It’s over. He will shoot us. We’ll be free.

But he doesn’t move. He sees the mirror, full length on the wall, and in the mirror himself.

Or rape me, she thinks. On the floor beside my son. The Arabs never raped in bed, not the men from the Aurés. His young face came from those mountains.

Still he does not move. He confronts the long mirror, a wedding present from her father. He stands there rooted to the boards, such a look of terror on his face Marie Amaral thinks, Is it possible? Is this the first mirror he has seen? Can he never have seen a mirror before? Does that explain the awful cry as he jerks up his gun and squeezes the trigger on his reflection? His cry is more terrifying than the sound of the women below.

And then, desperate, on all fours, he searches for a body in the glass. He whispers something, noticing her at last. She crouches in the corner. She has urinated and her feet are damp and steamy. In a thin, dreadful voice she says to her maid, Zohra. “What does he say?”

“He says, ‘Where is he?’”

He speaks again. His fingers are tipped with blood.

“‘Or was it a woman?’”

But Marie Amaral is not listening. She has seen the bed. She has seen her mirror-wounded son.

When a mirror breaks, seven years of misfortune follow. But when a mirror is shot?

Marie Amaral, making a supreme effort, pressed one foot on the bin-pedal and threw away the pot.

And still the poniente blew, ruffling the lanky palms along the Marina Española, following the road upwards, past the massive red fortress of San Felipe built by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century and now a Sala de Bingo, past the Multi-Cine Cervantes showing Persadilla en Elm Streets 5, beyond the Museo de Arqueologia with its empty sarcophogae, where Senator Zamora had spent the past month restoring what he believed was a Moorish prickspur, but had found to be a rowlock, past the catering vans, the terrapin sheds and the compound fence of the tunnel workers and into the decrepit alleyways of El Hadu, no broader than a shoulder.

It blew over the prison, over the lighthouse, over the orchids beginning to flower on the slopes of Monte Hacho, over the protected military beach where a figure crouched stiller than stone and over the mother who walked up and down the shore hallooing again and again and again to the gloating sea.

“Emilio! Emilio! Emilio . . . ”

3

“Emeeeeleeeeoooo . . . ”

The waves were huge things, but they had not brought him in. For three nights she had faced them and her cry, at first the anguished-angry call of a mother for a truant son, had become irregular and flattened, like a gull’s cry.

“Emeeeeleeeeoooo . . . ”

She stood on the beach in the dusk. Wavery saw her as he walked home along the Marina Española. Where she stood a group had gathered that morning on the grey sand. They were looking at Emilio’s overnight bag, empty and pulpy and pearly with oil.