“The levante!” said Sandra the Rapist, a hand flying to her chest. “The levante!” And a shudder ran through the easels. Every sailor feared the levante, the mad-bull wind that paced out of sight on a mirror sea. It came at you from nowhere. You saw it shivering awake the waves and you heard its breath, the desperate breath of a creature locked in the cavities of the deep.

The mad bull charged from the east. A mile away, in the Moorish quarter of El Hadu, lived those who believed you could prevent its charge. They believed the levante could be frightened off, in the same way a child might summon it by playing with a sieve. They would truss up a dog and make it howl. They would sprinkle dry blood on a fire, hoping the smoke would blind the wind. But you cannot blind the levante. In fact there is little you can do when the levante hurls itself from a ring of sky, removing boats, beaches and restaurant roofs on both sides of the Straits.

“Come Sandra, away,” said the superintendent, closing the window.

It was not the cruel east wind, he told the artists. It was the poniente, a mild westerly which blew from the Atlantic, driving rain and sea mist through Hercules’ pillars and winnowing the valleys.

Joseph Silkleigh felt the poniente at sea. He was searching for Emilio, the fisherman, beneath a turtle egg of a moon. He had steered from the headland, to where the Grau was blazing. The wind bid the waves rise to spray and a current tugged at the wheel of his boat. Silkleigh looked at the Grau lolling in the swell. He listened for some cry. But of the fisherman who had been sailing his new boat home when that vast prow towered through the fog, he heard nothing.

Rosita heard the wind in a room above the Café Ulises. It flapped the blue awning with such force that Gallo, the bellboy, who had climbed the stairs to enquire if she was ready, was obliged to knock twice. “Yes, yes, I’m coming.”

The wind blasted through the shutters of the library, where Dolores painted her long nails. Tonight the library closed at eight. She was blowing on her varnish, a shade of scarlet that shrilled “I don’t work”, when the telephone rang. It was Panteco to say he still had business at the prison. He would collect her at nine. As the policeman talked, Dolores put on a large brown coat. This had been Ernesto’s coat. It had deep velvet-lined pockets down into which she would plunge her fingers when they were dry. “Feel there, put your hand in,” she would challenge a man. Anyone who didn’t say immediately, “Yes, it feels wonderful,” she didn’t trust. It was a primitive test, but the coat was all she had of Ernesto. She would never give it up.

The conductor’s widow heard the wind and for the first time in three days unfastened the balcony window. Immediately, a pigeon blew into her room and toppled onto the television a cup of tea she had poured herself and forgotten, and then an empty bottle of White Bear perfume which had belonged to her mother, before settling briefly on a book belonging to her mother’s friend Colonel Slava who was forever leaving her bits and pieces from better collections, including the third volume of a priceless history of Kiev, printed in French in 1633, upon which, lifting its tail before flying off, the bird deposited a small grey memory. If vodka were made out of pigeons, Ernesto used to say, there would be no pigeons. Ernesto! Genia Ortiz flinched at his memory. She sat down on a banquette of pink window cushions and breathed in the fresh air. Her eyes smarted from a weekend’s confinement. She felt old and fragile. She felt worthy of her grandson’s nickname for her, “Age”.