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Yes, he was coming from behind. What’s more, on the steamer Lafayette , having got over his seasickness, he spent almost all the time astern, watching the ship’s wake and reading the newspapers the girl had sold him. He read them from top to bottom every day of the fourteen the journey lasted, enough to learn everything by heart, including the chapter in the literary supplement that came with El Noroeste . He’d read the supplement with the chapter from Anna Karenina so often it seemed the most real part of the whole newspaper. ‘“Here, if you please,” he said, moving on one side with his nimble gait and pointing to his picture, “it’s the exhortation to Pilate, Matthew, chapter xxvii,” he said, feeling his lips were beginning to tremble with emotion. He moved away and stood behind them.’ Everything he knew about the painter Mihailov was in that chapter, but it was enough, he thought. From this fragment, he’d built up a picture of the novel and was convinced it would be extremely similar to the one the Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, had written. Standing astern, he felt a bit like Mihailov. The newspaper, the ship’s wake, mirrored his guilt. He couldn’t get the girl out of his mind, with her basket of newspapers flapping their wings in the sea breeze.
    This newspaper would end up in the hands of an even more elegant friend of his uncle’s. There was Fermín Varela in the portico of the Inglaterra Hotel, devouring the pages of El Noroeste . Uncle Ernesto was reading it over Varela’s shoulder, a glint in his eyes. Artificial wine? Fishing with dynamite? MPs at a bullfight? He looked at him as if he were to blame. After all, Antonio was the last to arrive. ‘Is ours a country or a scorpion?’
    ‘What can you do?’ asked Fermín Varela.
    ‘A bit of everything.’
    ‘I like the sound of that,’ said Varela.
    ‘That’s the good thing about being born in the sticks,’ observed Uncle Ernesto. ‘You learn a bit of everything.’
    ‘Can you fire a gun?’
    He couldn’t. But he said he could.
    ‘Can you give orders?’
    ‘Give orders?’
    ‘I mean, can you tell other men what to do?’
    He was asking very difficult questions. Antonio Vidal had never thought about that, about the possibility of telling others what to do. He’d come in search of a job. He could work hard, without stopping. But giving orders was something else.
    ‘He’ll soon learn, Varela,’ Ernesto intervened. ‘There’s nothing that can’t be learnt.’
    ‘What do you want to do?’
    He tried to suppress it, but a voice replied for him, ‘Own a news-stand in Central Park.’
    They burst out laughing. They hadn’t been expecting such a remark. But then Varela said, ‘It’s not such a bad idea. I like it, Vidal, I like it. You’ve got potential. The future lies in Vedado, that’s the golden rectangle. But for now your fate’s a little further off. I can offer you a job in Mayarí. Go and work for my wife. A bit of everything, like you say. She’ll teach you how to give orders. She’s a real field marshal!’
    Varela spoke with a mixture of irony and boredom.
    ‘Are you not coming, sir?’ asked Vidal.
    ‘It’s time for me to be dirty. I’m fed up of the provinces, my Galician friend. I feel like the people of Havana, now I can’t stand the countryside. You’ll feel the same one day.’
    ‘I come from a village, Mr Varela, well, a crossroads actually.’
    ‘There you go. But who do you think fills the music halls, gets their shoes cleaned twice a day here, in the colonnade of the Inglaterra, has a drink in the square? We all got off the Central Train, so to speak. And we don’t want to go back. Work hard and you’ll earn enough money to put a wrought-iron news-stand right in the middle of Central Park, next to the Diario de la Marina , and still have enough to build yourself a house on Seventeenth Street.’
    ‘What kind of work is it?’ he asked his uncle when they were alone.
    ‘It’s a large estate