His father told the anecdote and his friends guffawed loudly. Argenis laughed too. Ernesto was a son of a bitch who no longer roused any sympathy in him. The noise bothered the other customers – their bursts of laughter were even more annoying to the Dominican petit bourgeoisie than the Molotovs they’d thrown in the Autonomous University in 1970. In the midst of the laughter, a grain of rice from Pellín’s mouth landed on Argenis’s plate. Although he still had his shank of lamb, Argenis considered the food finished.

The memory of his grandmother cleaning the rice wormed its way into his body. It wasn’t a two-dimensional image – she was there with him. Consuelo was smiling impishly, showing her missing tooth, and, holding a tiny stone she had just extracted between her fingers, she said, “In this world, there are those who clean it, and those who eat it.” Was she talking about the rice, or the world? Argenis had no idea. His father’s friends were grinning vacantly at him like marionettes as they licked the tips of fingers thick as sausages. He felt nauseous and excused himself to go to the bathroom, where he urinated and threw some water on his face, his neck, his wrists. He looked into the mirror and felt better. As he pushed down on the soap dispenser he thought of Susana. How she would marvel over his father’s table, over that liquid soap that never stopped flowing.

When he came out of the bathroom, he saw José Alfredo enjoying a crème brûlée, and at the next table a waiter was seating a pair of attractive forty-somethings. The man wore his hair gelled back, a polo shirt and khaki shorts; the woman a strapless linen tube dress. It was Giorgio Menicucci and his wife, Linda Goldman. Three years ago they had given Argenis a scholarship on the north coast. He didn’t have to do anything except paint and pay attention to the Cuban curator they had brought over. Argenis didn’t keep his side of the bargain. He had had a nervous breakdown, made himself ridiculous. When they kicked him out he came back to the capital in such bad condition that his father had him committed to the mental health ward of the UCE that same day. He didn’t want them to see him. He wanted the earth to swallow him up.

Giorgio got up from his chair, took two strides, and put his hand on José Alfredo’s shoulder, who greeted him with an affection Argenis knew was feigned. He felt embarrassed by the airs his father gave himself whenever rich white people said a word to him. Then Giorgio looked at Argenis and, without greeting Pellín or Aquiles, opened his arms as if waiting for a hug. It would have been very awkward not to return the gesture. “Can I borrow the maestro for a few minutes?” he asked José Alfredo, referring to Argenis with a mock nineteenth-century courtesy which José Alfredo, passing a dirty napkin from one hand to the other, also failed to detect.