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anything, that’s because the murderer must have picked up Luz in his car and taken him somewhere to kill him and then throw his body in the harbor.”
    â€œListen, no little whore is going to tell me how to do my job!” the policeman grumbled, shaking his chops. “Now get out of here,
India de merda
, before I lock you up. Naked, how would you like that?”
    Paula shivered on her chair. The station’s walls oozed violence, arbitrariness, and beatings. Jana held her breath, her eyes burning with hatred. It wasn’t just Jorge, the manager of the Transformer; for the cops too she would never be more than someone who sucked cocks, a subhuman or alien of the species that you fucked in cars, a bastard who grew up in the dirt and was thrown into the city like a prison, an Indian who pissed her kind’s blood: nothing.
    Nothing but a whore.
    She took Paula’s icy hand.
    â€œ
Rajemos
!” 3

3
    The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, the Peruvians from the Incas, the Colombians from the Mayas, and the Argentines descend from boats,” goes the old joke.
    In fact, Buenos Aires existed chiefly through European eyes. A play of mirrors and reflections that honed the soul of
Porteños
. After the natives were wiped out, losers from the old world gathered in this silted-up port without docks, which was reached by half-submerged wagons drawn by horses. Hardly had the dust raised by the Indians settled than the colonists began building the city of Buenos Aires that Daniel Calderón loved so much.
    Was that why he left it so often, like a passionate mistress, the better to return to it? When he talked about the city, Daniel had the
duende
, that creative brilliance dear to Lorca that is sometimes found in a bullfighter’s pass, a singer’s voice, or the trance of a flamenco dancer. Rubén found this
duende
that “rejects muses and angels / as learned dogs in the mud” in his father’s poems, the fire and light that had dazzled his childhood. Daniel and Elena Calderón had given him this name in honor of Rubén Dario, the instigator of their language’s independence movement and a precursor of the manifesto of
Martín Fierro
, the avant-garde poetry magazine that had put its stamp on the beginning of the century in Argentina, and of which Daniel was one of the most innovative heirs.
    Rubén had discovered Buenos Aires through the eyes of his father, a poet bound to his city the way the plain is bound to the rain: very early on, Daniel had told him about his tricks of sleight-of-hand, his bars where they smoked and talked until dawn about politics, about the tango that had returned from the whorehouses and its women bent under the other’s desire, the colors and prism of the Europe that haunted them. As they sat for hours on benches or café terraces in the Florida neighborhood of Buenos Aires, his father had taught him to observe people, to recognize that a young girl was walking alone in the street for the first time, so proud in a touching way to show everyone that she was free, the elegance of lovers on the paving stones shining in the night, to divine the reflections of old men in parks, the lost thoughts that had to be recuperated for them, the insouciance of cats in cemeteries, the peaceful happiness of mature women when they had fallen in love again, the stirring vitality of some women when they gave the gift of their grace to the world, thus restoring its enchantment. Together, they imagined the lives of passersby, like the man in a hat they saw near the opera house who, by following Borges’s itinerary, would end up shaking Pinochet’s hand (a typical joke, the great writer having both drawn up his “ideal itinerary” through the checkerboard of Buenos Aires and shaken the hand of the Chilean dictator before retracting his act “to some extent”). As Rubén grew up, women became their favorite playground, where passionate