“What were you dreaming about?” Argenis asked. “The same thing as always,” she responded, downing a second glass to smooth the furrows the screams, tractor-like, had left in her voice. “And what is it that you see?” She opened a button on her housedress and pulled her left breast out. A tit without a nipple. A few seconds were enough for the diagonal scar over her areola to be burned into her nephew’s retina, for him to see its centipede shape projected on the walls for many minutes after she had covered the breast again.

Argenis downed a second glass, feeling the heavy atmosphere of the hour of intimate revelations closing over his head. Involuntary, stuttering images of what he felt sure Niurka was about to tell him rolled through his head like an abstract trailer for a horror film.

“I wasn’t a communist or anything. Your dad was always the hothead. But he has the luck of the devil, and after the purges of 1971 they weren’t able to catch him again. I used to collect the pictures of the martyrs that came out in the paper: Orlando Martínez, El Moreno, Tingó. Like picture postcards. I liked to look at them there in the shoebox. They were dead and I was alive. Alive with all my secrets inside, secrets that had nothing to do with Balaguer or with Castro. They were asking for it, as Renata used to say. They wanted to die. They went around in the streets tempting the devil with their slogans and planning attacks that never amounted to anything. The rebels were a bunch of amateurs, but Balaguer’s assassins were professionals. They’d take you down just for having a university degree. I didn’t want to overthrow any government. What I wanted was to go out dancing, but José Alfredo wouldn’t even let me listen to music in English. That fucking man only started listening to the Beatles in the eighties because Tony Catrain played them for him. If it wasn’t for Tony, he’d still be listening to Niní Cáffaro.”

Niurka smiled sadly as she said “Cáffaro” and put her hand on her pajama just where her breast was, for a second, as if shutting a folder with a click. Then she poured herself a third drink, looked at the contents of the glass, and tossed it down her throat like a bucket of dirty water onto the street. Argenis breathed a sigh of relief, sensing that the story of the tit had been put off for another night. He couldn’t allow a woman to beat him at drinking, though, so he imitated his aunt’s move with a last drink, even though the two previous ones were already scratching up his insides. The clock that hung above the picture window showed four a.m. Niurka stood up and walked toward her room, turned off the main lights, and without looking at him said, “Go and lie down – take advantage of the few hours you have left.”