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

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

'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 Dona 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 Dona Marina.

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