Jorge arrived in Buenos Aires at the end of March. The ship had left from Rotterdam. He had been away twenty-two years.

Shortly after coming up on deck on the last day of the voyage, he could guess the contours of the Buenos Aires skyline. A little while later it was more clearly visible. Yet Jorge felt no emotion.

When he was seventeen and in his fourth year of high school, he dropped out just before he would have been expelled for lack of attendance. He disliked studying, it was boring. He preferred playing hookey, hanging out downtown, playing pool, going to Devoto’s to see some sex film or other.

The day he decided to quit school, he felt vastly relieved. He told his friends about it and they went to a brothel in Flores to celebrate. Jorge had finished his studies.

He chose not to tell his parents about his decision. They wouldn’t have cared anyway. His father worked twelve hours a day in a Segba power station. He got home late at night, ate and then went to bed, without taking a bath. Aurelia, his wife, and Jorge were quite used to it. The metallic odour that permeated his father’s sweat was part of the routine.

Aurelia worked as an orderly in a local hospital. She started at seven and got back home at five. Years of dirt, pain, screams and despair had numbed her. Nothing disturbed her anymore. A liver cancer, an amputation, a baby born without a brain. It was a job. And worse than that. She had become numbed in other respects as well. Life was a chain. Aurelia hardly felt bitter anymore about the misery she lived in.

Jorge went off in the morning as if he was going to school. He took the 37 from Lanús Station and got off somewhere near the Congress building. He breakfasted in some coffee-shop or other. Often he went to Los Angelitos.

His money supply dwindled. An older man whom he met in that coffee-shop told him he could earn some cash down at the port, moving smuggled goods. The man took him to C dock. A Norwegian ship had put in. The man whistled from the quayside. A red-haired sailor emerged with a grunt to see who it was. The man, whose name was Jacinto, shouted out the name Carl to him several times.

Carl came up on deck. He was a forty to forty-fiveish man, strong-looking though a little hunched in the shoulders. His face was crossed with premature wrinkles. He looked trustworthy. He signalled to Jacinto to come on board. Jacinto pointed to Jorge. With a sweep of his arm Carl beckoned the two aboard.

Carl’s cabin contained four bunks. The room was dimly lit by a single light bulb in one corner, above a minuscule washbasin. The air was half-stale, owing to the room’s poor ventilation. Carl spoke a few words of Spanish and some snatches of English. They communicated through gestures.

Carl pulled out a bag from under one of the bunks and opened it. He showed them a couple of radios. He put his hand in his pocket and fetched out two twenty-dollar bills. He pointed to one of the radios. He took out a five-dollar bill and pointed to Jacinto.

Jacinto asked what else he had. He pointed to the bag. Carl opened it and showed him several electric shavers. He took out a fifty-dollar bill and a ten-dollar bill and held one in each hand, the fifty dollars next to the shaver, the ten dollars next to Jorge.

Jorge showed a real knack for moving the goods. He went to downtown businesses and offices, and getting into a chat with a couple of office-workers he was soon surrounded by a group of five or six people. He knew how to entertain people though he never told them anything about himself. The important thing was the task, to sell, and not to talk about himself.

Through Carl he got to know other sailors on various ships. Business prospered. If the sailors brought some electrical gadget which was almost unknown in Argentina,

they would lend one to Jorge for him to show to future customers. Jorge also got orders for whisky and imported cigarettes.

Two years went by living with his parents and selling smuggled goods. As he thought, when he finally told his parents that he had quit school, they showed no reaction. Jorge often brought them things from abroad as gifts and with that they seemed quite happy. Above all because they could show off at work and to their neighbours.

Jorge, though, was growing bored. He had shown he could sell. Now he needed more action. One very grey Wednesday in May of 1954, Carl asked him if he would like to go to Europe. The ship was leaving the following Monday. He wouldn’t even have to be a stowaway. If he worked in the kitchen he could travel for free. Jorge told him he would think it over, even though his mind was already made up.

In five days he wound up his business, obtained his travel documents and said goodbye to the few friends he had. He told his parents that he was going away for three months. He knew that it was not true. He also knew that he would not see them again. It did not matter to him.

Jorge felt Buenos Aires very strange. He did not know whether it was him —after all twenty-two years was a long time— or whether it was the city that had changed so much. He had the feeling that the change had happened quite recently.

In a boarding-house on Constitution district he took a small back room with a high window that gave a lot of light. One could not see out of it, though, unless one stood on a chair.

He spent two days lying in bed. The landlady of the boarding-house came to ask him if there was something wrong with him. “Yes,” he lied, “I suffer from gout”. The landlady offered to bring him something to eat in the room. Jorge only wanted something simple, boiled potatoes, buttered noodles, or steak and salad.

