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the movies or on TV. He had lived in New York, a city without any of the ridiculous hierarchies of a small town in the province of Buenos Aires—or at least where they weren’t as visible. He always looked happy. Everyone who spoke to him or ran into him on the street felt important because of how he listened to them. How he agreed with them. One week after being in town, he had established a warm and sympathetic aura about him, and he became popular and well known even among people who hadn’t met him. 3
    He had a certain ability to win over the men, and this seemed to draw the women to his side as well. They talked about him in the ladies room in the coffee shop, and in the halls of the Social Club, and in endless telephone conversations on summer afternoons. The women were the ones, of course, who started saying that Tonyhad actually come to town after the Belladona sisters.
    Until finally, one afternoon, he walked into the bar of the Plaza Hotel with one of the two sisters—with Ada, they say. They sat at a table in a far corner and spent the afternoon talking and laughing softly. It caused an explosion, a show of joy and malice. That very night was the start of the hushed comments and the stories full of innuendos.
    They were said to have checked in at the Inn on the road that leads to the town of Rauch. And that the sisters used to receive him in a small house of theirs, in the vicinity of the closed factory that stood like an abandoned monument some ten kilometers from town.
    It was all rumors, provincial chatter, stories that only served to further elevate his prestige—and that of the sisters.
    The Belladona sisters had always been ahead of their time, they were the precursors of everything interesting that happened in town: the first to wear miniskirts, the first not to wear bras, the first to smoke marijuana and take the pill. It was as if the sisters had decided that Durán was the right man to help them complete their education. An initiation story, then, like in those novels in which young social climbers conquer frigid duchesses. The sisters weren’t frigid, or duchesses, but Durán was a young social climber, a Caribbean Julien Sorel—as Nelson Bravo, the writer of the society pages for the local paper, eruditely put it.
    At this point the men changed from looking at him with distant sympathy to treating him with blind admiration and calculated envy.
    â€œHe used to come here, peaceful as could be, and have a drinkwith one of the sisters. Because at first (people say) they didn’t let him into the Social Club. Those snobs are the worst, they like to keep everything hidden. Simple folks, instead, are more liberal,” Madariaga said, using the word in its old sense. “If they do something, they do it out in the light of day. Didn’t Don Cosme and his sister Margarita live together for over a year as a couple? And didn’t the two Jáuregui brothers share a woman they got in a brothel in Lobos? And didn’t that old guy Andrade get involved with a fifteen-year-old girl who was a pupil in a Carmelite convent?”
    â€œSurely,” one of the patrons said.
    â€œOf course if Durán had been a blond gringo everything would’ve been different,” Madariaga said.
    â€œSurely,” the patron repeated.
    â€œSurely, surely…Shirley got put in the clink,” Bravo said, sitting at a table near the window toward the back of the tavern. Stirring a spoonful of bicarbonate in a glass of soda water. For his heartburn.
    Durán liked living in a hotel. He’d stay up all night, wandering the empty hallways while everyone slept. And sometimes he’d talk with the night concierge, who went around trying the doors at all hours, or took brief naps on the leather chairs in the large reception hall downstairs. Talking is a figure of speech, though, because the night porter was a Japanese man who smiled and said yes to everything, as if he