The uneven beard that had started to grow when he was thirteen was his first triumph over his brother Ernesto, who at fifteen already had two definite callings: kissing their dad’s ass and making Argenis’s life impossible. Ernesto was the best student in his year, besides being class president, and he had already had a couple of girlfriends. But that summer, while Argenis stood in front of the bathroom mirror trying out shaving with his mother – since José Alfredo had already left them for Genoveva – his older brother’s hairless white face was colonized by the nastiest acne case in history. Traces of blood and pus stained every pillow in the house.

Their father had boasted a splendid beard from a young age. He proudly pointed it out whenever he showed them pictures from his militant stage: pictures of him at protests sporting an untrimmed Afro and thick-rimmed sunglasses. He was a different person back then, a person who knew less than Argenis did about the dark phenomena that would turn him into the hypertensive, clean-shaven, permanently suited guy who defended his party, the Dominican Liberation Party, in the newspapers.

The paint on the stairs going up to Argenis’s new home was surrendering to the extreme humidity. Flakes of it hung down like the petals of an enormous funeral flower. The bronze spiral bannister decorated in art nouveau motifs had been recently polished, although here and there pieces had been hacked off by some thief or other. When they reached the fifth floor, his T-shirt soaking wet, Argenis felt like a man again and not like the shadow that had loomed over the untidy property of his best friends for the last few months.

From the apartment’s entryway you could see a balcony about three meters long, and a lovely breeze was blowing in from it. He dropped his bags and walked over to see if the view of decrepit buildings, rooftops, and laundry lines had the same contagious harmony as the rest of Havana. It wasn’t his first time in the city. In 1992 he had come to a summer camp for young revolutionaries from all over Latin America. His impression then had been the same as now: a heartbreaking mix of need and beauty. Standing out on the apartment’s balcony, he felt like a humble eighth note in a grandiose symphony whose sounds, audible only to the soul, greatly surpassed the appearance of its score of colonial architecture, dirty water, and ideology.

Standing with him on the balcony, Bengoa was speechifying on the history of the neighborhood, on Chinese immigration, on the old folk who used to stand in their doorways smoking opium – stories that he would embellish when he felt they were too short in the telling. Then he drew a little map of the best restaurants, in case Argenis wanted to blow the twenty bucks he was going to leave him, and Argenis supposed that, just as he had considered it appropriate to trust him with the administration of his own medicine, the doctor would eventually let him manage the money his dad sent, too.