I lift the torch from my pocket and switch it on. I shine the spotlight down through the gaping hole in the brick that must once have sealed the en- trance. I climb over and inside. I sweep the walls with torchlight, checking it out, making sure there’s no one hiding inside. I make sure they are not waiting for me just when I think I might be safe. Then I go into the dark with the light in my hand.

Five years and still she dreams of Buenos Aires. Day and night. In her dreams Inez walks the streets of her old neighbourhood: La Boca. She calls out to her family. She remembers the beginning, how she and Raoul met in the fish market and how later they danced and she wore tea roses in her hair. They haven’t danced now in five years. She cannot think of a man less likely to dance and her shoes stay wrapped in brown paper at the bottom of the wardrobe.

When she thinks of going back she tries to put her thoughts away, saving it up for when Raoul is out of the house and she’s preparing food. She saves it up for the carbonada: beef stew with sweet potatoes, corn, zucchini, pep- pers, tomatoes, apricots, peaches if she can get them, occasionally peas. If she closes her eyes Inez can see the fruit and the vegetables spread out on the scrubbed table in her grandmother’s kitchen, chopping boards and knives, the brittle leaves of bay, fat bulbs of garlic, a jar of green oil and the deep, black pan. She hears the pulse of Miguel Calo on the old gramophone as the stew simmers. It is her grandmother who teaches her the tango. ‘Dance like a cat Inez,’ she says. ‘Close your eyes Inez, that way you will feel the dance.’ And Inez closes her eyes and dreams of the man she will dance with while the kitchen fills with steam and the smell of the hot earth.

Raoul says he likes to sit in the fisherman’s hut at the bend in the river, that he sometimes watches the grey heron there, or the pair of buzzards that wheel overhead. What he wants a torch for she can’t fathom and she’s frightened to ask about the knife. Raoul is like a watermelon ripe to the point of bursting. She isn’t sure what she would do with all that juice and seeds running away or the left over skin.

I switch the torch off when I know there is only me. I can see enough and there are no shadows. I can look back to the light that comes in through the gap in the old wall. The air is warm and damp. The walls are crudely cut not bricked, shored up with old timber. In places the black soil breaks through and threads of pale root. Life grows from them even though they are wrin- kled and dry as a river bed in summer. I don’t go far, just far enough past the debris, past the bones and litter of cans and the cake of ash where a fire was once lit. My footsteps echo down the tunnel. I walk as quietly as I can. There are no hard soles here, no loud boots. When I reach it I sit down on my cushion of cardboard and newspaper and press my back and head against the rock. The pain in my back eases. My spirit lifts. Sometimes I am the grey heron looking into the bank of nettles and the entrance to the mine, sometimes I am the buzzard’s sharp eye. I see myself curled like a foetus in a belly. Like I once was in my mother; the children inside Inez. It smells of leaf and iron here and safety. There is no smell of urine or flesh. I like to doze here. I like to dream. I think of before and of going to the university. How I was full of fire and hope. How I wanted to travel, become a professor, teach in another university. Even afterwards when I could not finish and I was forced to train as a welder I think of that time. Of sparks flying up in a blue arc like the fireworks at carnival. How we spoke up for each other. How we were not afraid even when the power went off and Buenos Aires became a dark grave.

Without power, days are shorter. Once the sun sets there is not much you can do. I would read then under candle light and flashlight but after a while my head would hurt. Still it did nothing to prepare me for the dark of a world where men lived in their thousands without natural light, where our skins turned green and we prayed to be taken anywhere but to the basement.

I try to think of better times. I think of meeting Inez, of her making me chimichurri and of how her lips tasted of parsley and lime, and when I think of Inez I think I should go home and listen to Carlos Gardel sing of Buenos Aires and I should dance as my father did. I think of my father in his hospital bed wired up to the machine that breathed for him and fed his body and the transistor radio at the bedside, close to his ear, tuned to 92.5FM pouring tango and nothing else. And I think he was dancing even then, in his dreams.

For a while I stop dreaming. I stop wondering how it will all end or how to tell her I’m never going back. I cannot go back. Each time I come here I think I will decide on a plan, on finding work, anything, on telling Inez, but only here can I imagine telling Inez and it doesn’t happen like that. Each time I think of the knife, of cutting open a seam. Of the blood red of the tannery water at the river mouth.

