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  Neither the witnesses nor the police investigation could ever determine what happened or where the girl was between three o’clock on Thursday December 8th, 1983, when she left work, and the morning of Sunday 11th, when her body was found.

  Only Norma Romero and Elena Taborda, two new friends of María Luisa, claimed they saw her after she finished work. They walked a couple of blocks together, but then went their separate ways.

  The police search had barely begun when, on the morning of Sunday December 11th, the phone rang in Police Station 1. Someone was calling to report a body found on a patch of wasteland between Calle 51 and Calle 28, on the outskirts of the city. That area, now abandoned, was where earth used to be extracted for making bricks, and there was still a large, shallow pit that filled with water when it rained, forming a muddy lake the locals call a reservoir. In this almost waterless reservoir, the girl’s body was discarded. She’d been strangled with the same leather belt she put on in the morning before leaving for work.

  At the same time that Sunday, in Buenos Aires, 687 miles away, the echoes were only just fading from the street parties celebrating the inauguration of Raúl Alfonsín, Argentina’s first democratically elected president after seven years of dictatorship. The final stragglers were dozing at bus stops as the buses drove straight past, with not even standing room left.

  In Sáenz Peña, everyone had spent Saturday glued to the TV, watching the ceremonies and celebrations live on the National Channel from 8 a.m., when they began. As night fell, they too had gone out to celebrate, in Plaza San Martín, the main square. Those with cars had formed a convoy around the city centre, with mini Argentinian flags fluttering on the aerials, horns honking and passengers hanging out of the windows, waving their arms and singing. Although the elected governor of Chaco, Florencio Tenev, was from the Peronist opposition party and the incoming president was from the centrist Radical party, the return to democracy mattered more than political stripes and no one wanted to be left out of the fun.

  While everyone was busy celebrating, the Quevedos went on looking for María Luisa.

  The last day Sarita Mundín was seen alive, March 12th 1988, was also a fairly normal one for the girl. She’d been away from Villa María for a few weeks, in the city of Córdoba, looking after her mother in hospital. She’d brought her back to the little apartment on Calle San Martín where she lived with Germán, her four-year-old son, and Mirta, her sister of fourteen, who was pregnant. Their mother had just had an operation and needed taking care of, which would be easier for the Mundín sisters if they all lived in the same place. They crammed in as best they could; the apartment was tiny.

  When her lover, Dady Olivero, had helped her rent it, the idea was that just she and Germán would live there, and that Dady could visit easily, without the indiscretion of the city’s by-the-hour hotel rooms, which were risky for a married man and well-known entrepreneur. Olivero and his family were the owners of the El Mangrullo meat processing plant.

  What with her time in Córdoba and her mother’s presence in the apartment, it was a while since Sarita had seen Dady. That day, he said he’d swing by in his car and take her somewhere they could be alone without anyone bothering them.

  She didn’t want to go anywhere with him. Her relationship with this man, more than ten years her senior and with a family of his own, was petering out. It seems she’d met a guy in Córdoba she was pretty keen on. Still, when Dady came to pick her up that afternoon, despite her lack of enthusiasm, Sarita grabbed a towel – they were going to the river – and a bag, and took the stairs down to the ground floor to meet him.

  She hadn’t spent as long getting ready as she used to, back when the relationship seemed to be going somewhere and she thought it might change her life. She went out in a long skirt, a t-shirt and flip-flops. Dressed up or not, Sarita was a beautiful woman: slim, with wavy chestnut hair, pale skin, green eyes.

  Mirta and Germán followed her onto the pavement. The kid, when he saw his mother heading for the car parked on the kerb, wanted to go with her. But the driver inside said no so sternly that the boy cowered in his aunt’s skirt, pouting. Sarita turned round, kissed him and promised to bring him back a present.

  But she never returned from that outing.

