I get the chance to talk to her after breakfast. She’s the one who approaches me: she asks me for a light on the Costanera. I give her one. She smokes constantly, as do I. Now that I see her in the merciless light of day, I recognize her, but I can’t believe what I’m seeing, I refuse to believe it. About seven years ago, on the boundary between the neighborhoods of Caballito and Parque Chacabuco, in Buenos Aires, a twelve-year-old girl was kidnapped. A girl who caught the press’s attention because she was missing an arm. It was never known whether it was a congenital defect or the result of an accident. The disappearance was the outcome of a game that turned macabre: the girl and her friends went into an abandoned house in the neighborhood. A prank. Something happened in the house that the kids couldn’t see very well, and the girl never came out. Remarkably, the disappearance, which was labelled a kidnapping, didn’t spend long in the news even though there were a lot of interviews with the mother, who didn’t avoid the TV cameras. The hypothesis was that she was kidnapped by a mysterious man, who was never caught: the police found an adult’s clothing covered with blood inside the house, though no relationship could be established with any individual, and the girl never turned up. I wanted to interview the mother at the time, but my editor wasn’t interested. I turned to the editor-in-chief. He told me people didn’t want to hear about such a morbid story, and we should run good news. I never believed him. He said it mechanically. In other circumstances, he would have killed for a story like that. It’s true that those were some horrible months, with the Carapintada uprisings and the desecration of Perón’s body: no one could believe someone would cut off the hands of the most surveilled cadaver in the country. There was something bleak about the story of the disappeared girl, it’s true, and maybe that’s why they didn’t follow it up. Those things happen in journalism. The public’s imagination falls in love with certain horrors and is indifferent to others. When I tried to interview the mother anyway, maybe for a different outlet, she had already left her house and the neighborhood. Her whereabouts were a mystery.

“I came for my partner,” said the skinny woman, and when she spoke, I had no doubt. The voice tends to kick-start memory. If it wasn’t the disappeared girl’s mother, it was her twin. Or else the resemblance was supernatural. It was noon and the heat could kill a bird mid-flight, but I remember I felt a shiver. I was scared. The coincidence seemed like a sinister piece of fiction.

She recognized my fear, and paused before speaking.

“My husband and I were militants in the Maoist Leninist Liberation Army. That was its complete name, although even the history books and articles just call it the LA. I survived.”