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A slogan was attached to the wall above a vintage lamp: “Don't create models of life, create model lives.” There were piles of press kits, fanciful postcards thumbtacked to the wall, an enlarged portrait by Helmut Newton in which a tall, nude blonde perched on stiletto heels stared into the lens, an ashtray without butts holding a neighborhood shoemaker's card, a small box in the Peruvian style filled with coffee beans, and, in the middle of the desk, what seemed to be the place usually occupied by a portable computer. Ruben observed the loft, imbuing himself with its atmosphere.

Food in the fridge, recent purchases, clothes in the washing machine, there were multiple reasons for rejecting the hypothesis that Victoria had run away or committed suicide. An open bottle of fruit juice, leftovers, a few eggs and containers of soy yogurt—all perishable foods. Nothing that told him much. An ancient Polaroid was set on the chest of drawers, next to the landline phone. Rubén picked up the receiver: an electronically-generated voice announced a new message, recorded at noon—a certain Miss Bolivia, who was thanking María for her photos. Rubén took down her name and number. No address book or appointment calendar was visible anywhere around the telephone. He briefly flipped through administrative papers that had been put in folders, stuck the latest phone bill in his pocket, and called María's cellphone number, just to see: telephone out of order. Had she cut her line? Rubén went upstairs, doubtfully, and refrained from smoking.

The bed was made, clothes were scattered across the quilt. No sign of a cell phone. María had probably taken it with her. He went into the adjoining bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet: a bottle of sleeping pills, antianxiety medications, the rest beauty products. No prescription. He returned to the bedroom, went through the drawers in the night table—trinkets, condoms, a short, chrome dildo, heat-rub, a few photography magazines, a small bag of marijuana that smelled rather stale, a packet of powder . . . Rubén wet his finger: cocaine. Very poor quality. You could find anything in Buenos Aires, and coke in particular, but the proximity to Colombia did not prevent it from smelling of kerosene. He left the little chest of drawers and opened the closets, counted about twenty pairs of shoes. A careful search of the jackets and pants yielded nothing, as did going through the clothes lying on the bed. He bent down and saw three black hairs intersecting on the pillow: long, curly, similar to the photographer's hair. Rubén put them in a plastic bag before going back down the spiral stairway.

On his way, he picked up the shoemaker's card in the ashtray, went into the vestibule and took out the clothes that had been stuffed into the washing machine. They had not been washed. He inspected the pockets and found a crumpled cigarette paper at the bottom of a jeans pocket, with a few words scribbled on it in pencil: Ituzaingô 69 . . .

He'd already been there for half an hour. Ruben looked around the loft one last time. It was impossible to tell whether someone else had already searched it, whether María had left in a hurry, or why she was no longer giving any sign of life. He had seen no scratches on the lock, and so the front door had not been forced, but something was bothering him; he could not say what it was. He glanced into the toilet room before leaving—the cat litter was dirty—and noticed a strange series of pendants on the door, artistic compositions in plastic hanging on a string. Her specialty, it seemed. A series of humorous ready-mades, some with punning titles, others without. Then Rubén saw the pregnancy test hung on the toilet door: “
Terme au mètre.
”

The pregnancy test was positive.

Rubén didn't have a cat. Cats spent their time crawling all over him, curling up in his clothes if he'd been so unfortunate as to leave them lying around, rubbing them with their muzzles as they looked for the armpit, and he much preferred the company of women, even if it was episodic. The fact that he had never lived with anyone did not change his image of women, his desire for new romantic adventures: women just didn't last, that's all. He had spent years reconstructing himself after his detention. The balance was fragile, and certainly unpredictable, so what. Rubén lived in a pit of archives, faces that had disappeared, too much dust, file folders, with corpses between the pages and on the walls, a cage from which he watched women pass by. None of them had stayed long, or he had not held onto any of them, which for him amounted to the same thing: Rubén told himself that at the age of forty-seven it was too late. He was not expecting anything in particular and his solitude didn't need anyone. The time for affairs en passant was over, his father's poetry, which he knew by heart, would be of no use to him, he was reduced to silence, to nothing, words had long since betrayed him, and the stars didn't give a damn.

