“What I want is a plastic bag. I work in a laboratory and I’m going to analyze this meat. If it isn’t kid goat, I’ll complain to the authorities. This man will be my witness.”

She pointed an accusing finger, as if he too were pretending to be kid goat.

The waiter went in search of a plastic bag.

“I hope it doesn’t have any holes,” she said when the bag was brought, and then she dropped the leg of kid goat into it.

She rolled the bag up tightly and placed it in her purse. When they left the restaurant, once she’d explained how she was going to carry out the analysis of the sample and proudly informed him of how often the careful work undertaken by her laboratory had exposed restaurants—as many as seven cases where the meat wasn’t what was claimed on the menu—he said that as far as he was concerned it was kid goat. She made no reply and they didn’t exchange another word until he decided to leave for his home in another city. When they got to his car, she confessed that she’d been alone for too long. She was nervous. But in any case, she was going to analyze the meat.

The Majorcan mouse-goat died out some five thousand years ago. Its form has been recreated in drawings and there was even a wine whose label included a very free interpretation of the extinct animal. The illustration on the bottles was reminiscent of some kind of diabolical billy goat, or an aged satyr who harries women and is capable of appearing suddenly at night, like a ghost. It is believed that the mouse-goat was a food source for Neolithic humans due to the number of bones found in caves; this leads to the supposition that its flesh had a pleasant flavor. Scientists think it probable that the extinction of the mouse-goat was caused by the huge appetite of Neolithic man. It is also known that, being confined to the island of Majorca, the Balearic mouse-goat had difficulty finding food. In order to adapt to the scarcity of resources it became reptilian: it evolved into a cold-blooded animal and changed its growth rate and metabolism to make the most efficient use of the available vegetation. An adult mouse-goat weighed about thirteen kilos, was approximately fifty centimeters tall, and had short back legs. It was not a nimble animal, and had no need to be: it had no predators on the archipelago. Except for man, of course. Its brain was small, which meant it moved slowly. It used sunlight as a source of energy, as lizards do, and its head would seem strange to us nowadays as its eye sockets were set on the front of its face rather than to the sides; it also had a short snout and a grotesque jaw.