Who was it she hid in her dimples? Was he a fantasy, like one of those medieval rabbits in her room? Was he a married man? Or a woman? Dear God, was it a repetition of last time? Senator Zamora didn’t believe he had the stamina at this moment for another interior decorator, but he supposed anything was more tolerable than the alternative, a prospect which had haunted him since Christmas, and which he didn’t have the courage to voice even to Asunción.

Senator Zamora was concerned about his daughter and he was heartily sick of politics. Singly he might have coped with these tribulations. But what had added noodles of worry to his brow and made his eyebrows stiff and twisted like a ginseng root, was the matter of Pablo’s computer.

This afternoon he had tiptoed through the smoke to the playroom on the third floor. There was only one dignity, he told himself, settling at the keyboard. There weren’t two. He was rejoining his people, the bedouin of the sea. Together they would lose themselves in the fabulous mackerel sauces of Carteia. He switched on the computer, he inserted a disc, and calling up his much ignored file on Baal-Rosh, Lord of the Promontory, he faced a blank screen.

In the flickering monitor, through wisps of smoke, he saw the library burning at Carthage. He saw the quinologist’s boat sinking in the Bay of Mexico. He heard Virgil’s instruction to burn The Aeneid.

Senator Zamora removed the disc. He turned off the computer. He turned it on again. He inserted the disc. Nothing! Frantically, he rose from the table to rouse Pablo. But Pablo was in Madrid, visiting his father.

In the nursery, Senator Zamora felt the oblivion of his life’s work. His face drained of all erudition. He was considering whether to pitch the computer and all his files into the Calle Zamora when he had felt the rumble in the earth.

“You poor thing,” he repeated and he held Genia Ortiz’ hand, patterned with spots like a carp’s belly. He would go this minute to the work-site. He would speak to the foreman. He would demand to know what had happened.

5

Marie Amaral also felt the tremor in the earth. It travelled up Calle Camoes from the Marina Española, passed beneath the stall where she was sewing the last of the buttons onto Genia Ortiz’ dress, and shivered the surface of the fountain.

She sat down hard on a bucket and concentrated on the poster taped to the inside of her door. She read her son’s name and looked at the painting of a bull’s head. But she felt the tunnel slithering towards her through the earth.

Every time she felt the drilling-machine her heart squeezed back upon itself. It sent out soundless squeals of fear and the tunnel heard. She sensed its vibrations everywhere, in the meek interior of her flowerstall, in her bedroom, in her kitchen where she always kept the radio switched on. Once, during a power cut, she caught herself whistling a tune to hide the noise. She hadn’t known the tune. She was wondering where she might have heard it when she realised with a stab of horror she was whistling “Strasbourg, Strasbourg, You Lovely, Lovely Town”.