At some point after that first, long-ago visit to the tailor, when the two of them had looked into the mirror in Loudón’s shop, his father all dressed up and he himself saying a final goodbye to jingle bells, he began to hate that face, to hate those familiar gestures.

A few hours later, the kitchen table had turned into a modest laboratory, covered with smoking pipes, Ziplocs full of hydroponic marijuana, pills, and lines of coke belonging to Charlie’s guests, ex-students from the progressive school Argenis had attended as a child, as well as children of members of the party who had just won the election, like him. Dioradna and Fifo were no longer those Greenpeace members soliciting signatures on El Conde Street: now they were bureaucrats who preferred to talk contemporary art rather than politics. The suffocating competition between various brand-name fragrances hung in the air. They didn’t know or pretended not to know about the crossroads at which Argenis stood, and they asked him about his art, his paintings, the next exhibition, as if nothing had happened since he graduated from Chavón. They were the spitting image of their progenitors, but without the ideological baggage their parents had used to plan attacks. They looked contented, not at all naive, grateful for the battles their parents had fought against Trujillo and Balaguer but lacking any interest in perpetuating the struggle. They knew the reason for their current solvency. It had nothing to do with education or progress – all the plenty was the product of a pact. The PLD had made a pact with Balaguer and won the elections for the first time ever in 1996. In a final sacrifice for their country, their parents had signed a deal with the murderer of their comrades. Thankful for their privileges, free of contradictions and excuses, this was the new Dominican nobility.

A strangely good mood sank into his bones and he lied with very specific details about an exhibition that he had been preparing for months. In his mind’s eye he saw the pieces in that exhibition already finished and hung in a large, well-lit gallery, along with the reviews in the papers and the orange stickers with the word SOLD stuck just next to the pieces. The table paid him the kind of attention Argenis hadn’t received in years and he felt something inside him start to let go, to relax, to get comfortable with the inherited resemblance which sat so easily with his companions, to take advantage of his genetic circumstances: looking like his old man, being like him.

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He opened his eyes on Charlie’s sofa, a designer sofa he was afraid he’d drooled or sweated on. Charlie served him some toast and coffee in the kitchen before dropping Argenis at his Aunt Niurka’s house on his way to work. It was summer and there were no parents blasting their car horns on the way to their children’s schools. Under the morning light the scars that population growth had left on Santo Domingo looked less aggressive, like grime on a peacefully sleeping beggar. Argenis’s head hurt a bit when he got out of the car. He said goodbye, and from the gate of the building’s parking lot he saw his mother pressing the intercom button to go up and see him at Niurka’s place. He had asked Niurka not to say anything to Etelvina yet, but the request had been in vain. He hid behind the wall and took a second to calculate the effects the rough night had had on his appearance. Mami will think I’m shooting up, he thought as he went down the street, shaking his head to empty it of the guilt he felt at leaving Etelvina there, dreaming of seeing him, ringing the bell of an empty apartment.