© 2005

Now that the years have passed and everything’s been forgotten, and now that I’ve received a terse e-mail from Scotland with the sad news of Seldom’s death, I feel I can break my silence (which he never asked for anyway) and tell the truth about events that reached the British papers in the summer of ‘93 with macabre and sensationalist headlines, but to which Seldom and I always referred-perhaps due to the mathematical connotation-simply as the series, or the Oxford Series. Indeed, the deaths all occurred in Oxfordshire, at the beginning of my stay in England, and I had the dubious privilege of seeing the first at close range.

I was twenty-two, an age at which almost anything can still be excused. I’d just graduated from the University of Buenos Aires with a thesis in algebraic topology and was travelling to Oxford on a year’s scholarship, secretly intending to move over to logic, or at least attend the famous seminars run by Angus Maclntyre. My supervisor, Dr Emily Bronson, had made all the preparations for my arrival with meticulous care. She was a professor and fellow of St Anne’s, but in the e-mails we exchanged before my trip she suggested that, instead of staying in the rather uncomfortable college accommodation, I might prefer-grant money allowing-to rent a room with its own bathroom, kitchen and entrance in the house of a Mrs Eagleton, a delightful and discreet lady, she said, the widow of her former professor. I did my sums, as always a little optimistically, and sent off a cheque for advance payment of the first month’s rent, the landlady’s only requirement.

A fortnight later I was flying over the Atlantic in the incredulous state which overcomes me when I travel: it always seems much more likely, and more economical as a hypothesis-Ockham’s Razor, Seldom would have said-that a last-minute accident will send me back to where I started, or to the bottom of the sea, than that an entire country and the immense machinery involved in starting a new life will appear eventually like an outstretched hand down below.