“What’s wrong?”

Gaspar pointed to the wall behind him, the photo, the people gazing at it.

“That’s my dad. His name was Juan. And that’s me when I was little. I wanted to know where you took the picture. I don’t remember it. I mean, I don’t remember where you shot us. I can’t believe it’s a coincidence to find it here, I can’t believe we know each other and didn’t realize, I can’t believe you chose that photo today.”

“Holy Mother of God,” said Andrés. “Forget this bullshit. Let’s go upstairs to my office.”

Gaspar opened the diagrams of the two houses: the original house on Calle Villarreal and the one that had taken Adela, superimposed. He had started another sketch based on the Chapel of the Devil and the Karlen Grocery, the places Andrés Sigal had told him about. The chapel was real; he had called the tourism office in Corrientes to confirm its existence. It was an architectural rarity. The photos Andrés had taken of it hadn’t turned out well, so he had never shown them. As he told it, he’d been able to enter through a window, expecting something sinister, but inside there was just an eccentrically carved altar, an unsubtle imitation of Bosch in bas-relief, with clumsy, grotesque lines. Then Andrés had taken a fruitless detour to Posadas. His intuition was that maybe Juan and Gaspar were trying to cross the border. It was 1980, the worst years of the dictatorship were past, and he thought they were going into exile. He thought, even, that the scars Juan claimed were from an operation could really be from an armed confrontation. Gaspar confirmed they were not. And Andrés opened an unexpected door for him when Gaspar told him it was true what his father had said: they were going to his grandparents’ house. He barely remembered it. A wooden walkway over trees. The river. A park that had an orchid garden. Not much more. A nearby zoo—he remembered some colorful birds and a strange game of hide-and-seek with his grandfather and other adults. Andrés fell silent a moment and then asked his mother’s last name. Holy Mother, that house is Puerto Reyes! he said excitedly. Legendary. They have private police so no one can get in to take pictures of it. The family, your family, hasn’t let anyone near it in decades. You can catch a glimpse of it from the zoo, which also belongs to the family but is open to the public. Still, you can’t see much. It’s high up so the river won’t reach it if it rises, so from a certain point on the nearest road you can just see the rooftops. There are photos from the forties in the local history museum in Puerto Iguazú. It’s a marvel. It’s going to be yours? Why didn’t you ever go back? Will you invite me to the house once it’s yours? I would love to photograph it.