenis. They toasted and drank the contents of both bottles too fast. When his father set the empty rum bottle on the counter, he was crying. “Son,” he said, squeezing the boy’s shoulder, “today is a special day. I have to tell you something because I can’t bear you being lied to. Do you know who Santa Claus is?” Argenis said he did. “It’s me,” said José Alfredo, slapping his chest with a slight tremor on his lips. “I use my money to buy the stuff you ask for. The Yankees invented Santa Claus,” he said, looking out on the street with its high, sunny sidewalks. “They invented him to make people buy junk.” Argenis knew his father didn’t have a job so he imagined his mom in the red suit and beard coming down a chimney. He felt an enormous desire to protect the man whose nose was running the way his own did in the schoolyard when they teased him about his cheap sneakers.