There was a man of fifty-nine in a yard in Cárdenas, province of Matanzas, whose name was Eliseo Betancourt and who had worked as a bricklayer as long as his knees allowed it. Since he stopped working as a bricklayer he stays in the yard, and in the yard the big freezer is his. The big freezer is the only one left that holds: the others stopped one after another over the years, and whoever had something to keep cold brought it to him. At his place, now, there is the food of six houses.

He speaks of the food of six houses in the plural. He says our meat, he says what we put inside; and to whoever comes with a bag and leaves it in his hand he always answers with the same sentence, which explains nothing and which he has been repeating unchanged for years: "They left it with me, I keep it."

On Friday evening the house went out all at once. The fan stopped halfway through a turn and the back room warmed up in no time, and in the back room there is the bed with the striped mattress on it, the one with the dip in the middle where he has slept for twenty years.

The silence of the big freezer lasted longer than the other times, and in the yard that silence is heard before the others, because the big freezer is the motor that covers the rest at night. The other times, usually, were three hours or four, and then the light came back and the yard started humming again from every side. That evening the light did not come back, and the next morning it did not either.

What was known afterwards, and it was told by the ones who had battery radios, is that a two-hundred-and-twenty-kilovolt line between Matanzas and Cienfuegos had given way and that the system had come apart all at once: nine million people in the dark in the same minute, the eighth time since the beginning of the year. To put nine million people back together it took thirty-two hours, because the current in a whole country does not come back all at once: it comes back in pieces, small islands light up and then the islands are sewn one to another, and until they touch a house can sit in the dark with the house next door lit.

In Eliseo's yard no house was lit. In the first hours he did what he always does: he ran his palm along the gasket of the lid, from the hinge side to the corner that pulls, and where the palm felt air he put the rubber back in place with his thumb. Then he added weight on the lid, the way he does in August, the ironing board taken apart and the vegetable crate with the bricks inside.

In the yard they began to ask how long a closed freezer holds the cold, and each one said a different number, and the numbers they said no one had tried. Eliseo did not say one. He only said that what was in there was everybody's, and that as long as it stayed closed it was everybody's. Of the mattress, that evening, he said mine. In the singular, in the yard, that is the only thing he names.

Towards sundown on the second day the neighbour from across crossed the yard with the empty pot in her hand.

The empty pot she set down on the lid of the freezer, and on the pot she left her hand. With her hand there, still, she said how many hours it had been in March. Thirty hours, she said, and in her freezer there were two bags of chicken and the meat bought for her granddaughter's christening. The christening meat she carried behind the house on the evening of the third day, and she carried it there alone, because to go and throw away good food nobody comes. Then she said that that lid was as much hers as his, because her share was inside; and that this was the eighth one, and the eighth is never shorter than the one before.

Eliseo agreed with her on one point only, that the lid was as much hers as his. On the other point he did not answer. He went back inside while she was still talking, and from outside the bed was heard moving against the wall.

The mattress came out of the door edgewise, folded over his shoulder, and on the concrete it made the long noise of cloth dragging; on the step it caught once. Eliseo laid it on the lid, pushed it with his hands out to the edges, and the pot fell to one side, banged, turned around on itself and stopped against the low wall. Then he took the washing line, passed it under the freezer and pulled until the line scraped on the metal. He pulled again, and made the knot he makes for the washing.

The pot stayed on the ground until the neighbour bent down to pick it up. She picked it up, dried it on the side of her skirt and crossed the yard the other way; from the yard her door was heard. After her door nothing more was heard, because a yard without current makes no noise in the evening.

Eliseo went back into the back room. In the back room the bed frame was bare, with the springs showing and the rust on the hooks. He pulled the sheet down, carried it with him and lay on the ground in front of the door, on the concrete, with the sheet under his back.

That night, in the yard, nobody came out. Nobody brought him anything and nobody said anything to him, and there was no reason why they should: the lid was closed and the food of six houses was inside. How much he slept is not known.

In the morning the bed frame stood higher than it had stood for years.