On the way to the café the green wheels of his suitcase raised little droplets from the ground. From far away, just as he used to, he made out the customers sitting on the patio, so that he could head straight to the painters’ table and avoid the poets, practically all of whom were nineteenth-century pseudo-intellectuals with halitosis. The painters’ table, next to one of the entrances, was empty and they had replaced the old hexagonal metal ashtray with the Montecarlo logo with a cheap, round, glass one. The star waiter, Abreu, flitted between the other tables. In spite of his white hair, he hadn’t acquired even one new wrinkle. Abreu recognized him as soon as he saw him and said, “Good evening, sir. Céspedes is inside.”

José Céspedes was the only survivor of that roundtable. The other members had died unceremoniously, their work remembered only in brief, pictureless columns that the editors of the culture pages had begrudgingly written. He was sitting at a square two-top near the bathroom and the ceiling fan inside the cafeteria, wearing a pair of green Ray-Ban sunglasses that were too large for a face that had lost all its flesh. Céspedes was a skull, a skull with a five o’clock shadow and warts so big they reminded Argenis of tufts of cotton escaping through tears in a stuffed animal. He was bald, and his ears hung down as huge as steaks and the rotten cashew of a nose was covered with blackheads big as the points of pencils. Someone had set two paintings for sale on the two chairs next to him. On both of them, tremulous lines attempted to evoke the façade of the cathedral. It wasn’t the attempt of a child; it was the achievement of someone trying to paint from memory or from a dream, with lines over whose flow vision no longer had any control. Céspedes had gone blind.

Argenis leaned in to the painter and whispered, “Maestro, it’s me, Argenis Luna.” Céspedes smiled and extended a hand to touch his face. His hand smelled like piss, but Argenis allowed him to touch his cheek, happy to make the old man smile. That sack of bones had been the cause of magical afternoons. He had recounted a world history of painting for Argenis as if it were a fairy tale, had bought him beer, wine, and cigarettes, had blessed him, had recognized the talent within him. Now penniless, with a dirty, stinking olive-green shirt over which no perfumed scarf now waved, Céspedes still inspired great benevolence and admiration in Argenis. He ordered a large Presidente and a pack of Nacionals. He praised the paintings and asked their prices. Céspedes drily said they had already been sold. Sensing he had offended him, Argenis changed the subject. They spoke of dead friends, of Ovando, Piñal, the girls that – according to him – were still falling for him, the women who said he looked like he was forty. Argenis forced a laugh.