  She was missing for almost a year. At the end of December, the dairy farmer Ubaldo Pérez found the remains of a human skeleton lodged in the branches of a tree, on the banks of the Tcalamochita river, which separates the cities of Villa María and Villa Nueva. They were just outside a place known as La Herradura, next to Villa Nueva. The state of the remains – bare bones – suggests she was killed on the same day she went out with her lover, though it was never possible to say how.

  When I started university I moved with a friend to Paraná, the provincial capital, a hundred and twenty-five miles from my town. We lived in a boarding house and money was tight. To save cash, we started hitchhiking at weekends when we went to visit our families. At first we always tried to find a guy we knew, another student, to go with us. Then we realised we got picked up more quickly as just girls. In pairs or threes it didn’t feel dangerous. And eventually, as we grew more confident, we each took to travelling alone if we couldn’t find another girl to join us. Sometimes exams meant we didn’t go back to our hometown on the same day. We got into cars, lorries, trucks. We didn’t get in if there was more than one man in the vehicle, but other than that, we didn’t take many precautions.

  In five years, I went there and back hundreds of times without paying for a ticket. Hitchhiking was the cheapest way of getting around, and sometimes it was even interesting. You’d meet people. You’d chat. Mostly, you’d listen: the lorry drivers in particular, tired of their lonely work, would tell us their entire life stories as we added fresh hot water to their mate.

  There was the odd uncomfortable incident. One time a lorry driver from Mendoza, while telling me his troubles, said that female students sometimes slept with him to make a few pesos and that he saw nothing wrong with it, it was a way of paying for their studies and helping their parents out. It never went beyond this insinuation, but for the rest of the journey I felt very uneasy. Whenever I got into a car, the first thing I did was check where the inside lock was. I think that day I slid over the seat until I was pressed against the window, and kept hold of the handle in case I had to make a break for it. Another time, a young guy in a fancy car, who was driving too fast, told me he was a gynaecologist and started explaining about the regular check-ups a woman should have, the importance of detecting tumours, of catching cancer in time. He asked if I went for check-ups. I said yes, of course, every year, even though it wasn’t true. And while he was talking and driving he reached out a hand and started fondling my tits. I froze, the seatbelt across my chest. Without taking his eyes off the road, the guy said: You can spot any suspicious lumps you might have on your own, touching yourself like this, see.

  However, only once did I feel we were in real danger. A friend and I were travelling from Villa Elisa to Paraná, one Sunday afternoon. It had been a difficult journey, with a lot of stopping and starting. We got into and out of a whole series of cars and lorries. The last one left us at a crossroads near Viale, around forty miles from Paraná. It was getting dark and there wasn’t a soul on the road. Finally we saw a car approaching. An orange car, neither new nor old. We flagged it down and the driver pulled over. We ran a few yards to catch up. It was going to Paraná, so we got in, my friend next to the man at the wheel, a guy of around sixty, and me in the back. For the first couple of miles we covered all the usual topics: the weather, where we were from, what we studied. The man told us he was on his way home from some farmland he had in the area. I couldn’t hear very well from the back, and since my friend seemed to have the conversation in hand, I settled into my seat and looked out of the window. I don’t know how long it was before I realised something strange was going on. Instead of watching the road, the guy wa
s leaning in to talk to my friend, and he seemed more animated than before. I sat up a bit. Then I saw his hand patting her knee, and the same hand moving upwards and stroking her arm. I started chattering away about whatever came into my head: the state of the road, the exams we had that week. But the guy took no notice. He went on talking to my friend, inviting her to go for a drink when we arrived. She didn’t lose her cool or stop smiling, but I knew that deep down she was as frightened as me. No, thanks, I’ve got a boyfriend. Why should I care, I’m not jealous. I bet your boyfriend’s just a kid, what can he teach you about life. A girl like you needs a mature man like me. Protection. Financial security. Experience. The phrases reached me in bits. Outside, night had fallen and you couldn’t even see the fields by the roadside. I looked all around: everything was black. And when I spotted the guns lying on the shelf behind my seat, my blood ran cold. They were two long guns, rifles or something.

