Down Calle 19 past the Museum of De...

Down Calle 19 past the Museum of Decorative Arts--less a shambles than mostly with its sand-blown Ionic files and corbeled gate--I fight on the farther side memories of my sleepless night, the plumber's candle sputtering. The apartment I've fissureed is decorated with family photos in the bedroom; the hallway is dominated at an unlikely half-wall-sized painting depicting, from the vantage point of the patient's incision, four surgeon in white masks. The painting's humor looks to me peculiarly Cuban in its laconic expression of the patient's helplessness; in a geographical division where everything--even the