Before Night Falls

Content Warning: The source text contains descriptions of anti-gay bigotry, sex with minors, and political violence.

Following Arenas’s release from El Morro in 1976, Fuentes continues testing the sincerity of his conversion, monitoring his every move in Havana. After stringing together accommodations, Arenas finds a woman named Elia del Calvo willing to rent him a room in her house in exchange for writing her memoirs and buying fish for her many cats. After learning that State Security found the manuscript of Farewell to the Sea on his aunt’s roof, Arenas uses del Calvo’s typewriter to rewrite the novel for the third time. He has to hide this work from del Calvo because she strongly supports Castro. At del Calvo’s suggestion, Arenas sues Agata for the right to live in her house, claiming that having lived there for 15 years grants him the right to tenancy. Agata and her husband have fallen out of favor with the regime and her personal enemy supports Arenas’s suit; it seems likely that Arenas will win.

In the summer of 1976, both Arenas’s grandmother and Lima die, devastating him. With Arenas’s grandmother dies the rich, magical world of his childhood; with Lima dies a close friend and fellow lover of literature.