Admiring his new look, Argenis remembered his father, that morning in front of the tailor’s mirror, trying on a custom-made suit he would pay for with his son’s Christmas money. The smell of cigarettes and new fabric came to him, together with the name of the little man who was winking at him while his dad counted the bills out onto the sewing table. That same Loudón was the only witness to the debt his father had incurred with him that day, the memory of which Argenis had recovered during his illness, like a crumpled receipt in the bottom of a pocket. It was a memory much more valuable now than a suit. It was a debt that had accumulated interest, and Argenis was ready to collect on it.

He left the room and found the house as empty as the box of toilet paper that had been violently ripped open; Bebo’s buddies had claimed their daily loot: the silky Charmin. Before Bebo had saved him from giving his ass to a Spaniard, he had already been scratching himself for months with Cuban toilet paper, a thin, rough paper that didn’t protect your fingers from the shit at all.

He went down in an elevator lined with mirrors in which his head, a squarish but attractive head, was infinitely reflected. He felt a certain amount of pleasure and security allotted by Bebo’s clothing, as if the costume he wore might throw his complexes off track. He pictured himself in a custom-made suit at the opening of his first solo exhibition. He pictured himself selling all his pieces, and some newspaper dedicating the front page of its culture supplement to him.

When he got to the Hotel Nacional, a security guard poked his chest with a sharp finger. “No nationals allowed here, buddy.” Buddy, my ass, thought Argenis, as he took out his Dominican passport, a passport that would have brought him only trouble in half the world, but which here, thanks to the stupidities of the revolution, was as good as a Swiss one.

“Pardon me, sir.” Apologizing, the guard pointed the way to the upholstered phone booths full of foreign voices from which he had called his Aunt Niurka for the first time a week ago on Bebo’s dime. When his aunt picked up he could hear the sound of the Friday-evening traffic jam in front of her building in Santo Domingo on the other end of the line. She had returned from Europe not long ago and was renting an apartment on Bolívar Avenue, in the same Gazcue neighborhood Argenis was once again comparing with the dying Vedado.

Argenis missed those sounds: the swearing drivers, the frenetic tackiness, the trash besieged by thousands of flies on the curbs, the cell phone chargers, the plantains and loofahs, the swollen hands of Haitian beggars. He missed its filth. From time to time in the midst of the crowds you could feel something beautiful. A light that shone on everything, a color and a light that gave the commotion a secret meaning. Like a double-entendre song, only this time the song was vulgar and its hidden meaning sublime.