“What do you think, skunk?” Genia Ortiz had addressed a coloured photograph of Ernesto taken one week before his death. He was leaning on the balcony, making as if to hurl himself off. He was humming Bartók.

As well you might, she told him. His rehabilitation had been slow to establish itself. In fifteen years this was Ernesto’s first time out of the green trunk. It had coincided with the arrival of her ticket.

She heard his hum. Lately she had dreamed of him, making him less stout, paring away the daddy-longlegs that fluttered from his nostrils, straightening his teeth, adding more broken-wired hair. In her dream a reconciliation had taken place in the Plaza de los Reyes. She wanted to make herself beautiful for him, but her curlers had short-circuited. She had bought a pair of sunglasses, to hide the disconcerting angle of her gaze, and because she worried she would break into tears. In the event, it was Ernesto who burst into tears.

“Do you still have bones in your heart?” he asked, seeing the unmelting snow of her expression. “Didn’t you get the flowers?”

“What flowers, Ernesto?”

He had asked Marie Amaral to send gypsophila and jasmine, but the message must have reached her stall too late. The flowers had not arrived.

“My halfness,” he hummed.

“Skunk.” Senator Zamora was right. He was all tone, no content.

She sought another photograph of him, wearing a Moravian hat. In this one, he had an irritating expression. He misled in his photographs, as elsewhere. In life he wasn’t as facetious as he seemed here, posing with one arm around the artist Alphonse Mucha and the other about the neck of a terrified Tahitian model who had once sat for Gauguin.

Would his eyes have widened so approvingly at the dress Marie Amaral was making for Genia Ortiz? What would he have thought of his widow’s journey home? Would she have permitted him to share her berth on the Hummingbird? A gum-pink slipper circled the air. In her excitement she thought of their nuits folles. Too impatient to suck, she munched on a vitamin pill and looked away, to the balcony where she had heard him humming.

At the sight of her pelargoniums, Genia Ortiz was reminded to ask Marie Amaral to cover the plants with plastic, so the sparrows wouldn’t peck at them in her absence. She would have asked the Consul General, but she had not set eyes on Wavery for several days. While she welcomed the sight of his lovely garden, she had become more than a fraction irritated with her English neighbour. The way he sat himself at that table, evening after evening. He was boring. He never entertained. Ever! And now that his house was ready he had sealed himself away inside.

Last Monday, worried that she had not yet received her invitation to the reception at the British residence, she had telephoned Wavery at home. She pretended she was trying to reach Asunción, but had muddled the numbers.