Rambo lived on a street next to the market and Argenis, since he didn’t really need the drugs, decided to walk to Little Haiti behind it before going up to knock on the door. When he was a student at Fine Arts he used to buy artifacts from other eras there for just a few pesos – used clothing a Haitian woman sold from a pickup, Ben Sherman shirts from the sixties, brightly colored polyester pants, even the motor from a remote-controlled car he had used to create a homemade tattooing machine. Most of these treasures came from the Duquesa dump. It was trash rescued by the dumpster divers who would later lay out the screws, picture frames, and faded plastic lunchboxes on a towel to sell.

This is the purgatory of all things, thought Argenis. Stuff that doesn’t reach the heaven of antique shops and stuff that escapes the hell of Duquesa, here is where it all ends up. Maybe it’s up to me to redeem one of them and elevate it to an eternal life in my bedroom. He felt generous and much calmer, and before getting to the end of the street where the dumpster divers had arranged their knickknacks, he proposed a stupid game to himself: if I find an object in the shape of a cat, it means I shouldn’t shoot up. Renouncing all responsibility in this way, he already felt more optimistic. The cat thing was incidental; it was just the first animal that entered his head, and the occurrence brought to mind the little blue porcelain cat his mother had had in their home when he was little. His eyes skimmed over the edge of the sidewalk, stopping at pieces of iron, lead, and bronze of unknown origin, beach toys, ceramic plates, baskets, hardware, telephones, napkin holders, belts, forks with bent tines, and on top of a mountain of threadbare wigs, a black cat missing an eye. He picked it up to examine it. The remaining eye was a plastic emerald. Around its neck it wore a collar of silvery lace from which hung a stone that matched the eye in shape but was ruby-red, and its velvet fur, although a bit bald in places, was shiny and very dark. It was a very old toy, maybe from the sixties. Maybe from the Trujillo era. He took out a fifty-peso bill without asking the price and handed it to the diver like he used to do back in the day; the guy put the money in his pocket without lifting his gaze from a steel apparatus he was trying to loosen with a screwdriver. As soon as the cat was his, Argenis forgot the deal he’d made with himself and walked with a quick step to Rambo’s apartment. He pressed the animal to his chest and felt the hard stuffing inside it, either rice or sand, as he asked in a soft voice, “Little cat, little cat, who threw you in the trash? What sins could have kept you from reaching eternal glory?”