When would he be able to go back to Santo Domingo? What would he go back to? After years of conscientiously descending the rungs of the food chain, he’d finally reached the bottom. He saw himself pushing a shopping cart full of trash, beer cans, and dirty stuffed animals along Lincoln Avenue, wearing shoes made of trash bags and fly larvae in his beard. The image of his mother in a housedress came uninvited and put a wrinkle in his pessimism. Etelvina was beating him with a broom, shouting, “You turd, you piece of shit,” hitting him with the broom handle in the parking lot of the building where he’d grown up, in front of all the neighbors. The idea made him laugh. He stood up and caressed the handle of the red suitcase. It was all he had left. That, Vantroi’s friendship, and the promise they’d made to share the money they’d earn from their Rhythm Nation show in Coribantes, the event space into which Iñaki, a young Spanish architect, turned his Vedado mansion every weekend.

Iñaki’s house reminded him of the Gazcue neighborhood of his childhood. It was practically identical to the villa that had housed his elementary school, a school for children of leftists and feminists, an experimental school where his mom worked so that she would only need to pay half-tuition for him and his brother Ernesto. Both the Vedado house and the one in Santo Domingo’s Gazcue had been built in the thirties. They belonged to the well-to-do that had migrated north in the second half of the twentieth century – those from Havana to Miami, and those from Santo Domingo to the outskirts of the city; the former fleeing Castro and the latter fleeing a proletariat that had made enough money in New York to buy and mutilate the old edifices, turning them into boarding houses, corner stores, beauty salons, and internet cafés.

Like all buildings in Cuba, Coribantes had to contend with a lack of materials for repairs. Time had traced an intricate series of cracks all over the salmon-colored walls. The porch, spanned end to end by an arch, sprouted a rounded marble staircase along whose edges bannisters descended like rivulets of condensed milk and spilled over the cement cookie at the stairway’s base. Asymmetrical chunks missing from the marble of the staircase sullied the house’s old-man smile. The ferns and lenguas de vaca in the front yard were the only sign of life in the whole ensemble.

The door was open and from it emerged two anorexic young queens carrying a papier-mâché Venus de Milo. Inside, the vestiges of a chic past – furniture, lamps, rugs, and designer ashtrays – looked much newer than the filthy exterior walls. The long mahogany bar bore witness to the parties held there before the guys with beards forbade fun. From the bar hung a sign with the word CORIBANTES in gold sequins on silver fabric. A spiral staircase led up to the second-floor bedrooms, and on the mezzanine below a stage with a dressing room occupied what must once have been a music room. They dragged the suitcase up onto the stage and behind the curtains to the dressing room, but when they tried to open its zipper, the fabric ripped from one end to the other. A gold chain, a cow’s horn, a femur, and a black rumbero sleeve its owner had claimed once belonged to Kike Mendive spilled through the wound. Vantroi had pulled the chain off a neighbor’s door, received the cow horn as a gift from a santera who had used its shavings in certain particularly aggressive spiritual cleansings, traded a clandestine butcher a tiny perfume sample for the pig’s femur, and acquired Kike’s shirt sleeve from an ex-lover who had been a grandson of the illustrious rumbero.