“I would, madame, if that were possible.”

“Of course, I will make you a dress.”

“Then I must have some flowers. Those. What about those?” She waved at the same bucket of Stargazer lilies through which the fisherman’s dog had wagged his tail. Marie Amaral lifted the bucket onto the table. She cut a strip of paper and a length of ribbon. “You’ve heard about Emilio’s ring?” It had been found by Berahu the dustman, inside a conger eel.

“Poor man,” said Genia Ortiz lifelessly. She scanned the square.

Marie Amaral scraped her closed scissors along the ribbon, watching it curl into a multitude of tiny bows. Sandra the Rapist was loose again. People were talking about a funny little episode during last night’s soap which involved an antiquated contraceptive device. Apparently –

Genia Ortiz turned, the coast was clear! “Madame, if I could collect these in a few minutes,” and she seized her bag and tacked across the square towards the man from Algeciras.

7

Normally when he walked home to lunch, Wavery approached the inviolable territory of his residence along the Marina Española. On this Saturday lunchtime he approached from the west.

As he walked along Calle Silvestre, he thought of Zamora in the museum. His guide was consumed by certain obsessions, yet he impressed Wavery as a considerable civic figure. Unlike the man Wavery could see standing on the residence balcony.

Plaisir des Yeux had not seen Wavery. Every so often he rotated his head in the opposite direction, after which his eyes reverted to the tunnel. Wavery knew this expression. Those on the esplanade below looked at the tunnel with mulish curiosity: members of the Club Nautico would skim in blue kayaks to the edge of the concrete barrier; fathers strolling with their families in the early afternoon would point and then boast inaccurately of how far the shaft went down into the sea; the snub-nosed Land-Rovers would slow down, windows lowered, before accelerating towards Monte Hacho, Plaisir des Yeux, the simple tiler, did not look with mere curiosity. He gazed with longing.

There was something dangerously distracted about Plaisir des Yeux. On his neck he had a scar where a tube had been inserted after a fall from the minaret he was tiling in El Hadu. In the fortnight since Wavery’s arrival in Abyla, Plaisir des Yeux had done little save screw a new lock into the front door with the keyhole upside down and chisel a phallus on the wall with the goalpost. “Against the evil eye, señor,” a statement accompanied by a gesture of his index finger.

Twice Wavery had come across him watching a fly flying figures of eight in the room he was supposed to be tiling. Wavery rarely heard him utter a word. The way in which he held himself suggested Plasir des Yeux had taken to heart the saw about a bowed head not being cut off. Halima had no illusions. “He doesn’t do anything,” she complained. “He smokes. He eats bacon. He wears his mother’s beads under his shirt –”