She noticed me lying beside her and returned to work, shaking her head over my feeble erection. She took her left breast and teased out the nipple, tapping it with her sharp nails until it grew erect. Raising it to my mouth, she pressed the warm body of the breast against my nose and chin, placed my hand against her buttocks, and steered my fingers down to her anus, pushing the tip of my ring finger into the soft pad. She reached down to the root of my penis, searching for my prostate. When my penis came to life she nodded encouragingly, made sure that my eyes stayed on her breasts and my fingers on her anus. With her strong arms she turned me onto my back and squatted across my hips, sitting on her haunches so that the only part of her body to touch me was her vulva.

Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia. At last, when the rake of both penis and pubis had matched to her satisfaction, she settled down and let my penis enter her vagina. She bobbed away energetically, glancing briefly at herself in the dressing-table mirror and now and then blowing the hair from her eyes.

I held her strong thighs, aware that she was working as hard as the older women assembling their trinkets. All of us, myself certainly included, were working to make the film festival a success. Even the empty camera in whose lens we were reflected had helped to shape our sex act. As she smoothed her eyebrows Carmen was measuring her profile against the lens, preparing herself for the even more elaborate sex films in which she would appear. Lying between her thighs, I was little more than an extra recruited from the hotel terraces of Copacabana. When she raised herself, teasingly holding the tip of my penis between her breasts, I almost felt that we were extemporising a small variation on a fixed routine.

With its passive and unobtrusive despotism, the camera governed the smallest spaces of our lives. Even in the privacy of our own homes we had all been recruited to play our parts in what were little more than real-life commercials. As we cooked in our kitchens we were careful to follow the manufacturer’s instructions, as we made love in our bedrooms we embraced within a familiar repertoire of gestures and affections. The medium of film had turned us all into minor actors in an endlessly running daytime serial. In the future, airliners would crash and presidents would be assassinated within agreed conventions as formalised as the coronation of a tsar.