After eating, many people leave for their siestas. I can’t get used to the custom—I didn’t even take them in Zañartú, where the weight of the humidity and the anesthetized village can make you want to spend hours in a dreamless sleep. Instead, I get water for mate at the hotel and settle in on the boardwalk, under the trees, in one of the wicker chairs that turn out to be more comfortable than they look. I take notes in a notebook. I read for a while. There are others out, sitting on the little beach or the boardwalk. From where I am, I can see a couple, a man and a woman of about sixty years of age, and a young woman, very thin with pale arms, who is wearing a long dress. I approach the couple and dive right in, asking what I want to know. They open up immediately. They want to talk, or at least the woman does. That isn’t unusual, but I’m still surprised. People always want to talk, they want to tell their stories to a stranger, even knowing that that stranger is going to publish and surely distort what they’ve said, because that is the nature of the job.

They are the mother and father of a young man from Corrientes, a student leader at the National University of the Littoral. He was taken in April of 1976, just after the coup. He had lived with them in one of those large provincial houses where they build for all the family members on one piece of land: the business looks out on the sidewalk; the main building is for the parents; the back one, past the yard full of azaleas, is for the children. The parents had been tied up and gagged and couldn’t defend their son. They only took him; he had a girlfriend, but she wasn’t at home.

“He never believed they would come for him. He said those things happened in the capital, you know? We didn’t think so either. He had friends who’d gone to Brazil, and others who were in hiding, clandestine, all that. Honestly, we thought they were coming to . . . My son was just a student activist. I can assure you of that because he told us, and he said we shouldn’t be afraid. I’m not justifying what they did with the kids who chose armed struggle, but that just wasn’t the case with Gustavo.”

The woman participates in the small collective Mothers of the Corrientes Disappeared. I would have guessed as much from her way of expressing herself. The man says nothing. The victims’ fathers tend to be silent companions. Many have died during these years spent in the background, accompanying their wives. They’re killed by impotence and love; they’re unprepared. Women know how to manage these emotions better.