“And Ernesto.” “And Ernesto.”

“And Tromso.” “And Tromso.”

After three glasses she would lapse into Russian. After four into an overbearing recollection of someone who might have had something to do with the Duke of Albuquerque before he married. At this point Zamora would organise a competition for the year’s ugliest Christmas card. Then lunch, during which she would remind everyone of the occasion she had eaten a Christmas cake stirred by Peter the Great. And afterwards they would open their presents.

Senator Zamora, who had bought Señora Criado a cookbook, took up the novel he had been reading when he heard the sound of wings. He held it to the steamy light. He turned a damp page and the corner came away in his fingers. The novel had not been noticed by El Faro’s critic, but he was enjoying its description of the rainforests which had attracted his great-grandfather, Leopoldo, the man who had written on matters quinological but who had vanished into the sea with his life’s work.

4

A car circled the empty square, mimicking the passage of the birds overhead. The birds flew over the palm trees in the Plaza de los Reyes, flying with hunched backs and shallow wing beats. Marie Amaral stared after them. She had been cherishing the poniente on her cheeks, gathering her energies for the evening ahead. Rosita was coming to dinner.

The birds resisted her scrutiny. They were strange and unexpected and she had not seen anything like them. They were the size of the lame stork on Santa Maria de Africa, except they were black. Black storks?

“Kay, kay, kay.” The call was harsh. It was the caw of something she had suppressed inside her. Had black storks brought her her son?

Silence had attended Periclito’s birth.

He was born on 17 February, on the floor of Marie Amaral’s drawing room in the Rue Balzac.

She chewed her sleeve, shredding it, but she did not cry out. In her silence, stretched on the floor so no one would see, grasping the legs of her bed as Periclito slithered into life, she heard everything. The sounds echoed from the world upside down in the mirror: the yap of the newspaper boy, the girls returning from the toy factory in the Rue Troyas, the foghorn of a boat loaded with families for France.

Unseeing, she reached for the infant between her legs. “I have nothing to tell my child.” That was her first thought, not knowing whether to hug or to repel him, hugging him, wiping from his face the yellow creamy substance, offering him a button to suck.

She attempted to stand. The blood had dried and her legs were part of the floor. She was looking for somewhere to put the shiny blue eel of cord when Dr Blechin arrived. The hospital had sent him and he gave her morphine.

Then one day in March, a knock.

She sits on the sofa, cutting cloth for a dress. It takes a while to reach the door. By the time she opens it, the caller is walking away. He is small, with black curly hair and under his open blue shirt he wears a vest. He hears the sound of the door opening and stops in his tracks beside the gate. He returns up the path. He is European, but she cannot tell from where. He speaks in bad French, confident of his accent, nervous a little. Although he is nervous, he smiles. He explains to Marie Amaral how he was a good friend of David.