The gallery was located in the new downtown area, on a Lincoln Avenue recently built up with beige or sand-colored towers and huge liquor stores with Spanglish names. You could breathe in the economic well-being, except for a brigade of Haitians in rags who were drilling a huge hole into the sidewalk cement. They belonged to another century, to a sepia-toned world of mud and lamentations.

An Apollo Taxi stopped and Argenis asked the driver to take him to a Banco Popular. He wanted to cash his check as soon as possible, feel the gasoline smell of those bills. They headed toward 27 Febrero Avenue and, despite all of Argenis’s warnings, the driver decided to take it. It was two p.m. and one giant traffic jam ran up and down it for kilometers, for its entire length. The faces of the pedestrians waiting on the sidewalks for conchos and buses wore an endemic sadness, a mixture of resentment and acceptance, of hate dressed up as debauchery. Desperation dressed in a Burger King uniform was holding up prepaid cell phones with monstrous Chinese porcelain fingernails. Decades of shit, of systematic looting, of public schools that were just farms for containment, had sculpted that dizzying, endless wave of eyes. Who could defend them, thought Argenis, now that the elected officials had turned into ruminants? Would it be up to him? To his frivolous friends? “There’s no way to fix this,” he said aloud, and the driver, who thought he was talking about the traffic, said, “Don’t worry, buddy. Up ahead this shit’ll thin out.”

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He chose the green suitcase for its color. He wanted to believe that just as the green balanced the red, this suitcase would bring him better luck, bring him a destiny that was positively complementary to the strange and desperate one his mother’s red suitcase had provided in Cuba. It was a Samsonite bag, a bit expensive, made of cloth, modern and hard. Unlike the red one, it would have survived the adventure with Vantroi, full of costumes and scenery.

The employee who sold it to him, a Colombian with transparent braces on his teeth, told him that the suitcase was “cool,” pressing his lips together in pleasure as he opened it like the skirt of a lover to show off the inside. Argenis imagined that anyone seeing it would do the same, and made his decision. Now that he was walking with it, empty, along El Conde Street he felt how cool it was, what its compact design added to him, as he very carefully made a mental list of the products he’d fill it with. The space was limited and everything should have a certain importance and significance. Like in a painting. He wanted to bring art supplies and quality wines, clothing to give away, cheeses, chewing gum and chocolates, books and magazines, things he should buy on the other side of the city, in the Supermercado Nacional or Plaza Central.

The cell phone Niurka had loaned him rang and he pulled it out of his pocket, saw it was his father. José Alfredo had threatened to call him and talk about a few things. Argenis felt tired just imagining those things. Being introduced to the president, a possible appointment. He ignored the call and stopped on the corner of Hostos Street to hail a taxi. Just then a cloud emptied itself like a bucket as the sun hid away. He ran with the other pedestrians to take shelter under the decrepit eaves of an art deco building, and from there he glanced over at the Cafetería El Conde a block away, where he had spent all those afternoons with the old painters when he was studying at Fine Arts. Back then he liked the place because it was the closest thing to Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night and, now that the rain had stopped and the water was making the cobblestones reflect the light from the recently lit streetlamps, he was filled with a sentimentality that made him think of all the troubles poor Vincent had endured.