They brought Argenis back to the house looking like a blowfish, his eyes and teeth hidden by the swelling, an allergic reaction to the anemone. Luckily, Linda had an epinephrine pen and gave him an injection. She was aware that the anemone, Condylactis gigantea, was in abundance in Playa Bo, but that its poison wasn’t enough to do harm unless the person was allergic to it. Hours later, Argenis’ face began to turn back to normal, but not before he’d asked Elizabeth to take a photo so he could have a souvenir of himself as this curious monstrosity.
He spent the next week sweating with fever, unable to sleep, and suffering from vertigo that kept him from standing for any amount of time. Malagueta brought over a mattress to sleep in his room and take care of him. His guest entertained Argenis with stories of his childhood in Los Charamicos.
Malagueta was the only one of the artists who was born in Sosúa. As a teenager, he’d been accepted into the baseball academy the Dodgers had on the island, where they educated and trained future major league talents. “But just when I was going to be signed, I screwed up my knee,” he explained. He’d stay up all night talking with Argenis about the pitching speeds of his ex-teammates and the stats and whereabouts of those who’d managed to become professional baseball stars. His long arms and legs were typical of a batter’s body, but less so his belly, which he’d cultivated tenderly with Presidente beers and pica pollo. He had a peculiar way with the word “faggot,” which he used to refer to everyone, including Argenis: “Drink that soup, faggot; go to sleep, faggot; are you dizzy, faggot?” Argenis thought he was taking it too far, but the guy was taking care of him and he couldn’t afford to let things get sour with him.
The mystery as to how this human lump had ended up as a conceptual artist had a lot to do with his love of the Japanese animation they aired on Dominican TV. Malagueta was a fan of Dragon Ball Z and as a kid he’d filled seventy notebooks with muscular men with hairy veins and shocking yellow manes floating in a violet or orange sky. When he’d gotten injured, his father—who worked at Giorgio’s restaurant—reminded him of his drawing skills, taking him to meet Giorgio and see if he really had talent. Some of Malagueta’s photos of Ana Mendieta captured Giorgio’s interest. In one, the artist appeared nude and covered in feathers; in another, her silhouette was carved into the ground and set on fire. These strange images were connected with Malagueta’s childhood obsession with animated heroes; the body, as it was when on the baseball field, was the protagonist, presenting itself to all who might see it with an elemental and magical fury, like a ball of fire. Not long ago he’d participated in the First Performance Festival in Puerto Plata with a piece called Home, in which, standing nude in a batting cage, without a bat or glove, he was hit over and over on his belly and chest by a stream of baseballs from the machine, each coming at him at seventy miles an hour.
During the day, Malagueta worked on his next project—that is, he attended the daily sessions with Iván, worked out, and read about the performance art scene on the internet. In the afternoons he would work one-on-one with Iván, jotting down even his sighs in his little notebook. These talks took place on a stone bench right in the center of the artists’ complex of cabins and Argenis would watch them from his bed like a jealous lover. At noon, Nenuco, the gardener, would bring him pumpkin and yautía soups prepared by Ananí, the woman who worked in the house, and later Ananí herself would bring him chamomile tea so he could get some rest. One morning, Giorgio came in to see how he was doing and to drop off a bunch of materials he’d picked up in the city. Billy didn’t want to come in, so he stayed outside, barking, diminishing even further what little love Argenis had for him. When he saw the huge new roll of canvas against the wall, he felt better and told Malagueta he could go back to his own room.
That afternoon, finally free of the vertigo, Argenis sleeps and dreams. He drowns. He flaps around like crazy but can’t move; his chest hurts from his violent efforts to breathe in air instead of salt water. On the horizon, an infinite green and gray line of rocks and palms. Several bearded white men with stained clothes approach him in a canoe, pulling him out of the water and taking him to shore. They’re carrying knives and antique pistols on their belts and wearing sandals made from braided leather. There’s a dark one with very straight black hair who, though he dresses like the others, appears to be Taíno. The only one wearing boots is the one who seems most nervous. He has curly brown hair and wears a long, dark beard. Later, they’re in a peasant’s hut and they throw Argenis on a leather cot. The Taíno comes in and talks to him in a strange language while the bearded guy in boots brushes the soles of his feet as though he were trying to activate his circulation. There’s a smell of meat that wafts in from outside and he wakes up drooling.
