His voice piped over the field. “Did you get it, Maman?”

Before they had left Abyla, her son had seen for sale in the Plaza de los Reyes a daguerreotype of a bullfight. He had entrusted her his savings to buy it. But the man wasn’t there. There was no one in the square. Marie forgot her own business and spent the afternoon passing from shop to shop, desperate for a hat, a cape, the plastic model of a bull, anything to do with the corrida. But there was nothing.

Determined not to return empty-handed, she bought him a straw sombrero outside the Hotel Zamora.

At thirty, Periclito’s head had grown too large for the sombrero, but in his own eyes he remained the figure in the daguerreotype, his throat outstretched to the crowd as if he was a goat nibbling at an argan tree.

“Oh, Periclito,” she said aloud while concentrating in an abstract way on the Senator and his grandson. She had last seen her son three years ago.

“Olé!”

She saw him circled by oxcarts, lunging at something or other somewhere in Venzuela, not yet a matador. When would she see him again? Perhaps he would come for the celebrations next August. Perhaps – how could she not have thought of it! The feria de toros! The bullfight for which her instructive and lovable Senator Zamora had been appointed President.

At the fountain Marie Amaral stooped to pick up her bucket, and an idea thrilled her.

4

Rosita saw her stepmother through the window. As soon as Marie Amaral was back inside her stall, Rosita slipped the rabbit-skin coat from its hanger, tucked the collar against her ears and said to her assistant, “I’ll be back at two.”

All morning she had been modelling shoes and clothes for Portuguese tourists. All morning they had wanted to see if this boot or that leather coat or that gum-pink slipper would suit their wife, their girlfriend, their mistress. All morning they had gazed at Rosita unseeing. They saw her taller, thinner, fatter, prettier. For one hour she would be her unhappy self.

She circled the empty fountain to the bench where she usually sat.

“Now that’s what I mean by not using your intelligence,” Teodoro Zamora was lecturing his grandson. Pablo was crying. He had offered the dog a lick and the dog had eaten his whole ice cream.

“Naughty Toribio,” Zamora. The dog licked his fingers. “See those feet, Pablo, webbed like a duck’s? They help him to swim. He swims like this, rope in mouth, to the shore. In times of war he used to carry messages across the Tagus. Didn’t you?” But Toribio the Portuguese waterdog must have had water in his ear. He licked the last flecks of ice cream from his mouth, yawned, and trotted down the hill.

Zamora stood up. “I’ll buy you another ice cream.” He set about cleaning Pablo’s sticky cheeks with a sleeve of his cardigan.

“Hello, Pablo,” said Rosita.