I was late to breakfast. Beatriz Bradford was not in the dining room. The concierge told me she’d left in the early morning, in her car.

“I don’t think she’ll be back for a few months,” she told me. “Sometimes when she drinks a lot and makes a scene, she leaves early. She’s ashamed. She’s a refined woman.”

I stayed a bit longer with the concierge. I don’t know why I thought Beatriz might have left something for me. Her address, her phone number. But she hadn’t. I spent that day meeting the newly arrived family members, and at night I reserved a flight from Posadas to Buenos Aires. I didn’t go back to Zañartú or the pit.

The Forgotten Girl

Back in Buenos Aires, I wrote up my article about the Zañartú pit, the last in a series on Operation Itatí and the repression in the yerba plantations in the Littoral near the border. This essay, however, is different: it’s a personal text, less concerned with information and history. My encounter with Beatriz Bradford hit me hard, and after I finished my assignment, I turned to confirming her identity, and to finding out if she really was Adela Álvarez’s mother.

She hadn’t lied to me. There aren’t all that many news articles about the case of Adela Álvarez, but I can direct readers to the piece by Guillermo Triuso published in Panorama two months after she vanished (Panorama Magazine, “The Disappearance of Adela,” 27 November 1986, n.139). It’s a unique document, because it cites the investigation documents; these, stored in a basement of the courthouse, were lost soon after—odd, because it was an active case—in the flood of July 1987. Just two folders, nothing extravagant. Very little attention was paid to that girl and her circumstances, or to the statements given by the other minors, Pablo Fonzi, Victoria Peirano, and Gaspar Peterson, which were not contradictory but were very fanciful. While the judicial file containing Gaspar Peterson’s statement no longer exists, his testimony to the police remains in the fifth precinct of San José de Flores, and it attests to his complete name and parentage. Beatriz Bradford hadn’t lied: the boy’s parents were Juan Peterson and Rosario Reyes Bradford. Both deceased. Gaspar had been legally adopted by his uncle, Luis Peterson. The statement includes a description of what happened the night of the disappearance. As the kids told it, they were inside the house for about an hour and a half. Maybe forty minutes after they entered, Adela went into one of the bedrooms; the rest of the time was spent trying to open the door the girl had disappeared through, which had been hermetically sealed. They gave up after almost an hour. Then they left and told Victoria Peirano’s parents, who reported it to the police.