Raoul is not at the fisherman’s hut. Perhaps he’s gone to the wood. Inez will not go wandering in the woods. She was not made for that, she was made for the city. The rain has stopped. She unties her scarf and stuffs it in her coat pocket, then sits down on the bench in the hut, leaving the door open. From here she can look out on the river, from here she smells the damp that’s so much part of this place. Perhaps she’ll see the grey heron stalking the shallows, looking for fish. The sun appears and throws sparks up from the water, casting a shadow of leaves on its silver back. She wonders how far Raoul has gone. What does she know? Perhaps he doubles back, catches a bus into town, perhaps there’s somewhere he goes that she knows noth- ing about, or another woman perhaps. Inez sometimes imagines life with another man, what that would be like. Whether in the end all men have thin skins fit to burst. But then she thinks of Raoul when they first met and she knows that it’s the climate that grows the skin.

I lose the sense of time passing. If it could be like this, then perhaps I could live. What I don’t understand is how? But I daren’t ask, else the prison and its iron bars, its filthy walls and blood stained floors will come raging back at me, for sure. No matter that the letters tell me it is demolished: gone. I still feel the humiliation. I feel the anguish of all the men who suffered there long before me. I feel its bag over my head, sucking at my mouth, tak- ing my breath. In there I learned how to make the faca. Out here I have no need of homemade knives, I have a knife. Inez keeps any number of knives for cooking. Sometimes I watch her slit open the zucchini and I want to plead with her to take the knife to my back and open it.

I need to sleep. I need to rest my head and back. I listen for the voices of long-ago miners, for the hum of their world. I think of my letters. I write home to everyone about our life here. Some of my letters return unan- swered, like those to my brother Juan and I wonder where he is.

We were six when we dug the hole in Estrella’s garden. Our aunt Estrella, my mother’s sister, lived out in the Tigre Partido, in a grand house north of the city, in a place where men once hunted the jaguar. One summer when my mother was ill we stayed with Estrella for the school holidays. Her garden was wild and we went to the very bottom of it, where it came close to the canal and dug a hole big enough for both of us. We made a cover of woven branches and sacking and we hid there even though nobody was looking for us. We hid from the jaguars. We were invincible that summer. Now in this summer, here in my safe place, I am reminded only of what I have lost and I smell the jaguar. I feel its breath on my shoulder, its teeth biting through the bones of my skull, piercing the brain. I put the torch and the knife in my pocket and prepare to leave.

Inez thinks she’ll go back. There’s no heron today and the sky threatens rain again. She stands outside the fisherman’s hut and takes her scarf from her pocket. Above her the crows are circling and calling. She sets off on the path until she comes to the clearing by the pumping station near the entrance to the old drift mine.

She hears it first, a rustling in the grass. A fox perhaps, they come into the garden sometimes but usually at night. She moves towards the sound. It’s overgrown here with banks of nettles and wild roses. She stands and waits. The pale flowers of the wild rose begin to nod, then slowly, where they part a head – surely it is a man’s head – appears as if coming out of nowhere. Inez thinks she should turn and run now before … but it’s already too late. There isn’t time. She is fixed to the path as she watches the stooped figure emerge from the undergrowth. It is her husband. It is Raoul. As he pulls himself up to standing he sees her. She hears his sharp intake of breath.

‘Inez.’ ‘Raoul.’

‘What are you doing here Inez?’ He pulls his coat around him and begins to brush the leaves and soil from his jeans.

‘What am I doing Raoul? What are you doing for God’s sake?’ He doesn’t answer. ‘For God’s sake Raoul. Is there someone there with you? Is it a woman? Don’t lie Raoul, don’t lie to me.’

‘No, there is nobody. Look, see for yourself.’ Raoul moves forward and touches Inez on the arm. ‘Here, come with me.’ He takes her back through the nettle bank, parting them, holding them back with his arms to prevent her from being stung. At the entrance he says, ‘See, it is the old drift mine, that is all. Somewhere I come.’ Raoul shines the torch into the hole in the brick. ‘Come with me?’ 

Raoul lets go of the chair. Stands upright. He moves: slowly, unerringly, across the floor, fixing his prey, his hips shifting from left to right. When he reaches Inez he straightens his spine and lifts his chest. She holds her breath waiting for the arm to encircle her waist; the hand to press at her back. They lean towards each other. Their foreheads touch. The kitchen fills with steam. Inez closes her eyes.