“So I left my books behind and descended the hill from the house that had never been mine, into the incomprehensible streets. I had floated above them for months, an angel on a cloud. I had no place to go. If I went back to Dublin, I really would end up winged and haloed. By the people waiting there to shoot me. And suddenly the weather began to change and I understood that I was not in the tropics after all. Temperatures plummeted and the frigid wind stripped the leaves from the trees and the city turned the colour of ash and switched from
languorous dilapidated Havana to bombed-out Stalingrad.”
