Before Night Falls

Living with del Calvo and her dozens of cats becomes unbearable. In 1977, Arenas finds a man named Rubén Díaz willing to rent him a room he owns in the dilapidated Monserrate Hotel, formerly a hotel for prostitutes. For rent, Arenas gets 1000 pesos from Agata in exchange for not returning to her house.

Arenas improves his new room, constructing a loft for more space and bricking off the door to Díaz’s room to prevent Díaz from continuing to try to sleep with him. Arenas feuds with Malas, who lives in another room in the hotel, and continues evading Víctor’s requests to write propaganda. One day, a French couple sent by Jorge and Margarita call on Arenas at the hotel. They are shocked by the squalid living conditions. They smuggle his newly-completed manuscript of Farewell to the Sea back to Paris.

Arenas finally finds a dentist to re-cement his false front teeth, restoring some of his confidence. He becomes lovers with Lázaro, a young man who lives in the building with his abusive parents. Lázaro has mental health conditions, loves literature, and wants to be free of the chaos of his home life. Arenas and Lázaro walk the city together and covertly swim at the beaches, which Castro has closed to the public.

Arenas has a strained relationship with Díaz, who he suspects is an informant for State Security. Nevertheless, Arenas befriends a painter Díaz introduces him to named Blanca Romero. After falling out of favor with the regime, Romero turned to prostitution to survive. One day, Romero asks Arenas and Lázaro to make a window in her windowless room. Behind the wall they discover a huge convent that was abandoned and sealed after Castro came to power. Over the following months, the three smuggle the valuables out of the convent to sell on the black market. Eventually, they sell even the bricks from the convent walls.

After Díaz discovers that Arenas has renovated his room with marble countertops and 18th century furniture from the convent, he threatens to reclaim the room. Arenas is vulnerable to eviction because his living arrangement is illegal: Only the government can legally lease housing. After Arenas threatens Díaz with a kitchen knife, he drops his plan to evict Arenas.

Arenas and Lázaro fall in love while maintaining an open relationship. Lázaro marries a woman named Mayra and they invite Arenas on their honeymoon. Arenas continues to seek affairs in Havana. The government calls on Lázaro to work the sugarcane harvest. The work causes him to suffer a series of nervous breakdowns that leave him emaciated and self-destructive.

Through Prado Arenas meets a man named Samuel Toca, a Christian anglophile who tried to escape Cuba by boat to Grand Cayman Island. Toca holds literary gatherings and orgies in his cell at the Episcopal cathedral. Toca, Arenas, and Lázaro find a woman in Matanzas who promises to smuggle them out of the country. After Arenas returns to Havana from Matanzas, Víctor confronts him about his escape plan and threatens to return him to jail. Arenas suspects Toca of informing.

Around this time, people in the literary scene in Havana start a “war of anonymous letters,” circulating insulting, slanderous letters about their enemies (503). Prado and Arenas instigate a feud between Toca and Malas by circulating a letter they write detailing Toca’s gay orgies and telling Toca that Malas wrote it. After the letter begins circulating, people add slanderous accusations to it and eventually someone posts it to the door of the Episcopal church where Toca lives. Enraged, Toca fights Malas.

In 1979 Castro throws an International Youth and Student Festival in Havana that depletes the country of food. People begin stealing zoo animals to eat. Arenas struggles to find both food and a job. Castro decides to expel some former political prisoners from the country, including Toca. The privilege of leaving Cuba inflates Toca’s ego. After arriving in Paris, Toca broadcasts the secret messages Arenas asked him to give to Jorge and Margarita and writes libelous letters to Arenas intended to endanger him with State Security (which reads all incoming letters). State Security refrains from imprisoning Arenas again to avoid further scandal but increases its surveillance of him.

In 1980 Piñera suddenly dies under suspicious circumstances. Prior to his death, Víctor probed Arenas about Piñera’s housecleaner’s schedule, and State Security refuses to provide his body for the wake under the pretense of performing an autopsy. Castro hated Piñera because he wrote a novel in which a diamond called Delfi (an anagram of Fidel) is identified as fake and thrown in the toilet. To Castro, Piñera was an uncontrollable dissident, the persistent thorn in his side. Against Víctor’s injunction, Arenas attends Piñera’s burial where he denounces the suspicious nature of Piñera’s death. Consequently, State Security increases their surveillance of Arenas.

Following the uptick in surveillance after Piñera’s burial, Arenas realizes he has lived his entire 37 years under dictatorships, deprived of the freedom to live fully: “That was my life in early 1980; surrounded by spies and seeing my youth vanish without ever having been a free person” (489).