I first remember him saying it when I was little, perhaps six or seven. I had tripped over in the yard and was crying to see blood on my knee. He sat me on the kitchen table, washed it off and told me solemnly to make a heart out of my guts. I didn’t understand him fully, and had wondered at the idea of my guts squirming up through my body to wrap around my heart. My heart must be too soft, I thought. That’s why it needed the guts to protect it. It was good advice to a child growing up in that place.

Ifrahim was the inn’s cook, and he had been there almost as long as I. Mama Morales hired him after she found out that María, the old cook, had been cheating her on prices and pocketing the difference. I don’t know what happened to María. People said that Morales paid a man to break her hands, but that might just be rumour.

Ifrahim was as different to María as could be. Where she was loud and sour he was quiet and gentle. He wore a faded red shirt and never opened his eyes too wide, as if it hurt to look at things. No one was sure where he came from, with his deep brown skin that seemed almost silver beneath, and his wiry, pepper-black beard. I once heard him say that his father was from Zanzibar, and was a sailor. One of the girls told me that his mother had been a fine French lady from Réunion Island, but that he had been given up, and raised by a ‘grandmother’ in Lisbon. Any of that was enough to make people at the inn sneer at him, especially Morales. For all her defiance of others, she was a fierce Spaniard, and a proud cordobesa, and that was why she despised me, I think, for my aimless blood.

Everyone wondered why she had hired Ifrahim, until we tasted his food. I was just a child, but I still remember it, that first meal. He served salmorejo; poor man’s food, made from bread too hard and tomatoes too soft to be of use. But Ifrahim’s salmorejo tasted different. Beneath the hot blue sky, that cool soup calmed and kindled at once; it bit with acid and licked with oil, rewarded us with salty little stars of ham. We wiped the bowls of every last trace, and all the while Ifrahim sat at the door of the kitchen, smiling quietly and shelling hard-boiled eggs. There was never any question of his employment, after that.