How it’s always been. Margarita is right. The pit, its atrocity, ruptures the quotidian resignation of this place. An atrocity so far removed from this village stopped in time, with its noisy refrigerators and soda brands imported from Paraguay. The anthropologists clean the bones carefully. They have to remove the dirt, but without breaking the bones or altering them in case they still have any evidence. A bullet wound, for example. In spite of my reluctance, I go to the pit anyway for the second visiting period, in the afternoon. One of the anthropologists shows us a skull without a jaw, a hole in the left parietal. We ask if it’s a gunshot and he, professional that he is, replies he can’t be sure, but it looks like a lesion compatible with a firearm.

That night, we eat in silence. We’re leaving the next day. The pervading feeling is of defeat. There’s a grave, there are crimes, and there will be no investigation into the perpetrators. In all this oppressiveness, I’ve decided to take a short detour before going back to Buenos Aires. There’s a town nearby where local tourists go, along the shores of a lake called Totora. A lot of people prefer the calm of lake fishing, the sunsets over scrubland, to the river, which is more unpredictable. Motorboats are forbidden on the lake and there are no palometas, the local, less fearsome version of piranhas. I’m not going in search of calm, though perhaps I’ll be able to write a little: its hotels are better than the inn—really, the inn isn’t made to house people longer than a night or maybe a few hours. It’s said that the family members of the disappeared and murdered who could be in the pit are gathering in that town. As if they needed to be close, to keep vigil. Why don’t they come to the village? I wonder. And I realize it’s a question I should ask them directly, if it’s true they have occupied the town on the lake with their suspended mourning.