He lay listening to the sounds outside. Despite more than twenty years of absence, they were so familiar to him. Cars accelerating, braking to let a bus pass, cars with sporty mufflers, cars with broken mufflers. The knife-grinder and his whistle, the rag and bones man. The newspapers.

He had left behind him so many places, so many women, so many acquaintances. He had never felt nostalgic. One had to take life as it came. Feeling bitter over the loss of a good woman would not help him find another.

When he finally decided to go out, he set off to find Jacinto. He knew all the coffee-shops where he hung out. It was a matter of co-inciding. Jorge would go to a coffee-shop in the morning and sit beside the window. He would order a coffee. Read the newspaper from front to back. From time to time he would look around inside to see if Jacinto had come in through another door. Sometimes he would sit staring fixedly out of the window. The hustle and bustle of Buenos Aires and the beauty of its women filled him with awe.

A month passed with the same routine. It was no bother, though, hardly a chore. Jorge would get up early, let his feet carry him along to a coffee-shop and sit there all morning. He enjoyed it.

One Thursday in early May, Jacinto appeared. He looked older but stood tall and erect and seemed in good shape. Jorge went up to him.

“Jacinto!”

“Jorge! Jorge Mendizábal! —he opened his arms to greet him— How are you, my boy? Where have you been? You’re looking great!”

“You too.”

“Well, I’m not getting any younger” he pointed to his grey hair.

“Yeah, but you’re not shrivelling up.”

“No, son, life goes on.”

They spent the whole day together. Jorge began to feel that nostalgia might not be so bad after all.

“Jacinto, I need to earn a few bucks,” Jorge said, full of self-assurance.

“Well, my son, you sailed in to the right port.”

“You remember the port? You’re still in that business?”

“No, not anymore. Now I sell merchandise, televisions, stereos, that type of thing.”

“Uhuh.”

“And you need some help?” Jorge said, more by way of an offer than a request.

“No.”

Jorge decided that he would let Jacinto break the silence.

 “Listen, son, this is heavy stuff” said Jacinto, stirring the last drops of coffee in his cup.

Jorge knew he had won out, that Jacinto was asking something of him, explaining it to him.

“Uhuh.” he answered.

“I know some people who have some work to offer. Sometimes they hire people from outside, like you.”

Jorge raised his eyebrows in an invitation to Jacinto to keep on talking.

“Listen, nothing’s gonna happen without them checking you out first. Give me your I.D. number and they’ll get back to you in a week.”

Jorge gave it to him, switched to another topic and noticed that Jacinto seemed afraid.

He could not allow himself to be plagued by the suspense. Nor was it in his interest to ask Jacinto for more details. That would have been a sign of weakness. Moreover, Jacinto seemed to be going out on a limb for him. A visit to a good brothel would take his mind off it.

Jacinto showed up punctually at the coffee-shop. Jorge had got there very early.

“You’re clean,” Jacinto said.

“Uhuh.”

“Go to this address tonight at eight o’clock. It’s in the Flores area.” And he gave him a slip of paper. “Ring the bell four times and say Tato sent you.”

On the stroke of eight he rang the bell four times. A metallic voice rang out from a hidden intercom.

“Who is it?”

“Tato sent me.”

“Come in.”

The door swung slowly open. The hallway led into a single lamplit room, a library. Jorge walked in and stopped in the middle of the room. The subdued light came from a couple of rather short standing lamps. The bookshelves were made of very dark wood.

“Take a seat,” said someone in a deep voice and urged, “don’t turn round.”

Jorge sat down on a chair with his back to the voice.

“Your name?”

“Jorge Mendizábal.”

“Age?”

“41”

“Where do you live?”

“A boarding-house on Constitution district.”

“Address?” bawled the voice.

“1473 Brazil Street.”

“Ever done a murder?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“No. I ‘ve never killed anybody.”

“Ever done a robbery?”

“No.”

“You’re lying!”

“Yes. I’ve done a robbery.”

“Don’t lie to me again. Don’t you trust me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, do you trust me, yes or no?”

Jorge felt the barrel of a gun in the back of his neck as other hands pulled his backwards and handcuffed them to the chair.

“Yes.”

“You don’t sound very sure.”

“I’m not.”

“You son of a bitch!”

“Screw you!”

“You fucking pig, you realize I could kill you!”

“You bastard! You think you’ll get me to trust you like this?”

They left him alone. A long time passed. The worst of it was his urge to pee.

Three hours later the voice returned.

“Release him.” The voice waited until he had been released. “Stand up.”

Jorge stood up.

“Turn around.”

