On this second attempt, I tried asking a neighbor for help. I told him the truth, that I couldn’t find the house. The man offered to help and we went together. We got lost. Twice. The man got a little mad, frustrated: he felt, I think, that same dreamlike unreality. “Find it yourself, ma’am, I don’t have all day.” I tried a few more times, but I remembered what Beatriz Bradford had said. You won’t be able to find him. Juan marked him. You won’t be able to. I realized with the lucidity of the irrational that I was being kept from reaching the house at 6th and 43rd. I don’t know why. I spent a few hours on the corner: I thought that if I stayed long enough, I would see one of them. I never did, plus, I didn’t know what they looked like: the people I asked told me to just go to the house on 6th and 43rd. One of them gave me the phone number. I called from a public phone by the road. It was busy at first. Then I got an answering machine. When I went back to the corner, I felt afraid and impotent and I decided to go home. Next time, I told myself, I’d come back with a photographer to document that strange defeat, or to find, at last, the elusive house.

I couldn’t get there on the third try. I took the train to Villa Elisa. The Roca line’s bad reputation is well deserved: windows without panes, many of the seats destroyed, constant theft at the stations of impoverished neighborhoods, and an unusual number of street pedlars and buskers. At Hudson, generally one of the less frequented stations, I saw a bum traversing the cars. There were always so many bums that there was no reason for him to catch my attention, but I couldn’t help staring at him. The man was missing an arm. The coincidence with Adela’s missing arm was disconcerting. I tried to reassure myself. There were a lot of homeless people with missing limbs. A lot. None had ever scared me or given me any reason for alarm. People with mutilations, if they’re poor, don’t adapt well in society.