What he had said impressed her more than his Phoenician anecdote. Her nose wrinkled. “Menendez?” she said.

Zamora nodded. “Even Menendez.”

She began to giggle, a superb rich giggle that caused Senator Zamora to begin laughing himself and Marie Amaral to respond until she had to wipe the tears from her eyes.

The wrong man had been killed, the wrong woman raped. She knew what she had suffered was nothing, nothing, nothing compared to the experience of many others in Oran. But she knew after that night she never again wished to be in Europe.

Death came in nibbles. Stress locked her jaw. She ceased to menstruate. It was natural for women in a state of shock to cease menstruating. When she discovered she was pregnant she cut her wrists. She nearly died, but she had no talent for death. She shaved off her beautiful hair. In the mirror she saw a face such as she would later see in the asylum in Calle Silvestre. She tapped the window, grinning. She cartwheeled about the room uttering hideous cries. She squatted in the corner, not bothering to go outside.

It was curious. By the act of pretending to be someone else, she preserved her sanity. “I survived because I played a madwoman, Teodoro.”

She played a madwoman for a month. Her head began to blacken again. Her stomach grew.

In September she was stopped by two policemen in the Rue Balzac.

“Why the veil?”

Don’t scream, she told herself. They can smell your fear. Look at him. What does he remind you of? She could only compare the small hard peak of his cap to a bitten fingernail.

“It’s hot. It’s not illegal. I was seeing a friend.”

“An Arab?”

“She is, yes.”

“Any Arab is a rebel.”

“Let her go,” said his colleague. “Elle avait la frousse.” He could see she was no more than what she said, the daughter of a colon. He waved her on, not bothering to flatten the hand which held the address of the woman in the next street.

Marie Amaral had read of her in the newspaper. Absolute success in discrete matters. Feminine ailments quickly and economically cured in strictest confidence. Many testimonials. It would be more expensive than she could afford. The Abortion Act meant not only the mother risked prison, the abortionist too.

“I won’t ask who’s given you the big stomach,” said the woman, drawing her lips on a cemetery of yellow teeth. Marie Amaral lifted the gold chain over her head. “I can only pay with this,” she said in a voice further away than the mountains. The woman trailed it from her fingers. She nodded.

Marie Amaral stripped. She lay on the couch, her folded shirt a cushion under her head. The woman strapped her ankles into stirrups. She prattled from the basin. She believed it soothed her clients to know exactly what she was doing. She was preparing a salve of camphor and saffron which she was now injecting through this tube, a little wider, no – a little more, that’ll do, into the uterus. To poison and dislodge the foetus.