Consuelo didn’t know that José Alfredo had left Etelvina. They’d hidden it from her so as not to worry her. What she did know was that one morning during Balaguer’s twelve years Etelvina’s brother, a marine, had saved both of them from being shot to death when he recognized them. That same day, Etelvina Durán and José Alfredo Luna married and abandoned the underground forever.

“San Miguel brings them,” Niurka said in a weird voice, since she was holding the smoke in. Argenis thought of the suit and imagined himself wearing it. His aunt’s voice made him laugh, and hearing him laugh made Niurka laugh. They laughed long, until they cried.

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The street he knew was gone. Gone were the wide sidewalks lined with jasmine, tamarind and almond trees, the modern houses built in 1950 by local architects who had recently returned from Mexico and Paris, the buildings made up of two or three apartments with high-ceilinged rooms and cool granite floors, the silence interrupted only by the calls of a passing street vendor and, from time to time, by student protests when they came off campus. Emilio’s and Renata’s was the only house on the block that hadn’t yet been sold and carved up to accommodate low-rent shops. Microbusinesses stuffed into four square meters that announced their services in vulgar typefaces printed digitally onto vinyl banners. Color or black-and-white photocopies, internet cafés, and barber shops. Fake nails, Chinese cell phones, and second-hand clothing. Boarding houses for Haitian and Pakistani students, Serbian strippers, and male prostitutes. The dreaded slum that Renata had so often mentioned as a distant inconvenience had exploded right at the door of her house. But Renata was no longer there to complain, to send Consuelo to shut the French doors that opened onto the entry hall, because the street was full of nasty people; because, as Renata had yelled during her last weeks in the house, she had never seen so many ugly people in one place in all her life.

The doors that opened onto the street remained shut in spite of the definitive absence of the lady of the house, and Argenis had to bang on them with his fist several times before his grandmother came to ask “Who is it?” in a frail, frightened voice.

She couldn’t hear over the megaphone of an evangelical preacher and the insistent speakers of the minibuses that came down from Correa y Cidrón Avenue, so she asked the same question three times before her grandson’s answer reached her. The preacher’s pickup truck went away along with its apocalyptic shouting and Consuelo, overjoyed by the visit, squealed like a girl. The wavering voice of a few seconds before now filled with vigor and a youthful scorn. Argenis heard her clanking around with a noisy key chain until she was finally able to open the door, a solid slab painted white, on whose surface one could still see the marks of the rocks Autonomous University students had thrown at the police during the conflicts of the seventies.