After trying to comfort her husband, Claudia returns to the kitchen. The cook, who is distressed—but protective of her work—is still standing where Claudia left her, passing the tray of dough from one hand to the other. Claudia pokes the dough with her index fingers. It feels even worse than it looks: “It’s certainly off,” she says, but since she’s got Sergei raging in the room next door, she issues a command. “Give it a try, Lantur, make the bread just as you always do, let’s hope it bakes well,” and she retraces her steps, unaware that she says aloud, “Is the world coming to an end?”

“It’s not the end of anything,” Sergei replies angrily. “It’s just starting. I don’t see how to avoid it…. Help me think, Claudine…. For God’s sake! Be still!”

Claudia faces him. She looks at him—hands raised, palms outward, index fingers, still feeling the strange consistency of the dough, extended to keep from dirtying her clothes—and when she realizes the position her fingers are in, she extends her arms toward Sergei and says playfully, “Olé, torero! Olé! Watch my horns, here!”

As a girl, she had been to a bullfight on one of the many trips she took with her father, the ambassador, a good-natured, lighthearted man who knew how to enjoy everything life had to offer and took great pride in his busy diplomatic engagements, sometimes saying, “My wife and I don’t remember clearly where our children were born, they were all born in different places.” It was true: her mother confused her pregnancies and their births, and for him it was all one big party. Eleven children born in eleven different cities—their parents confused their birth years, even their names.

Claudia is their eighth child. She and her siblings were named after the countries in which they were born, “To aid my memory,” her mother used to say, “not that it helps much!” Ten boys and one girl, little Claudia, who was born in Spain.

Sergei looks at his wife pretending to charge at him and takes her joke as an attack; he’s still wrapped up in his own world. “I’m sunk, there’s no way out of this mess. It’s the end. I’m a dead man. I can’t go on.”