After sleeping fourteen whole hours, Argenis felt phenomenal.
At the breakfast table, the conversation touched on the usual themes: art, politics, and environmentalism. John Kelly, the UCLA professor Linda was developing the Playa Bo ecological project with, had joined them that morning and was talking about the increase in the water temperature and the coming crisis that would result from the fatal bleaching of coral in the Caribbean. Argenis was ravenous and putting away his Spanish omelet and garlic toast, catching only bits of information. In his mind, there were fragments of conversations with Malagueta, the dream, and the memory of the moment when he was trapped by the mouth of the rock underwater. Iván got his attention when he said that in the coming weeks they’d be studying Goya and would do an exercise at the end based on the work of the maestro from Aragón. The idea was to complicate the notion of contemporaneity in art and analyze the ways in which Goya, two centuries ago, had articulated his philosophical and formal observations, divorcing himself from the expectations of the work he was commissioned to do and thus inaugurating modern art.
Iván never shut up. He had a special talent for closing down the most disparate and extreme arguments, which had nothing to do with Cuban history, with anecdotes about Cuba, Fernando Ortiz, or Fidel. Argenis was completely out of it. This had happened to him in high school all the time: the teacher would talk and, in his mind, he’d be concocting fantasies, usually sexual and involving classmates, while the teacher, the desk, and his companions all disappeared, lost to the hormonal onslaught of his mental movie. But this was different. He hadn’t tried to conjure anything, and he wasn’t inventing; he had no control whatsoever over what he was seeing as clear as a memory. He was once more in the hut from his dreams.
A few men are working on something near the door. The bearded man in boots supervises and gives orders. When he sees Argenis he comes up to him and starts to talk. Argenis can hear his voice. “You’re better,” he says. Argenis hoped the others heard it too, but they all kept yakking, except Giorgio, who had left the table and was now on the couch out on the terrace reading Rumbo magazine. The guy in the boots introduces himself: “I’m Roque, and these are my men.” Argenis takes a few steps. He sees what they’re doing: pulling the hair from cattle skins, scraping at them with knives while kneeling on the orange dirt.
They’re the same guys who pulled him from the sea. “Do you remember your name?” Roque asks. Argenis doesn’t dare utter a word; he makes a superhuman effort to focus on what Elizabeth is saying now at the table. She complained that if Goya was modern, then Velázquez was too.
While Ananí brings in the coffee pot, Roque the bearded man tells Argenis he is the only survivor of a shipwreck: “You must have hit your head, that’s why you don’t remember anything.” While Elizabeth puts on a Morcheeba CD out on the terrace, Roque shows him the modest equipment they use to cure the skins from the cattle they hunt inland. While Malagueta digs between his teeth with a wooden toothpick, Argenis gets a nose full of urine, smoke, and flesh in that other place. What the fuck is this? Unlike dreams, with their weird transitions and time portals and stuff like that, the story that’s unfolding inside him is coherent and linear.
The others got up from the table to attend the day’s session with Iván de la Barra. Argenis remained seated, closing his eyes so he could focus on his internal vision, then extending his right hand to touch Roque and verify the tactile reality of the bearded man and his world. He touches the warm, damp arm of the man who is now smiling at him and suddenly opened his eyes. He was back at the table, on the terrace, and Giorgio, who had raised his eyes from behind his magazine, had seen him making that strange gesture with his arm while his eyes were closed. Embarrassed, Argenis repeated the movement as if he were trying to get rid of a cramp, afraid Giorgio would think he was crazy. “All those days in bed have fucked up my shoulder,” he said, trying to cover his butt, and then ran to catch up with the group.
