For all my pain and terror and sickness, I remember being stunned by that. I had never heard anyone call Morales by her first name. She stopped moving. I couldn’t see her face from where I stood, but I could tell her eyes were fixed on Ifrahim’s.

‘I’ll use her in the kitchen,’ he said, softly, the way he always spoke. ‘God knows I could do with the help.’ He winced and shifted his chest, and I knew his heart was paining him. Morales knew it too, because I saw her lower her head a fraction, as if to look through his ribs. ‘If she doesn’t work,’ he said, ‘I’ll throw her out myself.’

I don’t know what passed between them in that silence. I could only see Ifrahim’s face, his brown eyes betraying nothing as he held Morales’ gaze.

She never agreed. Never disagreed either, just turned her head and walked from the room.

It was Ifrahim’s heart that caused him to speak for me that day, I am sure of it. In the kitchen, he helped me clean my face and gave me a lump of precious ice from the box to soothe my tongue, and let me sleep in front of the stove, so that I wouldn’t have to tread the corridors of the inn, where the men might still be at their business.

The next morning, early, he set me to chopping onions and peeling potatoes, while he went to the plaza to argue for meat. Vegetable tears stung my eyes as I worked, and I wished that they were tears of love, so I could give them to Ifrahim.

That day, we made tortilla. We used eggs from the market and oil from the huge canister by the stove and my own cut onions and potatoes. And when I saw the gusto with which the guests greeted those plates of tortilla, when I saw them cramming it down with bread and beer, a strange realization crept into my mind.

Without us, those people would have gone hungry. Ifrahim and I kept them in their seats; we held them there spellbound with only a few humble ingredients. It was a kind of magic – slender but potent – and I understood for the first time that Ifrahim lived by it. Being a cook gave him authority; he wasn’t like the men upstairs, with their clean shirts and their deep pockets, but he had a control they didn’t, and he could wield it in ways they never would have imagined.