There was an air of laziness and poverty in the outskirts of the city, as though no one had the energy or the money to build anything more than one story high, and the city itself as we careered along its grid-shaped streets had that odd air of provisionality that I could sense everywhere in Argentina, as though the whole country could fade away, all of us go back to the places from which we came and leave this landscape bare as it was a hundred or two hundred years ago. I remembered the story by Borges about the map of Argentina the same size as Argentina, and pieces of it being found in remote parts of the pampas years after it was made. I used to think it was a marvelous fantasy. Now I thought that it could almost be real. It would be easy for everyone to abandon these towns in the middle of this vast plain and years later bits of what we had brought here would be found: a hubcap, a metal curtain-rail, some rusty nails, and an atmosphere in which someone very sensitive could detect the vague echoes we had left behind us.

I paid the driver and went into the hotel. When I gave my name the man behind the desk became very attentive, and told me that I must go immediately to a restaurant on the corner of Avenida Perón and Rivadavia where my friends were. They would be just starting lunch now, and they had said—I could hear Susan’s voice giving instructions—that I was to leave my bag at reception and go there at once. I needed a shower, but I realized that this man had taken his orders very seriously, and he expected me to obey. I handed my bag over the counter to him and I followed the instructions he gave me on a small map of the city to the restaurant where I would find my friends. I walked along the dusty streets, suddenly enjoying my anonymity here, the fact that I was not a part of this place. I walked four blocks and turned left, as he had told me to do, walked one more block and found Restaurante Los Andes.

When I walked in the door I saw them immediately. Susan had a look of triumph on her face, and beside her, looking at me sheepishly, was Jorge. Clearly he was the friend who had accompanied her to La Rioja. As the waiter ushered me to their table I realized that I was a necessary element in whatever relationship they had formed: they needed me here to be with them, to know about them, to become implicated in their secret. They would need me in a nearby room while they made love, like a thief needs an accomplice for a certain sort of crime.