“Me too,” Gaspar replied, and got to his feet. He reached out his hand to help her up, too. They went inside and she spent the rest of night talking to other people, never losing sight of Gaspar. She was attracted to him, that was never the problem. The day she’d seen him for the first time outside the Princesa, shy, just out of high school, beautiful, with his dark hair combed back, she’d thought he had a tragic face that reminded her of all those dangerous and delicate boys she fell for, James Dean looking at the stars, Motorcycle Boy playing pool. That first sensation had diluted over time, and in their last months together, all that had remained was his melancholy, and also his anger: if he got mad, he could destroy something valuable (she remembered how he’d once thrown a camera against the wall just because it was the closest thing in reach), or even hurt himself if he was too furious. That tension was still telling her it was better not to get back together with him. At the same time, though, it was as impossible to ignore Gaspar as it was a house fire.

Days after they saw each other at the Princesa, Marita had gone to Gaspar’s house. He still lived in Villa Elisa but, he’d told her, he was looking for an apartment in La Plata. Marita was going to interview Luis: the university press where she worked was putting together a book on the resistance of Peronist trade unions. They’d had a simple gathering of friends, homemade pizzas, pot smoking. The house seemed warm in comparison to hers, to her boyfriend’s, or her friends,” who always heated their places with stoves and left the windows cracked so the rooms didn’t fill up with smoke, who always had light blankets full of holes, worn out on trips through Patagonia or Jujuy, and houses that smelled of starving dogs, where everyone drank mate and ate plain bread. She understood that, in part, she was fed up. Activism was surprisingly homogeneous, the discussions were circular, the offenses identical, the dues to be paid insurmountable. A year ago, the way El Hueso monopolized the party meetings at the university inspired a sort of pride. Now she felt like yelling at him to let someone else talk. She saw the frustration on her comrades’ faces when they lost votes, and the rhetoric seemed ever more useless, precisely now when everywhere in the country the strikes were layoffs and the layoffs were picket lines. The student branch of the party only answered with articles in its newspaper to express solidarity, denounce the patronal system and neoliberalism, and call for mobilization of workers and students. But the workers remained outside the factory, cutting off the highway or trying to form a co-op to get their jobs back. Marita thought they should participate fully in those actions or join in the strikes—enough with the talking and talking and the theorizing and mate drinking. She had discussed all that with Luis during their interview.