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didn’t understand Spanish. He was small and pale, slicked down, very servile, always wearing a bow tie and jacket. He came from the countryside, where his family ran a flower nursery. His name was Yoshio Dazai, 4 but everyonein the hotel called him the Japo. Apparently, somehow, Yoshio was Durán’s main source of information. Yoshio was the one who told Durán the history of the town and the real story of Belladona’s abandoned factory. Many wondered how the Japanese porter had ended up living like a cat by night, shining a light on the hotel’s key cabinet with a small lantern, while his family grew flowers in a farm out in the country. Yoshio was friendly and delicate, very formal and very mannered. Quiet, with gentle, almond-shaped eyes, everyone thought the Japanese night porter powdered his face and that he went as far as applying a touch of rouge, a soft palette really, on his cheeks. He was very proud of his straight, jet-black hair, which he himself called raven’s wing . Yoshio became so fond of Durán that he followed him everywhere, as if he were his personal servant.
    Sometimes, at daybreak, the two would come out of the hotel together and walk down the middle of the street, across town to the train station. They’d sit on a bench on the empty platform and watch the dawn express speed by. The train never stopped, it raced south toward Patagonia like a flash. Leaning against the lighted windows, the faces of the passengers behind the glass were like corpses at the morgue.
    It was Yoshio who, one early February day at noon, handed Durán the envelope from the Belladona sisters inviting him to visit the family house. They had drawn a map for him on a sheet of notebook paper, circling the location of their mansion on thehill in red. Apparently he was invited to meet their father.
    The large family house was up the slope in the old part of town, at the top of the hills looking over the low mountains, the lake, and the gray, endless countryside. Dressed in a white linen jacket and matching shoes, Durán walked up the steep road to the house in the middle of the afternoon.
    But they had Durán come in through the back service door.
    It was the maid’s mistake, she saw that Tony was a mulatto and thought that he was a ranch hand in disguise.
    He walked through the kitchen, through the ironing room and the servants’ rooms, and into the parlor facing the gardens where Old Man Belladona was waiting for him, thin and frail like an old, embalmed monkey, his eyelids heavy, his legs knock-kneed. Durán very politely bowed and approached the Old Man, following the respectful customs used in the Spanish Caribbean. But that doesn’t work in the province of Buenos Aires, because only the servants treat gentlemen in that way here. The servants (Croce said) are the only ones who still use the aristocratic manners of the Spanish Colonies, they’ve been abandoned everywhere else. And it was those gentlemen who taught their servants the manners that they themselves had abandoned, as if depositing in those dark-skinned men the customs they no longer needed.
    So Durán behaved, without realizing it, like a foreman, or a tenant, or a farmhand slowly and solemnly approaching his master.
    Tony didn’t understand the relationships and hierarchies of the town. He didn’t understand that there were areas—the tiled paths in the center of the plaza, the shady sidewalk along the boulevard, the front pews of the church—where only the members of theold families could go. That there were places—the Social Club, the theater boxes, the restaurant at the Jockey Club—where you weren’t allowed to enter even if you had money.
    People asked themselves, though, if Old Man Belladona wasn’t right to mistrust. To mistrust, and to show the arrogant foreigner from the beginning the rules of his class, of his house. The Old Man had probably wondered, as everyone