“How can I? I used to see things in him I recognised in his father, but I couldn’t tell him why I cried, ‘Out!’ And now it’s too late. How can I tell him I feel as much guilt as love? That guilt is stronger.”

Zamora uncrossed his legs. He picked up his father’s hat from the sand and leaned forward. He held the hat between his knees, allowing his gaze to fall into its bat-coloured bowl as if he would find there, on the label reading SEVILLE – CALLE DEL GATO, 34, the words she needed him to say. He looked back at her. When he spoke his words were candle-light kind. He didn’t speak of the rat-hunt, nor about betrayal, nor about what David might have thought. He talked about the Phoenicians. “People laugh. But they had many answers,” he said. He asked Marie Amaral to imagine herself a woman of Byblos.

“Byblos?” said Marie Amaral, doubtfully.

He explained. Once in the course of their lives, it was incumbent on any woman born in Byblos to visit Astarte’s temple and there to associate with a stranger. Only foreign pilgrims were permitted entry to the temple. When these women – “all honourable women, Marie” – had offered themselves to a pilgrim they could return home, their duty fulfilled.

“Major Merimée as a pilgrim?” said Marie Amaral, astonished.

“As a pilgrim,” insisted Zamora who all along had suspected what everyone else in Abyla suspected.

“Look at his ears, look at his ears,” Marie Amaral would say in the early days. “They’re just like David’s.” Zamora had been glad when her appeal ceased. There was no one in Abyla who could verify whether or not the owner of the Café Ulises had David’s ears. One thing was unarguable: he did not have his mother’s uninheritable grace.

Marie Amaral pressed her side as if she was about to say something, but Zamora continued. It was wrong to grieve forever. Too much grief made a cobblestone of the heart.

“But when Minerva died?”

“When Minerva died, I grieved – for a while,” and he thought of those soupless days, sitting on the bed with her photograph. “But old love doesn’t rust.”

Marie Amaral remembered the iris he bought on Minerva’s birthday, every year an extra stem. “If she lives to a hundred you’ll have to sell the car!”

On the rock beside her, Senator Zamora said, “And God? I don’t suppose he helps?”

“No,” she faltered. “What do you believe, Teodoro?”

“I believe – No. What do I believe?” Telling someone what you believed had the same effect as looking them in the eye. He sat back. An hour ago he was routing Porcil at dominoes. He sat forward, groping in the darkness of his father’s hat.

“If I think of what you have seen, Marie, I have seen nothing,” he said. “Yet I have lived through six revolutions. And you know what happens? After each revolution everyone becomes a hero. I was never a hero. I tried to be honest, that’s all. But one thing I have learned is this: neither intelligence nor art is a weapon against the beast in the human heart. That said, I do believe all of us at some point experience what it is to be beautiful as well as to be ugly. To be strong and also to be weak. To be good and bad, funny, boring, rich, poor, a flower seller, a senator, I won’t go on. We all become Hercules. We all become Menendez. One cannot avoid the fate. That is what it means to be human. The important thing is to be yourself when it happens.” He looked her in the eye. “It’s time to be yourself again, Marie.”