He was attached to the void. As for seeking a kindred spirit, it was already there, in the closet, near the bed where no woman would ever sleep again.

Rubén put on a Ufomammut CD to drown out the noise of the air lane that passed over the intersection of San Juan and Peru, aired out the bedroom where he woke up, and had a coffee-croissant-cigarette breakfast that struggled to compensate for too little sleep. The business with the cat continued to bother him: if the building's concierge had found it meowing on the landing, María Victoria must have deliberately put it out so that it would be taken in—in which case she had fled without even taking the time to leave it with the concierge—or else it had escaped. How? The loft's windows were closed, but the animal might have been able to sneak out when the front door was opened. Had it been frightened by someone breaking in?

Sparrows were chirping excitedly outside the window, charming little monsters imported from France that had driven out the native
calandria.
Rubén gave them the remains of his breakfast, took a shower, and mentally drew up a list of his leads.

–A telephone message left the day before from a cell phone (“Miss Bolivia”).

–The photos of a singer that were hung on a string.

–A crumpled piece of paper in the bottom of a pocket of a pair of jeans thrown in the dirty laundry, with what looked like an address (“Ituzaingó 69”).

–A neighborhood shoemaker's card.

–Three hairs on the pillow.

–A phone bill for the preceding month.

–A small amount of dope in the night table—marijuana, cocaine.

–A pregnancy test, positive.

On his way back from the loft, Rubén dropped the pregnancy test in the mailbox at the Center for Forensic Anthropology, along with the bag containing the hairs and an explanatory message for Raúl Sanz, who led the research team. According to the SMS he received on his BlackBerry, he would have a reply by the end of the day. It was noon. Rubén began by calling the number saved on María Victoria's answering machine, let it ring. “Miss Bolivia” didn't pick up, so he left a message on her cell phone before continuing his research on the internet.

“Ituzaingó 69”: dozens of hits came up, ranging from the famous battle between Argentine and Brazilian troops that was to result in Uruguay's gaining independence to a city in Corrientes province, by way of a garage rock group and several addresses in Greater Buenos Aires. Rubén wrote down the names and addresses, and then went to the photographer's site, which she seemed to update regularly. María Victoria Campallo followed artists on tours or films, which explained her frequent travels. He made a list of the musicians with whom she had worked: the most recent was a saccharine pop star who was very popular in South America and had performed in Santa Cruz a month before, but he and his staff had continued the tour in Colombia. Surfing on the site, Rubén came across the face of the man in the photos hung up in María Victoria's studio. The date of the concert indicated that the pictures had been taken toward the end of November, during the rock festival in Rosario. A black leather outfit, boots, pomaded hair like a stallion's mane, black eyeliner emphasizing his tormented eyes, a little too heavy, but an undeniable aura that would elicit the screams of the groupies that he must collect in large numbers: Jo Prat, that was the vampire's name, the former leader of the Desaparecidos, unrecognizable under his makeup and his extra weight. Rubén called Pilar, a friend of his who handled the cultural pages in the celebrity gossip magazine
Clarín
.

Pilar Dalmontes liked to fuck her husband and also other men. She answered on the third ring.

“It's been a long time, you little bastard!” she said, seeing Rubén's number come up on her phone.

“Nice to know you remember me.”

“I'd have preferred to forget you,” Pilar admitted, clearly in great form at lunchtime. But you know how I am.”

“Marvelous.”

“Flatterer! Don't tell me you don't have an hour for me?”

“How about a minute?”

“I'm not sure I can do much for you in such a short time.”

“I need a contact,” Rubén said. “Jo Prat. Can you get it for me?”

“Hmmm. I like it when you put on your velvet voice,” Pilar said, ironically. “What do you want with him, with Nosferatu?”

“I want to bring a little sunshine into his life.”

“How is yours going?”

“Great.”

“I don't see you anywhere, night owl: have you got something against your contemporaries? Married women?”

“On the contrary. So?”

Pilar looked through her address book.

“Gurruchaga 3180,” she reported. “Do you want his number, or would mine be enough for you?”

