Orestes Loudón emptied his own in one slow, silent gulp. One drop escaped from between his lips and traced a black line, which could have been red, down to his throat. Argenis, who drank his murky water in sips, felt the hairs on his head, which he had shaved that morning along with his beard, stand up.

The power outage had shut off the fans and Loudón took his shirt off to cool down. When he came over to take back the empty glass, Argenis saw scars on his hands that extended like gloves of wrinkled skin up to his shoulders, as if the man had stuck both his arms into hot lava. His chest was covered by very black curly hair that dipped below his belt and, although he didn’t look like a weakling, his shoulder blades stuck out from his back like the mounds of dead roots big trees left in the ground many years after being cut down.

As the tailor took the nearly finished suit from its plastic cover, a cold wind blew through the window, agitating the candle flames and projecting dancing shadows onto the walls. The suit and shirt were white: it was a tropical suit, like the ones diplomatic protocol required for certain receptions, and the ones kids with villas at Casa de Campo used for their parties at the marina. Argenis had never worn a suit like that – in fact, the only time he had worn a suit jacket at all it had been an old one of his brother’s, which he wore for Leonel Fernández’s presidential inauguration.

It was a one-button jacket with pointy lapels, and the pants were cut straight and narrow. Dazzled by this marvel, Argenis stood in the middle of the circular rug, where he undressed in just as much of a hurry as his father had done twenty years earlier, and kicked his clothes and shoes far away, opening his arms into a cross so that the suit’s creator could help him into it. Once Argenis had it on, Loudón moved the candles in front of the wall mirror so that, multiplied by the reflection, they could light his client more intensely. Then he made Argenis turn around and look at himself while he took some pins from a beat-up, apple-shaped pincushion, deftly sticking their ends between his teeth.

Under that primitive light Argenis looked like an apparition, a cut-out silhouette on a black background, the very spirit of elegance. He thought of The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest by El Greco and, like that man, he put his hand on his solar plexus like someone taking an oath.

Loudón asked him to raise his arms again so he could use the pins to mark the spots that needed adjustment: the shoulders, the waist, the hem. The tailor went about his work in silence, allowing his client to remain standing before himself. This really was a work of art, Argenis thought, admiring the exquisite cut, the symmetry of the parts, the fall of the fabric over his limbs, the way in which the white contrasted with his bronze-colored mulatto’s skin. For the first time since he had graduated from Chavón he felt he was part of a relevant creative process, that this new Argenis, the one who peered at him from the mirror, was his concept, his work of art, the new man, as Che Guevara used to say – and here he couldn’t help but let out a chuckle.