James’s apartment building was larger and whiter than I remembered it, seeing it now sober and in daylight. I pressed the bell at the side of the filigreed iron gate and then realized it wasn’t locked. I went in and climbed the stairs. It had been months since that night we left the bar together, but I remembered that his door was on the third floor, beside an alcove at the top of the stairs. There was a prayer placard on the door that looked like it predated the building.
“¿Quién es?” said a voice from within.
“It’s Anne,” I said, and my voice came out with an exaggerated mid-Atlantic flatness, as if to brush aside his carefully accented question. “Anne from—from a couple of months ago. From the Bar Catalán.”
There was a long, ponderous silence. I dropped my face into my hands. You are all right, you are all right, I said to myself. You are quick and smart. He will open the door. You will not go to prison today. He will open the door.
I heard footsteps within and then another long hesitation. I cleared my throat and brightened my voice. “Maybe you don’t remember me,” I said to the peephole. “I’m sorry to come on a day like this. You must be thinking—”
The door opened and he appeared in the gap, unshaven, wearing glasses I didn’t remember, in an undershirt. His hair was standing up. He looked like a cadet in a war movie, about to go into France.
“Anne?” he said.
I mustered an apologetic smile.
“I couldn’t remember your name. You sneaked out,” he said. His face was open and curious, but he was not smiling.
“Can I come in, please?” I said.
He stepped back out of the doorway. The room beyond was larger than I remembered it, perhaps an effect of daylight coming through the large street-facing windows, the white bulk of the colonial building opposite, its terra-cotta roof leaching Mediterranean warmth into the winter day. A weaving on the living room wall showed the eagle and snake from the Mexican flag, their details picked out in pink and green thread. Between the windows there was a framed photograph of an Aztec sculpture, a pre-Columbian face laughing riotously, crowned with feathers, with a knife for a tongue.
“Well,” I said.
“Is this a social call?” he said. I watched him pick up a sweater that was draped across the back of a chair and pull it on, then resettle his glasses and run a hand over his hair. He was only slightly taller than I was, and he had a ready stance, like a boxer.
The room was neat and settled. No sign that he was packing up.
“My apartment was ransacked,” I said. “I’m afraid to go back there.”
His eyebrows went up. “Ransacked? By who?”
I suddenly wanted to sit down. “I have no idea.”
“Was anything missing?”
“I was too scared to go inside. The door was open when I got there, I didn’t know if they were still there.”
“Well, you have to call the police.” His arms were akimbo now, like a marionette.
I laughed. “The police?”
He was already walking toward the phone hanging on the wall in the kitchen, but at this he stopped and turned around. “Right, I guess this isn’t the day for it. Do you think it was them that did it? I’ve heard of that happening. People get home and there’s a note on the door telling them to come in for questioning and all the cash in the place is gone.”
I pretended to consider this with dawning horror. “I guess it could have been.”
“Sit down,” he said. I sat in the chair under the eagle and snake. He rattled in the kitchen for a few moments and then came out with a cup of instant coffee that he handed to me. “You’re a student?”
“Yes. Psychology at the UC.”
“Maybe they’re cracking down on students. They’re always suspicious of psychologists anyway. All those dirty books.”
This was true. There was an antipathy between Freudians and political conservatives in Argentina that had persisted for decades. If James was willing to make this argument for me, I would let him. “But I’m not even Argentine.”
“Well, that’s even worse. A foreign psychology student. They probably think you’re transmitting straight to Moscow.”
I laughed uproariously.
“Has anybody been after you at the university?” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I drank some of the foamy coffee. My hands were still unsteady. “I tried to go to Montevideo this morning, just until things settle down, and they wouldn’t sell me a ticket at Puerto Madero. They said there are no foreign passports going in or out today. And then I went back to my apartment and it was—well, I told you. And now here I am.”
“You don’t have friends here?”
“No. I haven’t been here long. Just a few months.”
“I thought you said you’d arrived just after New Year’s.” Something changed in his tone, as if he had caught me in a lie. A black cat appeared from under the sofa and rubbed against my leg.
“Six months, then,” I said.
“Six months and all alone. You seem awfully friendly for that.”
I glanced up. His arms were folded.
