The door was missing its window pane and Argenis stuck his head out to breathe some fresh air, but outside it smelled like spoiled milk, and like the bitter, liquid scent of rotting vegetables. It smelled of human shit, of layers of sooty sweat, of the dust raised by Haitian workers’ drills. It smelled like dead rats, like a congregation of sick pigeons, like a drunk’s vomit, and of the green stew of water that had been standing in the ditches for months and months. The woman on the other end of the call scraped a layer off this mixture with her knife, like scraping a stick of butter. Argenis could see pieces of human fingers with dirty nails compacted inside that stick, and then the driver scarfing the disgusting sandwich down into a nearly toothless mouth.

“Artistic ability,” Professor Herman had called the involuntary ease with which her student mixed reality and invention, repeating it to calm him when, three years ago now, she had come to the mental health ward of the UCE to bring him books and cigarettes. She had pulled these gifts from a Hermès bag, smiling behind her huge, expensive sunglasses. Now that the Dominican Liberation Party had won, she would soon be named director of the Museum of Modern Art. Her training and career meant she deserved the post, but they would have given it to her even if she were illiterate, just because of her mother’s position in the party.

As he got out of the car in front of Independence Cemetery and looked through the iron gate, Argenis saw a chubby woman lighting a black candle placed next to a blackened pot of rice and beans on top of a tomb. Behind her, two fifty-something mulatto men held the same color candles and prayed, eyes closed, shirts stained with sweat. The woman caught Argenis’s gaze, raising her eyebrows like she would raise her arms to challenge an opponent in a street fight. Then she brought a bottle of gin to her mouth, took a swig, and blew, spraying it over the food they were offering to the Baron of the Cemetery. Under the rays of the sun the atomized liquid momentarily formed a little rainbow in the air. The red plastic Casio watch Niurka had given him showed it was noon; vendors were crowding around outside the cemetery to sell their dusty lottery tickets.

Susana had warned him on that Havana balcony that the only thing that had changed since the Middle Ages was technology. Worldly flesh continued to be imprisoned by the same old superstitions. Next to the cemetery gate, old men and women besieged the vendors with money in their hands, requesting specific numbers they had dreamed the night before. A black dog was number four, a motorcycle taxi was a two.

The light of the white-hot sun left nothing to the imagination. The pockmarked walls and the impressive rust on gates and gutters surfaced like lines of text highlighted by a fluorescent marker. When he got to the Padre Billini Hospital, Argenis was sweaty from head to foot and for the first time he thought that maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Next to the entrance to the hospital, red plastic bags were piled in a heap as tall as him – red because they contained organic waste, bloody gauze, and used syringes. The mountain of trash emitted the same disagreeable energy as the queue of patients next to it, waiting their turn for a consultation or for the delivery of some medicine. They all looked terminally ill, and some were praying. The line reached all the way to the corner, and there on the corner was the store at which, twenty years earlier, his dad had revealed the mysteries of Christmas.