Slowly he turned round.

“You passed the first test,” Francisco said, shaking his hand. “Come back tomorrow at eight, and say that Pocha sent you. And come prepared to stay up all night.”

As Jorge left, Francisco commented:

“He’s made of good stuff, he didn’t even wet his pants.”

“Who is it?”

“Pocha sent me.”

The door creaked open.

“The situation is very serious, Mendizábal. This country has turned into a big whorehouse, the clown on the international stage. The economy is in shreds, our lady president was unable to pull the strings of even a puppet, unions playing around as they pleased. A STRONG HAND is what’s needed,” Francisco said, almost spelling out the words ‘strong hand’. “Youth has gone mad, has taken the wrong turn. Real youth was back in our times. Screwing was the main thing, pardon my language, but we are men only here. But not screwing our girlfriends, of course. Nobody wanted to get their girlfriend into trouble. For that there were prostitutes, loose women, street broads, women who weren’t going places and the odd one or two in each neighbourhood who were nymphomaniacs. Your girlfriend would never have allowed you to touch her. They knew what was what. Of course, one would kiss them and caress them between the legs to get them ready, for their sakes. But you wouldn’t go the whole way.” Francisco lit a cigarette. “And what do these degenerates do nowadays? If all they did was screw around, fine. Each generation has to have its fling. But no, they have to get mixed up in politics. What do these crazy fools know about politics? They get brainwashed by the Russians. The KGB is all over the place, I have it on good authority. They’ve done a good job. Stuffing rotten apples into every barrel. It’s an epidemic!”

Jorge listened to him intently.

“The Russians give them money, arms, papers. Behind youthful innocence one can hide so much. Couples kissing in the street can hide a molotov cocktail. Young fools of nineteen try to take over a barrack. So, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. And that’s what we’re doing. We’ll use their own dirty methods. They know how to plant bombs, kill, threaten, steal. We’re going to learn too. We have to penetrate their ranks, understand them, destroy them.” He smoothed his hair and regained his composure. “We have to get information out of them.”

Jorge waited for more details. None were forthcoming.

The first assignment was in the Faculty of Natural Sciences. Five of them went in a green Ford Falcon. Cholo was driving with Francisco next to him. Jorge sat behind the driver, beside Miguel and Alberto.

They stopped in front of Building Two. They already had word that Andrea Prego, alias Lucía, was inside.

“You, Jorge, stay beside the car and make sure nobody comes near.”

The other four went into the building, down to one of the classrooms in the basement and picked out Andrea in the front row. She was eighteen, not very tall, with light brown hair, thin and pretty. They did not want to waste any time. Francisco took out his gun, pointed it at her and ordered her to come with them. Her classmates’ expressions of terror contrasted with her look of surprise.

They tied her hands behind her back, slapped her across the face, put a hood over her head, grabbed her by the arms and carried her out through the main entrance.

Jorge was beginning to realize how people looked at him even though they avoided him. He was on the other side now. He was one of “them”.

Francisco shouted for him to open the trunk and tossed him a bunch of keys. Jorge opened it and two of them thrust Andrea inside. They drove off towards the Boardwalk.

The setting sun was beautiful, the calm sunset of a day that belied the onset of winter.

Andrea lay tied to a narrow hospital-like stretcher, stripped naked, very frightened. Francisco took Jorge into the other room.

“You’re OK?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to be in on it?”

“Yeah.”

“We’d better not talk too much. Your nickname will be Pepito. We’ll communicate through signs. You can do what you like but it’s best if you don’t screw her.

“Why?”

“Because you’ll never ever get her out of your mind.”

When they went back in, Alberto was preparing the cattle prod.

“Are you going to sing?” Alberto asked her.

“I don’t know anything,” replied Andrea in terror.

“You want a taste of this?” He showed her the cattle prod.

Andrea was shaking her head from side to side.

“And this?” said Cholo showing her his penis.

Andrea kept shaking her head.

Cholo approached the bed from the back of the room, masturbating, while the others laughed.

He masturbated slowly, rhythmically, approaching the head of the iron bedstead. Slowly, with perverse pleasure, he came all over Andrea’s face, which was transfixed in a rigid grimace of disgust and terror.

The cattle prod session continued for two hours. Francisco urged Jorge to join in on various occasions. He whispered to him to “give it to her here”, to “hurt her there”, “look like the ‘good cop'”.

Andrea did not tell them anything. She was bloodied and in pain but she did not say anything. Francisco took Jorge into the next room.

“This broad is bottom rung. Just a go-between. She sold newsrags in the University. Revolutionary Socialist Student League stuff. I don’t think she knew more than one or two of them. And they were the ones who squealed on her. But you never know.”

