That, I think, was the first change, the night when I started to have appetites again. And over the next year a rhythm began. A man I met told me about a sauna in the city not far from where I worked. At first I thought that I could not possibly go there, but he said it was no problem: not everyone was gay and you could just sit around and watch. It was several months before I tried it out, and at first I did nothing, I learned to read the signs, and then slowly it became a place I went to once or twice a week. At that time you had to be careful, but the signs were generally clear.

I found a restaurant two streets away where I often went on my own. A few times I met friends from the university, or went for a drink with teachers from the school, or had coffee with students, but mostly I was alone and I was reasonably happy. I never bought a newspaper except to read what was on in the cinema; I seldom turned on the television. Everybody learned to ignore what was going on in public as though it had nothing to do with them. There was, I suppose, a climate of fear which everyone understood, but the fear was like an undertow: it never appeared on the surface and it was never discussed. And no one believed that anything would change.

I remember going down to have coffee one morning and reading in a newspaper headline at the kiosk on the corner that we had taken the Malvinas. But I did not buy the newspaper, and I did not think about it. Either the report was untrue—there were always rumors about taking the Malvinas—or it was not important. It was only when I went to work that I began to realize that something serious had happened. A few of the teachers were unsure about me because I was half-English and they thought that I might be against Argentina taking the islands by force. I had no views on the matter. I went into my class and taught English to the students as usual. None of them mentioned the Malvinas.

I remember that when I was a child my mother laughed when I brought home my first atlas. The Malvinas were too big, she said. They were tiny little places, no one cared about them, and yet on the pages which showed Argentina in this Argentinian atlas, the islands were significant pieces of land in the South Atlantic. My mother thought that this was another example of the lack of proportion, the extreme silliness, which lay at the heart of Argentina.