Esteban thought it would be simple enough and wouldn’t take up much room in his suitcase. That’s all? he’d asked her. You don’t want anything else? Or I could bring you four or five, in different colors?
After all, he was going to New York, and who knew when the conference circuit would take him back there. He thought of the dizzying list his first wife would have made. But she had insisted that all she wanted was a bottle of nail polish, in that color and no other. It was a nail polish that wasn’t sold in Argentina, she explained, in a golden, coppery rose tone, and she wrote down the name he was supposed to look for on the label: Penny Thought. He repeated it out loud, intrigued. Every color has a name like that, she said, and held up a finger in warning: if they don’t have it, even if they say they’ve got something similar, don’t bring me a different one.
Esteban had already seen that she could be quite vehement when it came to colors. Soon after they’d met, just a few months before, he’d given her a skirt as a present, and he’d brought her back a pashmina from another trip. In both cases, she’d found a problem. She’d exchanged the skirt immediately because the wine-red color didn’t look good on her and was hard to match. And as for the pashmina, it was true that yellow was her favorite color, but it wasn’t yellow, it was corn, couldn’t he tell the difference? He’d taken it good-naturedly and told her next time he’d borrow her Pantone color swatches and pack them in his suitcase. Yes, she admitted, it came with the territory in her profession, and then she pointed to the long whiteboard he had on his desk, peppered with mathematical symbols and Greek letters: but wouldn’t you say all those little formulas are the same thing?
On the plane, waiting for takeoff, Esteban looked over the conference agenda and told himself he’d go look for the nail polish the first day because after that he’d be absorbed by the lectures. It was odd, now that he thought about it, now that he really stopped to consider it, how zealous she was about nail polish. The refrigerator thing, for example. When she’d moved into his apartment a couple of weeks before, the army of little bottles had immediately invaded all the shelves in the bathroom medicine cabinet and then spilled over into one of the drawers he’d emptied out for her. But she’d also put a mysteriously selected number of them in the refrigerator, and their airtight sparkles and motionless glittering now caught his eye when he opened it every morning. Esteban hadn’t said anything to her; he’d just let her expand inside his apartment, ceding one space after another, both amused and alarmed by the number of things she’d brought. He also couldn’t have held his own long, he knew, because she, with careful sadness, held the trump card, the one neither of them wanted to mention again, and yet it still hung between the two of them like an unsolved crime: in order to live with him, she’d had to leave her cat behind. That damn cat. A shiver ran down Esteban’s spine, like it did every time he remembered that attack in the darkness, the puffed-up whirlwind of claws on his naked feet, the vertical, unstoppable spurt of blood, the succession of bandage changes in the hospital. Even now, she tried to come to its defense, and when Esteban found her crying in private sometimes, he wondered if she’d ever be able to forget about.
The plane rose and rose until it pierced the clouds, and when it reached cruising speed, Esteban went back over the papers for his lecture. He was still a little unsure about the beginning. It was the first time he’d had to give an inaugural conference, and not everyone in the room would be a mathematician. He’d thought of starting with the different criteria for organizing a library and the fatal ambiguities of any method of classification, whether by country, by topic, or even in alphabetical order. Then—second example—he would discuss the attempts, which also invariably failed, of locating all the products on the shelves of a supermarket “by similarity.” At this point, to add a bit of humor, he would insert a slide with the delirious classification of animals that Borges cited in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” All of this would make it clear, at least intuitively, that if a set was vast and varied—like the universe—one couldn’t expect there to be a comprehensive classification of its elements by class. However, he would say, and here he hoped to achieve a dramatic effect, on the other end of the spectrum was Ramsey’s theorem: if a set was sufficiently large, complete disorder was also impossible. The universe, which was not totally classifiable, was also not totally disorderable. Once more, he felt the soft excitement of the theorem’s statement, with its astute yet elementary demonstration, made out of nothing. The night before, he’d wanted to rehearse for her the two-color slideshow he would outline during the speech, but even with the yellow marker as bait, he hadn’t gotten her to sit down and listen to him. They’d had their first bitter fight because of it: after all, Esteban argued, he listened to her every day when she got back from work and knew the details of even the slightest disagreement she had with her bosses. Oh, please, she’d said: he pretended to listen to her, with his blank expression, while he kept thinking about his math problems. They’d made up half-heartedly, without fully abandoning their battle stations, and only at breakfast, a few minutes before he took the taxi to the airport. Distractedly, Esteban rolled and unrolled the slip of paper with the name of the nail polish written in her neat, round handwriting. Yes, he should definitely go look for it as soon as he dropped his things off at the hotel.
