Nothing must prevent her own flight from Abyla.

3

In the jungle-humid silence, it struck a muffled two.

Teodoro Zamora, punctilious historiofabulist and author of an article in that morning’s El Faro entitled “The Nail in the Abyla Coffin”, heard the noise of wings as he read a novel in the thermal baths of the Club de Pensiones. He arched his neck. Upside down through the overhead pane flashed five shadows. Geese migrating, he reckoned. Or wonderfully plump duck. Like the brace in his freezer he wished they were eating tomorrow. But Señora Criado had promised to surprise them all. Something involving pork and clams which she glorified as the noon dish of Portuguese peasants. Why this was considered apposite for the Zamoras’ Christmas meal, he was uncertain. Asunción had whispered in English behind her back, “This is going to be a cockup.”

A drip of water from the ceiling landed on his book. The baths were silent, dimly lit and steamy. Like hell at seven o’clock, he thought. On any other day, the water would be verdigrised with tunnel dust and splashed by elderly men on their backs. Tonight, Zamora had the warm water to himself.

He sat on the submerged steps, one hand gripping a bannister. The brass bannisters on either side of the steps gave him the impression of a grand staircase leading into the water, as if a drawing room had been filled to waist-level. The water poured from the mouths of tritons chained to a wall of dark green tiles. Zamora liked to stand against their fin moustaches, the hot water coughing onto his neck and over his stomach where the flesh fell away in knobbly folds like candle wax.

But this evening he was too exhausted to stand. He needed to sit on the steps and read a book.

All afternoon, as on every Christmas Eve, Senator Zamora had locked himself in his study and stuffed presents into woollen socks. Later, as the house slept in various stages of anticipation, he would paste a white beard to his chin, dip his head into a conical red cap and stump through the corridors.

This, too, was a tradition. He had no notion he was making such a noise. Those lying in bed – if they remained awake – had learned to ignore the scrape as his left hand dislodged a picture; the ouch! as Zamora jarred his toe against the washstand outside Clotilda’s room; the slow squeal of the doorhinge; the shuffle to the end of the bed; the at-long-last positioning in the crease between mattress and footboard of the stocking knitted by Minerva and bulging with this year’s surprises wrapped in last year’s paper. Everyone had to conspire in the reality of Senator Zamora’s Papa Noël, whether you were an eight-year-old grandson with Christmas-tree lights behind his eyes as he considered last year’s computer, sent mail order in lieu of his father (Tromso busy editing an omnibus edition of The Strong Tend to Leave), or an adult like his wife, her eyes screwed up so tightly he never knew, not even at the moment of her death, whether she did ever sleep during their Christmas Eves together.