In twos, he went up the narrow steps of a stairway smelling of piss and beer. His friend’s fourth-floor door sported a sticker from the last census and a deep groove made by some kind of blade. He pressed the bell and listened to the commotion of someone hiding whatever they could because they were always expecting the police. Rambo, an olive-toned mulatto, turned white as snow when he opened the door.

“Man, what you doing here? Get out of here, man. Leave me alone.” Rambo was shitting himself with fear, and if Argenis hadn’t stuck the cat between the door and its frame, he would have shut it in his face. With something like resignation in his sunken eyes he opened it again but didn’t let Argenis enter. Behind him, a woman in an oversize T-shirt was lighting a cigarette from a stove burner in a dark kitchen.

“What’s up, Rambo? You smoking crack? What kind of paranoia is this?”

“No paranoia, buddy,” the pusher said, scratching his arms nervously with both hands. “Your dad came by with two thugs and stuck a Beretta in my mouth before sending you off to Cuba. I can’t sell you anything, man. Get out of here. Don’t call me. You don’t know me, you never knew me, and I don’t know you.”

‌

He had nothing left, not even a pusher. He flopped back onto Niurka’s sofa bed and looked at the ceiling. He tried to remember the number of Hans, another pusher who had gotten heroin for him, but then he remembered Bebo had said Hans was in jail. Aunt Niurka is a psychiatrist, he thought. If I tell her, maybe she can get me some Valium, some lorazepam, something. In his mind he heard “priorities of a junkie,” just the way his ex-wife used to say it. He went to the kitchen and served himself two shots of Barceló Imperial one after the other, returned to the sofa, lit a Nacional, and thought about how Susana had fucked Bengoa so that he could shit himself comfortably during his withdrawal syndrome. He thought about the son that, according to Ernesto, he might have, and again the memory of his grandmother came to him: Consuelo sitting on the bench in her bosses’ kitchen, cleaning rice.

What was the meaning of that memory? Why was it always coming back, like a hip-hop loop? It was a living image, in color, which filled his nose with a mixture of smells that included the Vicks VapoRub Consuelo rubbed on her knees, the old wood of the cabinets, and the sofrito seasoning for the meat in the pot. He made an effort to recall more details, moving about inside the memory like in a virtual reality game, turning his head and walking around her house, traveling in time. He put out the cigarette, closed his eyes, and tried to relax. He voluntarily drew the image toward him: his grandmother Consuelo, not yet fifty years old back then. She had had his father very young. She is missing one of her first molars. Her long pianist’s fingers delve into the rice, as if, instead of cleaning rice, she is picking the fleas from a dog. The space where her molar once was can be seen when she opens her mouth to say something. What is she saying?