After breakfast, he would read a bit at the iron table from a coverless copy of Asimov’s Foundation and Empire which Bengoa had brought, and a half-hour later he’d be in the water again. Arms spread like a cross, his back to the edge of the pool, he would bicycle his legs and watch how the hospital awoke little by little, how the ill would emerge from their rooms with lazy eyes and feet. He amused himself by thinking that the hotel was an old movie he was projecting with the movements of his legs underwater, and he would slow the bicycle down as if it was a crank that would make the scenes go by in slow motion. He always achieved the desired effect; it was a simple trick, since everyone in La Pradera moved as slow as hell.

If it was really sunny the pool would fill up by about ten a.m. and Argenis would get out, afraid of contracting some strange disease, or rather another disease, because Bengoa had made him see that he was sick, that addiction was a physical condition and that he was there to cure it. He would be cured of shooting up, although addiction itself had no cure. “Your brain will always have that hunger, that thirst for relief,” Bengoa had said, as he handed Argenis a pack of Popular cigarettes.

Bengoa and Argenis had lunch together every day and they would smoke at the iron table before and after the meal, observing the staff giving a blond boy with Down syndrome water therapy. They would discuss Argenis’s symptoms and then the doctor would return to the gravitational center of all his conversations, the Cuban Revolution. Bengoa had been in the mountains with Fidel and had met Argenis’s father during the Latin American Solidarity Conference of 1967. He would speak of these events with the solemnity of a preacher, highlighting dates and the names of forgotten places where he’d cured the wounds, fevers, infections, and asthma of the revolutionaries’ flesh. Each day Bengoa would extract a sample from his bottomless sack of anecdotes. Most of these memories were as precise as Argenis’s dose of buprenorphine, and it was obvious that they filled the doctor with the same kind of calm that the medicine gave his patient. Remembering these events and their sensations, Bengoa’s pupils would dilate, his pulse accelerate, and then the inevitable comedown would make him stare at the pool water and throw out a last, usually tragic, line to ease his forced landing just a bit.

“When your dad came I met Caamaño, who was training here so that he could sacrifice himself in the DR later on.”

Argenis imagined the word “sacrifice” beating in Caamaño’s veins and those of his companions, the dark euphoria that had made them disembark on a boggy beach on the Dominican Republic’s north coast in 1973 in order to topple Balaguer’s government with just nine men. A tremendous high. Cuba and its revolution had pricked their veins and those of millions of young people around the world.