“I fool nobody,” he said, “although I try real hard.”

He told me the story then of how he came to leave Buenos Aires and go to the States. He was eighteen, he said, he had just finished high school and was about to go to college, although he still did not know what he wanted to do. I tried to work back in time to what I was doing when Pablo was seventeen. I was in college, I realized, and although I knew Jorge I had never been to his house. This was before we went to Barcelona. I must have known that he had a brother, but I could not remember anything about him.

His parents and Jorge were in Bariloche, he said, skiing, and the house was empty, the servants were also getting a break. A friend from school came to stay. They planned nothing, he said, things between them began casually. They played poker, and then they played strip poker, and then they found that they were both naked lying on the living room floor so they went upstairs and got into bed together. The other guy was his best friend, he said, they played tennis and swam together, they had played football on the same team. He had seen him naked before, and for a few years he had dreamed about this, watching him strip and then going to bed with him. The guy was beautiful, he said, and he was enjoying himself. The next night they did the same, and again they went to bed and they fell asleep together. His parents still were not due back for a day or two. In the morning they woke up, he said, and started to mess around in the bed. He could not tell me what they were doing—it was too embarrassing. But at one stage he looked up and Pepita, the maid who had been with the family for forty years, was standing at the bottom of the bed watching everything. He had no idea how long she had been there. When he saw her he covered his face with his hands, and when he took his hands away she had disappeared.

He went in search of her. He thought that he could convince her not to tell and considered trying to buy her off. He sent his friend home and waited in the house for her to appear; when she did not, he waited for his parents to come back. He saw Pepita at breakfast the first morning after their return. She behaved as though nothing had taken place.