The narrator, a self-proclaimed “normal man,” ogles every young woman he runs across, at work or in the street. A photographer coworker he thinks must be his own age is too old to interest him, while a 17-year-old schoolgirl, the niece of one of the suicides he’s investigating, is the female whose intelligence he most respects and whom he most yearns to hear from. Although he almost never thinks about the changing gender expectations for women that are happening all around him, they do affect him. He lives in his childhood home with his doting mother, his brother, and his brother’s wife and four children, while several of the women he sleeps with, or tries to sleep with, live alone. All the women he pursues are, like him, employed. Unlike him, some own cars, and they drive him around. His housewife sister-in-law does not emulate his mother’s pure self-abnegation but complains about him, even quarrels with him. And he’s dimly aware that the schoolgirl who draws his attention is off-limits.

He demonstrates glancing knowledge of Margaret Mead’s work on the social construction of gender in her 1935 Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (published in Spanish in Buenos Aires in 1947), a comparative study of three Melanesian societies: the warlike Mundugamor, the pacifist Arapesh, and the Chambri, among whom, Mead claimed, women were dominant. He’s also aware that there are alternatives to heterosexuality, suggesting to a policeman that two teenage boys who’ve perished in a murder-suicide may have been involved in an unhappy love affair. Yet his perception of gender as destiny remains ironclad.

The gender whose destiny concerns him is his own. He’s preoccupied with manhood, what has become of it, and his own place within the lineage that extends from his fearsome paternal grandfather to his suicide father to himself and his brother. A news item about a man who committed arson to give his volunteer fire brigade a chance to hone its skills makes him reflect on the existential absurdity of firemen with no fires to put out. The dossier of types of suicide his colleague Bibi, a.k.a. the Card Catalogue, prepares for him includes the case of a warrior who kills himself for want of a war. But does the problem really lie with the modern world’s restrictions on masculinity? Bibi later brings up the Roman emperor Hadrian’s decree that the penalty for a soldier who attempts suicide is execution. Then there’s King, the “chained maniac of a dog” that Juan Tiflis, one of the suicides under investigation, left to his widow, who keeps the large mastiff locked in a bathroom where he spends all day howling. You don’t have to be human to be denied the life evolution destined you for.