Joseph Silkleigh smelled it as he sat on his usual stool in the Café Ulises. He was staring into an open notebook. The pages were blank except for the words “Chapter One” above which he had written and crossed out A Man of Promise. “The words are not leading me by the hand, Mohamed,” he told the man behind the bar. He was reaching for his glass when his nose filled with what he knew at once were diesel fumes.

Dolores caught the same smell and wondered if it might not be something to do with the books, possibly those in the Local History shelves. She locked up the library in a hurry. It was Friday and early closing and she was meeting Rosita for lunch. Rosita wanted to discuss Silkleigh. She wanted to discuss Panteco. Depending on how long lunch lasted, they would end up talking about Ernesto, the conductor.

At that moment the conductor’s widow was contemplating the cluttered drawing room of her apartment in Calle Zamora. What a revolting smell! thought Genia Ortiz, and she hurried to open the windows. The smell liberated several memories she had imprisoned in the green trunk under her bed: the empty lake-lamps in Balnasharki, the snuffed-out candles after dinner, her arrival in Abyla sixty-eight years before, aboard a ship wreathed in black flies. More disturbingly, it reminded her of Ernesto, whose memory she had made strenuous efforts to fumigate from her life.

In the dining room of the red house opposite, Senator Teodoro Zamora de Avellaneda Mancheño y Centurión, was eating lunch. It was a while before he realised the smell had nothing to do with the soup which his Portuguese cook had splattered over his purple cardigan as she summarised the plot of last night’s soap.

Senator Zamora sat and nodded. But his mind was promiscuously elsewhere: on the Governor’s letter, unfolded beside his bread plate, inviting him to be President of the Bullfight; on this afternoon’s drive with his grandson, Pablo, to visit the rock formation known as the Footstep of Hercules; on the tunnel.

“Give that to me, señor.” Señora Criado, concluding her synopsis, had noticed the soup spot on Senator Zamora’s cardigan. Before he could protest she was undoing the buttons.

“Thank you, Señora Criado,” he said, allowing her to peel the cardigan off him. She held out a hand and he passed her the bowl. He gave his cook an erudite smile. “A day without soup is a day without sun!”

If it wasn’t the soup, could the smell be in some way connected to his next course?

To Marie Amaral, closing her flowerstall for the day and catching sight of the rancid drift above the Club de Pensiones, the smell brought back such a terrible and unexpected memory that she dropped the yellow begonia she was bringing inside and her lungs filled with an Algerian night, a night of burning hair and animal screams and mad klaxons and flames of every colour twisting through the trees. Think of something else, she told herself. Anything but that, Marie Amaral. Anything. Her left arm had been weakened by a tetanus booster and she pulled off her gloves with her teeth. She needed the sanity of her flowers, but their sanity deserted her. She bent to gather up the pieces of shattered terracotta, the spilled earth, the plant. “Where shall I put you?” she said aloud to hear a voice.