SUSAN AND DONALD thought that I should rent a small office in the city and begin to operate as an independent consultant and translator. Susan put herself in control, forced the landlord to reduce the rent of the two rooms on the first floor of an old building near the center, organized the decoration and the furniture. She conducted brisk interviews with several bilingual secretaries, made them take dictation in two languages and made them type while she stood over them. She chose one of them and then chose her desk and chair and electric typewriter, her filing cabinet and filing system, told her what to say when she answered the telephone.

There was hardly anything to do in the new office; one or two phone calls came a day and sometimes a visit from an American oil executive with time free in the city. The serious meetings were held in the ministry building, or a hotel suite, or at Donald and Susan’s house. The longest meeting was with an accountant, another of Susan’s discoveries, a pale-faced, puzzled-looking man, who advised me on tax.

My office was somewhere to go every day. I read the newspapers in the morning, searching for stories about oil in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, following the share prices in the Herald Tribune, and then I wondered what I should do. I looked out of the window. I had coffee in the bar downstairs. I wondered if Luisa, my so-called secretary, had been alerted by Susan to my abiding interest in my own sex, but then I did not know if Susan knew. Maybe, therefore, this did not explain why Luisa hardly ever looked me in the eye. Maybe this was what she had been told to do in secretarial school. Maybe she did not like me.

I had been in the office about a month when I got a phone call from Federico Arenas, whom I had met for the first time on the night of the dinner for the economists in the hotel. I knew that he worked for YPF, the national oil company, and I remember that he had been introduced to me by Donald. He was about forty years old, with dark eyes, black hair, and full lips. He smiled too much and he wore too many rings and he smelled of cigarette smoke. As the party was breaking up that night, he had invited me to come to a club with him, he was full of mateyness and false intimacy. I was too tired and I thought I knew what sort of club he meant and I was not interested.

I asked Donald about him; Donald said that he was important, and that he had become rich while speculating in shares or currency. He did not need to work in YPF any more, Donald said, and, once any reform of the oil industry took place, it was unclear what would happen to him. I spoke to him on two more occasions when various oil executives from the United States or Europe were visiting. He was always friendly and even deferential toward me. Each time, he suggested that we go out together some night, just the two of us, we could go around the clubs, he said.