She closed her book and turned her unclaimed eyes on him. “What are you going to say?” The truth was she didn’t greatly care, either about her husband or about his tunnel. His fingers stopped their scratching. They tugged at his gold chain, imprinting a red line in the backfold of his neck. They descended over his face, where his shaving line spread like a grey paste, to his chest. They became wild horses on the plain such as he had simulated in his days at Radio Salamanca. He said, “I wonder what people in the past thought of this weather. Would it have been worse for them?”

His wife said, “I suppose they accepted it. As we do.”

He nodded. Then he said, “What do you think people in the past would have thought of this rain? It would have been worse for them, I imagine.”

She nodded. “I suppose they would have accepted it.”

He nodded. “That’s the truth. Don’t you think? It would have been worse for people in the past.” And he guided his belly into the bathroom.

Untended for so long, Beatrice Menendez launched a pugnacious look at her husband’s back and collapsed onto the pillows. Soon her gaze had tangled in the blades of the overhead fan and went into a slow and lazy reverse returning her to the never-to-be-repeated afternoon when Lieutenant Casares had shyly sought her cheeks to say goodbye, señora, thanks for the tea, it was a lovely – and found his mouth fastened to a pair of skatelips that sucked him upstairs, along a corridor, through two cedarwood doors and puffed him onto a bedspread of pink corrugated cotton where, gaspingly, without words, without explanation, with her skirt still flustering her waist, she made him remind her of what it meant, O God, O sweet, incorrigible God, to be a woman again.

“Gentlemen, Deputies, Ministers of the Chamber . . . ” Under the loose nozzle of the shower, the Governor rehearsed his speech.

The thought of Lieutenant Casares led Beatrice Menendez inevitably to think of another who had made the same pilgrimage to this bed. Gratifying as her experience with the Lieutenant had been, it in no way eclipsed her memory of Periclito.

She had been thinking recently a good deal about Periclito. They had seen something of each other when she first arrived in Abyla. Aware of this, her husband had tried to be kind, which she found irritating. And now Periclito was coming back . . .

“Please believe that I . . . ”

In the bathroom, the Governor was still expressing himself to death. He was unsuited by temperament to the admission of failure, that was the problem. And to judge from the look on his face, suggesting he had mislaid a vital expression, he had been staring at it with some intensity since yesterday evening.

“ . . . it is with enormous regret that I announce to the chamber my decision to postpone the opening of the tunnel by a further year.”