And so, by using the image of the dog to fill the empty, or seemingly empty, discourse, I’ve discovered that the apparent emptiness was hiding some painful content. It’s pain I chose not to feel at the time because I knew I couldn’t cope with it, or at least because I knew I was too busy to release it little by little in a way that would make it bearable. Because on March 5, 1985, in the early afternoon, I got into the car that was to take me to Buenos Aires “permanently,” and on March 6, 1985, at ten o’clock in the morning, I was due to start work in an office in Buenos Aires. And I was going to have to adjust to life in a different city, a different country. There was no time to feel the pain of all this, so I opted to anesthetize myself instead.

This anesthesia was a conscious psychological act. At the time I called it “pulling down the shutters,” and a little later “controlled psychosis”: a denial operation that essentially involved telling myself over and over, “I don’t mind about leaving all this,” “I’m quite happy to be leaving all this: this city that oppressed me and that I saw destroyed during the dictatorship years; this apartment where I’ve lived, suffered, and loved; these friends who used the apartment as a meeting place, and almost a place for therapy.” I didn’t use words to say it, but rather a mental process I don’t know how to describe; something like blocking channels, disconnecting wires, and erecting barricades between myself and every emotion that threatened to take shape. I knew it wasn’t true, that I did mind, that I wasn’t happy. What I was happy about, though, was the prospect of starting a new life and having new experiences at an age when I hadn’t been expecting a great deal to change.