“I’m pretty shy, really,” I said.
He was avoiding my eyes. “I’m surprised you remembered this place,” he said. “To find your way back.”
“I’ve got a good memory,” I said. Was he angry with me? That happened sometimes. They got angry with you for being too easy, for going on existing afterward. The Aztec sculpture in the photo stared me down.
James got up abruptly and looked out the window. “More trucks,” he said, over the diesel squalling in the street.
There was a long silence.
“It’s just very unexpected,” he said finally.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have come,” I said. I set the coffee cup down on a magazine, relieved to get rid of it, the caffeine mixing badly with my adrenaline. I stood up, red-faced. “I’m so sorry. I’ll try the airport. Maybe I’ll be luckier there. I’ve got some money.”
“No, no. You don’t have to—”
“It’s all right.” I picked my handbag up off the floor and the cat struck at the scarf trailing from it, pulling it off in a long smooth sweep to the floor. “I just—it’s all right.”
“It could be dangerous.” He was distressed now, hands open. I tried to disentangle the cat’s paws from the scarf, but she was rolling silkily on the rug now, delighted.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“You won’t be. You know that. You hear the same things I do.” He meant the secret jails, the beatings. “Stay here.”
I gave up on the scarf and straightened up, letting him see my reddened eyes, then pressed my hands to my face.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Of course you can, it’s easy.” He took the handbag from my arm and set it down on the table. “I’ll make you something to eat. I feel badly now, I upset you. And you had such a bad morning already. Do you want to lie down?”
I realized then how long I had been awake already that day. He pointed me toward the bedroom and I lay for a while in the aquatic dimness of the bed I barely remembered, the windows heavily curtained to keep out the light. I slept and had a dream that I was in the basket of a hot-air balloon that was rising and rising through thinning air, the sky shining on all sides, the earth becoming illegible in the distance. I woke with an ache in my chest and heard the subsiding whistle of a teakettle in the kitchen. I read the spines of the paperbacks on the night table: Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith. Novels about liars. I needed to call Gerry.
If I could get back to America I would cash out everything and buy a house on a river and train up a big vicious dog that loved only me. A house and a dog. A trellis with some clematis on it. I ached and there was shame somewhere in it, for wandering so far away, for being so unconnected, about to be twenty-six years old with no one in the world wishing me well, no one who knew anything about me that was true at least, only this man in the other room, whose ego couldn’t bear the thought of sending me away to be arrested and tortured in the sub-basement of some police station in Avellaneda, as had happened to others before and would happen again.
He tapped on the door and pushed it open a crack. “I warmed up some empanadas,” he said. “And soup. Campbell’s. Did you know they sell it here?”
“I didn’t,” I said.
The afternoon was growing dim already, steel gray through the living room windows. My mind was clearer now than it had been before. He had set out the food on a small table with flowers carved around the edge, the kind of thing a proper señora would keep polished with wax. The radio was on. The government was now headed by a junta of three, whose names I had heard from time to time in the confitería. But where was Onganía in all this?
“You have nice furniture,” I said. In a half-silvered mirror I caught my reflection before I sat down: my skirt crushed, with concentric creases radiating from my hips, and my hair a mass aggravated by sleep and humidity, impenetrable and black.
“The apartment came furnished,” he said. “But the art is mine.”
I looked again at the eagle and snake. The snake’s body was caught in one talon and it curved back on itself as if about to strike, the tongue a furious neon pink.
“That snake looks like he might make it,” I said.
James was not listening. The radio was making the trilling noise that meant there was a bulletin. “All officeholders are relieved of their duties.”
“All of them?” James said, mostly to himself.
“All services are suspended. Curfew in effect from sunset to sunrise.”
“You couldn’t have gone anywhere anyway,” he observed to me, and then added, as if to clarify, “They said there’s a curfew. Can you speak Spanish?”
So this had not been clear from our night in the bar. I wondered how much he remembered. “Yes,” I said.
“I’m sorry to leave it on while we’re eating. I don’t want to miss anything.”
“I don’t mind.”
The radio went into a patriotic fugue state. A person of indeterminate gender with a dry, tremulous voice read aloud from Martín Fierro, a poem about horses and knives, with breaks for “Ave Maria” and the national anthem, sung by a soprano over a remote and crackling orchestra.
