Genia Ortiz responded, “Ernesto was more a man of passion than of love. He was for mixing the two. I never did, you know. Love can be repeated, he used to say. But it can’t. Isn’t it so, Asunción? Isn’t that the truth? I would always know when Ernesto had been unfaithful. Because he’d be so extremely nice – and then tell me utterly unnecessary details about what he’d been doing. What did I care if for lunch he’d eaten a cassoulet with delicious cheese sauce at Periclito’s café?”

Asunción agreed. While their two experiences were not entirely similar, at least not so similar as Genia Ortiz, in her pressing need for an ally, would have liked to think, infidelity was infidelity. It was the same, whether you ran off with another woman or your clipboard.

Alone again in her room, Genia Ortiz retrieved the Ukrainian letter from her sleeve, poured herself another measure of vodka, took a sip, reread the letter, looked at the Virgin, took another sip, reread the letter again and sat down. She lifted the telephone and dialled a number. She waited, her gaze passing from the Virgin to the photographs on the desk and back to the letter.

“Tromso?” she said, hearing a voice. “Tromso, it’s your mother.”

Genia Ortiz’s relationship with the son of her middle age had never been easy. He was a workaholic who had married late in life, like the General. He separated from Asunción three years later. He had not lived with anyone before, so when he put down his glass and she moved it, he could not cope. He had advanced to the age of forty-eight having learned to play one or two simple theme tunes on the keyboard of a relationship, but little more. So far as Genia Ortiz knew, there was no other woman in his life. He was wedded, more successfully than ever he had been to Asunción, to his work. While wealth and prosperity had followed the success of The Strong Tend to Leave, Genia Ortiz noted in their recent conversations a grub of dissatisfaction. The industry did not regard him seriously enough. He wished to find a project which would attract recognition too. “Something of quality, mother. Like a documentary.”

“You could make a documentary about Abyla, Tromso.”

“Mother, there’s nothing in Abyla.”

“I’m sure Senator Zamora would talk to you about the Phoenicians.”

If television was Tromso’s mistress, he would never want for female attention. He was good looking in a supine sort of way – the way that is one step beyond handsome – causing old women to think him charming and men to dislike him.

Tromso’s charm had no effect on his mother, who had become jealous of him in the way that parents do who make sacrifices for their children in order to give them every opportunity. Once Tromso had seized his opportunity a bitterness crept into the relationship. Ernesto had been more in awe of his son than bitter. It fell to Tromso’s mother to experience the more elementary feeling.