When Bengoa finished his daily historical venting, it was usually just before four p.m., the time when, without fail, he would inject Argenis in his room. He could have done it by the pool, but Argenis preferred to lie down on the bed for a bit, looking at the ceiling fan or at a transfer of an Argentine flag someone had stuck onto the sliding door. Argenis had thought the flag was an allusion to Che Guevara, but Bengoa explained proudly that Maradona had once stayed in that clinic and pointed out the sticker as irrefutable proof of the star’s past presence. The sticker had started to peel off and air pollution had tinted the transparent edges the same amber color as the Temgesic capsules.

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Argenis had never been good at packing suitcases, which might seem strange for a professional painter with a fine arts education and a proven talent for composition, perspective, and proportion. For him, transferring objects from the world or from his imagination onto canvas in a balanced way had always been a natural inclination, even before his artistic training. When he was little he would draw his classmates’ heads during the Spanish class he hated, achieving a realism so effective that his mom raced to sign him up for lessons with the master painter Silvano Lora. Silvano had been one of his parents’ comrades in arms in the seventies and his exile during Balaguer’s twelve years in power had been one of the topics of the article for which the journalist Orlando Martínez had been assassinated. “Orlando Martínez died so that people like you and Silvano could be free today,” Etelvina had told him as they were waiting for Silvano to open the door of his studio.

Like Bengoa, Argenis’s mom was a natural-born storyteller, but unlike the doctor, her memories of that era brought her little comfort. Instead they made her speak slowly and painfully, in the rhythm of someone drinking a bitter tonic.

Order and cleanliness were the only weaknesses Argenis had been able to detect in his mother. The last time she had taken him into her house, after his divorce from Mirta, he had dared to say that her desire for pulchritude was merely a Trujillist relic. Etelvina refused to speak to him for three years – until the night when, having dragged Argenis out of his pusher’s apartment by force, José Alfredo had left him in her house. She had made him swallow a sedative without water and he’d awoken on her sofa twelve hours later with his stomach turning from the smell of salami being fried up for breakfast. There were two red fabric suitcases open in the middle of the living room which Etelvina was filling with clothing, tins of food, and toiletries. “Where are you going?” Argenis asked, and she looked at him, glad to see him awake, wearing an expression of tenderness he hadn’t seen on her face since he was a boy.

Just hours before Bengoa picked Argenis up from La Pradera to take him to the apartment he’d rented for him in Havana’s Chinatown, Argenis’s clothes, which had arrived in Cuba as orderly as a good game of Tetris, had been strewn all around the room: on the bed, on the floor, falling out of drawers, and untidily hung over the towel rod in the bathroom. He was too lazy to pick them up. He was too lazy for anything. He was wearing the same old pink rubber flip-flops from his pusher’s house. His new shoes, leather moccasins and a pair of sneakers, were still in one of the suitcases. The second suitcase, which contained cans of food and Nesquik, was still locked.