1

CUBA, 1954

That Englishman with Ernestina,” she said, looking down at the luxuriously appointed public room. “He reminds me of you, Señor Hausner.”

Doña Marina knew me as well as anyone in Cuba, possibly better, since our acquaintance was founded on something stronger than mere friendship: Doña Marina owned the largest and best brothel in Havana.

The Englishman was tall and round-shouldered, with pale blue eyes and a lugubrious expression. He wore a blue linen short-sleeved shirt, gray cotton trousers, and well-polished black shoes. I had an idea I’d seen him before, in the Floridita Bar or perhaps the lobby of the National Hotel, but I was hardly looking at him. I was paying more attention to the new and near-naked chica who was sitting on the Englishman’s lap and helping herself to puffs from the cigarette in his mouth while he amused himself by weighing her enormous breasts in his hands, like someone judging the ripeness of two grapefruits.

“In what way?” I asked, and quickly glanced at myself in the big mirror that hung on the wall, wondering if there really was some point of similarity between us other than our appreciation of Ernestina’s breasts and the huge dark nipples that adorned them like mountainous limpets.

The face that stared back at me was heavier than the Englishman’s, with a little more hair on top but similarly fiftyish and cross-hatched with living. Perhaps Doña Marina thought it was more than just living that was dry-etched on our two faces—the chiaroscuro of conscience and complicity perhaps, as if neither of us had done what ought to have been done or, worse, as if each of us lived with some guilty secret.

“You have the same eyes,” said Doña Marina.

“Oh, you mean they’re blue,” I said, knowing that this probably wasn’t what she meant at all.

“No, it’s not that. It’s just that you and Señor Greene look at people in a certain way. As if you’re trying to look inside them. Like a spiritualist. Or perhaps like a policeman. You both have very searching eyes that seem to look straight through a person. It’s really most intimidating.”

It was hard to imagine Doña Marina being intimidated by anything or anyone. She was always as relaxed as an iguana on a sun-warmed rock.

“Señor Greene, eh?” I wasn’t in the least bit surprised that Doña Marina had used his name. The Casa Marina was not the kind of place where you felt obliged to use a false one. You needed a reference just to get through the front door. “Perhaps he is a policeman. With feet as big as his, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

“He’s a writer.”

“What kind of a writer?”