When they closed the curtains, the living room went dark. Iván turned on the projector and there on the wall was print number sixty-six from Los caprichos. “In this series of engravings—besides fusing techniques—Goya presents a subjective satire that cannot be tied to any single reading, destabilizing the sociopolitical paradigms of his time with characters and situations that oscillate between the locally eccentric and the universally mythological.” A twisted, androgynous body held a flying broomstick above his head, obscuring the more feminine figure behind him, who also held on to the broomstick and sprouted bat wings to facilitate the magic ride. With Iván still talking in the background, Argenis again closed his eyes. He feels the sun on his skin of that other morning opening up to him.
They’re in the hut again, which is a single room with several beds and hammocks. Roque hands him a pair of rough linen pants to wear; that’s when Argenis notices he’s naked. “If you want to eat, you have to work,” Roque says. He hands him a short knife and points to the group curing the skins. “Regardez! Celui qui a survécu à la Côte de Fer,” one of the men says as he walks up to them. The man pulls on his pants to make him kneel while showing him what he has to do with the knife on the skin.
When Iván turned on the lights to end the session, Argenis, intent on the involuntary projections in his head, focuses on the skin he’s been given to work on. At lunch, Giorgio served some juicy fillets he’d thrown on the terrace grill. The men curing the skins also pause to eat because the Taíno has called them by hitting a rock on a cowbell.
Argenis tried to look calm as he served himself a glass of water from an ice-filled jug, while in his head he is checking out what’s going on behind the hut, where strips of meat are being smoked on a green wooden grill. Argenis has seen this before in history books. He brought Giorgio’s fillet to his mouth—it was exquisite—but the taste of the hard and salty jerky he was chewing in his other mouth killed his appetite and he ended up leaving both plates untouched. His fellow artists in the Sosúa Project were comparing the PRD and PLD governments: Elizabeth, who was from a family with old money, and not the new stuff politicians took turns stealing, accused both parties of piracy. “Excuse me, but they’re all thieves,” she said, trying to bait Argenis, whose father was one of them. But it was as if he’d never heard her. The word “pirate” had made him remember Professor Duvergé from fifth grade, when he listed the causes and consequences of Osorio’s devastations on the blackboard.
In 1606, Governor Osorio had ordered the depopulation of the island’s northern coast to avoid the illegal trade with English, French, and Dutch smugglers, who had been providing the people with what Spain could not. After they were emptied, several towns—among them Puerto Plata, where Sosúa was now—became a refuge for French and English castaways and runaway slaves, the result of abandonment by all military and civilians. They had joined forces to survive, hunting the abandoned cattle, of which there was plenty, to produce leather and smoked meats, which they traded with the smugglers who still made stops on the coasts. These are buccaneers, thought Argenis, somewhere in the space between the two planes he was now navigating. I can see the past, he said to himself. I’d heard about this but I never imagined it could be like this.
They were supposed to watch a movie, Goya in Bordeaux, after lunch, but Iván excused himself so he could talk to Giorgio, and Elizabeth and Malagueta insisted on going into town for a stroll. Los Charamicos was a backwards town, dirty and small, and completely dependent on tourism—in other words, prostitution, in all its varieties. The stroll was short and boring: a bunch of little wooden stalls with Haitian paintings, towels, and souvenirs with the words “Sosúa No Problem.” Argenis dropped back and walked alone, resuming his work curing the skins while very aware of the rugged faces of the people working around him on the other side of his mind. The Taíno was a man of blunt movements who’d just started to go gray; the man who’d said “Côte de Fer” was blond with a narrow back, a prominent chin, and a fuzzy peach mustache. There was also a one-armed man with black hair and a beard, a black man they called Engombe, and Roque. They were all bags of bone and sinew, encased in skin that had been marbled by permanent sunburn.
