The Dark Twilight

The town at Lake Totora is called San Cosme del Palmar. It gets its name from a saint who is very revered in the area and from a nearby palm grove that can be seen from the shore, in the distance. The place surprises me, subverts my prejudices. One of the hotels is simple but truly comfortable and pretty, with airy rooms, wicker furniture, the smell of wood and oranges. The concierge is also the owner, a woman maybe sixty years old who bought the place in the eighties. The house, she says, was pretty well abandoned; it had been one of the weekend properties of a moneyed local family that fell into misery after various misfortunes. She doesn’t name the misfortunes, as if relating them could contaminate the diaphanous atmosphere of her adorable hotel. She gives me the breakfast schedule, directions to the beach, recommendations for where to buy sunscreen if I didn’t bring it, and the few—but, she assures me, good—restaurants (“you have to try the pacú, they panfry it in yerba mate, it doesn’t sound good but it’s delicious, you won’t regret it”), then takes me to my room, the only one available. In the doorway, after she explains that the key is a little tricky (“but the room locks up tight, and around here it’s totally safe”), I ask her if there are family members of the dead from the Zañartú pit staying here. I ask like that, no beating around the bush, because for days now the silence has had me depressed and paralyzed. The woman stands straighter and says, sincerely, that she doesn’t ask her guests why they come, and it’s not her place to tell me. That hotel owners, like bartenders, are similar to psychologists; they hear confessions and the secrecy is implicit. “You can ask them, though,” she says as she turns on the light. The room doesn’t need it: it’s very bright and looks out on to an inner yard with lemon trees and freshly cut grass.

The pacú coated in yerba mate is indeed delicious. And I’m surprised to see that there are almost no empty tables in the restaurant. The small pier I walked along to get here was overflowing with boats. At this hour, just past noon, no one is fishing; they go out at twilight. Near the hotel is a small boardwalk with jacaranda trees: you can see the ruins of the weekend house that used to dominate that part of the lake. I wonder which of the region’s rich families was its owner. The town has a regional museum where I could find out about its history—the hotel concierge’s discretion is exaggerated—but it’s closed, and it’s possible that, as often happens in small towns, it has no employees, or maybe just one person who occasionally checks in at the office to organize old papers.