The machines could have stopped digging for two reasons. Either they had not managed to replace the equipment lost on the Admiral Grau. Or the rumours were true at last. They had run out of money.

Zamora went into the Governor’s office without knocking. He saw the empty coat stand, where once his father’s hat had hung. He saw the empty desk. He saw the empty chair.

“Where is he, Angelita? Where’s the bloated dwarf?”

“Señor Zamora, he had to go somewhere. Urgently.”

“Where has he gone?”

“Africa,” she said wanly.

Africa? On Christmas Eve?

Like Genia Ortiz, Zamora believed nothing good came out of those mountains, but wild pig and low-flying duck. What new baboonery could Menendez be hatching?

Another drop of water landed on his head.

Whatever Menendez was up to, ‘Zamora would not find out until after Christmas.

For the first six years of Teodoro’s life, the Zamoras spent Christmas at an uncle’s ore mine in the Rif. An oak table was lowered underground and the family assembled by the light of candles to eat a feast that ran on until teatime. Since Abdel Akbar made it impossible, every Christmas had been celebrated in the red house on Calle Zamora.

This year, as for the past two years, it seemed Tromso wasn’t coming.

“Has he had second thoughts?” Zamora had asked Asunción.

“I doubt if he’s had first ones,” she said. The news had disappointed Asunción, but he could not deny that it was a relief to him. Zamora had never taken to Tromso, nor indeed to his famous television programme, but he had done his best for Asunción’s sake.

“Tromso and I are splitting up,” she had told him at last.

“Oh,” said Senator Zamora. “Oh, my dear,” and he hugged his daughter to his lambswool chest, as if to wipe away her unhappiness. But to christen a child Tromso was to saddle him with responsibilities he would never be able to discharge. His bogus bohemianism was extraordinary. And now he wanted to be taken seriously. How could one take seriously a man whose ambition for many years was to direct a remake of Les Enfants du Paradis? He stank of artifice and fakery, the same trait exactly which had disfigured the music of his father.

It was odd. Zamora had forgotten Ernesto’s face as one forgot a joke. Everything else he remembered: his licentiousness, his attachment to music, his shallow good nature. Ernesto’s heart had been relatively cold. He had not been a sentimental man. He had simply been infantile: an amiable conductor who liked spanking women.

His music was another matter. In Zamora’s ears, Ernesto had been spoiled by his desire to be a composer. Music conducted by Ernesto was music that became elaborated by the conductor’s truculent vision of himself as Bartók or Sibelius or Janáček. His impact on Abyla’s musical history might have been less regrettable had his interpretations not been so scandalously unoriginal, without an ant’s breath of life, failing wherever it lay in the man’s power to avoid bathos.