occasionally conflicting techniques: firstly, the most traditional: visiting someone who’d asked him to pay a call, as a result of his well-established reputation as a fair buyer; then, the embarrassing, almost medieval procedure of hawking – “I buy old books”, “I’m the man to take those old books off your hands”; or the most in-your-face, knocking optimistically on doors and asking whoever opened up if they were interested in selling a few well-worn books. The second of those commercial approaches was the most productive in outlying, perpetually impoverished districts that were generally quite unfruitful – though there was the occasional surprise – and where the art of buying and selling the impossible had for years been the survival system for hundreds of thousands of people. On the other hand, the “truffle” method of sniffing out houses was necessary in once aristocratic districts like El Vedado, Miramar and Kohly, and in parts of Santos Suárez, El Casino Deportivo and El Cerro, where people, in the teeth of the poverty spreading across the nation, struggled to preserve increasingly obsolete ways of life.

What was extraordinary was that he’d not chosen that shadowy mansion in El Vedado, with its neo-classical pretensions and debilitated structure, as a result of any odour and much less as a result of his shouting in the street. In fact, Mario Conde was almost convinced he was suffering from a progressive loss of smell, and had already spent three hours on that sultry Cuban September afternoon banging on doors and getting no for an answer, on several occasions because a colleague had passed that way before him. Sweating like a pig, fed up, and fearful of the storm heralded by the rapid accumulation of black clouds on the nearby coast, Conde was preparing to sign off for the day, totting up his losses in the time-wasted column when, for no particular reason, he opted to go down a street parallel to the avenue where he’d thought he’d be able track down a minicab.