“Really?” she hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment. “I just came out to get some petrol, and look what’s happened,” she moaned, pointing her greasy hands at the mortally wounded tyre.

“Are the nuts too tight?” he asked, by way of introduction, as he clumsily tried to look handy at putting a jack in place. She crouched down next to him, keen to express her moral solidarity, and the Count saw a bead of sweat launch itself down the lethal incline of her neck and plunge between two small breasts that were no doubt free and firm under her sweat-stained blouse. She smells like a femme fatale coming on, warned the persistent protuberance the Count tried to conceal between his legs. Well, who’d have thought it, Mario Conde?

Yet again Conde grasped why he always got low marks for manual techniques and workplace training. It took him half an hour to change the punctured wheel but in that time he discovered you tighten nuts from left to right and not right to left; that her name is Karina and she’s twenty-eight, an engineer; and that she is separated and living with her mother and a half-crazy brother, a rock musician playing in the band: The Mutants. The Mutants? He’d also found out that you must use your foot to turn the nuts with the spanner, and that she was driving to Matanzas in the morning with a technical unit to work in the fertilizer factory till Friday – and, yes, it was true, she’d always lived in that house opposite, although the Count had been going down that same street every night for nigh on twenty years – and she’d even once read something by Salinger and she thinks he’s fantastic (and he even thought of correcting her: no, he’s squalid and moving. In short, he learned that changing a flat tyre can be one of the most exacting jobs around.

Karina’s gratitude was bubbly, all embracing, when she suggested he should accompany her to get petrol and then she’d drive him home – look how sweaty you are, you’ve got oil on your face, oh dear, I told you – and the Count felt his little heart race at these slow, sweet words from that woman, who liked a laugh and who’d appeared from nowhere.