But when she was about to enter Teacher Training College she made up her mind to stop studying and asked Mrs Ana, the wife of Don Tomás and Mr Alcides’ mother, if they’d let her work in the house as housekeeper or administrator, because she fancied being here, surrounded by beautiful, pristine, expensive things rather than life as a school teacher in a state school struggling with snotty-nosed children for a hundred pesos a month. That was when Mummy was nineteen or twenty, and by that time the Montes de Ocas weren’t as rich, because they lost a lot of money in the 1929 Depression and because Don Serafín, who’d fought in the War of Independence, and his son Don Tomás, a renowned lawyer, refused to play along with Machado, who was a dictator by then. Machado and his people made their lives impossible, and ruined lots of their business operations, just as Batista did with Mr Alcides, although before Batista’s coup d’état Mr Alcides had made a fortune in deals he made during the Great War, so it didn’t matter so much if he didn’t get a share in that degenerate’s big handouts… Ah, but I’m losing my thread as usual… Well, the truth is that Mummy helped Mr Alcides an awful lot. She dealt with all his papers, accounts, income tax declarations, was his private secretary, and when his wife, Mrs Alba Margarita, died, Mummy also took responsibility for their children. Consequently, when Mr Alcides decided to leave, he suggested to Mummy that we should go with him, but she wanted time to think it over. She wasn’t immediately sure if we should go or stay, because Dionisio, who’d joined the clandestine movement to overthrow Batista when very young, and was a hundred per cent behind the Revolution, had gone to educate the illiterate in the hills of Oriente, and Mummy didn’t want to abandon him.