“Guess.”

“I have only his landline.”

“I'll make do with that. Do you know if Prat is around here just now?”

“I think he's on the program for the Lezama festival next week.”

“O.K.”

Rubén wrote down the number, thanked the gossip queen, who pretended to simper, and called the singer. Another answering machine. He left his name and number, asking Prat to contact him right away. Outside the windows, the sky was still threatening. He warmed up some leftover paella, and called the numbers that appeared on María Campallo's telephone bill, all of them administrative or professional contacts that were of no help. Same with the shoemaker's shop, which was closed that day and the following—the shoemaker, whose name was Gonzalez, took Mondays off. All that didn't get him very far. Miss Bolivia finally called him back.

Pleasant, the young woman agreed to meet him in an hour at La Trastienda, a nearby bistro where she was appearing to promote her album. She was also a rock singer: Rubén found her profile on Facebook, and saved the information. Outside, a storm was brewing. The sparrows had left the windowsill, driven away by the wind. Rubén left the agency in a downpour.

The covered market in San Telmo did not attract an upscale crowd, with its dilapidated stores displaying antediluvian underwear, its bric-a-brac and shops with dusty ironwork. On the Plaza Dorrego, a few retirees were playing violins to supplement their pensions, which Menem had trimmed. They played on imperturbably, despite the gusts of wind that were whipping the displays of the itinerant vendors and second-hand sellers. Rubén crossed the square, where tourists who had taken refuge under plastic windbreakers were standing around, and found Miss Bolivia at the bar in La Trastienda.

A representative of an ethnic, explosive variety of rap, less than five feet tall and lost in a pair of shorts and big sneakers, Miss Bolivia was surrounded by her fans, half a dozen little lesbian dolls who followed her everywhere. They immediately hit it off. Rubén paid for a round of Coca-Cola. The rapper confirmed that she had called María the day before regarding the cover of her next album. The little Bolivian had not seen her since the photo shoot ten days earlier, it was the end of vacation, everyone was still a little here and there. In any case, María Victoria wasn't a close friend, they had just met through work: she didn't know if the photographer had a steady boyfriend, what she did with her nights, if she was interested in politics, astrophysics, or dog grooming.

“All I can tell you is that María is hetero,” Miss Bolivia said.

The little dolls giggled behind her. He left the bar with the rapper's CD.

On badly photocopied flyers, girls with breasts like artillery shells pretended to be hungry for sex: Rubén brushed off a dozen hawkers soliciting on the Plaza Dorrego and went home. As he came in the door, half-soaked, Jo Prat called back on his cell phone.

 

*

 

Jo Prat had created his rock group in the early 1980s, when the junta had had to make concessions to social pressure.
Los Desaparecidos
had saluted the victory of democracy at the Obras Sanitarias stadium, supported by a vengeful crowd:

 

Milicos, hijos de puta! Qué es lo que han hecho con los desaparecidos? La guerra sucia, la corrupción son la peor mierda que ha tenido la nación! Que paso con las Malvinas? Esos chicos ya no estan, no podemos olvidarlos y por eso vamos a luchar!
10

 

The rest had been less glorious: the group had worked the concert halls and festivals for four years without taking time off, endured stress, lack of privacy, and drug addiction, and finally sank into quarrels about matters of ego and alcoholism. Colombian marijuana and the spangles of the Menem years had ended up disgusting him: quarrels, depression, treatment, Jo Prat had crossed several deserts where he'd dried out over and over. The disappointments and the wounds inflicted by people who the day before were rubbing him the right way had made him taciturn, somber, and bitter—“open-pit coal,” as he said in his songs. Courageously or rashly, at the age of fifty Jo Prat was resuming a solo career with an album and a tour that had begun in November, before the summer festivals.

Gurruchaga 3180, Palermo Hollywood. The paved streets were shaded by sycamores with trunks covered with romantic slogans. Jo lived two blocks from the Plaza Cortázar, famous for its beer taverns, its giant screens, and its high-priced, fashionable stores, in a white three-story building shaded by the foliage of a rubber tree.