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clue,” smiled the priest, “he just told me he couldn’t get the singer, Violeta or whatever her name was, out of his head. Your father came to see me because he said he was going mad. He told me everything right here. Poor man.”
    Conde finally smiled. The image of his father infatuated with a singer of boleros seemed unreal, but it was so human he found it reassuring.
    “So my father fell in love with a singer and watered at the mouth at the mere thought of her. And nobody ever found out . . .”
    “I did,” the priest corrected him.
    “You’re different,” explained Conde.
    “Why am I different?”
    “Because you are. Otherwise, my father would never have told you.”
    “True enough.”
    “So why didn’t you ask him what her name was?”
    “It wasn’t important. For either of us. It was as if desire had struck like lightening: it came and turned his life upside down. What’s in a name? I just told him to take care, that some changes can’t be reversed,” answered the priest, standing up and grumbling, “Well, I must get ready for mass. Will you be staying? Look, the altar boy’s not come yet . . .”
    “I’d fancy myself as an altar boy . . . Keep your hopes up, but don’t get too excited . . . Know what? If I discover my father did in fact fall in love with Violeta del Río I’ll start believing in miracles.”
     
     
    It was inevitable: as soon as he saw their faces he recalled Rubbish’s early morning jubilation at the feast of leftovers; recalled the worst nights during the Crisis, when his desolate larder forced him to toast old bread and drink glasses of sugared water; he even recalled the old man who several days ago had asked him for two pesos, one peso, anything, to buy something to eat. The now happy but still emaciated faces with which Amalia and Dionisio Ferrero welcomed him told the Count that both had got to the market the previous evening before it closed and, like himself, had feasted on an exceptional banquet that, because they were out of gastric training, had made sleep difficult. Such an irritation, though, would never mar their real satisfaction at feeling stuffed, and safe from the cruel, stabbing pain of hunger. They might well have had some milk with their breakfast that morning and restored a creamy bliss to their gruel, even luxuriated in bread and butter, and drunk proper strong coffee, like the coffee they now offered their buyers, perhaps over-sweetened, as the ex-policeman’s expert palate detected, though it was no doubt genuine, and not the ersatz powder sold in minimal amounts according to a strict ration book.
    On arrival, Conde had introduced them to his business partner: flustered by the proximity of the treasure, Yoyi Pigeon hurried through the polite chit-chat and asked to see the library, as if it were a warehouse full of hammers or a container of scissors.
    Amalia gave her apologies, because she had to wash and feed her mother, go to the market – did she still have money left? – and do a thousand things in the house, but Dionisio stayed with them in the library, hovering mistrustfully by the door. At the Count’s suggestion, the buyers began their prospecting among the bookshelves located on the right of the room, a less crowded area where the bookcases had been cut back to create space for the ironbarred window overlooking the garden now dedicated to growing vegetables necessary for survival. Following the Count’s plan, they started to make three piles on the desk’s generous surface: books that should never be sold on the market, books of less interest or no interest at all, and books for immediate sale. Conde placed in the first group nineteenth-century Cuban publications that seemed straightforwardly rare and very valuable and a number of European and North American books, including a first edition of Voltaire’s Candide that made him sweat excitedly and, especially, exquisite, invaluable original printings of the Most Short Account of the