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races, about his ‘sure things’. He’d get angry if one of them was having trouble with the police or the Triple A (in books it says it stands for the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance, but papá always called it the Argentine Assassins Alliance) when they were thrown in jail or beaten up.
    One day he told me that Tío Rodolfo was dead. He asked me to go to the wake with him. And when Tío Raymundo asked me where I lived, I lied. I told him I lived near La Boca.

11
LET’S GO
    Mamá put her head around the classroom door and asked if she could come in. She was wearing the navy blue tailored suit that I always liked because it gave her a wasp waist. She had a lit cigarette between her fingers, as she always did. I think this is the only trait of the mad scientist I ever associated with mamá, that and her obsession with explaining everything in terms of physics – her inability to see a game of football as anything other than a complex system of masses, resistances, vectors and forces. If mamá needed to remember anything, whether it was a phone number or a formula, she jotted it down on the back of her pack of red Jockey Club cigarettes; then she’d forget she’d written something important on it and throw the packet in the bin. This was a law as unchanging as the law of gravity.
    Señorita Barbeito turned the projector off, went to the door and had a whispered conversation with mamá. I took advantage of her well-timed interruption to stop playing Hangman so I could regroup (one more mistake and I was hanged), pretending to be interested in what was happening. What was mamá doing here? Shouldn’t she be in the lab? Maybe she had come to pay the bursar and stopped by to say hello?
    â€˜Get your things, you’ve got to go,’ said Señorita Barbeito.

    I made a covert triumphant gesture and started stuffing my things into my schoolbag. Bertuccio looked annoyed. Mamá had robbed him of his victory.
    He filled in the missing letters and asked what we were doing that afternoon.
    â€˜Same as always,’ I told him. ‘I’ll come by your house right after my English class.’
    â€˜My mother is making
milanesas
,’ Bertuccio said to tempt me. And boy did it work. To extrapolate my grandpa’s expression: ‘God is in the details – and in Bertuccio’s mother’s
milanesas
.’
    Then Bertuccio gave me the piece of paper we’d been playing Hangman on. Now, it didn’t read A _ _ A _ A _ A _ _ A. The solution was simple and elegant. In fact, it was magic.
    Bertuccio’s word was ‘
ABRACADABRA
’.

12
THE CITROËN
    At this point it’s essential to dwell for a moment on the merits of the car in which we made our getaway. Mention the name Citroën and the average man pictures an elegant car driving around Paris with the Arc de Triomphe permanently in the background. But while it’s true that our car had the same name and could trace its ancestry back to France, Citroëns in Argentina in 1976 were as different from that stereotype as Rocinante is from Bucephalus.
    First: the shape. Seen in profile, our car might be described as having the classic curves of a Volkswagen Beetle, a large semicircle comprising the boot and the interior with a smaller semicircle containing the engine sticking out in front – but you’d be wrong. Whereas the Volkswagen has the reassuring sturdiness of German engineering, our Citroën was so flimsy it was like a Matchbox car.
    The chassis was the problem. If a Volkswagen Beetle crashed into a common or garden wall, it would simply plough through it, whereas our Citroën would crumple like an accordion playing ‘La Vie en Rose’. The roof was just as flimsy. It was a canvas roof, but don’t confuse this with the folding roof of a European convertible. When I say it was made of canvas, I mean it could be unhooked and rolled up.
    The flimsiness of the chassis