“Oh! Señor Wavery, that’s not you? I hope I have not disturbed your writing.” But since she had him on the line, would he perhaps care to come to a little dinner party she was giving on Saturday. It wasn’t smart. Nothing here ever was. But he would know them all.

“I suppose you might almost call it une soirée d’adieu. There’ll be Senator Zamora and his daughters. Madame Amaral, the flower seller. The Governor and his wife. So I think you’ll have some fun. At least we don’t have to respect this fasting.”

She waited for him to respond with his own invitation.

“That’s kind of you, Señora Ortiz, but I’d better say no. I’m hoping to be in Africa this weekend.”

“Africa?” repeated Genia Ortiz, uncertain whether she had heard correctly.

No. Señor Wavery had not turned out to be the asset to Abylan social life she once anticipated.

And now it was late afternoon and she slept and her husband floated beside her, sharing her glucose memories. Together they heard the bell ring through the water, not the cathedral bell ringing for Mass, but the bell her mother rang every evening before tossing bread at the lake. Her body lifted from the deep. It had taken her more than seventy years to rise this far. She rose evenly towards the surface. Her back shattered the water and the lake rippled into oily patches of colour. She was opening her mouth to feed when she saw a figure on the hard-frozen bank. He was bending down. His gloves were scraping the ground and there were figures on either side of him. Some carried torches over their heads, the flames falling orange on the snow. Others were pointing at the water, pointing guns. Colonel Slava! she thought. She saw the snowball in his hand as a terrible noise churned the air.

Senator Zamora arrived within moments and five minutes later, Asunción.

“It’s all right, Genia,” said Senator Zamora as she lolled her head now on one shoulder, now on another, her face pale as tissue. He too had felt troubled fins breaking the earth as he worked at his computer.

She said, one hand searching her breast, “Pablo’s right. I’m getting very old, Teodoro.”

“Nonsense, Genia.”

“What do you mean ‘nonsense’? Dr Alvaro said I should think of a hip operation. I have to look up words in a dictionary. I have to get up in the night the whole time.”

Zamora realised he had not extended the appropriate sympathy. “But look at you! Even now you look wonderful.”

He was dressed in bituminous grey. Nothing could persuade him to remove the colour of his depression. He felt as humourless as destiny. For two weeks he had burned in his poisoned cardigan, the shade of the fatigued sky above his city. Abyla, the design of its houses, the abrupt humps of its promontory, was as much a part of him as his fingertips. The idea that it was to be his no more had meshed together his eyebrows into one inseparable strand of bushy hair.