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waitresses and-not too far away-the Victory Burlesque planted, ironically, in the centre of the garment district, as if to advertise the clothing these women shed with such astonishing gestures. Gestures Ann will never see. Past Portuguese gardens that grow sunflowers, beans, and then – miraculously – a small enshrined Virgin. All this glides like a parade by the child’s pale face in the window when her mother drives downtown. And thenthere is Swan Lake , Mozart, Tintoretto. Her own Tintoretto. Her own square inch of it.
    Now, three years after the purchase, Ann gazes through glass at yet another city’s centre: Franco’s Madrid. Long boulevards leading to the architecture of Fascism and, snaking out from these, thin streets filled with the small lives into which Ann’s tour bus is too large to shoulder.
    “There is no poverty in Madrid,” the tour guide announces in perfect English, with only a hint of the song of her native tongue. “There are no slums.”
    As mother whispers, “That’s a bunch of nonsense,” Ann looks down from her elevated seat, through the window to the sidewalk where an old woman is selling lace to tourists. Does the tour guide mean there are no hot plates in Madrid?
    They glide down the boulevard behind polished glass. They are well above the crowd, travelling as if on a low-flying magic carpet towards the Prado Museum.
    Though the child doesn’t know it yet this is the world’s darkest collection. It inspires awe. It inspires terror. The first five crucifixes cause Ann’s knees to weaken; her heart to pound. Yellow skin, too many wounds, too much blood, too many women screaming sorrow. And the familiar parquet, platform of the world’s great art, sighing and groaning in sympathy under her feet.
    Room after room after room of Rubens. Pink and yellow and lavender skin. Eyes and mouths. Then Bosch’s daydreams and nightmares. “Mummy, look! He has a flower growing there! And, look! Is that dog going to the bathroom?” The Goya horrors: assassinations, witches’ sabbaths, monsters, cripples, and hunchbacks. And then a memory in the making, one that Ann will never shake. Her mother standing, contemplatively, in front of Goya’s bloodstained Saturn who is frozen in the act of devouringone of his children. “Mummy, that man has bitten the baby’s head off!”
    “Goya’s vision,” says her mother, still gazing at the painting with admiration, “was remarkably dark.”
    Ann discovers portraits of small people in the next room and senses that, after these statements of brutality, the absent children would be a relief. Entering, however, she is surprised by a collection of dwarfs, each more cynical, more knowing than the last. This is immediacy. They, unlike the frozen children, leap live from the canvas right into the territory of Ann’s childhood. Grotesque, accessible imps and elves, behind whom unfurl more and more rooms of chaotic injustices.
    Ann feels safe with these lively deformations. “Velazquez dwarfs,” her mother whispers, having at last torn herself away from Saturn’s murderous activities.
    Then, five rooms down, on a facing wall, Ann sees it: a familiar leg, from which is being pulled a familiar piece of clothing. Ann propels her mother straight through five doorways, past the El Grecos, past the Titians, past the Raphaels until the painting is there, directly in front of them. All the disciples, the pitcher, the bowl, the water, the tile floor, the table, the plate-all the details Ann has memorized at the Art Gallery of Toronto since the painting’s arrival three years before, after the money was raised.
    “Well, I’ll be damned,” says her mother.
    Ann knows now that what she purchased was a square inch of fraud, a square inch of betrayal. Judas, she notices, is a major figure in the painting.
    In the hotel room at siesta time Ann takes off her skirt, leans back against the two large pillows she has placed behind her, and searches through her portable