You leave the university alongside the youth members. You take the main street, pass by the market, the hardware store, the bakery, the restaurants, and arrive at a bar. You enter and discover a space that shuns metals and glass. Wood and candles offer a comfortable, even homey atmosphere where you can relax. The sound from the speakers is tinny, even cheap, but the instrumental of some centuries-old salsa harmonizes perfectly.
You settle at the bar. At the other end, a gang of strikers shouts and argues while watching a live broadcast of a baseball game on the ceiling TV. Leones vs. Magallanes... The Leones are winning.
"What do you want to drink, boys?" asks the pretty lady in charge of the place. She has a bold, striking smile. It seems she knows Gustavo and the rest of the guys, which is why she looks at you—the discordant factor—with interest. "A new recruit, I imagine."
"A classmate; I'm trying to hit it off. And I don't know, Andreina, do you still have that Zambo piss they call Cocuy?"
"Don't be stingy. You want to hit it off? Then buy something top-shelf. I got a case of Carúpano rum that will work wonders for forming bonds."
Gustavo looks down at his chest.
"From what I can see, I'm still not made of gold."
Andreina flashes a half-smile.
"I'll bring you the bottle."
Gustavo's friends pat him on the shoulders and back in consolation. Though going by the laughs and jokes they share, they seem quite happy that Gustavo is "footing the bill" to throw them a proper binge. You join them, at first with doubt and caution, but soon the rum lowers your inhibitions, and you find yourself joking and laughing with Gustavo and his friends. You find out that Gustavo has a beautiful fiancée. That Rick sings in the school choir. That Daniel wants to be a vet. And Michael, well, Michael seems to have forgotten his own name.
You share time at the bar until Andreina kicks you out to close (it is forbidden to sell liquor past 10 PM), and you walk down the street, going in a line shoulder-to-shoulder, singing hymns and military marches.
"When we die, we shall be immortal!" you shout in unison.
Gustavo, despite his profound state of inebriation, retained the composure to write the ingredients for his grandpa's super-anti-hangover cure on your arm with a marker—an antidote you would need the next morning to attend classes without being an inoperative disaster.
Go to your dorm and rest. You need it (Scene 16)