“Is it true, Teodoro, that you’ve resigned?”

Senator Zamora took his place beside her. His face was derelict, his eyes sunken. He had resigned, yes, this afternoon at ten past four, shortly after the decision was made to replace Leopoldo Zamora’s clock with an electrically operated system manufactured in Zurich. He had been sitting on a bench when his hat blew off and a Benelux official, crossing the square and thinking Zamora must be a tourist down on his luck, threw in a coin. The Senator was required to look for no further sign that his political life had ended. There was nothing more for him to do. He had tried for five years to obstruct the tunnel, but he was no politician. Men who spoke with their heritage in mind made bloody awful politicians. He would remain as a councillor on the Corporación Muncipal until August. He would discharge his duties as President of the Bullfight. After that he would find fulfilment in the bosom of his family, and Menendez whose face was now stamped on posters with the effigy of a baldheaded ibis as a sign that under his historic governorship he had not only emulated the epic engineering feats of Tamburlaine and Xerxes, but managed to keep Abyla “nature friendly” in the process, could kiss the jellyfish.

“They spelled your name wrong,” Genia Ortiz said feebly. She wrinkled her nose. Over the linseed on his breath, she sniffed something else. Another minute passed before she realised it was his cardigan.

When Señora Criado suggested she might wash his cardigan Senator Zamora had declined. Besieged by the Moors, Abyla’s first governor had worn the same suit of chain mail for sixteen years. Two weeks was nothing. Nothing! On this evening it reeked not of Zamora, but of another of his cook’s fiascos. Mournfully, the portraits looked at him as he passed. On the landing there was such dense smog he could see nothing except the feet of his monarch thrust into the air. Coughing, he found the door to his study, but it was Clotilda’s bedroom he burst into, interrupting his youngest daughter in the course of a telephone conversation. She was wearing a man’s cable knit jersey and there was joy on her face.

He closed the door, gesturing for her to continue the conversation. Far from delighting Senator Zamora, the sight of Clotilda’s happiness had unsettled him. There was definitely someone in his daughter’s life. He knew this much from the lavish applications of Tromso’s make-up, from the time she came home at night, from the time she spent on the telephone. But after six months he was no closer to knowing this person’s identity.

When he asked, “Clotilda, is there no one special you wish to bring home to dinner?” she merely became shy.

When he said, “That’s a nice jersey, darling,” she agreed.

When for her birthday he left outside Clotilda’s bedroom a bunch of thirty orchids she had for a moment mistaken their provenance. For the first time in several years, dimples decorated her cheeks.