At one point I suggested we have coffee. Displaying the same self-assurance with which she had made herself at home, she stood and, pointing at the plaster cast on my hand, said she’d make it if I told her where everything was. She mentioned that Kloster drank coffee constantly (actually, she didn’t say Kloster, she used his first name, and I wondered how close they had become) and that the first thing he’d done was instruct her how to make it. That first day I didn’t ask anything more about Kloster, because I was sufficiently intrigued by him to be able to wait until she and I had got to know each other better, but I did find out, as she gathered cups and saucers in the kitchen, almost everything I would ever know about Luciana. She was indeed at university, in her first year. She was studying biology but was thinking of changing subject. Mummy, daddy, an older brother in his final year of medicine, a much younger sister, aged seven, mentioned with an ambivalent smile, as if she were an endearing pest. A grandmother who’d been in an old people’s home for some time. A boyfriend discreetly slipped into the conversation, without actually mentioning his name, with whom she’d been going out for a year. Had she slept with the boyfriend? I made a few cynical remarks and she laughed. I decided she had, definitely. She’d studied ballet but given it up when she began at university, although she had retained the upright posture and something of the outward turn of the feet when standing. She’d been to England, on an exchange-with a grant from her bilingual school. In short, I reflected at the time, a proud expensive daughter, a finished example, perfectly educated and polished, of Argentina ’s middle class, seeking work much earlier than her friends.