Elizabeth was recording their outing through the neighborhood ruins with one of her cameras to “document” their visit, while Malagueta greeted a few people who recognized him. For a moment Argenis set aside the curing of skins in his parallel world and felt a sudden embarrassment. What were they doing strolling like kings through a poor neighborhood? Fucking cultural tourists. “Allez, allez,” says the blond buccaneer, urging him to cure another skin, but Argenis was too busy feeling out of place in 2001 Sosúa. What would happen if I didn’t do what they asked? As though he’d heard his question, Engombe punches him in the ear, which frees him of embarrassments and distractions. He picks up the knife and starts anew, fearful the black man will hit him again. I’m screwed, he thinks. Where do I turn off this shit? On their way back to Playa Bo, Argenis pretended he’d fallen asleep in Elizabeth’s car so he could finish peeling his skin. Afterward, they give him a little jug of moonshine that he drinks while leaning on a guayacán tree, watching the black man stack the smoked meats, now cold, in a barrel. The sun is going down for the buccaneers, with the same tones in the sky as in Playa Bo, and for Argenis two suns dropped below the horizon. Experiencing these two realities at once was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle on the table while watching the news on TV. The news was his present, predictable and harmless; the world of the buccaneers was the jigsaw puzzle he had to focus on, lifting his head now and again without dropping any pieces. The two suns didn’t compete for his attention, instead appearing one on top of the other, like stacked negatives. When they vanished, and with them his strange internal movie, Argenis felt relief and fear in equal parts. But the worry and curiosity about what had happened lasted as long as the excitement over an interesting dream. He dragged a chair over to the cliff. Alone, he took in and savored the blackening view. Iván and Giorgio were drinking wine out on the lightless terrace, listening to a recording of John Cage talking about a tie. Someone lit a candle and the light attracted Argenis, who saw from afar the illuminated face of his prosperous patron. He followed the black line of Giorgio’s mouth and jaw, calculating the colors he’d need to mix to achieve the brick tones that the flame gave his skin. It had been a very long time since he’d looked at anyone the way he was looking at Giorgio now, translating every detail his eyes perceived into the technical steps he’d need to make a facsimile. In his mind, Argenis was already painting, and then he rushed toward them. “Don’t move,” he ordered. He darted back to his cabin, imagining how he would apply the perfect color already mixed, and selected the tubes he’d need. He returned to the cliff with a chair, the small easel he’d had since high school, and the battery-powered lamp he’d clamped on the side. He turned his back to the sea to arrange his instruments, looking at the terrace. A jungle of palms, sea grapes, and almond trees framed the house in a cloud of deep gray. An intense black broke only in the very center, where Giorgio Menicucci, his precise features and body lost in the gloom, had become an igneous mask floating in the air. In front of it, Argenis decided to paint another face: his own, the one he’d worn after the accident with the anemone, the one Elizabeth had photographed. The face lit by the candle was haughty and beautiful; it seemed to be giving an order with which the deformed monster, given the inclination of its head, would comply.
Unfortunately for Argenis, the buccaneers returned the next day. As soon as he opened his eyes, the strange handle that seemed to let the ghosts into his head began to turn and, just like the day before, everything was connected and real. He stayed in his cabin, trying to get rid of the visions by taking deep breaths, doing push-ups, taking cold showers. Nothing worked against the Taíno, who passes around a bucket of milk, nor the black man, who leads him to a rough basin where the little French guy greets him once more: “… qui a survécu à la Côte de Fer.” He’s using a paddle to stir the peeled skins in a dark liquid. Argenis grabs another paddle and copies the French guy’s movements. The black man watches him with a tight fist but Argenis is doing a pretty good job. Concentrating on that one repetitive activity and now seriously concerned, he decided to step out of his room.
When he got to Iván’s workshop (he was late), there was a photogram on the screen from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 2, in which Norman Mailer played Houdini.
