Our Man In Havana Read Online Free PDF

be getting along. Enjoyed our chat.’
    ‘Wouldn’t you like to watch a cleaner at work? Lopez here would give you a demonstration.’
    ‘Not at the moment. I’ll be seeing you again – here or there,’ the man said with a vague and insolent confidence and was gone out of the door before Wormold thought to give him a tradecard. In the square at the top of Lamparilla Street he was swallowed up among the pimps and lottery sellers of the Havana noon.
    Lopez said, ‘He never intended to buy.’
    ‘What did he want then?’
    ‘Who knows? He looked a long time through the window at me. I think perhaps if you had not come in, he would have asked me to find him a girl.’
    ‘A girl?’
    He thought of the day ten years ago and then with uneasiness of Milly, and he wished he had not answered so many questions. He also wished that the snap-action coupling had coupled for once with a snap.

CHAPTER 2
    HE COULD DISTINGUISH the approach of Milly like that of a police-car from a long way off. Whistles instead of sirens warned him of her coming. She was accustomed to walk from the bus stop in the Avenida de Belgica, but today the wolves seemed to be operating from the direction of Compostella. They were not dangerous wolves, he had reluctantly to admit that. The salute which had begun about her thirteenth birthday was really one of respect, for even by the high Havana standard Milly was beautiful. She had hair the colour of pale honey, dark eyebrows, and her pony-trim was shaped by the best barber in town. She paid no open attention to the whistles, they only made her step the higher – seeing her walk, you could almost believe in levitation. Silence would have seemed like an insult to her now.
    Unlike Wormold, who believed in nothing, Milly was a Catholic: he had been made to promise her mother that before they married. Now her mother, he supposed, was of no faith at all, but she had left a Catholic on his hands. It brought Milly closer to Cuba than he could come himself. He believed that in the rich families the custom of keeping a duenna lingered still, and sometimes it seemed to him that Milly too carried a duenna about with her, invisible to all eyes but her own. In church, where she looked more lovely than in any other place, wearing her featherweight mantilla embroidered with leaves transparent as winter, the duenna was always seated by her side, to observe that her back was straight, her face covered at the suitable moment, the sign of the cross correctly performed. Small boys might suck sweets with impunity around her or giggle from behind the pillars, she sat with the rigidity of a nun, following the Mass in a small gilt-edged missal bound in a morocco the colour of her hair (she had chosen it herself). The same invisible duenna saw to it that she ate fish on Friday, fasted on Ember Days and attended Mass not only on Sundays and the special feasts of the church, but also on her saint’s day. Milly was her home-name: her given name was Seraphina – in Cuba ‘a double of the second class’, a mysterious phrase which reminded Wormold of the race-track.
    It had been long before Wormold realized that the duenna was not always by her side. Milly was meticulous in her behaviour at meals and had never neglected her night-prayers, as he had good reason to know since, even as a child, she had kept him waiting, to mark him out as the non-Catholic he was, before her bedroom door until she had finished. A light burnt continually in front of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He remembered how he had overheard her at the age of four praying, ‘Hail Mary, quite contrary.’
    One day however, when Milly was thirteen, he had been summoned to the convent school of the American Sisters of Clare in the white rich suburb of Vedado. There he learnt for the first time how the duenna left Milly under the religious plaque by the grilled gateway of the school. The complaint was of a serious nature: she had set fire to a small boy called