And Other Stories<\/a> on March 31, 2020.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nPrivilege. He could feel the word in his mouth, as it made the same movements it would make to taste and swallow a spoonful of frosting. He said it every morning after brushing his teeth and washing his face, as he put on the tiny Speedos his mother had picked out. Then he would swim a bit, not very athletically, doing a few laps of breaststroke. Bengoa had prescribed it to stimulate his appetite and it was working. Around eight a.m., Haydee would bring a tray of fried eggs, toast, and coffee that he\u2019d scarf down in his room without being able to avoid thinking about the people outside the clinic, people who mainly breakfasted on a watery coffee of chickpeas and old grounds.<\/p>\n
\u201cEat it all up, Argenis,\u201d Haydee would tenderly request as she filled her bag with paper from the bathroom trashcan to throw out. Argenis wondered if Haydee lived in La Pradera or if she took the patients\u2019 leftovers home every night. Her rubber-soled shoes were as hygienic as they were discreet and they didn\u2019t reveal much beyond the work that allowed her to have them. They would never let on what Haydee thought of the foreigners whose dollars gave them access to places and services Cubans couldn\u2019t even dream of. According to Bengoa, Argenis wasn\u2019t in La Pradera because of the dollars his dad had sent along with him in a diplomatic pouch on the Cubana Airlines flight, but rather because of his father\u2019s revolutionary credentials, his political career, the expanding orbit of his attributes.<\/p>\n
After breakfast, he would read a bit at the iron table from a coverless copy of Asimov\u2019s Foundation and Empire which Bengoa had brought, and a half-hour later he\u2019d be in the water again. Arms spread like a cross, his back to the edge of the pool, he would bicycle his legs and watch how the hospital awoke little by little, how the ill would emerge from their rooms with lazy eyes and feet. He amused himself by thinking that the hotel was an old movie he was projecting with the movements of his legs underwater, and he would slow the bicycle down as if it was a crank that would make the scenes go by in slow motion. He always achieved the desired effect; it was a simple trick, since everyone in La Pradera moved as slow as hell.<\/p>\n
If it was really sunny the pool would fill up by about ten a.m. and Argenis would get out, afraid of contracting some strange disease, or rather another disease, because Bengoa had made him see that he was sick, that addiction was a physical condition and that he was there to cure it. He would be cured of shooting up, although addiction itself had no cure. \u201cYour brain will always have that hunger, that thirst for relief,\u201d Bengoa had said, as he handed Argenis a pack of Popular cigarettes.<\/p>\n
Bengoa and Argenis had lunch together every day and they would smoke at the iron table before and after the meal, observing the staff giving a blond boy with Down syndrome water therapy. They would discuss Argenis\u2019s symptoms and then the doctor would return to the gravitational center of all his conversations, the Cuban Revolution. Bengoa had been in the mountains with Fidel and had met Argenis\u2019s father during the Latin American Solidarity Conference of 1967. He would speak of these events with the solemnity of a preacher, highlighting dates and the names of forgotten places where he\u2019d cured the wounds, fevers, infections, and asthma of the revolutionaries\u2019 flesh. Each day Bengoa would extract a sample from his bottomless sack of anecdotes. Most of these memories were as precise as Argenis\u2019s dose of buprenorphine, and it was obvious that they filled the doctor with the same kind of calm that the medicine gave his patient. Remembering these events and their sensations, Bengoa\u2019s pupils would dilate, his pulse accelerate, and then the inevitable comedown would make him stare at the pool water and throw out a last, usually tragic, line to ease his forced landing just a bit.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen your dad came I met Caaman\u0303o, who was training here so that he could sacrifice himself in the DR later on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Argenis imagined the word \u201csacrifice\u201d beating in Caaman\u0303o\u2019s veins and those of his companions, the dark euphoria that had made them disembark on a boggy beach on the Dominican Republic\u2019s north coast in 1973 in order to topple Balaguer\u2019s government with just nine men. A tremendous high. Cuba and its revolution had pricked their veins and those of millions of young people around the world.<\/p>\n
When Bengoa finished his daily historical venting, it was usually just before four p.m., the time when, without fail, he would inject Argenis in his room. He could have done it by the pool, but Argenis preferred to lie down on the bed for a bit, looking at the ceiling fan or at a transfer of an Argentine flag someone had stuck onto the sliding door. Argenis had thought the flag was an allusion to Che Guevara, but Bengoa explained proudly that Maradona had once stayed in that clinic and pointed out the sticker as irrefutable proof of the star\u2019s past presence. The sticker had started to peel off and air pollution had tinted the transparent edges the same amber color as the Temgesic capsules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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