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A knife traces a slit from the throat to the anus of the cow. They are skinning it. That black hand belongs to a man dressed in a bloodstained linen tunic. He is carrying a kind of arquebus on his shoulder and has a purple rag tied around his head. In his right hand, which coincides with the upper-right corner of the painting, he is holding up a leg, a leg from a reality that doesn’t exist in any other part of the painting. You could count the hairs surrounding the hoof, see the dirt stuck to the hoof. You could feel the animal’s past vitality in that leg. In the lower-left corner another man is kneeling, a white man. With both hands clinging to one side of the gash that has divided the cow’s skin, he is pulling outwards. There is blood everywhere. The grass has turned red, purple, black. The white man has a knife in his mouth. Where his eyes should be there are a couple of gray smudges made with a spatula, as if his features had been liquefied – the way you sometimes see the features of two people mixed together in dreams. In some areas the paint has been applied with too much water and it drips. Inside the gash there are no guts, no flesh, no bones. What peeks out is a blue, the iridescent blue of a pool. It’s as if a David Hockney were living inside a Francis Bacon cow. The buccaneers are peering into that portal. They are going to extract a Hockney from the cow.

Argenis would never have been able to paint that now. He remembered creating the piece, but he couldn’t recall all the details. Where had he gotten such bravery? Those thick brushstrokes on the muscled arms of the buccaneers? Those accidental-seeming stains that made distant features of the tropical landscape jump out of the canvas? The little drops of Vermeer-like light he had used to bring the hands to life? What he did remember were the names of those men, names his psychosis had told him. Roque, Ngome – buccaneers who made their living from wild cattle. They sold their hides to smugglers. He didn’t know if he had invented them to feed his paintings or if he had painted them in order to be able to deal with their insistent and inopportune presence.

“We could ask ten thousand dollars for this one,” Linda Goldman said, standing in front of the work. She was wearing sweaty workout clothing from a Zumba session at the gym and sucking water from a little pink plastic water bottle. They were in the gallery’s basement, an art storage space with polished cement floors and climate control. Giorgio Menicucci had pulled the piece off the shelf and was holding it up by one corner. He was looking at it with the very same face his father used to admire lobsters. The price was not bad for an emerging artist.