Our Man in Havana [antikvár]

Chapter I1"That nigger going down the street," said Dr. Hassel-bacher, standing in the Wonder Bar, "he reminds me of you, Mr. Wormold." It was typical of Dr. Hasselbacher that after fifteen years of friendship he still used the prefix Mr.friendship proceeded with the slowness and assurance of a careful diagnosis. On Wormold's deathbed, when Dr. Hasselbacher came to feel his failing pulse, he would perhaps become Jim.The Negro was blind in one eye and one leg was shorter than the other; he wore an ancient felt hat and his ribs showed through his torn shirt like a ship's under demolition. He walked at the edge of the pavement, beyond the yellow and pink pillars of a colonnade, in the hot January sun, and he counted every step as he went. As he passed the Wonder Bar, going up Virdudes, he had reached 1369. He had to move slowly to give time for so long a numeral. "One thousand three hundred and seventy." He was a familiar figure near the National Square where he would sometimes linger and stop his counting long enough to sell a packet of pornographic photographs to a tourist. Then he would take up his count where he had left it. At the end of the day, like an energetic passenger on a trans-Atlantic Uner, he must have known to a yard how far he had walked."Joe?" Wormold asked. "I don't see any resemblance. Except the limp, of course," but instinctively he took a quick look at himself in the mirror marked Cerveza Tropical, as though he might really have been so broken down and darkened during his walk from the store in the old town. But the face which looked back at him was only a little discoloured by the dust from the harbour works; it was still1