My father picks up the phone. He is twenty-seven years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People phone and say, "It's Carmen" or "I'm from the post office" or "Hello, I'd like to confirm your appointment." But at night, if the phone rings and my father picks up, no one answers. He waits with the receiver to his ear until he gets tired of standing there doing nothing, or asking questions in vain, or sometimes even cursing. he lowers the receiver onto its base, and though the mechanical click puts an end to the session, he senses there is something more. The silence that calls him every night sticks with him throughout the day, and he can't help but think about Morris. About Morris and the three gas pump islands at the service station in General Acha, about the eighteen hoses hanging from their handles, about the nocturnal lights of that YPF station on the side of the flat endless highway through the pampa. For my father, the silence is a slippery frustration; the calls, a long enigma that will follow him for nearly twenty years.