Professor Herman had dedicated an entire class to Barney’s work. Iván de la Barra noted the connection between his installations, videos, and sculpture, and Goya’s work, their shared sensibility for the sublimely terrible and the elaboration of mythologies rooted in popular culture. Iván had seen Cremaster 2 in Madrid at the Reina Sofía the year before and Elizabeth had seen it in Chicago in 1999. Malagueta had never left the island and Argenis had only been as far as Cuba, to a camp for the children of revolutionaries, so they had to make do with Iván’s narration. Iván explained that the cremaster is the muscle that lifts and lowers the testicles and responds to changes in temperature; the narrative thread that runs through all five films in the cycle is the process of sexual differentiation in the embryo. In Cremaster 2, the organism resists differentiation, resulting in a drama that, according to Iván, plays out like a surreal western while creating a poetic biography of the American killer Gary Gilmore. “In a spectacular exercise of free association, Gilmore was executed in 1977; he was the first person to be condemned to death after capital punishment was reinstated in the United States. Gilmore’s father was supposedly the son of a famous magician who passed through Sacramento, possibly Houdini. Gilmore’s mother was a Mormon, and the honeycomb is a Mormon symbol.” Iván was writing all this on the blackboard. “What Barney is doing is sifting through this information with an aesthetic proposition that blurs the usual connections that symbol and ritual make,” said the Cuban as he clicked through to show other photograms.
The skins are now free of hair and flesh and nearing their final color and texture at the bottom of a basin filled with alum and salt. The little French guy plucks an unshelled peanut from his pocket and eats it. His hands, blackened by work and the lack of hygiene, are much more real to Argenis than Iván’s efforts to make Barney’s films a work of genius. After the workshop, Argenis accompanied Malagueta to look for a book on Cremaster 2 in Giorgio and Linda’s library, a bookcase three meters tall in the living room. While Malagueta climbed a chair to reach the book, Argenis glanced over the collection and was surprised to find a shelf filled with volumes on buccaneers, Osorio’s devastations, and pirates and smuggling in the Caribbean. This kind of coincidence ought to have a name. Whenever he heard a word for the first time, a stream of references, information, and associations would rise up out of nowhere, as though the universe were conjuring up the tools necessary for learning, or as though it were giving its approval to a specific path of knowledge. Linda was on the terrace and Malagueta went over to her to let her know he was taking the book to his cabin and that Argenis, too, was borrowing some books. After the incident with the anemone, Argenis had reacted like a cat stung by frog venom and avoided Linda as much as possible. “Giorgio said you painted something incredible last night,” she said as she caressed Billy with her big toe. “Can I see it?” At any other time, Argenis would have taken Linda to his studio, thinking about his dick coming in and out of her beautiful ass the whole way there. But something had happened in the water and now he felt a strange repulsion connecting the libidinous desires that drove him into the nest of anemones with the resulting disagreeable experience.
Once in his studio, she was quite pleased with the painting. “It’s excellent,” she said, then, winking at him, she added: “If there’s a disaster that destroys technology, electricity, and digital files, your work will survive. What would happen to the work of all of those video artists and performance artists?”
Linda Menicucci had an apocalyptic way of thinking about things and treated everything, even works of art, like species to be measured for their capacity to survive on earth. She had agreed to sponsor these artists because her husband had assured her they would recover their investment and the profits would help push forward her environmental protection project for Playa Bo. Giorgio and Linda were thinking about buying several more kilometers of beach and continuing the research to identify all the species that lived in the coral reef. Although government laws protected areas of the reef, the lack of resources made it practically impossible to enforce them, leaving hundreds of species at the mercy of indiscriminate fishing, construction, and contamination. Argenis now understood Linda was only interested in him for one reason, the same reason he was interested in her and Giorgio: money. She needed it to save her little fish and Argenis to realize his fantasy of future happiness: a life snorting coke, painting, and paying sluts so they would suck him off without anyone giving him a hard time.
In this way, Argenis and this high-class woman were equals. Argenis would have enjoyed this small victory more if it wasn’t for the fact that, in his other life, he was being forced to pull the skins from the basin to air them out: it required almost all his attention. During the three hours the process involves, his arms begin to tremble; the black guy, Engombe, as always, waits for him. He walked Linda to the door and saw her in this new light. He could make out the lines the sun and her excessive concern for her cause—a lost cause, as far as Argenis was concerned—had drawn on her face. He closed the door, glanced at the clock to confirm it was lunchtime, and threw himself in bed. He quickly fell asleep, fried.
