Marie Amaral’s legs were drawn up in the same position as Merimée had raised them when he entered her. The syringe was old and the contents leaked through the nozzle over the abortionist’s hands.

Later the tube was removed and the woman swabbed her with carbolic soap. She returned to the basin. At this age it had a heart but no face. Her interminable talk rose over the sound from the bed. The sound was not describable. Every woman had her own sound, but uttered through the same snarled-back lips. She had wanted to be a chemist, not an abortionist. She dropped the syringe into a wooden box. There shouldn’t be any problems. In case there are, remember – every day the horsie!

When the abortion failed, Marie Amaral did not return to the apartment in the Rue Narbonne. She drank foul-tasting lavender tea and ate plants containing volatile oils. In October she swallowed four packets of matches, heads only, hoping the phosphorus would kill. She was sick for a week. Under its smock her stomach grew. In November she jumped from a charred branch into the garden, spraining her knee. A day before Periclito was born she made a vow. If the child lived she would hurl it into the sea – towards the country of its father.

A bark returned Marie Amaral to the square. Pablo’s rocking horse had excited the fisherman’s dog. Once he became accustomed to the motion, Toribio returned to Zamora’s side. He slumped to the ground, watching Pablo on the horse, his tail slapping in the dust.

Zamora’s grandson wanted always to know everything. He would visit her stall when he should have been at school.

“Why doesn’t Periclito look like you? Why does he have to fight bulls? Why isn’t he at home ever?”

“I don’t know, Pablo,” she said. “Maybe he just doesn’t like Abyla.” But it was a lie. The truth had a different smell. The truth had its own smell, but how could she convey it to an eight-year-old boy, still less to her son or her stepdaughter.

Periclito had looked and behaved much as Pablo had behaved at the same age. Marie Amaral, watching Pablo on his horse, realised she had done nothing about the red bouvardia stems. Every bucket in the stall was full. The only spare bucket was that by the fountain which she had left last night filled with rock roses. She walked outside, into the square.

“I’m a picador!” Pablo’s arm was a lance, the dog at his feet a bull. “Olé!”

She thought of Periclito. She had failed her son, as an hour ago she had failed Rosita.

“Olé!”

She thought of Periclito at Pablo’s age, more than twenty years before.

“Maman, did you get my bull?” He was running through the marigold field on the other side of La Mujer Muerta. She had taken a house for the summer, where Teodoro Zamora shot his duck and wild pig. A flock of doves flew low over the marigold field, catching the sun on their wings, fading, catching the sun again, settling, rising as he panted towards her.