As he chewed, Ernesto took out his wallet and grabbed three or four thousand-peso bills. Argenis had just put the empty glass back in the corner minibar, and again he saw the mirror reflecting a pale man, marked by adolescent acne, pulling money from a wallet. He knew what was coming, but this time he was prepared. Ernesto offered him the pesos, speaking with his mouth full, but Argenis had already opened the door and was walking toward the exit on the way to the elevator. Spurned and angry, his older brother followed him to the lobby with fork in hand, and right there in front of the receptionist he said, “Mirta left you for a woman, didn’t you know? Yes, Papito, a dyke stole her from you. A lesbo. She looks really happy going around with her dyke, and with a little boy who looks just like you.”

He was already in the elevator when Ernesto said “just like you.” The doors closed and the machine started its slow descent to the street. In his guts he felt the same pain he had felt in Havana when he quit using the synthetic morphine. Some absurd desire to vomit, even though he had nothing in his stomach, made him lean against the wall. When they separated, Mirta told him she had aborted a baby boy. His baby. And if that baby was alive? And he had a son? He felt panicked thinking about what was waiting for him down there, when at last the elevator doors opened. Suddenly everything gained an absolute and absorbing depth. The news of his successful reproduction had turned his world – a Paleochristian, naive, two-dimensional mural – into a Da Vinci painting, three-dimensional, wide-screen, in vivid perspective.

A line of taxis was waiting for customers at the exit of the office building. Inside the cars, dented eighties Japanese models, the drivers ate Chinese food over their newspaper or slept with the driver’s seat in a horizontal position. Under a light-blue tarp tied to a flamboyán tree a street vendor sold cigarettes, sweets, and coffee from a rusty thermos. Argenis bought a pack of Nacionals and smoked one while looking at the pink waffle cookies on the cart, listening to the gravel-crunching sound of the taxi drivers’ radios. The rain had stopped and an asphyxiating steam was rising from the asphalt. Niurka had given him a few pesos so he could get around, so he could look for work. His aunt had also loaned him a little pay-as-you-go cell phone, which she kept for foreign friends who came to visit her. He hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the Mercado Modelo. On the way he dialed a number – one of the few he still knew by heart: Rambo, his heroin pusher.

Rambo was not in the habit of taking calls from unknown numbers, so he didn’t hit redial. He calmed down as he anticipated the peace that soon, very soon, he would be feeling. Imagining the needle pushing it into him gave him goosebumps and filled his heart with a childlike euphoria. He avoided all thoughts of failure: that Rambo might have moved, that he wouldn’t be home, that he could be traveling, or dead. He also avoided thinking about his Aunt Niurka and her good intentions, about the genuine affection she showed him, and about the offers of work she had made him. Giving art classes to abused women or to violent offenders wasn’t his idea of happiness, but at the NGO where Niurka worked they could get him a studio and materials so that he could restart his career, once and for all.