Sometimes I became tense with worry that I might blurt it out, summon up the courage to ask him on the way out of a lesson. It would just take one moment to say it. “There’s something I want to ask you. I’ve noticed that you never mention girls the way most men here do, and you never look behind at a woman who passes on the street, and there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you, you may guess what it is…. Do you understand. ¿Entendés?” And if he had said yes, perhaps I would not have wanted him as much as I did in this twilight time when I taught him English and did not know about him. Maybe I wanted whatever part of him was unavailable. Maybe if he had understood I would have despised him. Maybe I am being too hard.

The generals were in power then, and nobody stayed out late, even though the cafés and bars in the streets around us remained open, eerily waiting for the lone customer who had missed his train to finish up and go, or for time to pass, or for something to happen. But nothing happened. Or, as we later learned, a great deal happened, but I never witnessed any of it. It was as though the famous disappearances we hear so much about now took place in a ghost city, a shadowy version of our own, and in the small hours when no sounds were made or traces left. I knew—or thought that I knew—no one in those years who disappeared, no one who was detained, no one who was threatened with detention. I knew no one at that time who told me that they knew anyone who was a victim. And there are others who have written about this and come to the conclusion that the disappearances did not occur, or occurred on a lesser scale than we have been led to believe. But that is not my conclusion.

My conclusion centers on the strange lack of contact we have with each other here. It is not simply my problem, it is a crucial part of this faraway place to which our ancestors—my mother’s father, my father’s great-grandfather—came in search of vast tracts of land: we have never trusted each other here, or mixed with each other. There is no society here, just a terrible loneliness which bears down on us all, and bears down on me now. Maybe it is possible that I could watch someone being dragged away in front of my eyes and not recognize it. I would somehow miss the point, and maybe that is what I did, and others like me did, during those years. We saw nothing, not because there was nothing, but because we had trained ourselves not to see.