one

The photograph must be no more than five years old. Everybody in it finished primary school in the mid-sixties, so they are all between the ages of forty and fifty. There's a woman on the right with short hair and one white lock, à la Susan Sontag, who is flanked by two skinnier, more submissive-looking women. The central importance of the apocryphal Sontag is obvious, though I wonder if her authority had already been established in adolescence, or if, suddenly, on that night of the reunion, the other two had found themselves attracted to the unexpected and still incomprehensible magnetism exuded by someone they'd always felt sorry for. Most of the people who were reunited that night - according to the woman who took the picture out of a shoebox lined with fabric - hadn't seen one another for years. Almost all of them were the children of the more privileged workers in the oil industry, and as adolescents they had gone away to study or find more suitable matches. There is a row of men perched on chairs and looking straight at the camera, each with a glass in his hand. The glasses are made of plastic. The man in the middle of the row, the owner of the photograph tells me, is the one who organised the reunion. He spent about a year tracking them down one by one. Like a detective, like an avenger. He found some of them abroad: in Spain, Germany, even the United States. Quique, the man who organised everything, never moved away from here, from Cañadón Seco. And maybe that's why he got the idea; he saw that theatre, which was sometimes used to show movies and other times wasn't used for anything, and he thought, why not use it as a time machine to travel back into the past. Quique is skinny, and he looks like someone who's gone through life with a small but constant malaise that he has never stopped to think about. In the photo, he's smiling at the camera, like everyone else in that row. The reunion must have taken place in the summer: most of the men are wearing lumberjack shirts. The women's attire, in contrast, shows painstaking care: each woman devoted as much thought to her dress as she did to the one for her wedding, and to the one she would have worn to the first big family funeral, if she'd had time. They look relaxed in the photo, as if they'd already gone through that inevitable moment at any class reunion when everybody is sitting around a big table and feels obliged to give an account of what they've done with their lives. Despite the evasions - the long-windedness, the innuendos, the changes of subject, the feigned deafness, the wallets opening to reveal pictures of children and/or spouses - someone would have surely admitted a failure, and most would have inferred everybody else's failures, someone would have been surprised by a revelation with sexual or economic implications, others would have been in charge of remembering those who'd died, others those who hadn't come. Everyone would have made an effort, especially that night, to show themselves off in the best possible light. Their eyes also made clear that by that point in the evening they'd already drunk a lot of the red wine that can be seen through the white plastic glasses. The photograph seems to have been taken at precisely the right moment - a labile, furtive moment - during that interval between settling accounts and saying goodbye, that swath of time that leaves room only to recall the best kind of connection that had ever existed among those present. And there, precisely at that instant of the green flash, someone had taken that photo.

It was not until later, a while later, when the owner of the photo asked for it back so she could put it away in the lined shoebox, that I saw, near the bottom, something I had previously missed, the face of someone who definitely didn't belong, someone who wasn't participating in either the reunion or the general rejoicing, who wasn't sharing hugs and whose eyes didn't look like he'd drunk too much. There he was, an impassive figure, his black hair combed back and his black eyes staring into the camera. He was at the bottom of the frame but in the middle of the scene. I stared back at him for a while, and at some point it seemed to me that all the others were, in fact, surrounding him; that he was a kind of deity in his hermitage who knew exactly what was going on while all the others, minor figures in his constellation, were waylaid by sentimentality. When I sensed that it was me rather than the lens he was staring at, I put the photograph away in the shoebox. The woman told me that was León, from the store, who had also left Cañadón after high school but had later returned.

There are two stores in Cañadón Seco. One is called Multirrubro, and it has a device that whistles every time a customer opens the door, the way some men whistle when they see a woman walk by. The device, however, is less sexist - the first day I went to that store, I walked in and was followed by the whistle, which sounded again exactly the same way a few minutes later when two men in overalls entered - and more effective: it brings the owner out of her kitchen and everybody can buy their chewing gum, their cigarettes, their can of beer. The other store is León's, and until two years ago it was on the same block as the second restaurant in town, which has since closed, and on the same block where the town's main bar used to be, but it has also closed. To get to León's store, you have to make your way around two German shepherds lying on the sidewalk like idle Cerberuses, finally vanquished. Inside, León looks exactly as he does in the photograph: immutable, staring, his black hair combed back, surrounded by figures in his hermitage. In this case the figures are not his high school classmates but merchandise arrayed on dusty shelves: a bottle of Mary Stuart cologne, another cologne called Siete Brujas, a green melamine sugar jar whose colour has faded in the sun, a plastic doll in a bag that at some point must have been transparent, two combs with pointy handles, a salt-and-pepper shaker on a fake silver tray, three jars of dried-up nail polish, a Ludo Matic box game, an apparatus for drying socks that turns every time the wind blows through the door. These are the remnants, what's left over from the large store his father opened in 1953, when there were as many as two or three hundred customers a day, almost all employees of YPF, the Argentine petroleum refining company, created in 1922, a crucial part of the development of the national sovereignty in Patagonia. Now, on his very best days, he barely has ten. The objects have ceased to be merely mass-produced consumer goods and have become unique items, active parts of a protective constellation in the centre of which is León, who now turns to look at me, just like in the photograph.

To think, I returned for a week and stayed forever, he tells me.

He sometimes speaks, but even then he doesn't gesture or move any of his facial muscles. His right hand barely slides up to his mouth to smoke: one quick and imperceptible motion, always the same. He makes a couple of random comments in a tone that is either sullen or reticent, at first I can't tell. After each sentence, he goes silent for a while and stares at the door. With one of these utterances he tells me that he sells tickets for the buses that travel across the northern part of Santa Cruz, from one end to the other, but that the buses stop when they want. Sometimes they're late and then why should they stop here at all, where at most a couple of vagrants will board. That's why he tries to stay alert, especially for the five minutes of the day when Cañadón should be a stop. It's really awful when he has to refund tickets because the bus didn't stop. Not only for the people who missed the bus but also because sometimes that's fifty per cent of his sales for the day. For example, now, in about twenty minutes, one should come. I, too, look outside, and the only thing I see are the Cerberuses. He tells me that the long wooden bench that runs the length of the store is there for people who are waiting for the bus and that I can sit there even though I'm not going anywhere. I accept, and then we talk while we both look out the door, freed from having to look at each other.

To think, I returned for a week and stayed forever, he tells me.

A teenager comes in carrying a guitar in a case and sits down on the same bench as me. It's almost time, and we have to be even more alert. The three of us stare out the door. He plays in a band in Comodoro some weekends. If the bus doesn't stop, the other members of the band manage without him: there's a drummer, a bass player, and a guy who has a voice that melts your heart, so nobody complains if there's no guitar. On days the bus doesn't stop, he just goes around the corner here to some friends' house, and plays the guitar for everyone as long as he's the only one who doesn't have to pay for beer. León doesn't vouch for anything the boy says, not even when he mentions the bus and its unpredictability. I'm about to ask if the dogs bark when the bus comes but something tells me that the most prudent thing to do is adhere to the policy of silence shared by León and the dogs.

There's always something terrifying, I think,...