  My friend went on deflecting the man’s persistent advances, pleasantly and calmly, dodging his arm as he tried to grab hold of her wrist. I was talking non-stop, though no one was paying attention. Talking and talking and talking, and I never normally talk – an act of infinite desperation.

  Then the same thing that had made my blood run cold returned it to my body. I was closer to the guns than he was. Not that I’d ever used one.

  Finally, the lights at the entrance to the city. The petrol station where we could get the bus into the centre. We asked him to drop us there. The guy sneered at us, pulled over and came to a halt: Yes, get out why don’t you, silly little bitches.

  We got out and walked to the bus stop. The orange car started up and drove off. When it was a long way away, we dropped our bags, hugged each other and burst into tears.

  Maybe María Luisa and Sarita felt lost in the moments before they died. But Andrea Danne was asleep when she was stabbed, on November 16th, 1986.

  That Saturday had been like all the other Saturdays for the past year and a half, since she’d started dating Eduardo. It had finished quite a bit earlier, without them going to a dance or a motel like they sometimes did. The following Monday Andrea would have the first of her final exams to qualify as a psychology teacher, which she’d started training for that year. She was nervous and not feeling very confident, and wanted to get an early night and study in bed for a bit instead of going out with her boyfriend.

  They spent a few hours together, though, when he came by on his motorbike to see her. They drank mate and talked, sitting on the pavement; it was a boiling hot day and a storm was brewing.

  The sun had disappeared behind the low houses in the neighbourhood, and the few street lamps on Calle Centenario were lighting up and filling with bugs. The sprinkler truck drove by, damping down the dust in the road and leaving the pavements steaming and smelling of rain.

  At around nine they headed into the kitchen, made some milanesa sandwiches, poured cold drinks and went back to the pavement. The house was small, and when her parents and brother were in as well, there was more privacy outside than indoors.

  While they were eating, Fabiana, Andrea’s sister, appeared and asked her to help choose an outfit for the dance that night. It was Noche de las Quinceañeras at the Santa Rosa club, which had become a tradition in the city of San José: all the girls who’d turned fifteen that year paraded up and down in their dresses and everyone chose the prettiest.

  So the sisters went indoors, and Eduardo was left finishing his sandwich by himself.

  The neighbours were bringing chairs outside and some had turned their TVs to face the pavement, with the volume up high so they could hear them over the street noise: a few cars, but mostly groups of kids playing tag or catching fireflies. There was no cable back then. TVs used aerials and only Channel 7 from Buenos Aires and Channel 3 from Paysandú reached that area, so everyone watched more or less the same shows. The scent of the mosquito spirals soon filled the air.

  Later, Andrea and Eduardo went for a ride around the centre on his motorbike. The traffic built up near the main square, with lots of cars and motorbikes cruising along, as if in a procession. They had an ice cream and then went back to Andrea’s.

  Her parents and brother were in bed; Fabiana had gone to the dance. The house was silent, the sound of the TV in her parents’ bedroom barely filtering through the thin walls. The kids spent a while making out in the kitchen. At one point they heard noises in the yard. Eduardo went out to have a look and didn’t see anything unusual, but the way the wind was moving the treetops and the neighbours’ clothes on the line warned him the weather was turning. He said as much to his girlfriend when he went back indoors and they decided he should go, so he wasn’t caught in the storm. He didn’t set off right away. They kissed some more, touching each other under their clothes, until she put her foot down: time for him to leave.

  She went with him as far as the street. The wind made her long blonde hair billow around and her clothes cling to her body. They kissed one last time, he started the engine and she hurried inside.

  She left the window to the yard open. Although the temperature had dropped a little, the walls were still hot and the sheets warm, as if freshly ironed. She lay in bed, in her vest and knickers, and picked up some papers, stapled and underlined photocopies with her handwritten notes in the margins.

