A catalog, a litany, beginning nowhere and ending nowhere, names begging to be remembered, honored. Journalists . . . students . . . a fifty-four-year-old Uruguayan poet imprisoned without charges and not yet brought to trial, suffering from emphysema, no medical care, unspeakable prison conditions; a nineteen-year-old university student, his body covered with first-degree burns, weighing less than one hundred pounds at the time of his death; a twenty-seven-year-old Frenchwoman, a free-lance journalist, “disappeared” in Rio. Of course the authorities knew nothing. It was one of the privileges of authority to know nothing.

And now the first-hand reports of torture by electric shock, starvation, near-drowning, mutilation, routine beatings, stompings: this too Marya had heard before in slightly different accents and tones. Delegates spoke rapidly, passionately, often interrupting one another. Sometimes several persons spoke at the same time. Marya, taking notes, converting pain and the recollection of pain into notes, observed (not for the first time: she was thirty-four years old) that the human voice is a frail vehicle. It requires breath, amplification, tonality. As soon as it falls silent the surrounding air will remain as before, unaltered. The surrounding walls will remain as before. A ventilator will be heard humming, finely vibrating; perhaps a plane far overhead; someone—perhaps even Marya Knauer—will be observed coughing into a tissue.

She knew Spanish well enough not to require the headphones most of the time but her Portuguese was poor, useless. So she was dependent upon the simultaneous translator, a young man from the United Nations, olive-skinned, handsome, very much in control, rather beautifully in control. He made every effort to communicate, even to mimic, the outrage of the Brazilian delegates: their despair at the conditions in their own country and their despair at the indifference of Americans, even knowledgeable Americans. Marya watched him as he spoke, translated, rapidly and unhesitatingly, his voice beneath its Latin rhythms level and mellifluous, commanding. Unlike the South Americans he never paused; he never swallowed in the midst of a lengthy tangled remark; he never faltered, gave up, hid his face in his hands. Help was the universal human plea, please help me was the demand, but the simultaneous translator dealt with it in a thoroughly professional manner.

Marya was not to collapse until the third day of the conference but her strength began to drain from her on the morning of the second day, when she found herself observing the translator more and more, and the delegates less.