“This is what I call aerodynamic design, Argenis. If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” he said with childlike enthusiasm as he plugged the apparatus in and stuck his hand without permission into the Case Logic, which was lying on the counter. He rooted around until he found a CD by Joan Manuel Serrat that Argenis never played but which the doctor apparently loved. Then he sat on one of the rocking chairs and took a swig from the flask of Havana Club he always had in his back pocket, and which he’d sometimes used to spike their coffees at La Pradera.

Susana was cleaning Argenis’s room with a broom and a mop she had found in the kitchen. He could hear her clanking around in the closet and prayed she wouldn’t find any dirty underwear that hadn’t made it to the laundry basket. Bengoa, now standing in front of Argenis, took another swig from his bottle, grimaced, and then puckered his lips as for a kiss, looked toward the room where Susana was working and, while pushing his fat middle finger in and out of the circle he’d made with his other hand, said loudly enough for Susana to hear, “Susana studied art history, Argenis. You’ll get along very well.”

Later, when Susana came out to clean the living room, the two men moved onto the balcony so she could finish. Bengoa was humming along to Serrat, and Argenis, feeling a mix of arousal and annoyance, was quiet until they both left. After checking from the balcony that both of them had gotten into the Lada, he turned off the Serrat, ran to the bathroom, and lowered his pants to inspect the modest erection the episode had given him.

Thanks to the heroin he had spent many months without any desire for sex, and he was happy to see that, in spite of the Temgesic, his penis was returning to life. He touched himself to test the hardness of this rebirth and then jacked off – simply, nothing fancy. After he came he got into the shower, but there wasn’t any water. Susana’s cleaning had used up the contents of the rooftop tank. He put his jeans on to go up to the rooftop and look it over, see if he might at least get enough to fill a plastic jug to throw over himself. The tank was enormous, metal, homemade, and painted in red and white. When the water got low you had to fill it up with a pump you connected to the water main in the street. In Cuba, everything required a major operation. “You do it at night,” Bengoa had told him. “Vantroi, your neighbor, has the pump.”

Văn Trỗi. Argenis had heard that name for the first time during a Holy Week vacation at the beach house belonging to Tony Catrain, his father’s best friend. He and his brother were maybe eight and ten, and Ernesto was playing a game with his father that they called “Revolutionary Dictionary.” José Alfredo had made him memorize a communist hero for each letter of the alphabet and at any time and any place he might say a letter to Ernesto, who would respond like a dog hoping for a biscuit. “Nguyễn Văn Trỗi, fighter in the National Liberation Front of Vietnam,” Ernesto had said that afternoon, standing out of respect, as his father had demanded, since almost every person he had had to bottle up in his mind was dead. Ernesto said it beautifully, against a picture-postcard orange sunset, but José Alfredo was waiting for the next paragraph about the fighter and Ernesto couldn’t recall it. José Alfredo had been drinking with his friends all day, and he said, “This boy is such a shit. He always makes me look bad.”