I spy with my little eye. What do you spy? A thing. What color is it? Gold. What size? Small. What’s it made out of? Metal. Iron? No, gold. Your rings? Your earrings? And so on, for half an hour.

A clue? It’s in the hand of an angel. Argenis searched for an answer in the giant clouds in the sky on both sides of the highway. Later, tired, his gaze fell unaided on the little holy card of Archangel San Miguel that hung from the rear-view mirror. In his right hand the sword, raised over a demon ablaze under the boot of the celestial soldier. In his left, the golden scale of divine justice.

To call his aunt he’d have to walk to the Hotel Nacional and pay an arm and a leg for just a few minutes. Bebo’s wallet and passport were on the nightstand. Without asking, Argenis picked up the turquoise leather wallet and looked inside. A wad of dollars in various denominations stopped it from closing completely. Using two fingers like tweezers, he pulled out eighty dollars and returned the wallet to its place, thinking that the privileges his friend enjoyed could serve as proof of reincarnation just as effectively as those children with flies in their eyes on the UNICEF ads. He brought the new bills to his nose. They were so new that he could have cut a slice of ripe papaya with their edges. Bebo must have been a saint in his previous life and he himself must have been Trujillo, at the very least. Blessed by abundance, money was just an abstraction to Bebo, a concept lacking in that curly head his barber always cut in the style of a Roman emperor.

Bebo asked for a blanket. At this point, all of his plans for the day were canceled, except for reading the poem “7:00 on the Nose” by Virgilio Piñera, which he recited like a rosary every night at the time of the title. Argenis handed him a pink blanket that was hanging on the back of a chair and Bebo wrapped himself in it from head to toe. Under the blanket Argenis found a cream-colored sport jacket, hung there so it wouldn’t lose its shape, a jacket Bebo wore with Bermuda shorts and white T-shirts, and which, like everything he wore, fit as if he had been sewn into it. The label, embroidered in wine-colored thread on the garment’s neck, attracted his attention. He picked it up and read the name of the tailor: Orestes Loudón. The name sounded familiar. “You’ll have to wake up a little more,” Bebo recited from inside the blanket, deciphering Piñera with a tiny flashlight. Argenis put the jacket on, looking at himself in the mirror Bebo had set across from the bed to enjoy the reflection of his lovers. Argenis’s Police T-shirt gave an edgy touch to the blazer, but not the cut-off jeans. He peeled off his shorts and looked for something in the closet to wear, deciding on some brown cotton pants. “Remember it in the midst of your hell,” Bebo whispered from inside the blanket as Argenis put them on. “It is your compass to the final north.”