That body Vantroi had inherited was posing on the rooftop stage in a G-string, so that Argenis could fill bits of cardboard with drawings of it. His hand was practiced, despite it having been a long time since he’d last worked, and the lines came out sure and inspired, except when he asked himself what Susana would think of the sketches. Then a certain melancholy would infiltrate his steady hand, a melancholy that populated his curves with tiny vibrations. The morning sun gushed over his model, who changed position every ten minutes, laughing and commenting on all the failures Argenis recounted for him, the sequence of clusterfucks that, deserved or not, had followed him ever since he had left the Altos de Chavón art school.

Having accumulated a number of sketches, Argenis asked Vantroi to come down from the stage and sit by him. Over the top of those bodies, he drew various outfits and accessories, triangular forms that emulated the heads of Wifredo Lam creatures, the post-apocalyptic armor of Mad Max, and the magical signatures of the Palo Mayombe religion. He was aiming for a heavy metal/rumba aesthetic, as he ate some mashed potatoes Vantroi had brought up in a saucepan. A George Michael cassette that a pen pal had sent to Vantroi from Prague in the eighties played in the background. Next to the TV and the VHS tapes in the living room Vantroi had two boxes full of letters he’d received from friends all over the world, with whom he shared his literary and musical interests. Sometimes they sent gifts: colored pencils, stickers, photos of artists torn from magazines. Many of them arrived already open. “They read them before they give them to you, as if you’re going to plan a coup by correspondence,” Vantroi told him. “Like it’s the fifth century or something.”

Argenis tried to imagine the dimensions of that kind of claustrophobia, but he couldn’t. His friend had been asking permission to leave the country since he was twenty-one. Now he was thirty-seven. He surprised himself by making plans to get Vantroi out of Cuba, but all of them involved his father, José Alfredo, who still spoke of the Cuban Revolution as if it were a living thing, a good thing, clinging to the worn-out luster of a few social achievements on top of which repression in all its forms had been piled. How easy it was to hang the framed photo of the comandante in the living room of an apartment in Naco, its refrigerator full of imported cheeses, fresh vegetables, and ten pounds of churrasco meat his father would consume rare with a bottle of Marqués de Murrieta several times a week, ever since the PLD’s first win in 1996, when he’d taken a couple of classes in etiquette and manners. He thought of his Aunt Niurka, his father’s sister, who had never boasted any militancy whatsoever, but who gave everything she had to others on a daily basis. After graduating in Madrid with a degree in psychiatry, she had dedicated herself to helping abused low-income women. He’d have to get the money together to call her and ask for a plane ticket or some cash.