Immune to sleep, the buccaneers continue. After hanging and massaging the skins, Roque, who had disappeared for most of the day, comes out of the northern thicket with the one-armed man, announcing that there’s an English galleon on the coast and they will meet with the crew the next day. He pulls two bottles of wine from the bag on his shoulder as proof and a shirt, which he tosses to Argenis. “Regardez, survivant à la Côte de Fer…” says the little French guy, who doesn’t have a name for him, and gestures for him to put on the shirt. They drink, passing the bottles from one to another in the warmth of the fire prepared by the Taíno, who takes great pains to offer the best pieces of cassava and pork to Argenis, whose eyes are shutting in that world just as he is due to wake in this one.
It looked like this nuisance was going to be around for the long haul and there was no way for Argenis to disconnect himself. Unlike the previous night, this time the visions had left him full of questions. Was this a past incarnation? Was it schizophrenia? Witchcraft? If his patrons ever found out about this they would kick him out of the project, and then he knew he’d really go crazy, out of his mind, full-on wacko at his mom’s house.
Oh shut up, he told himself, and stepped into the fresh night air of Playa Bo with Esquemelin’s Buccaneers of America under his arm, following the sound of music coming from the terrace. As he crossed the row of dwarf palms dividing the cabins from the house, he got a whiff of the marijuana Iván and Giorgio were smoking as they whispered together. He had promised himself he’d stay away from coke for the duration of the project, but he wasn’t going to say no to a little pot. When he saw Argenis coming, Giorgio stood up, a little nervously. “Monsieur, try this,” he said, passing him a joint and catching sight of the book Argenis had set on the table. “You like that? This place was full of buccaneers,” he said, with a gesture to suggest as far as the eye could see. “Must be full of ghosts.” Iván had a Word document open on his laptop that read: “Notes for Olokun,” in a font that looked like Helvetica Bold. When he closed the document, the screen showed the first engraving from The Disasters of War as his wallpaper. “Do you like this engraving?” he asked without looking up from the screen. Argenis explained that he’d taken engraving classes and had worked on his technique in school, but he’d never made a professional series of prints. By then Giorgio had filled Argenis’ glass and was raising his own for a toast: “That the spirits of the buccaneers will bring us luck!” Argenis was on his second toke of the hydroponic grass, which was much more potent than he was used to, and it hit him hard. Giorgio was talking about the adventures of a friend of his who’d spent the last twenty years combing the beaches of Puerto Plata with a metal detector, looking for treasure left by the pirate Cofresí. His friend had dumped his wife and abandoned his kids, his job, convinced that one day he would find the loot buried somewhere by the great plunderer. Rapt, Iván coughed from too much laughter. “Dude, what an asshole!” he said. Argenis opened the book to a random page so he could focus on something and avoid their looks, because he felt on the verge of a panic attack. In his narrative about the lives of the pirates and buccaneers of America, Esquemelin had included the code that protected injured pirates: “For the loss of an eye, one hundred escudos or one slave. For the loss of the right hand, two hundred escudos or two slaves. For the loss of two feet or two legs, six hundred escudos or six slaves.” The reading competed with the associations Argenis was making in his mind: They are referring to me, I’m never going to get ahead, the dead buccaneers have come to find me, Goya’s engravings are a sign: they are going to mutilate me. And on it went. Giorgio noticed Argenis was not doing well. “Maestro, relax.” He stood behind him and started to rub his neck. These faggots are going to rape me, thought Argenis, that’s why Iván said ‘asshole’; goddamn pot. Giorgio’s massage began to take effect and a heaviness came over every part of his body, sound vibrations overwhelmed his interior dialogue and produced a silence punctuated by a low and heavy hum. He experienced a few fleeting holograms. In one he was a little boy running towards his father, there to pick up Argenis and his brother for an obligatory biweekly visit. When his father lifted him up, Argenis grabbed his head with both hands and kissed him on the mouth. His father threw him violently on the ground, looking around them in all directions. “Are you a faggot, huh?” He felt again the equal parts of pain and fear he’d felt that afternoon, as the tiny particles of light that made up the memory vanished, victims to a miraculous dispersal. He opened his eyes and the massage was over. Giorgio was squatting in front of the stereo to change the CD and Iván was tying up the trash bag next to the grill to take it out. “Man, if we leave this here, it’s going to attract flies.”
