More and more as she grew older, Marie Amaral detested cruelty to animals. She hated the men lying patiently in wait for green turtles on the military beach at Monte Hacho. She hated the boys on La Mujer Muerta who inserted feathers through the beak-holes of butcherbirds and tied their legs with string and waved them at passing cars like kites. And most of all she hated that part of herself which attracted her on this breezy afternoon to the corrida de toros and the spectacle of her corseted son, short, fat and out of breath, unable to run but (she hoped) nimble with his sword, whose swordplay she would find it somewhere in her heart to admire because whatever the distance between them, a distance which from childhood he had filled with women, bulls and cassoulet, he was her son.

This afternoon, despite her reservations, she looked young, relaxed. In the morning a palmist had read her fortune, saying that if she squeezed it tight into a fist he would promise to tell her how many children she had and whether she was leading a double life.

“Like that?”

He pronounced her very honest, very human and able to separate her head from her heart.

“And how many children?” she wanted to know.

He counted the lines. “Two.”

On a cushion next to her Wavery remembered, “I think my first fight must have been in Lisbon.”

“Pshaw!” exclaimed Marie Amaral. “That’s not bullfighting. The animal is led through the whole process – and not killed! But killed in a butcher’s shop. Very frivolous,” she said, “For a fighting bull not to fight to the death is not to fulfil his life.”

In the Royal Box Genia Ortiz was making a favourable comparison with Kiev’s Horse-Racing Society.

She leaned forward, enjoying the sight of her son and his camera-crew, enjoying the sun flashing on the brass as the Tercio band rested their instruments. There had not been a corrida in Abyla for twenty years. Every seat was occupied.

Asunción wiped away the lipstick on her father’s cheeks, left there by her younger sister.

“Where are my other handkerchiefs? Clotilda? Pablo, give those to me! For God’s sake, Asunción; control your son.”

An official tapped his watch. It was time! President Zamora gestured he knew this perfectly well. He waved the white square of silk. A trumpet sounded and a door opened in the makeshift stadium and a black bull trotted into the ring.

Periclito’s first bull was the third of the afternoon. He took the alternativa from “El Troyanito” in the presence of Rafael Lara. He limped into the centre of the bullring, waving at the crowd who answered him with a murmur of the flowers they held back, but intended later to hurl at him. Troyanito waited, sweating, as the bare-headed matador de novillos hobbled towards him. They shook hands, and Troyanito gave to the Earthquake his red-serge cape and the sword with which ten minutes before he had despatched the second bull.