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flock is heading north as fast as it can, but she accepted.
    â€œWho are you?” she asked the young woman who had stepped forward in front of her in the early hours, during her second visit to the market.
    â€œI’m a beauty queen. Ana Torrente. Everybody here knows me as Miss Bolivia,” the cherub explained.

5
    She became a lawyer to fight the good fight. It has to be said that was another era: a ferocious dictatorship was on its way out, defeated in the military adventure of the Malvinas. Verónica truly believed her university degree could be of some use.
    â€œBut power isn’t changing hands,” she was warned by a man who shared her classes and her bed. A latterday Marxist, as he described himself, someone who never once tried to make her happy in a relationship that lasted several months, but simply to make her more aware. “The struggle of the people came to an end in the ’60s,” he would tell her, between bouts of lovemaking, like a voiceover for the adverts in the middle of a television program. “The revolutions were defeated by revolutionaries who had turned into bureaucrats. The Soviet Union was the gravedigger.”
    Another fuck; another round of adverts. “Then came the Pope, the Internet, Bill Gates. Who reads Marx’s
Das Kapital
today, or at the very least
What Is to be Done?
by that old baldy Lenin?”
    He left her after three months, but by then she was already pregnant with disillusion. Yet during Easter week in 1986 she went to the Plaza de Mayo to condemn the military rebellion trying to oust the democratic government. She shouted with the rest of the crowd that the coup-mongers should be shot. Nobody listened. Three years later, the same president who had decorated the military rebels was forced out on his knees, not by the military this time but by the real powerbrokers, the ones who never let it go. Verónica sought out her Marxistformer lover to tell him at least he had been right. She was passed from one telephone number to another, until at the third try she found him: working as a personal assistant to a consultant for multinationals.
    â€œIt’s not that I’m against democracy,” he insisted when they met in the Las Artes bar opposite the law faculty. “But this system is a bourgeois farce. I prefer dictatorship.” Nowadays he combed his hair across his head to hide his bald patch and had dark circles under his eyes. “I’ve got some good stuff,” he said. “Let’s find a quiet spot.”
    She said fine. “I’ll be back in a minute” As she stood up, she ruffled his gelled hair to reveal his bald pate. She walked toward the toilets, but then skipped into the kitchen. She raised her finger to her mouth to keep the dishwasher quiet and he led her to the service entrance. She ran out.
    â€œThat was fifteen years ago,” she says. “And I’m still running.” She is talking to Damián Bértola, the psychoanalyst she shares her office with on calle Tucumán, two blocks from the law courts.
    â€œYou ought to stop, sweetheart. Sometimes it pays to call a halt and look at yourself. Today for example. Who did you sleep with last night to end up with a face like that?”
    â€œNo-one. I spent the night waiting for news from a blond princess. First on the phone and then, toward dawn, on the radio or T.V.”
    Bértola listens. It is part of their agreement, although it is not in the contract: they listen to each other when they need to share their concerns or their expenses. One day a heartache, the next an inheritance.
    The original idea had come from the blond, Miss Bolivia, Verónica explains. A group of her fellow countrymen—petty smugglers, peasants selling their produce outside supermarkets—wanted to create a cooperative somewhere in the Buenos Aires area. They could not work in the city center anymore: the police there made life impossible. The