  However, she must have dozed off before long. According to her mother’s statement, when the wind picked up and she went in to close the window, Andrea was already asleep. It was past midnight. She finished watching a film they were showing on Private Function, a classic program from the eighties presented by Carlos Morelli and Rómulo Berruti. They showed a film, and when it finished the two presenters discussed it over glasses of whisky. That night it was Marijuana Smoke, from around twenty years earlier, directed by Lucas Demare. The film didn’t interest her, but since she wasn’t tired she watched it to the end. Then she turned off the TV, not waiting to hear Morelli and Berruti’s comments, and managed to drift off.

  After a bit she woke up, got out of bed, went to her daughters’ bedroom and switched on the light. Andrea was still in bed, but she had a bloody nose. The mother says she was paralysed, didn’t move from the doorway and shouted for her husband, two or three times.

  Come here, something’s happened to Andrea.

  He paused to pull on some trousers and a work shirt before going into the bedroom. When he lifted Andrea up by the shoulders, a little more blood trickled from her chest.

  The other bed, Fabiana’s, was still empty and made up. The storm had reached its glorious climax. The wild gusts of wind merged with the rain, and the zinc roof made a noise like gunfire.

  Andrea must have felt lost when she woke up to die. Her eyes, suddenly open, would have blinked a few times in the two or three minutes it took her brain to run out of oxygen. Lost, dazed by the drumming of the rain and the wind that snapped the thinnest branches of the trees in the yard, hazy with sleep, utterly disoriented.

  3

  The Quevedos, after reporting their sister’s disappearance to the police and being met with the usual response – that they should wait, that she must have gone off with a boyfriend and would be back in no time – decided to consult a psychic. A Paraguayan woman, who saw people in a modest little house. The large patio, which ran right up to the street, accommodated the visitors and their woes. They piled in, jostling for the meagre shade under the trees with some dogs that were always hanging around.

  Despite setting out more or less at sunrise, they found plenty of people waiting by the time they arrived. One of the Paraguayan’s assistants, whose job it was to keep the crowd in order and deal with the fights that broke out whenever some chancer tried to push in, approached them and asked what they’d come about. They explained. The assistant listened carefully to everything they said and then went into the hut. He emerged right away and beckoned them over. She’ll see you now, he said, leaning in slightly and
whispering to avoid the complaints, which came regardless when they were spotted going in first despite being the last to arrive.

  The psychic didn’t tell them much: only that yes, she would come back, that it was Friday now and by Sunday it would all be over.

  Eduardo, Andrea’s boyfriend, also decided to consult a psychic. Two, in fact. The first somewhat by chance, because the man came to buy a few things from his family’s shop. A little sheepishly, Eduardo took him to one side, over by some shelves, and asked if he could look into his girlfriend’s death. The man stared deep into his eyes, horrified, and told him he didn’t mess with the devil’s business.

  Later, one of Andrea’s cousins had the idea they should consult another: Luis Danta, who was a very famous psychic back then and saw people in Paysandú, a Uruguayan city some twelve miles from Colón, where Eduardo lived. Many people crossed the General Artigas international bridge every day to see Danta.

  They went on the motorbike.

  After you cross the bridge, the greenery by the roadside turns to riverside plants, because of the wetlands that reach almost to the tarmac.

  Eduardo was riding at full speed, Andrea’s cousin clinging round his waist. Neither was wearing a helmet – back then almost nobody did. His long hair kept hitting her in the face, forcing her to squint and surrender to the power of the machine. Their visit to the healer hadn’t given them any answers. Just ambiguous phrases, here and there in the trance. Eduardo was thinking about Andrea, thinking about her was all he ever did, and about solving the mystery of her death. Hence the speed, too, he was like a madman, nothing mattered, if he had to be killed in a crash so be it, maybe that would bring some peace to his heart and head, and his endless questions: who, why.