From the eaves, from which he had imagined descending to steal the Adidas no time at all ago, Vantroi had hung a mobile, a little homemade Calder of wire and circular pieces of plastic milk jugs. It made him want to paint that little solar system onto the indigo band of the Atlantic in the background, onto the amalgam of crumbling cement rooftops, the most frequently painted ruins of all the Antilles, worn away daily by a ridiculous proliferation of directors of mediocre music documentaries.

If he thought about the city rather than himself he could decipher the outlines of his new solitude, forcefully detached from his Temgesic dependence, from Bengoa, from romantic love, from his father. He did not feel any self-pity; he was floating in space under little plastic planets with the names of gods. There was already a star named Vantroi in his personal galaxy – not the Vietnamese communist, but the neighbor who had sheltered him. A stray breeze brought to his ears the new jack swing of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation”, which was playing out on the rooftop terrace. Vantroi had moved his rehearsal upstairs so as not to bother him.

He climbed the stairs, following the rhythmic shouts of the beginning of the song. Vantroi was dancing on the little pink stage, blasting the music on an old, battery-powered tape recorder. Argenis ducked behind the water tank like an urban guerrilla and from there spied on his neighbor. He remembered the choreographies he’d put together with Charlie, Tony Catrain’s son, in the schoolyard. It was 1990 and house music was bursting out from all speakers. It was all steps they’d seen on MTV videos, just before discovering the Doors and Led Zeppelin. Vantroi threw sparks of sweat into the air as he executed the rigid, symmetric movements from the video. He was wearing boots that could only have been a present from his cousin Juani in Chicago, together with the hot pants he’d had on the first time Argenis had seen him peering into the water tank. He wore no shirt, as was his custom, and the contracted muscles of his torso reflected light from the sky like a living Rodin.

Resonant metallic beats like clashing swords punched Argenis in the stomach, and he felt the same intense desire to dance that at thirteen had moved all his friends whenever they heard Technotronic. It was a powerful sensation, the same one that makes fingernails want to grow, he thought, marking the rhythm with his bare feet. In his mind he ran through a short sequence of what Vantroi was breaking into four-counts. He saw himself as part of the dark underground army in the video: a fin-de-siècle Black Panther dressed in leather with stainless-steel insignia, fighting a musical battle against psychological complexes and bad memories. Not even Bengoa’s penis could rob him of the desire to move to the beat of that song.

Vantroi saw him and burst out laughing. “Boy, you’ve got good rhythm,” he said, weaving his words together with his deep and contagious laugh. He had a space between his two front teeth, like Madonna, and a little pink button nose well suited to transvestism. He came down from the stage with the tape recorder in his hand and passed it to Argenis to hold as he drank water from a metal jug in the shadow of the tank.