Maestro. He had called him maestro. He could only be called that as a joke or with the intention to hurt. He hadn’t painted a thing in years. Nevertheless, Giorgio was looking at him with something more akin to admiration than pity. It was strange; Argenis didn’t know what to attribute it to. Giorgio’s gestures were careful and respectful toward him, and his wife’s eyes sparkled when she greeted him. They asked where he had been and he invented some experimental performance art he’d done in Havana: “Some research into the limits of the socialist body,” he said. He was talking like Susana, and they loved it.

Linda took his hand and the gesture surprised him. She looked at him with eyes that didn’t seem to lie and said, “Argenis, it’s so good to see you well.” They had broken the ice and all of them were feeling more relaxed. Giorgio ordered a glass for the gentleman and they served him a delicious ice-cold prosecco. They had started to build a conservation laboratory for the reefs on the north coast, and the art gallery was doing well. “That’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” Linda said, looking at her husband as if she were about to announce a pregnancy. “We have a collector who’s very interested in your work.”

During the Sosúa grant, he had painted a number of canvases with motifs from his mental illness, phantasmal buccaneers who were flaying cows. As he painted them he could smell the blood of those animals in the red acrylic. It was an intense trip that he ended up believing in. The day they threw him out, he had sworn that Giorgio was the reincarnation of one of those buccaneers, either that or a demon. Argenis had gotten violent. He didn’t even like to remember it. It shamed him. He had imagined that those paintings weren’t worth a cent and that Giorgio and Linda had thrown them in the trash, just like him.

It hadn’t been like that. Linda had always preferred painting to conceptual art. “I saved them so I could give them to you when you were better,” she said, and Argenis appreciated the gesture, forgiving her the condescension common to all gringos. They were talking about a collector, about money. They were talking about a solo exhibition at the gallery, a studio, new work, possible exhibitions in Europe and, after ordering another bottle of prosecco, they asked if he could please get them an audience with the president. They wanted to talk to him about the laboratory, ask for funding, money to fulfill their capricious environmental dreams.

Argenis understood the power being a satellite of his father’s would confer upon him. He weighed up what was in play. His face did not darken. On the contrary, he smiled with the same hypocrisy as Aquiles and Pellín. “You can count on it,” he told them. Now that he had something the Menicuccis wanted, he saw them in a very different light. No longer were they the epitome of good taste and cool. They were just another couple of hustlers. He got up to go in order to make himself more important, but not before leaving them a little piece of paper with the number of the cheap cell phone Niurka had loaned him.