Argenis came to understand that the buccaneers would let him be at night but would claim the day, even his daydreams, so he decided to wait until the sun came up to go to bed. He was mentally exhausted and he didn’t give a damn about Iván’s theories concerning Goya. As soon as he fell asleep, he found himself among Roque’s men, walking through a scrubland of sea grapes and brambles.
The one-armed man cuts a path with the scimitar in his good hand. They’re hauling one hundred skins in rolls of ten, two barrels of jerky, one bag of salt, and some sweet potatoes. They cross the last of the vegetation and find themselves on an ash-colored reef, heading west. They reach a cliff and climb down with the goods. They’re in Playa Bo. The Menicuccis’ beach is almost unrecognizable, the sea full of shoals, fish swimming in circles in the hundreds, some a meter long that could be pulled from the water by hand. A galleon with its sails furled is anchored a short distance from the coast and two small rowboats approach to pick them up.
Once on deck, the captain—an Englishman with clean nails and yellow teeth who has just sacked a Spanish rescue ship en route to New Spain—goes over the list of things Roque requested in exchange for the skins. Twenty bottles of wine, a sack of wheat flour, two pairs of boots, two felt hats, a trunk, gunpowder, buckles, two long arquebuses, and a sort of table the three men struggle to lift out of the porthole. The captain removes the canvas from it to reveal a printing press.
With the press come three rolls of paper, three wooden plates, and everything needed to make an engraving, except ink.
They complete the deal. Roque promises to bring the captain one hundred more skins once he returns from Bayamo, Cuba, where the people—who’ve been abandoned by the Spanish policy that only Havana and Santiago can receive commercial ships—will welcome him as a hero. It takes them half the day to transport the heavy machine to the hut. Roque meets the complaints by explaining that the Spanish residents on the island, as needy as the people of Bayamo, will want to buy it for much more than they paid for it. The Taíno, who had stayed behind to keep guard over their settlement, welcomes them back with joy and tells them there are two hundred heads of cattle in a nearby clearing. His Spanish is clumsy and only Roque can understand him. With the others, he acts like the fallen cacique he probably is. Roque orders the construction of another hut to house the press. The one-armed man and the little French guy pick up their axes and head south looking for wood. Roque, Engombe, and Argenis start for the place where the Taíno has seen the cattle, armed with one of the new arquebuses, a bottle of wine, and several knives. Without a word, Engombe, who carries the arquebus, separates from the group and stealthily makes his way east. A few steps ahead of them, Roque and Argenis can see the animals, grazing at the foot of a hill, and Engombe, who has reached the far right side of the slope and is loading his gun to begin the slaughter.
Argenis woke up at the first shot. With a feeling of dismay and excitement, he sat up, watching how the cattle fell to the bullets Engombe was pumping, at close range, into their heads. Those that were still alive, stupid and heavy, ran in circles. Roque explained that they would flay a few of them now, that tomorrow the cattle would return to graze in the same place and they’d slaughter a few more then. Engombe and Roque worked on the dead cattle quickly and with precision, slashing from the throat to the anus and then from one leg to another. When all the cattle had been opened up, they began to peel the skins, with the help of Argenis, who took notes with a piece of charcoal and a piece of fabric he’d unrolled on the floor of his workshop. With his vision clouded with the hot smell of blood, which was beginning to clot in the faraway pasture, he reached for the Cadmium Red, squeezing the tube of Winsor & Newton straight onto the brush like toothpaste.