The kindness of women came to my rescue, at a time when I had almost given up hope. Within a few weeks of her death I discovered that I had lost not only Miriam but all the women in the world. An unbridgeable space separated me from Miriam’s friends and the women I knew, as if they had decided to isolate me within a carefully drawn cordon. Later I realised that they were standing at a distance, in the nearby rooms of my life, waiting until I had faced my anger at myself. Then they came forward and did everything to help me. The kindness of women and the affection of my children steered me safely through those first long months.

During our final days in Rosas, as the Nordlunds helped me to pack, I looked down from the balcony at the tourists stretched out on the beach, playing their parts in the eerie imitation of reality that life had become. The sun shone on the same parasols and pedalos, but everything had changed. In the hours since Miriam’s death the entire female race had mutated into a different species. The women eating their gambas in the beach restaurants avoided my eyes, talking among themselves as they licked their red-stained fingers. When I cashed the last of my traveller’s cheques I noticed that the bodies of the women queuing at the counter had lost their scent. Even Mrs. Nordlund, with her determined smile and affection towards the children, stared at me with the gaze of a relief worker from a foreign country.

Only Señor Robles’s German-speaking secretary was still herself. Checking the inventory, she peered into the darkened bedroom, clearly assuming that here Miriam had died at my hands. She opened the mirrored cabinet in the bathroom and ran her fingers along the tooth glasses.

“Nix kaputt?”

“Kaputt nix.”

She glanced at me in that way I would come to resent, a mixture of curiosity and distance, like a spectator at the scene of a crime. I wanted to take her wrists and raise her elbows so that I could inhale the scent of her armpits, press my fingers into her natal cleft. I disliked this cocksure young woman enough to have sex with her while the children waited in the car with the Nordlunds. I wanted to prove that at least one woman still existed. But she moved away from me to the hallway and took the stairs rather than be alone with me in the elevator. In her mind my wife’s death had let a rapist loose upon the world.