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your hand stuck? Don’t you know how to tell the time?’
    Her last question brought Antonio Vidal back to reality. Over their heads was a scoffing sky, the seagulls’ mocking calls. He counted on his fingertips in his pocket. He’d spent a large amount buying his uncle ‘Doctor Ayala’s Asian Tonic’ and ‘The Miraculous Zephyr’, inventions that were supposed to stop you going bald. He felt he was being guided with a healthy vengeance by his mother’s ghost because in Sucesores de Villar he also bought ‘Carmela’s Miraculous Waters’, a lotion to prevent your hair going grey and to restore its natural colour. His mother insisted, ‘As a boy, he had a receding hairline.’ And added, ‘A receding conscience as well.’ There she stopped and he never wanted to find out more about Uncle Ernesto’s receding conscience. In Havana, he had helped to set up a modern school in Cruceiro de Airas and from the pulpit it was rumoured the emigrants had turned into ‘Masons, Atheists and Protestants’ and were trying to corrupt children. ‘You can’t be all things at once,’ observed Antonio Vidal. ‘You can’t be what?’ ‘A Mason, an Atheist and a Protestant, you can’t be all three things at once.’ ‘You shut up, what do you know?’ his mother, Matilde, told him. ‘Say hello to Uncle Ernesto and then get on with your work, unless you want to end up with a receding hairline too. And don’t go wasting your money.’
    ‘Do you need a bullet extractor?’ asked the newspaper seller.
    ‘What for?’
    ‘For your coins.’
    Antonio Vidal scrabbled in his pocket. What he was really looking for were not coins, but some quick, light-footed, low-denomination words to get him out of a tight situation.
    ‘I’ll take one today,’ he said. And then thought better, ‘No, two. Give me the one that was flying away.’
    ‘Lucky me!’ she commented ironically. ‘I found myself a tycoon to support me!’
    ‘I’m off to Cuba, on the steamer Lafayette .’
    ‘How I’d love to own a news-stand in Havana’s Central Park.’
    ‘What do you know about Havana?’
    ‘Everything. Or almost everything. As if I’d been a rich lady sitting in the colonnade of the Inglaterra Hotel. When you get off the boat, don’t go up Prado Avenue. People will laugh at you. And anyone laughing at your accent and beret is a Galician who arrived before and now has a white suit and a dandy white hat. Don’t go up Prado Avenue at least until you’ve got yourself a white suit.’
    The whippersnapper handing out advice. She really seemed like a chatterbox now. Talking nineteen to the dozen, words spilling out of her mouth. All that talking made her look smaller. Vidal decided he’d wasted quite enough time. He forgot about walking to the end of the Iron Quay. He still had to visit his boarding-house and the General Transatlantic Company.
    ‘I’m in a hurry,’ said Antonio Vidal. He folded the two newspapers under his arm and left her gawping.
    ‘Keep them, take them with you!’ she shouted seriously, sensing his distrust. ‘They’ll each open a door for you, you’ll see.’
    She was going to add, ‘I can’t come tomorrow. Tomorrow I have to collect clay on Lapas Beach.’ But she didn’t, he was far away by now. Who cared whether she came tomorrow or not? He hadn’t even asked her name.
    Antonio Vidal felt ridiculous with his bottle of ‘Asian Tonic’ and other lotions to stop your hair falling out. Uncle Ernesto had a full head of hair and a stylish haircut. ‘What you looking at? You like my hair?’ He took it off. ‘Here you go, a genuine wig imported from New York. The best there is. Made from the hair of a virgin Amazonian Indian.’ Having arrived in Havana after a two-week crossing, he still wasn’t sure when his uncle was joking or being serious. But the thick, black wig shone in his hands like jet. ‘This is where progress is, don’t forget,’ Ernesto told him, ‘you’re the one coming from behind.’