2

“I hope he fights well, for his mother’s sake,” Halima told Wavery, who stood drinking a glass of water at the sink. The señor Consul General had interrupted her in the kitchen as she was consulting a card from the concertina folder. This was to have been the evening of his reception. Despite its cancellation, she wanted to treat her master to a special meal. But she was worried for him. When she had seen two hens looking into each other’s eyes she had known Emilio would die. And this morning, in a courtyard in El Hadu, she had observed the same omen.

“Yes,” said Wavery vaguely. He filled another glass and went upstairs.

“I’ve put your shirt on the bed, señor,” she called after him.

Halima wanted to believe that Señor Wavery was depressed about the tunnel. But it had nothing to do with the tunnel. This depression her master had caught the other side of La Mujer Muerte. She didn’t know what had happened in those mountains, but he had returned from Africa with a different mouth. His eyes were different too. The glasses magnified the ripples of flesh beneath, as if his eyes had been thrown with force against his face.

Since the weekend of his visit to Chauen he had become a statue of himself. He had not once been swimming. He never noticed Ham’s horse-shoe of fur against his leg. He stayed in his bedroom with a huge pile of paper on his lap. These were the pages he had written on the terrace. But Halima never saw him writing anything. Nor did he read as he used to. Instead he sat on a cane chair by the open window, picking up each page and passing his eyes over it with an expression of such blankness that Halima was reminded of Ghanem of the Mute, on the occasion she had to collect her husband from the Café Ulises (after Berahu had decided to taste for himself whatever it was the Nazarenes made such a fuss about).

Last night she had tried to galvanise her master from the chair. “Come here, señor, come here. Look!” She led him to the tree on the terrace. In twenty years this was the first time she had seen it in flower. She held back the branches for him to see. The white, veined oval broadened under the leaves. “The tree is dreaming.”

Briefly Wavery stared at the handkerchief, before hitching his eyes over Senator Zamora’s roof. His mouth was silent, but it told Halima he was trying to find the world smaller than a star.

3

The Earthquake was back. Quite as fat and very red, one leg trailing slightly behind the other, no room between his mouth and nose for the black moustache that trembled with wine drops. Periclito, the gourmet who bridled if you asked whether his famous cassoulet was tinned, whose heart never failed to bounce like a hare at the sight of a blond head, such as the once-blond head of Señora Criado, the cook, who whenever she thought of their nights together thought of a double-door falling upon her with the key still in its lock. Periclito, the lover of two hundred and eighty-nine such women, who walked stiffly off the ferry wearing a surgical corset. Periclito, the blue-jowled, fast-talking, tender-hearted and passionately immoral owner of the Café Ulises. Periclito Merimée Amaral, the bullfighter who had travelled the world as fourth, third and very occasionally as second fiddle to the matadors of Bogota, Lima and Caracas was back in Abyla.