“I used to pass food through here to your father when he would come to see me in the middle of the night,” she told him. “They were hunting him down to kill him. If you could only have seen him. He looked like a skeleton.”

It hadn’t been Argenis’s lot to live in the time of gods and heroes, he had been born too late, but they had existed, and here was the rusty aluminum blind to prove it. He got up ceremoniously and touched the window with his open hand, just as the pilgrims in Higüey touch the glass covering of Our Lady of Altagracia. He felt a strange force pushing inside him, a kind of spiritual nausea. The atmosphere had become strange: it was pulling everything down, pulling him toward his grandmother’s cot, with a stench of sugar, or something like it. And with his eyes closed, he felt his father’s panic – the desire he’d had back then to change the world, with death nipping at his heels.

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The woman had dreamy tits, round as melons and crowned by a Tibetan pendant that fell right down to her cleavage. Her hands were perhaps too delicate for a really good wank. Argenis knew that the more masculine a woman’s hands, the better hand jobs she gave. But her mouth was large and fleshy and Argenis imagined her stretching it out to the limit like elastic on panties in order to eagerly swallow his cock, and later opening her legs right there on the desk to offer him her shaved, juicy cunt. She was the director of SOLIDARIA, a Spanish NGO that worked on women’s health issues, and Argenis supposed she was probably gay, like the majority of the friends, whether female or “female,” of his aunt – or that she was at least “complicated.”

Niurka had gotten him the interview. They needed an art teacher to give workshops for victims of gender-based violence. The salary was not exactly generous, but it was enough to pay the rent, electricity, groceries, and phone bills. Besides which, Mar, as the woman was called, had spoken of a vacant space with its own bathroom on the top floor of the building, which he could use as a studio and which was even big enough to house monumental pieces. He walked with her through the facilities into a classroom with individual work tables and an enormous, modern, white marker board. In the center was a round table, perfect for a life model for the anatomical drawing classes. All that was needed was some decent lighting, but only in the afternoon, since the mornings would surely see enough light streaming through the row of east-facing windows.

The classroom was cool and the scent of the centuries-old eucalyptus on the sidewalk wafted through the Persian blinds. Everything was new in the offices; this was the way the motherland eased her guilt complex. They were filled with posters bearing commemorative feminist slogans or announcing some international conference. There were too many ornamental plants for a workplace, and behind every desk was a woman, except for the accountant, an effeminate Frenchman who was the only one to stand when Mar introduced Argenis.