He took deep breaths until he felt his lungs collapsing under the weight of the dirt and soot, and reckoning he’d paid his dues in suffering to his restless self-torture, he returned to the shelter of his doorway and stripped off his shirt. The parched feeling in his throat now burnt more keenly, while the certainty he was alone had run riot and was trickier to trace to any particular corner of his body. It flowed unchecked, as if coursing through his veins. “You’re always bloody remembering”, his friend Skinny Carlos constantly told him: Lent and loneliness inevitably meant he remembered. That wind brought to the surface the black sands and detritus in his memory, brittle leaves of dead loves and bitter odours of guilt, with an intensity more perverse than forty days in the desert. Fuck this wind, he muttered, resolving not to wallow further in his melancholy, because he knew the antidote – a bottle of rum and a woman, the more whorish the better – was the perfect, instant cure for a depression that couldn’t decide whether it was located in his soul or in his skin.

The rum was a possibility, even within the bounds of the law, he thought. The challenge was to combine it with that likely woman he’d met three days ago who was now prompting an undertow of hope and frustration. It had all started on Sunday, after lunch at Skinny’s – who was no longer Skinny – which confirmed that Josefina was in league with Lucifer. Only that butcher with the infernal nickname could foster the sin of gluttony where his friend’s mother plunged them: incredible but true, an almost hundred-per-cent Madrid-style stew, the dame explained, summoning them to the dining room where bowls of stew were already in place, as was a platter, circumspect yet full of promise, overflowing with chunks of meat, juicy titbits and chickpeas.