Bengoa had equipped the kitchen with coffee, sugar, bread, eggs, rice, and a couple of potatoes, stuff he pointed out while opening the cabinets with the smiling gestures of a magician showing the inside of a box in which his assistant has been pierced by swords. Then he showed him the apartment’s two bedrooms, and Argenis mentally converted one of them into a painting studio. He saw himself there looking robust and inspired, putting the finishing touches to a monochromatic nude of a headless woman.

“Can I trust you?” Bengoa asked, passing him a key chain sporting a cheap medal of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, and Argenis said yes, of course.

With difficulty, Argenis waited for four p.m., the time the doctor had indicated he should inject himself. To deal with the anxiety, he eyed the vial that was lying on the decorative flowers of the rattan sofa in the living room, smoked a Popular, and drank the coffee he had made in the blue greca pot that came with the kitchen. The coffee came from one of the five packages of Café Santo Domingo that Etelvina had put in the suitcase. Each time he saw them he loudly asked, “Why didn’t you also pack me five cartons of Marlboro Lights?” as if his mother could hear him.

When only a few minutes remained, he sat down on the rattan sofa and laid all his instruments out on the coffee table. It was all much easier now that there was nothing to light. He put the needle into the vial and filled the syringe.

Bengoa hadn’t left him the rubber strap, so he took off his belt, and as he tied it around his bicep the Janet Jackson song “Escapade” emerged from some place in the building. Its first notes, in this setting strange and at the same time familiar, made Argenis think about the Cubans’ obsession with eighties’ synthesizers, those bland keyboards that for them are the essence of modernity, the things with which Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel made millions.

Millions.

With the relief the injection brought, he savored the idea for the first time. If he had millions, he would buy all the heroin he’d need for the rest of his life. The purest goddamn smack in the world. He would live a tranquil life, not bothering anyone, disciplined and satisfied with his daily ration of happiness, as triumphant as a worker on a Soviet poster, a syringe in one fist and a giant spoon in the other.

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The Bible says that God saw man was lonely, so he made him a woman from his own flesh. Argenis’s father, lacking such superpowers, sent him a boom box with a CD player. Bengoa brought it over, and Susana with it, “to clean your apartment.” Susana had curly dark brown hair, a perfect belly button, and beautiful toes with pink polish peeking through her plastic sandals. She had brought a cheap cloth apron, which she put on immediately in order to attack the dirty dishes piled up in the sink. The water made refreshing sounds as it splashed on the plates, though Bengoa insisted on interrupting them with his praise of Sony, the makers of the boom box.