“You’re Mexican?” I said finally.
“My parents came from Oaxaca to Texas before I was born,” he said. “We used to spend summers there. My grandfather was a senator.”
The empanada was so good that my hunger came back all at once, almost painfully. I took another from the plate he had left in the middle of the table. A warm smell of cumin rose from it when I broke it in half.
“Do you think the markets will be open tomorrow?” I said. “I don’t want to eat up all your food.”
“I don’t know. This is my first coup.”
“Ha. Mine too.”
I ate my soup very slowly, in shallow spoonfuls. James had forgotten half his food on his plate.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” he said. “It’s just nerves.”
“Go ahead.”
“Tell me again where you’re from,” he said.
“Toronto,” I said.
“Oh, yes. You said.”
“What do you do, James?”
“I’m in the family business. Leather imports. But actually—well, I’m AWOL from the family business, if you want to know the truth. I was supposed to go back last year. But I had a crisis, I guess.”
“A crisis?”
“Couldn’t face it. Going back to Houston, managing the warehouses. So I stayed here. I told them I was researching new techniques. Cutting-edge stuff in the tanneries in Corrientes. And I was for a while. But then that was all done and I still couldn’t face going back.”
“And now here you are,” I said.
“Here I am. A cosmic irony. I didn’t want to leave and now I can’t.”
“You’re attached.”
“Can’t help it,” he said.
The curfew announcement came on again. He wasn’t looking at me much, and his body was hunched sideways at the table, one arm braced across his stomach as he listened to the radio. Maybe he felt me watching him. He glanced up.
“I’m not an idiot,” he said.
I teetered. “What?”
“Who was it who turned your apartment over? It was a boyfriend, wasn’t it?”
This was an unexpected turn. “A boyfriend?”
“Or a husband, maybe? You come home with me and run out in the middle of the night. Three months later your apartment has been trashed and you’re back here. With no connections in the world, according to you.” He gestured with the cigarette in a way that seemed self-conscious. “If it’s money you’re after, don’t bother,” he added, taking a drag. It occurred to me that his watch was expensive. “I’ve got none left.”
Here the best path was obvious. “I’m not after any money,” I said. “I have money.”
“Is he Canadian as well?” James said. “Has he run out already?”
I needed to slow it down. “I’d rather not talk about him,” I said, experimentally.
“Should I be expecting him to show up here and murder us both?”
In this drama that James was scripting, the man I pictured—the betrayer, or the betrayed, whichever he would be, standing in the rubble of my living room, cuckolded, shouting, red in the face—was Nico. It had a dreamy logic to it. Certainly we had parted ways definitively that day.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He wouldn’t. He’s married.”
“Married?” A flicker of genuine moral shock, before he remembered to be louche.
“I’m so sorry about all this,” I said.
He looked satisfied now. He settled back into his chair. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re livening up this lockdown, anyway.”
“So sorry,” I said again. I reached out with my soup spoon and cut the last empanada in half.
After we ate, I tried to read an old mystery novel from the shelves in the living room while James smoked and listened to the radio. I couldn’t fully take in either the radio broadcast or the book, which was an Agatha Christie novel set, oddly, in ancient Egypt. At eleven o’clock we were both drowsy, the nerves of the day finally overtaken by fatigue, and there was a crisis of manners.
“Take the bed,” he said.
“No, no, no,” I said.
There were sirens in the distance, rising and falling along the river. He switched the radio off. The coughing and droning of police motorcycles sounded in the street below.
“The sofa is too small,” he said.
“If it’s too small for me, it’ll be worse for you.”
“My mother would be appalled if I let a guest sleep on the sofa,” he said.
“My mother would be appalled about everything that’s happened since I woke up this morning.”
He was hesitating in the archway that led from the living room to the kitchen. Poking around with the dishes, which I had washed. I thought maybe he expected that we would sleep together again—maybe he thought he deserved it, for being so broad-minded about me—but I also had a feeling I had better not start it myself. It would seem too transactional if I did, and that would bother him.
“The sofa is really all right,” I said. “I’m insisting.”
“We’ll renegotiate tomorrow,” he said.