As he descended the stairs back to Vantroi’s apartment, hands full of sketches, he felt a pleasurable sensation of calm. With those bits of cardboard he could pay Vantroi back for the roof over his head and the food he’d been offered. For the first time in his life, he could live off his art. The overly salty potatoes the Cuban Vantroi shared with him were bombshells of friendship, of a nameless brotherhood constructed around creativity and beauty.

He arranged the drawings on the floor in the light coming off the balcony and imagined them as monumental paintings, murals on the sides of Santo Domingo’s modern buildings. He felt the breeze that would buffet him up there on the tall scaffold, the tension in his hands as he moved a roller that would spread the paint along the hair on a huge, black head.

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Vantroi walked on ahead, wearing his tattered pre-washed jeans, turquoise high heels – executive-secretary-style – a sleeveless silk blouse the color of a zapote fruit, and, over his head and shoulders, a threadbare yellow pashmina. Argenis followed behind over the thirty or so blocks, dragging one of the red suitcases with which he’d arrived in Cuba, currently full of all the costumes and scenery needed for Vantroi’s next show. He regretted having been so creative, now that the weight of all the materials they’d gathered on errands all over Havana was making his balls swell. The temperature suddenly dropped and Vantroi arranged the pashmina to protect himself from the wind with a gesture borrowed from Claudia Cardinale, if Claudia Cardinale were one half of a duo of artistic beggars. As they passed by the parish church of the Sacred Heart the scene was complete: it was the living image of the Five of Pentacles in the Rider-Waite tarot deck. On the card, a pair of mendicants pass by a church’s stained-glass window: a woman walks ahead, cloaked in a rag, and a crippled man follows her on crutches. It was the card of poverty, of bankruptcy caused by emotional instability. In 2001, Argenis had worked as a psychic on a telephone line that offered personalized readings all over the United States, and he knew the cards by heart. No one there possessed any special powers, but they made them learn the meanings of the oracles, how to improvise and do free association. He didn’t need his cards dealt to know that he had become the Minor Arcana of poverty.

As they left the temple behind, one of the wheels of the suitcase fell off and Argenis bent down to fix it, without success. He’d have to carry the bag the rest of the way. In silence he begged, God, give me a break, and sped up, with the heavy suitcase in his arms as if this demonstration of vigor and determination were a substitute for faith. The effort brought an avalanche of sadness down upon him and he dropped the bag to sit on the curb and cry. Vantroi offered him the pashmina to blow his nose on. He couldn’t get the image of Susana out of his head, inconsolable and half-naked in the kitchen the day he’d caught her with Bengoa. He looked at the hand that had been dragging the suitcase, the fluid-filled blister on the thumb. As he poked it with a finger to make the bubble burst, the church bells tolled six o’clock. The peals were so weak and distant that Argenis wondered if the ringing was real or if he was imagining it. He had been confusing certain sounds ever since his brother Ernesto had convinced him to put a piece of Lego in his ear when he was three. The memory of the little blood-stained block in the doctor’s tweezers still made his eardrum hurt.