“Get off that, boy,” his grandmother shouted. “That thing’s got termites.”

When the coffee was ready, she served it in two large mugs with boiling milk, placing them on the tray that had once belonged to her masters, and setting the whole thing on an ottoman with a Star of David, which sat between two rocking chairs facing the television. Argenis sat down with the old woman, who was spreading butter on a cracker without taking her eyes from the news, making loud comments about the reports with the same passion and ignorance she used for the twists and revelations of the telenovelas. It doesn’t matter, Argenis thought; she has watched history pass her by just as passively as her telenovelas. It had never occurred to her to intervene, to rebel, to poison her oppressors.

As soon as he realized how closely he resembled his grandmother, he was full of contempt for himself. He was so arrogant. In that, he also resembled her. His father, on the other hand, even if he was a hypocrite, had at least tried to do something to change things. What had Consuelo done? Put up with it. Put up with it like Rocky in the first Rocky. Put up with it without being KO’d by the fifty years of greasy pans and someone else’s dirty panties.

Argenis took advantage of the hypnotic power the television exercised over his grandmother to observe her thoroughly. Her Milky Way-colored skin was plowed with wrinkles as precise and as deep as the marks left in an old folded letter. Her eyes were still beautifully happy, young, curious, and without eyelashes, full of a generosity his Aunt Niurka had inherited. Without removing them from the screen, she took Argenis’s now-empty mug from his hand and told him to get the sweets and bring them to San Miguel. He followed her to her room and confirmed his suspicions. At night the house was as empty as the run-down museum of a long-gone middle class, while its strange curator returned to her room off the courtyard, to the same rusty bed frame with a new mattress Consuelo had only recently accepted, reluctantly, from her children.

The servant’s room was smaller than Argenis had remembered, and it belonged to an era even more remote and absurd than Trujillo’s or Balaguer’s. The walls were bare except for a cross Renata had brought back from her trip to the Holy Land. There was no mirror, no hairbrush, no lipstick, no perfume, no curlers. She picked the bell up off an altar full of empty glasses in order to call her saint. She rang one, two, three times, with little ceremony, bringing the sweets to her mouth and chewing them with difficulty. Argenis was anxious to witness the prodigal spirit that had been the protagonist of so many stories.

“Do you smoke?” his grandmother asked. Argenis offered her the open pack of Nacionals and some matches. Consuelo took one out and lit it, but the flame didn’t touch the unlit one-peso candle on the altar. She stood up without even looking at the image of the saint and parted the towel that acted as a curtain over the room’s only Persian blind.