About a week later, Señor Canetto began to talk about a scholarship Pablo could win to a business school in Miami and said that if he did not win the scholarship he could go there in any case. Pablo was puzzled by this. It had been mentioned before but only as a vague possibility. Jorge was at the University of Buenos Aires; Señor Canetto had gone there too. He had always thought that he was sent away because of what Pepita had told his father. But maybe there was no connection. His father was making money at that time and the peso was worth a lot in dollars and maybe this was the reason.

He did not want to ask why his father was talking about sending him to the United States. The idea of having to speak to his father about what had happened in the bedroom filled him with terror. Forms and information leaflets about business schools in the United States began to arrive. He applied to several. His English was good enough. He did not want to go, or he was not sure that he wanted to go. He had always believed that he would work in the family business and get married and live in a house like his parents’ house. He went to Texas first and hated it, everything about it, and then later he went to Los Angeles and San Francisco. He found work. He got a work permit. He made friends. But he never really wanted to stay there, and after ten years he returned to Argentina for good only to have his mother ask when he was going back to the States. His father had looked at him, and told him that he would have to work hard and prove himself if he wanted to join the business. He had not been home on holiday for two or three years before that. It all seemed so strange and confining.

I did not ask him any questions. Sometimes, as he spoke, he shook his head and sighed as though all this were all too much. When he had finished, I covered my face with my hands. He laughed, and he told me that it would not work, Pepita would tell on me, Pepita had seen the filthy things I had been doing. We had finished lunch at this stage; we ordered coffee.

“Do you think your father knows?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was so afraid of him finding out. I would have gone to the Arctic Circle.”

“And what about the boy you were with?”

“Just married.”

“I don’t remember Pepita.”

“She went to live with her daughter soon after that, and then she died. Maybe she died of fright.”

“You should have asked her.”

“I was so afraid.”

“Are you still afraid?”