Time had not been cruel to Genia Ortiz, but she considered it had been mischievous. From behind, her figure had the shape of a teenage girl.

In only a few places did her eighty-seven years betray themselves. In a line below her nose, which made it seem as if the skin was smiling against itself; in the liver spots on the backs of her hands; and in a stiffness of movement. When she turned, as now, she turned with her whole body.

She faced the small, cluttered room. Through watery eyes she saw her brocatelle curtains, coloured in the blue and yellow of the Free Ukraine; the clock she overwound, its hour hand fashioned as a swinging pierrot; and standing in the centre of a dark blue carpet her oval Viennese desk on which was a framed photograph of her father in the elkskin breeches of a cavalry officer. This was the only photograph in the room. There was no likeness of her husband. Ernesto had been banished to the trunk beneath her bed, where with a feeling it served him right, she had locked away her childhood photographs.

“Your bloody photographs” – these had been the conductor’s last words to her, or the last words she recalled with clarity for he probably mumbled something about lunch at the Café Ulises with Periclito. So, as a penance, she forbade herself to look again at the photographs of her father’s estate. Ernesto might not have needed Dolores, his last love, or any of his other loves, had she done so earlier. From that day, she refused to think about him. Most of all she refused to think about gypsy-lipped Dolores who worked in the library next to El Faro and whose white skin Ernesto would joke was an octave too high for his taste but in whose long white arms on a second-floor room in the Hotel Zamora he had died.

Revived by the air, Genia Ortiz abandoned the window seat. She wondered if they had found Emilio’s body. She turned on the television. It was a present from her son, who made soap operas in Madrid and who was always promising to come for Christmas and then cancelling, causing Asunción, the wife from whom he was separated, to say, “See! Now do you understand? He was always impossible. But what do I tell Pablo?” Genia Ortiz could see how impossible Tromso was – “Exactly like his father.” The effect of his father’s absence on her eight-year-old grandson was too clear. She could only say, “I know, Asunción, I know. But next year, when he’s not so busy.”

This year again he had promised to come for Christmas. “If you don’t, Tromso . . . ” But she had nothing to threaten him with.

She was too late for the news. Tromso’s soap was playing, for once free of interference. One woman was saying to another, “Every little fish expects to become a whale, Tania.” But Genia Ortiz never watched her son’s programmes, not in the evenings nor in the mornings when the episodes were repeated. It was another challenge she had set herself, like her refusal to look at the photographs beneath her bed.