The nameless hero of The Silentiary also feels trapped and powerless, though he exercises near-absolute control over the lives of his mother, wife, and eventual infant son, moving them endlessly from house to house in his personal quest for quiet. He retains some of Zama’s belief in his power to alter his situation, working with a newly elected city councilman (a former journalist) to pass a local noise ordinance, and with his electrician cousin to create a jammer that interferes with the neighbors’ radios and TV sets. He grows enraged when the councilman-journalist says to him with a laugh “You’ve thought about killing yourself, haven’t you? That way you won’t hear any more noise”—so enraged he punches him in the face with a set of keys. His desire to change things for the better leads him to toy with the idea of open warfare against the noise-makers who poison his existence, and in the novel’s final pages he’s in prison. He emphatically rejects the idea, suggested to him by a dream, that this might be a conscious sacrifice on his part, that he might be deliberately saving his family from himself.

Zama, too, ends with involuntary sacrifice. Rather than executing Don Diego outright, his captor cuts Zama’s fingers off, whispering that if he cauterizes the wound in the embers of the campfire he might survive. In Lucrecia Martel’s overwhelming 2017 film Zama, which does not transfer the novel to the screen but encompasses it, responds to it, sees into the depths beyond it, the Indian Don Diego was told might save him does appear. In the film’s final scene, an indigenous child sitting opposite the mutilated Don Diego in a swiftly gliding canoe gazes at him gravely and asks “Do you want to live?”

The novel, however, ends differently. Don Diego sees a blond boy, a figure he’s glimpsed several times already, whose age never changes in the course of a decade. This could be an actual rescuer but can also, and perhaps more plausibly, be read as a dying man’s final hallucination of his own earlier self.

Don Diego de Zama’s dissatisfaction is personal; he wants to improve his own situation. The protagonist of The Silentiary, however, may be the “dissatisfied” person that his counterpart in The Suicides thinks should be in charge of all governments, the kind of person who “won’t resign themselves to anything, who will always demand that everything should be improved.” Written and set, like Zama, during a period of worldwide political upheaval, The Suicides offers only a single glimpse of an active demand for improvement: a prison uprising. The inmates demand mattresses to sleep on, freedom of religion, and the right to receive magazines and visits from family. The narrator, coming across their story in a newspaper, finds it absurd that they’ve resorted to violence and risked their own lives only to demand so little.