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marriage—to a prominent family whose share in the mining industry is well-known but it is the first time, as far as we know, that she has spoken of it in public.”
    â€œHa!” Eric exclaimed, beginning to see. “Did she speak specifically of this family and the mines they own?”
    â€œNo, no, no, not at all. She explained why she chose today not to speak of the Huichol beliefs and customs but instead of the industry that destroyed their habitat and made it difficult to continue their traditions such as the pilgrimage and the hunt for peyote. But she was speaking to an audience that is informed, academic, specialist”—he licked the words as if they were tiny crystals on his lips—“certainly not industrialists or businessmen, so we are all surprised, you might say.”
    The woman at his side spoke to him again, with asperity, and he replied to her out of the corner of his mouth, then took her elbow and turned away from Eric in search of a group with whom conversation might flow more freely.
    Eric helped himself to more hors d’oeuvres. If Em were here, he thought, she would have understood and grasped the whole situation in no time.
    The little hors d’oeuvres were delicious but the thought of Em made him deposit his plate and glass and make his way toward the wrought-iron gate that opened onto the street. As he did so, he passed the bookshop where he had begun the evening and saw the lecturer seated there with a plate on her lap and a cup in her hand. Several people hovered around her, conversing in respectful tones, but she herself was occupied in devouring a large cream cake. A bit of the cream adhered to her upper lip and as Eric slouched past on his way to the gate, he could not help thinking she looked like an aged and very spoiled cat being fed by her devoted keepers, for whom she had the utmost disdain.
    Â 
    M AKING HIS WAY back to the hotel through the crowds, Eric for once found no distraction in the food stalls where pepper flakes sputtered in hot oil and office workers paused for a snack on their way home, or the sharp young men peddling designer watches, bottled perfumes, and pornographic comic books. Instead, he was trying intently to pursue those words and names heard twenty-odd years ago in a cottage in Cornwall that had now reappeared only to escape and flee from him like so many goldfish darting into the turbid waters of Mexico City’s evening streets.
    He tried to capture the links and present them to Em like the trophies they were to him while she packed in readiness for an early flight next day to Merida but she seemed not to be listening with her usual attentiveness. Barefoot, clad only in a brief petticoat, her hair in wet wisps from a recent shampoo, she went about her packing with a preoccupied air.
    â€œWell, if it’s true that your grandfather was a miner in Mexico once, you surely couldn’t have forgotten that, could you?” she asked, a little exasperated because he was in her way as she went back and forth between the suitcase open on her bed and the brushes, combs, bottles, jars, and still-damp pieces of clothing that were scattered about the room. What with packing, an ending and a beginning, she was distracted.
    â€œWell, I had,” Eric insisted. “I
had
because I saw him on just that one visit. People didn’t fly back and forth across the pond the way they do now, and that’s the only time my dad took me to England. He left me in Cornwall and took my mother off on a motor trip through the old country, or something of the sort, I don’t know, I was five, maybe four years old. I must have been too young to take along, I suppose. I really don’t have any other memories of the visit—just that one.”
    â€œBut surely you’d have heard your dad
speaking
of his father? Didn’t he say anything the time he told you he was
born
in Mexico?”
    â€œNot really,” Eric said. He was lying