The way to Madrid is always via a night garden of disseveral paths. The city’s face looms like the moon and becomes Madre Marina Barbero, whispering hija, daughter, to your mother and also to you, in the warm-asphalt air of Port of Spain, Trinidad. A Spanish Civil War tragedy sent Madre into a teaching order and overseas, and when you played truant from your tormenting school, you ran to her, and she was your refuge. Madrid’s sky fell into the eyes of Trinidad’s masqueraders, a four-generation Creole family whose matriarch recited their surname, a surname the length of a street, with pride, as you leant against a wall to rest your dancing feet. It is your fault, your fault, your great and seaborne and bloody fault, you whisper back to Madrid, but you are also almost at home, more so than in England, never asked where you are from, because the Castilian lisp has passed down to you from Don Carlos’s plantations.

Your first arrival in Madrid was in transit during thirty-six hours of connecting flights, and you had developed a fever. So when the security staff treated you scornfully and threw the items of your hand luggage as they unpacked it, so that the toothbrush and hairbrush bounded up from the table, and when they roped off an area that everyone else filed past on the way into the aeroplane, while you waited behind the ropes, seated on a chair facing them, you simply sat gratefully in the chair, because it was good to rest, during thirty-six hours ...