Francisco took out a pack of imported cigarettes, took one and offered one to Jorge. He lit them with a gold Ronson lighter.

“But we’ve got to free up space. This vermin is filling up the jails. They don’t deserve such consideration. And we need the space. We don’t have time to send them down south. Either she sings in two days or she’s history. Well, she will be either way.

Francisco started toward the door. Jorge just stood there.

“You can take off now but be back by morning.”

Jorge walked away, lit up a cigarette and began to think that the job did not look bad at all. The only thing that bothered him was that the detention centre was too cold. He thought he would demand from the maintenance people to distribute more heaters.

Next day Andrea was dead. To spare her suffering, Miguel went to her cell after a torture session. He took her a jug of water.

“Look, girl, you’ll die today or tomorrow, I know. If you drink water, you are killing yourself. Up to you. I’ll leave it here.”

Andrea crawled towards the jug as Miguel was closing the door, picked it up with both hands and drank the lot. In one lucid moment she felt that the last decision of her life had been hers.

Francisco took Jorge down to eat at one of the stalls along the Boardwalk. The green Falcon created an aura of respect. A dense atmosphere of silence surrounded its occupants as they got out. Francisco had wanted to be sure that Jorge had the necessary spunk, that he was not a wimp. He was convinced.

Jorge liked hunting more than fishing. Hunting meant tracking down suspects. Fishing meant extracting information from them. He did not mind being a torturer and sometimes took pleasure in it though mostly it was just a routine. It could just as well be a pretty girl as an old man, a cripple or an ex-cop. It was a job, and he knew all the whys and the wherefores. Just as a slaughterhouse could look dirty and messy to someone who saw it for the first time, a detention centre could seem messy as well. Yet Jorge knew there was nothing further from the truth. There were order, cleanliness, objectives and reasons for everything. The more routine there was, the easier it was for everybody and the smoother things went. Jorge also saw his job as a necessity. If the motherfuckers would not speak even though they could so easily have done so, they left them no alternative.

Hunting was much more fun because one got to be out on the street, contact people, be feared, admired and hated. Jorge enjoyed all that; he felt important.

Some nights, in the small hours, they would go to some cabaret or other. They would go late, around three or four in the morning. Jorge liked going to the Lux. There were four girls working there. The proprietress treated undercover men royally. As they pulled up at the door, she would run out carrying a tray with five whiskies. If there were only four men in the car, she would drink the fifth herself.

The girls feared the men because they knew who they were. Yet it was something more than fear, something visceral, which the men sensed and played on. “La Negra”, even though she could have taken them to a hotel until midday and charged them a handsome price, after a fifteen-minute chat would end up in a corner with a man and suck his cock for free. When she had done, she felt like a schoolgirl being commended: “Very good, Mary, you’ve done your homework; now you may go back to your seat.” Jorge had no doubt that it was not fear so much as a need to be submissive.

For four years, life was stimulatingly enjoyable. Jorge worked ten hours a day, after which he slept, visited Jacinto, walked around La Boca district, painted, listened to classical music. The pay was good but the side-benefits were even better. That was Jacinto’s business, to sell goods taken from houses which had been searched. Jorge passed his goods on to Jacinto and gave him a good commission. One day Francisco called him to his office:

“Where are you living, son?”

“I rent an apartment in San Telmo.”

“There’s a house we did in Florida district. The owner died. If you like, we can have it transferred to your name.

“All right.”

The only expense was the lawyer’s bill. The deal took two months, after which Jorge received a two-storey house with a garden in front and behind. It took him four weeks of house searches to furnish it to his taste.

Between 1980 and 1982, things calmed down and Jorge ended up working more of the time behind a desk, though there was always a bit of action to keep his reflexes in shape.

The Falklands war changed everything. The power of the military began to fall apart. “Yankee shitfaces,” Jorge thought, “helping the British.”

In 1983, the torture centres started to be dismantled. Everyone was really quite sad. So many memories, so many jobs done, so many things which would disappear without even nostalgia. Jorge asked for a meeting with Francisco.

“What’s up, son? What do you want?”

“A passport.”

“You can stay, you know. We have a guaranteed pardon.”

“No thanks, this country is no good, people don’t understand. You get involved in something, you bust your ass, for the first time in your life. You clean the country of a cancer and all for what, eh? For what good?”

“Son, there’ll be better times.”

“No, these people will never learn.”

Forty eight years old, carrying a single bag of belongings, he goes with Jacinto down to the port. As it did some thirty years ago, a Norwegian ship awaits him. “That’s a good sign,” says Jacinto. “No, there aren’t any signs, there’s nothing at all. Just nothing.”