This was her son’s need and it appalled her. All he ever wanted was his mother’s pat on the back and she couldn’t give it. Marie Amaral could assure him, “I’m always here for you, Periclito,” but her approval was something she had sewn away also.

Only on one occasion did she talk to him about Oran. He was twenty-eight. It was December. She asked what he wanted for Christmas. Those were the days when he spent Christmas at home.

“A jersey?”

“No, Maman.” He lifted up his hair. He pointed to the small scar on the left of his forehead. He said: “I want to know how I got this.”

Her son had asked, so Marie Amaral told him. She told him about the Arab who had murdered his reflection and searched for it in the shattered glass. She had thrown hundreds of notes from a brown envelope to force him to leave. After he had blundered through the door and into the ranks of screaming women, their ululations louder all the time, she heard her son screaming on the mattress. His face was covered in mirror splinters and the largest splinter gouged his forehead.

A week after she told Periclito this, she learned from Señora Criado he had redecorated the Café Ulises.

“You have to see it to believe it, señora. From floor to pillar to ceiling!”

Periclito was hanging the portrait of Lieutenant Zamora when he heard his mother’s gasp. To each of her thousand selves, his eyes said: You see why I had to do this, Maman. Don’t you, Maman?

From then on he set out in search of the love she had denied him.

“Kay, kay, kay.”

The call was fainter. Marie Amaral watched the birds, dwindling in the sky until they were no bigger than the empty cockleshells, scattered around the fountain by the man from Algeciras.

“Señora!”

She looked down. The car which had been circling the square was parked, engine running, six feet away. A smart German car with tinted windows, such as Tromso Ortiz had driven on his last visit. The driver had an Arab face and wore a chauffeur’s uniform. The uniform made Marie Amaral nervous. All uniforms unnerved her, whether they belonged to Panteco or to Gallo, the bellboy. A tourist who’s missed the ferry, she thought.

He beckoned. “Señora!”

She crossed the road in small steps, wrapping the shawl around her shoulders.

The man grinned, showing irregular teeth. “The Hotel Zamora?”

She pointed behind him, down Calle Camoes. “But it’s one way. Go left there, then left again at the bottom into Plaza de Africa.”

He touched the brim of his cap. In the back she made out the shape of a young woman. Marie Amaral could not properly see her face, but she saw enough – long legs, gondola-black hair, nipples pressing like a cat’s nose against a white T-shirt – to know she was a woman who would have appealed to her son.

The car slid away. The number plate was Moroccan. It had come down from the mountains, just as she had come all those years ago, driven in a car without lights over La Mujer Muerta and from there onto the Playa Benitez, on a mule carrying seaweed. She carried Periclito in a sack on her back and supported Rosita by the waist.