3

In the Plaza de los Reyes a pigeon settled on a palm frond, dislodging a cough of dust. Marie Amaral observed its powdery descent. It tumbled into the waterless fountain and over the bucket she had left out overnight, filled to the brim with rock roses.

This morning when she opened her stall, the bucket was empty. It was a metal bucket with a handle that squeaked. In such a bucket Captain Panteco’s grandfather, a veteran of Cuba, a minor poet, and for twenty-three years the city’s night watchman, had carried the blood from the old bullring in Santos Vilela and tipped the contents into the ground at the base of the palm trees. The recipe was effective. The blood strengthened the roots and almost seventy years later the carnivorous trees spread a generous shade over the benches.

Marie Amaral loved this square. It was her luxury to sit here when the flowers did not require her. She would sit for an hour, a newspaper on her lap, now and then looking up to watch her stall. She could have her shoes cleaned or her palm read or a silhouette of her profile scissored out of card. In the bull-black shade, she sat out the heat.

In the shoe shop on the corner Marie Amaral saw her step-daughter arranging shoes in the window. Immediately, she became cross with herself. I’m full of emptiness, she thought. I am moved to sentimentality by a pair of children’s gumboots, yet I remain immobile in the real face of my stepdaughter’s unhappiness.

How she wished she could have found some words to say an hour ago. Anything. And she had been going to be a teacher! Ah, Marie Amaral, if you could know now what you knew then.

Into the stall had walked Rosita, tortoiseshell comb in her hair, red nails, rabbit-skin coat on her shoulders. But inside, dry earth.

“Is something bothering?” Marie Amaral could tell when her stepdaughter was distressed. She didn’t wear make-up or wash her hair.

“Silkleigh,” said Rosita. She picked up a piece of cellophane and tore at it with her teeth.

“Don’t do that. It ruins the enamel.”

“Mama, help me.”

Rosita sought Marie Amaral’s comfort as she had never sought it in the days of her marriage to the unsuitable guitarist, or afterwards when she lived with the policeman. Silkleigh was another matter.

Rosita wanted help and Marie Amaral couldn’t give it. She was useless, without a tongue, emptier than the babouche mounds in Oran’s medina. Something vital had gone. That broken mirror, its fragments, they had been reassembling ever since she had dropped the vase. Like a film in reverse. Sweeping off the floor, showing the world as it was before Abyla.

Marie Amaral retreated indoors. She needed to distract herself. She made some coffee. She wiped last week’s prices, written in felt pen, from a bunch of plastic tabs. She cut open a cardboard box, one of five purchased from the Dutchman. She removed the bouvardia. “In God’s earth till yesterday, señora.”