Jorge was already awake and he wanted to talk about the Chileans. What did I think of them, he asked. They seemed nice, I said, but it was a bit like walking in on a family. They all seemed to know each other very well. All of them, I said, with the exception maybe of the tall boy who looked like a priest, were good-looking. Jorge had stayed up late, he said, hoping that one of the girls would stay behind, but the boy with the dark eyes had stayed up to the very end, as if he were guarding the girls. The three girls stay in one room, he said, and the three boys in another. I said I thought they were refugees, and he sat up in bed and clicked his fingers: that was it, he said, that’s who they were, that explained everything.

At about ten o’clock that morning one of boys shouted at us through the door that they were going to breakfast. Both of us were half-dressed, and we asked them where they were going and then said that we would join them in a few minutes. We met them in a café around the corner. Some of them were studying at the university, but part-time courses only. We watched that morning as the priest, as I nicknamed him, and the boy with dark eyes, who was called Raúl, and one of the girls devoured the morning newspapers, passing pages to each other to read, concentrating fiercely on the print.

There was nothing about Argentina that morning, but the next morning there was a report about an Amnesty investigation into human rights violations there. They handed it to us before they read it themselves since this was our country, and we would need to read the news from there with the same urgency as they followed the news from Chile and the new politics in Spain. We both read it and nodded; neither of us said anything. From the beginning, from the first night in the pensión when we met them, I realized that they thought that we too were political dissidents of some sort. And when they learned that we were merely here on vacation, their attitude did not alter. They presumed, because we were young and friendly, that we followed the violations of human rights and the possibility of change in Argentina and Chile as they did. And we were certainly interested in what we read. I was, and I presumed Jorge was too, against the police and illegal detentions and tortures. But it seemed remote from us. I was surprised that the newspapers were not censored.