“David?”

Numbed, she lets him in. She offers him a chair, but he would prefer to stand. He casts an approving eye over the bookcase. He takes down and opens Camus’ Noces.

“How did you know David?” she asks. He has not told her his name. But to talk with someone who has known David . . . For a second it might bring him back. He replaces the book. He takes in the room, the unfinished bodice on the sofa, the tissue patterns from which she was cutting her fabric, a play open on the floor. That’s all she reads, plays. “We were at medical school together.”

“Then you knew him in Algiers?”

“That’s right.”

Her head dizzies with things she wishes to ask. She wants to ask how David dressed in those days, how he looked, whether he was always so shy. But he does not want to talk about David. He produces from inside his vest a brown envelope. He talks about other friends of his, but she doesn’t care to hear of anyone else. She wants to find out about David. Did his skin always smell of chicory? They admit they made a mistake, he is saying. He opens his envelope. He takes out the notes. He fans them out, rubbing them into a circle, until there are hundreds of Frenchmen’s eyes, all looking at her.

“They want to give this to you,” he says. “Fifty thousand francs.” For the first time he meets her gaze. All around there are screams, but he does not seem to hear. “They say they’re sorry.” Later the screams will converge on her lips and chase him from the house. But now they scream only inside her. Looking back through them she feels something beyond expression. Staring at him, to turn them both into something else, anything else, she turns him for a moment into David.

For a while, whenever she saw groups of men in the Plaza de los Reyes, Marie Amaral imagined she saw David among them. He had survived. He could cure anything. “I used to think those sort of people survive who can mend anything, Teodoro.”

But a day arrived when she became terrified of what David would say if he ever suddenly appeared in the square. What would she say? Would they even recognise each other?

“You look different.”

“I had Periclito, you see. The boy.”

He might ask something banal, such as, “Isn’t it time he had new shoes?” There would be a distance, like the distance that existed between her and her son.

On the subject of what had happened in Oran, Marie Amaral was more silent than Ghanem the Mute. Once she was safely arrived in Abyla, she sewed away certain feelings. She had resolved to tell Periclito if he ever asked. “I won’t lie to him. If you lie, you waste time.” But he never asked.

He grew up to suspect David might not be his father and that if there was a secret it lay concealed in his middle name. But he had learned his silence from his mother. He never asked: Who was the Merimée in his name. He never asked: Why am I not circumcised, thin, dark-eyed? Instead of seeking out the truth, he insisted on her approval.