For Juan, returning to Argentina meant failure. For me, it meant recovering my language, my hands freed, my blood cleaned of drugs; it meant finishing my studies at home, trying for my son in the place I knew I would find him. Puerto Reyes, the summer storms, having a drink on my father’s boat, going with Tali to the jungle and the reserves, traveling to Paraguay and laughing with her the whole way there. It meant having a bourgeois marriage, my fragile and beautiful husband waiting on the terrace reading poetry. It was the life of young millionaires waiting for their inheritance. Though we were no longer young, not after the massacre. Before returning to Argentina, I was able, finally, to visit Laura’s grave. I also wanted to leave so I could forget her. Everything in the city reminded me of her. Every street had a meaning on her alternative maps. We had walked through every park and every cemetery. They had placed her near the medium Olanna, at Highgate. Strawberry plants grew over the graves. Stephen had told me that on his first visit, he’d seen a fox. I lay down on Laura’s grave, remembered her dirty, tattooed body, and I said goodbye and promised to think of her. But when I got up and felt a pull in my shoulder, the muffled pain of the inoffensive wound that, nevertheless, sometimes hurt, I thought how this was my moment and Juan’s, and I knew that this death and the others had to be left behind, as, in her time, Florence had left others behind.

The Other Place had also changed me. Walking naked with its breath on my skin left me with a kind of shell. And, though it wasn’t easy, Juan and I were able to recover our intimacy. Now we shared a secret. Now, we were both marked. We had sex with sweetness and frenzy, and more frequently than ever before. I lost my pregnancies and didn’t tell him. I would sit looking at the thick, untimely blood floating in the water of the toilet or bathtub. The moment would come. My child would be conceived at Puerto Reyes. There, as well, Juan’s black depression would lift, and a permanent anger would replace it: I could never rid him of it. He feared for our child. He was afraid of being unable to take care of him or of not knowing how, or of dying before he met him; of loving him too much or being indifferent to him. I don’t know what I should feel, he told me once.

You will feel what you need to feel, I told him.

3

“I think Marcelina buried my knife. I can’t stand that mania of hers anymore.”