Argenis picked up the sword and found it was no toy. It was heavy and as sharp as a razor blade. He thrust it into a shadow in his mind, a shadow made of ocher stains that gradually grew more and more defined, like a Polaroid. It was his father, with no protection against the sword other than the grotesque jowls that were gaining terrain in the photos of him that appeared in the papers.

You are getting older and uglier every day and I bet you can’t even get it up anymore, Argenis thought, as he tried out a series of movements with the weapon. He repeated the detailed choreography several times as the outer world began to fill up with the noise of motorcycle taxis and male voices announcing the destinations of the conchos and minibuses. The sound of his aunt in the shower interrupted him and, as he returned the sword to its place, the golden detailing around the neck of the costume caught the first light of day and attracted his gaze. In a few seconds he had made a mental list of the paints and brushes he would need to reproduce on canvas the effect of the light hitting the sequins. The pictorial recipe came to him like a reflex, a side effect of his artistic education.

When Niurka came out of the bathroom, Argenis had breakfast ready for her: toast, eggs over hard, and coffee. Along with a few questions. She was wearing a short linen dress with red and white stripes, and had gathered her hair into a bun. With no Afro to compete with, her green eyes gathered up all the light in the room. He had already eaten and was looking through the yellow pages for Orestes Loudón’s tailor shop. “What are you looking for?” she asked, spreading orange marmalade onto a piece of toast. “A tailor,” he replied, tearing the page from the phone book and sticking it in his pocket. “You’ve never been one to go around in suits,” she said as she took too big a bite. “There’s a first time for everything,” he said, glancing over at the San Miguel costume that had sparked his curiosity, postponing his questions about it for another time and getting up to put another pot of coffee on the stove.

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“The park,” Argenis requested, handing the coins for his fare to the driver of the concho. Without turning his small head, the man took the payment with a hand extended backwards, taking advantage of the red light to tell someone on the other end of his cell phone call to put six eggs on to boil and get a couple of rolls ready.

Argenis imagined the woman on the other end of the line peeling the hard-boiled eggs and mashing them with salt and oil until they turned into a bright yellow paste that she’d spread on a couple of white rolls recently delivered from the colmado. The imagined scent made him hungry, but the various stenches with which passengers had cured the vinyl of the car seats were much stronger.