He cared nothing of the webs she spun without him in secret sessions, intrigue adding only another ingredient to the spice called Paula. As for the meetings, there had always been secret meetings in Cuba, who got excited about meetings? Dreaming and plotting futures that never arrived was part of the atmosphere, like the sun, like the lovers on the grass, like jai alai, like cockfighting, like the mysterious stains left on the marble sidewalks of the Prado when you stepped on the dark blue berries that dropped from the low-cropped trees. He minded his own business and nobody bothered to invite him to meetings since he was of the Meomartinos, a family which enriched those in power despite inevitable periodic changes in government.

Guillermo came home when Rafael was in his last year of medical school, the year of internship at El Hospital Universitario General Calixto García. Carlos hung his law degree on the wall of an office at the sugar mill and spent his time pretending to draw charts showing the relationship between sugar cane, brown sugar and blackstrap molasses. Often the pen wobbled in his hand due to a passionate predilection for double-and-triple-distilled beverages, domestic and imported. Rafael saw little of him, the internship filling all his hours, the days evaporating under the heat of overwork, too many sick people, too few doctors.

Two days after he received the degree of Doctor en Medicina his uncle Erneido Pesca came to call. His mother’s brother was a tall, thin man with military bearing, a once-gray mustache in a wrinkled and pouchy face, and a penchant for Partagás cigars and well-pressed white linen suits. He removed his Panama to reveal his blue-gray mane of hair, sighed, asked for a drink—by which he meant rum—and looked on with disapproval as his nephew poured himself a scotch.

“When will you enter the firm?” he asked finally.

“I thought,” Rafael said, “that perhaps I would busy myself with medicine.”

Erneido sighed. “Your brother,” he said, “is a fool and a dissolute weakling. Perhaps worse.”

“I know.”

“Then you must enter the firm. I will not last forever.”

They argued, quietly but heatedly.

In the end, a compromise. He would have the office next to Guillermo’s at the sugar mill. He would also have a laboratory at the medical school, Erneido would see to it. Three days a week at the mill, two days a week at the medical school; this was as far as Erneido would bend as head of the family and successor to his father.

Rafe agreed with resignation. It was more than he had hoped for.

The Dean, an academic veteran wise in the procurement of endowments, personally showed him to the large but shabby laboratory, filled with enough equipment to support three researchers instead of one and presented to Rafe along with the title of research associate.