Wavery completed another length. Whenever he swam towards La Mujer Muerta and saw the blurred outline of a woman on her back he thought of Catharine. He was famished for her. He wanted to be the person he had become when he was with her, who he might be again in July. Each time he swam towards La Mujer Muerta he was swimming a few yards more towards that possibility.

Each time he swam away from the mountain he wondered if their intimacy could be recreated. “Am I looking forward to something I know will never happen?”

Wavery’s days had passed – like the lengths of this pool – into weeks. Only Asunción knew the extent of his distraction. Every day she heard his fingers marking time on the desk, his chair squeaking back, his tread across the floor to the window where she would find him looking out at the roof of the Club de Pensiones, or fanning his chin with an invitation he had asked her to refuse. So he waited, the progress of the weeks measured by the vine on his trellis and the pile of pages on his table and the state of his residence. So the weeks crawled by into months until it was the eve of her arrival.

6

It was the end of Ramadan and El Hadu was tetchy with fasting. On this particular evening, Wavery waited for Marie Amaral to bring him a consigment of tuberoses. She was supposed to deliver them at six. By seven-thirty there was no sign of her. She must have forgotten, he decided. He was upstairs, packing for the coming weekend, when the doorbell rang.

“Madame Amaral!”

“I’m sorry. I was lost.” She was as white as a shirt.

“Lost? In Abyla?” He took the box from her arms.

“I could get lost on a straight road. I was in church. Then I took a walk.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“It’s Periclito,” she said.

As she was preparing to come to the residence, a girl came running from the shoe shop. “Come quickly! It’s Rosita. She’s on the phone. There’s been an accident.” Her stepdaughter was calling from Peru, a town called Huanta. The accident involved her son, the Earthquake, his stomach punctured by some Andean bull.

“Huanta,” said Wavery. “Yes, I know Huanta.”

Periclito had been a matador there. He had to travel thirty-six hours by bus to find such a town. But he wished to impress Rosita, his sister whom he had not seen for three years. The horns had passed in and out of his stomach wall so that for a few seconds he held his insides in his hands, like the coloured ribbons of his mother’s bows. “They missed my balls like so,” he told Marie Amaral on the telephone from his hospital bed. He was trying to sound jocose. They had told him not to laugh if he aspired to eat cassoulet again. “It was nearly my sweetbreads they served in the Royal Box!”