He must have been in his late thirties or early forties. His face was long. He stood up and smiled when I came into the bar. He put too much energy into his handshake and I could sense that he was making an effort. He was dressed neatly, his hair was carefully combed. When we went into the bar, he ordered the drinks.

“It’s great to meet you,” he said as he handed me the drink. He raised his glass and I raised mine. I liked the way he smiled. There were things about him, even in the first half-hour, that I felt I understood. The humor, the small attempts at irony, the shrugging of the shoulders were all self-deprecating, ways of protecting himself from the world.

I talked about Argentina and told him about seeing Menem for the first time, although I did not tell him that Susan was there. He listened as though everything I said were new to him and some of it astonishing. He smiled in a dry, amused sort of way. He said that soon he was going to start traveling in Argentina; some of it, he said, reminded him of parts of the United States where he had grown up, his family had moved around a good deal, his father had worked for Heinz.

I asked him where he lived; he was careful to emphasize that his apartment was no big deal, that he would have liked something different but he had to placate the security people. I enjoyed watching him, he was smart, and sometimes when he said something interesting or intelligent, or used a funny turn of phrase, he bunched his face up as though he had been caught doing something wrong. When he asked me about being English, I tried to be precise—to tell the truth. I said that one side of me, the English side maybe, was a way of hiding from the other side, which was Argentinian, so that I never had to be a single fully formed person, I could always switch and improvise. I had never said this before, or even thought about it like this, and I suppose I could say it easily to him because I believed that he would understand it; I imagined that he too must have learned strategies. There were other things I could say that I knew he would understand, like how working with Americans had made me feel American, that I knew how to fit into other people’s agendas. I could feel that he was like that too, but I said nothing about it because I did not want to say too much.