There were lots of children at the zoo, but surrounded as they were by all those animals in cages or scattered around the enclosures, they were hardly surprised to see me with Gilda by my side. The air by the river, where the zoo had been built, was stimulating, with gusts of wind that seemed like razor cuts, though only very slightly biting and not pitiless.

Gilda seemed sulky, she let herself be carried here and there, and it was only when we came to the big monkey pit that she was reluctant to stop and her hand stiffened in mine. Obviously those dirty, mangy, quarrelsome apes embarrassed her.

It all happened when we lingered by the gorilla’s cage. The gorilla was an extremely rare specimen. He sat there, huddled like an old carpet. Then he moved, and I saw that he wasn’t a male, but a female, with a baby in her arms. She was at least one metre eighty tall, maybe more, a big, vigilant beast with glossy black fur and aggressive tar-black eyes, but with her fingers tenderly clasping the little one in her lap. I hoisted Gilda on my back so that she could see better. Immediately I felt her shaking as if she’d been stricken with a high fever. She bent her little arms and squeezed my neck, and her breath in my ear sounded fractured with emotion, or with terror.

‘Good girl,’ I whispered to her. ‘Don’t you see how beautiful she is? A giant. Would you let me make ‘Bee-ba’ with her, eh?’

I felt the slight touch of her nails around my neck, and then a big shudder that shook her in every vertebra.

But when we got home, she shut herself in the bathroom and for a long time I heard her weeping desperately. I didn’t say anything, didn’t call her, because after three wives I know perfectly well how valuable silence is as a response to a female’s tears.

She came out and served dinner, without the slightest sigh escaping her mouth. She obeyed each of my requests – the salt, the oil, a fruit knife – with her usual docility, but without the celebratory frenzy I know so well.

After dinner, she immediately went off to bed, while I sat up to watch television.

It’s only now, in the bedroom, that I discover she’s swallowed an entire tube of sleeping pills.

From her mouth the breath emerges thin, already wheezing. I’ve telephoned the Red Cross, someone will be here soon. Maybe they’ll be able to save her for me.

My head feels empty, my hands alternately dry and moist. I stand here looking at her, waiting for the doorbell to ring. Yes, maybe they’ll save her. But what then? Will she still be my Gilda, will she be what she was yesterday, what she’s always been? Or will she start to grow suspicious and hate me, the way my other wives did? What little acts of revenge will she come up with in the labyrinth of her female mind?