So she laughed for him, not knowing anything about Huanta, not knowing it was a village at the boot-end of tobacco road where every street was renamed Avenida Sal Si Puedes. But guessing.

He was too fat. He ate too much. All he ever did for exercise was make cassoulet. “And love!” He had no more technique than an ox cart. He relied, he said, on intuition – the same intuition that told him when a dish was ready for the table, when a knee was ripe to touch. The same intuition which had punctured his stomach so that forever after he would be compelled to carry two scars, the shape of close-set eyes, to the left of his bellybutton.

“Maman, it’s not that I’m afraid of.” More ominous in Periclito’s eyes than his lack of technique or his failure of intuition at Huanta: he was shaping up to be a matador who couldn’t kill. And the feria was less than two months away.

Shaping up indeed! snorted Marie Amaral’s silence.

“What you are afraid of overtakes you, son.”

And she was afraid for him. Oh, Periclito. You idiot. You beautiful idiot, she thought. My son with whom I cannot exchange a single intelligent sentence.

“Periclito, do you have a girlfriend to look after you?”

“Rosita’s here with me. And I have a girlfriend. I’m not holy. That’s my place – if it exists,” and she saw him stabbing a finger through the hospital floor. “You’d like her mother. She’s Venezuelan. Lots of cats.”

“I hate cats.”

The line faded and when it came back he was laughing. Five thousand miles away she heard her son’s illicit laugh. “Her husband came home while we were upstairs. She made me lie under the bed. He’d come home with a fever. Go home and go to bed, said the doctor. So he went straight to bed. I had to lie there all afternoon, all night until – Mother? Are you there?”

“Thank God, he’s alive, that’s all,” Marie Amaral told herself that evening as she bundled up the hill from Santa Maria de Africa, not knowing where she was going, still thinking of the home-grown prayer she had said for her son – she who in thirty years had never attended Mass.

She was confused and upset. Because of his accident she had turned to a God she didn’t much believe in, a God who inspired in her a feeling of intense irritation whenever she bothered to think of him and for whom she reserved the ungainly anger timid women have when they lose their temper.

The Bible was a book written by men, she once informed old Padre Ruiz. And she knew men. David’s God had failed him. Why should He help her?

But this evening she had prayed and – this was the odd thing – as she prayed, there had come into her mind an extraordinary image, a figure she recognised as Tromso Ortiz. She had seen the director only from the back, with a worn carpet of hair as if the leg of a heavy chair had been removed. He was telling the cameraman what to do. He was appealing for quiet.