I looked at him. I had no idea what he was talking about. I don’t understand, I said to him. By this time the two visitors were watching us intently. Who was your girlfriend, I asked.

She was Marta Gomez, he said, you knew her. She studied English literature with you; that’s how I met you.

I knew who he was talking about: she was a tall girl who dressed in black and wore tinted glasses. I did not know that she had disappeared. Like most of the people I studied with, I had not seen her for years. I could imagine her now walking along a corridor with a folder under her arm. I tried to think what else I knew about her. I remembered that she told me once how she would like to study in Oxford and then return here and become a lecturer in English.

She’s dead? I tried to sound puzzled and shocked because I really was puzzled and shocked, but I did not know if anyone in the company believed me. What I had said was true, but now it sounded like a lie or a serious evasion.

During the trial of the generals, Francisco went on, Marta’s name and photograph were in the press every day for about a week. General Lanusse was a friend of her family’s—he was president here in the 1970s—and he gave evidence about her disappearance to the trial. They had gone to him when they could not find out anything about Marta. She had been taken away in the night with two friends who had been involved in the student movement, they were sharing an apartment and getting ready for their finals. They had nothing to do with politics. No one ever knew how their names got on a list or why they were arrested. At the time I believed like everybody else that they could not possibly arrest someone for nothing. But they were never seen again. When the general went to the army, they told him to try the navy or the air force. He was a highly respected figure and when he asked about her and gave details about her arrest, an officer in the navy told him that they could not help him with an individual case, that so many bodies were taken out at night and thrown from helicopters and planes into the sea that they didn’t keep records. At first he did not tell Marta’s family what he heard because he thought it was a figure of speech, a brutal remark to convey that she was dead, but later when he inquired more, he discovered that it was literally true: they drugged their victims and hauled them into aircraft and threw them into the sea. Maybe that’s what happened to her, he said. I used to think I saw her on the street sometimes but I never do now. I know she’s dead. I don’t know about other cases, except her two friends, one of them was also from a family who had good connections, but they disappeared too.