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Aside from its absence of windows, my apartment is a mausoleum which bestows an epic dimension upon the important moments of my existence: the books that have shaped me, a few letters, some photographs and, more than anything, my records, without which life would be colourless and bland With my headphones on, immersed in an almost perfect silence, I surrender myself to the music of Keith Jarrett and then sometimes a feeling might appear, a subtle, unobtrusive sensation, like when a ray of sunlight filters through to my neatly made bed, radiating heat and light for a few minutes onto the counterpane and the floor These are fleeting moments, when a part of me, usually buried, awakes as if by enchantment to tenderness, gentleness My lungs swell, opening and closing with the notes of the piano I feel fragile, like when I was a child And then back they come to me, the stinking, pot-holed streets of Old Havana, the sticky heat I never quite managed to get used to, my brothers sticking their dirty hands into the kitchen pot, in the kitchen bubbling away full of malanga, that ever-present tuber whose vile odour wafts throughout the entire house, forcing me to go out into the yard where my neighbours play Jarrett notwithstanding, I can never bear these memories for very long That kind of life – rough, miserable – pains me   I first began to hate at the age of five, when Facundo Martínez and his family showed up at our communal house Up until then, this big old house with its one floor and an inner courtyard had been exclusively ours, that is, it had belonged to my parents, my brothers, and my uncles and aunts and my cousins We lived on one side of the patio and my uncle and aunts on the other, in a harmonious, balanced existence I can still remember the morning the moving truck pulled up outside the front door A militiaman arrived with a piece of paper and a smile, to inform us that the Martínez family had been assigned half the lot Only then