Flesh protruded below a faded pair of denim shorts. Seaweed spores had stuck to the thigh and there was red algae along the calf. “Asparagopsis armata,” Silkleigh told Panteco.

“What about his boat, Silkleigh? That’s what I’m interested in.”

Emilio’s mother waited on the quayside. Her cheeks, warmed by fresh rouge, shuddered as she approached. Silkleigh helped her into the stern. He lifted the tarpaulin and she kneeled. One by one, she stroked the leather belt hooping the rib cage, the silver chain knotted around the vertebrae, the cracked tooth where his father, a maker of prosthetic boots, had struck him when Emilio refused to enter the family business.

She looked up at Silkleigh. “Where have you put his freckles?”

2

Next morning the drilling stopped. For two hours no one thought to wonder why. They enjoyed the silence. It was the first time in five years Abylans had experienced this silence. It had to do with Emilio, they thought. Or Christmas. Today was Christmas Eve.

By midday the city smelled of orange trees, a medicinal smell as if invisible hands were at work scrubbing the city’s hair. The clouds moving over Santa Maria were real clouds and the wind blew with the warm breath of a god, bearing to those who had forgotten them the dislocated notes of ordinary life: the gossipy tills in the Calle Camoes, the crack of Halima’s duster, the band playing in the Plaza de los Reyes and the fresh shouts of children marching round and round the alarmed bust of Leopoldo Zamora.

By the time five strange birds flew into Abyla, shortly after six o’clock, the fisherman had been forgotten. Instead it was the birds that commanded the city’s attention.

At six-fifteen Genia Ortiz entered Calle Zamora supporting under one arm a painting of the Virgin and under the other Matisse’s casbah gate. Happy hour, said the man from Algeciras, who had to catch the last ferry at seven. Two for the price of one!

I might be as old as a bush, she thought, but I feel younger than Pablo. Her heart sounded forcibly, like a wing beat. In this silence, she could hear everything! But it wasn’t her heart. The decisive wing beat came from the sky. She looked up and five extraordinary birds passed over the rooftops. They were large and black and untidy. They had bald red heads and long curved bills, and they flew with their ruffed necks outstretched, kay-keying in fright.

What ugly creatures! Genia Ortiz stood outside her building and watched them. They were the size of swans. They must be tarred and feathered swans, she decided. Swans which had freed themselves from the ice! she thought, remembering the winters in Norway, the town after which she had named her son, and Ernesto as she had first seen him, conducting the “Valse Triste”, stretching out his arms, his neck elongated, his dark blond curls bouncing off his shoulders, his shoulders rising above his head, filled to the scalp with immoral charm. Ernesto! She clapped her hand to her mouth. He flew out of the sunset and she saw the light beat up on his throat from the orchestra pit. But she had locked him up! This was the very last thing she desired, to summon the beaming ghost of her husband who would rather conduct Sibelius than eat. But it was no good, he had escaped the trunk beneath her bed. There he was, taking her elbow up the steps, humming “oof, les petits pois” into her good ear.