In the early days, Ernesto told her to be quiet, Genia, for the love of God. Vexed, she looked back, her eyes locking, then unlocking, not thinking about him at all. He knew it wasn’t snobbery that had given her a squint – as many suggested – but from time to time he did wonder if the non-alignment of vision that entranced him once in the foyer of an arctic concert hall had deteriorated with the century.

She would respond by saying she had been hurt, that was all, and fall into a proud self-consolatory sulk almost as irritating to Ernesto as whatever had precipitated it. Eventually he learned to say nothing.

Genia remained a virgin until the night in the twenty-third year of her marriage when Ernesto was scratched by a wounded tomcat as he left the Club de Pensiones. He had given up approaching her long ago, but as she washed away the blood, one hand remained squeezing his left ankle. Her other arm rested on his knee. Ernesto, sitting with no trousers, gently spread her fingers and laid them without a word upon the mound shifting inside his underpants.

Since his marriage to Genia that mound had shifted for many women. After all, what does a man do when his wife denies him, when instead of performing her conjugal duties she treats him to stories about the beau monde in pre-revolutionary Kiev, a diet far richer than the Hofbauer truffles with which Ernesto learned to commence his overtures? While he regretted Genia’s obstinacy, his position as conductor and his gamey good looks guaranteed a certain success.

The idiosyncratic justice he liked to administer on the flanks of aspirant cellists was a punishment he would much rather have wrought upon his wife.

Genia Ortiz, uncovering the mound, remained ignorant of her husband’s nuits folles and that part of his soul he allowed out to hunt. Because the same part of her own soul had not been awakened, she had not taken account his infidelities. Yes, she saw that women liked to mother him. Yes, she watched waitresses feed him pieces of almond cake she hadn’t eaten. Sometimes she wondered if she should mind. But until the night he was scratched by a cat, she had not coveted an area he had surrendered to others.

On the verge of making love for the first time with his wife of twenty-three years, Ernesto felt the nerves of a small boy whose bluff has at last been called.

At first sex terrified Genia Ortiz as much as the prospect of pregnancy. Under a delusion about the motility of semen, she lay back as clenched as when the cart approached the pothole telling Ernesto in a small voice to do as he pleased.

He didn’t like to do much. Jelly made her slippery and Hüter’s vaginal powder which she applied in large doses, caused him grave irritations. Possibly such sexual contact as they enjoyed in their first year would have ceased altogether in the second had not Ernesto returned from a season of Mahler concerts in Prague bearing a curious contraption described by its inventor as a Venus Apparatus.