The nurse watched Bengoa with smiling complicity as she told the women about the history of the famous ice-cream parlor. She pulled a heavy wooden key ring with the number nineteen painted on it from her pocket and handed it to the doctor, saying “the lock has a trick to it,” before helping the Argentines into a taxi.

The new chemical was entering his system to the hurried rhythm of Bengoa’s conversation: a torrent of dates emblematic of the anti-imperialist struggle; recipes for detox shakes; bits of songs by Silvio, Amaury Pérez, and Los Guaraguao; the Chinese economy; and baseball statistics. His mouth was dry and his pupils so dilated that everything around him was starting to look like a high-contrast photo. He held on to the doctor’s arm as they walked around the pool to room nineteen. The room, which Bengoa had called a privilege, had a view of the pool and a sliding glass door, in front of which two men, one in pajamas and the other in a bathing suit, were playing cards at a little wrought-iron table topped with plastic flowers. The doctor struggled with the lock, unable to hit on the trick Haydee had mentioned, while Argenis took stock of the furnishings of his new room through the glass: a ceiling fan, twin beds, a nightstand.

The door to his pusher Rambo’s house also had a trick to it: you had to pull on it as you inserted the key. “Let me try,” he said to Bengoa, and the doctor moved aside, satisfied with the noticeable improvement in his new patient. Argenis tried once, twice, wiggling the key in the lock like the tail of a happy dog until the door gave way and the smell of bleach and clean sheets hit them in the face.

‌

Privilege. He could feel the word in his mouth, as it made the same movements it would make to taste and swallow a spoonful of frosting. He said it every morning after brushing his teeth and washing his face, as he put on the tiny Speedos his mother had picked out. Then he would swim a bit, not very athletically, doing a few laps of breaststroke. Bengoa had prescribed it to stimulate his appetite and it was working. Around eight a.m., Haydee would bring a tray of fried eggs, toast, and coffee that he’d scarf down in his room without being able to avoid thinking about the people outside the clinic, people who mainly breakfasted on a watery coffee of chickpeas and old grounds.

“Eat it all up, Argenis,” Haydee would tenderly request as she filled her bag with paper from the bathroom trashcan to throw out. Argenis wondered if Haydee lived in La Pradera or if she took the patients’ leftovers home every night. Her rubber-soled shoes were as hygienic as they were discreet and they didn’t reveal much beyond the work that allowed her to have them. They would never let on what Haydee thought of the foreigners whose dollars gave them access to places and services Cubans couldn’t even dream of. According to Bengoa, Argenis wasn’t in La Pradera because of the dollars his dad had sent along with him in a diplomatic pouch on the Cubana Airlines flight, but rather because of his father’s revolutionary credentials, his political career, the expanding orbit of his attributes.