When he came downstairs, he ran into several of his colleagues in the lobby: the group of Russians, who had all arrived together; the unsettling and constantly smiling Erika, who had once dragged him off to dance tango and was now moving toward to him; the Colombian logician Francedo, who would introduce him the next day. And then there was Johanna, who just waved from a distance, perhaps because this time she had brought her partner. Francedo and Erika wanted to have a coffee with him in the hotel bar, but he begged off: he had to go out and buy something. You’re going out? Have you seen the weather? said Francedo, pointing at the white squall through the revolving door. Esteban held up his hands to show his gloves, as if they were defense enough, and promised he’d meet up with them at the cocktail hour that evening.
He almost changed his mind when, crossing the street, the icy wind slammed into him with its merciless gusts of snow that almost prevented him from opening his eyes. He hadn’t brought a hat, and he felt the cold in his ears, penetrating, whistling, criminal. But the cosmetics store he’d been told about, on Broadway, was very close, just four blocks away. He turned up the lapels of his coat as far as possible, nuzzled his chin into the neck, and ran with a sporting spirit, even as he felt his shoes begin to dampen in the drifting snow. When he got to the door, the security guard looked at him a bit suspiciously, maybe because he looked like a yeti, with his coat completely white and clumps of snow tangled in his hair and beard. Or maybe because his shoes had left wet prints on the parquet flooring of the entryway. He dried himself off as best he could, walked over to a bored-looking attendant, and showed her the name of the nail polish on the piece of paper. The woman nodded, as if she recognized it immediately but also as if the chances weren’t good. I’m not sure we have it, you’ll need to check for yourself. Esteban thought she was holding back a snort. Follow me, she said, and walked down one of the rows with a slightly military clicking of her heeled shoes, as if she wanted to be rid of him as quickly as possible. She brought him to an area over which hung a sign that read Nails, with a series of lacquered drawer units longer than he would have imagined possible. The woman stopped in front of one and had to stretch her arms wide to reach the handles on either side. She struggled a bit to shift the drawer, and the tinkling of glass could be heard inside, until she managed to pull it open far enough to show a chaotic world of bottles overlapping each other, tipped over, bumping up against one another. All the pinks are in here, the woman said, help yourself, and left him alone. Esteban took a second dispirited look inside the drawer. He put his hands in, shuffled a few around, picked up two or three at random, and became convinced that a simple inspection would never be enough to find the coppery hue she’d talked about in that sea of pinks. Like so many times in his life as a mathematician, when he had no other choice but to work out a long and obnoxious algebra calculation, he mentally rolled up his sleeves and swept the multitude of bottles to one side with his hands in a wave of glass that piled up until it almost flowed over the edge. Now that he’d cleared half the drawer, he told himself, he just had to move them one by one and check the labels until he found Penny Thought. He picked up speed quickly: a glance was enough to rule out one bottle and immediately pick up another. Even so, he still read every label, sometimes with an inward smile, sometimes intrigued by an allusion that escaped him. Every color has a name like that, she’d said. And now all those names slipped by inside him with their enveloping calligraphy, in brief whispers and barely awakened images, like ephemeral bubbles blown one after the other. Radiant Luck, Wrapped in Petals, Guilty Pleasure, Third Date, High-Class Affair, Your Place or Mine? There were very few, once in a while, that referenced the color: La vie en rose, Pink Panther, This Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose, Salmon against the Stream, The Name of the Rose. And even fewer evoked nails, and almost always in plays on words: Love: Nail It!, Nails for Sail, To Be or Not to Be Nailed. Cries of encouragement seemed to be the most common, made by a tireless and energetic coach behind the scenes: There’s No One Like You, A Star Is Born, Tonight’s the Night, Let the World See You, Strike Him Down with a Look. There were also defiant ones, triumphant, like cheering for oneself: Veni Vidi Vici, Queen of the Zodiac, I’m Driving, The Future in My Hands, Look at Me—Admire Me, Heartbreaker, Designated Seductress, Mrs. Right. But as he continued, what was most intriguing to Esteban was something in the order of quantity, of scale. He looked at the mountain piled up on one side, which he’d barely put a dent in, and thought that this was just one drawer with just one color, in only one of the hundred cosmetics stores there must be in the city, maybe not even the biggest one. He wondered, now with a certain admiration, what the system must be for naming each color. At first, he’d thought they would have come up with something semiautomatic, a computational variant of Ramón Llull’s concept generation discs, or a machine learning program, or a Chomsky-derived grammar based on color-adjective pairs. But the hints of humor, the literary allusions, and the double entendres that he noticed every so often quickly convinced him that there was a person—or, indeed, more than one person per color—who spent eight hours a day tossing out thousands of possibilities and submitting just a few each time to nitpicking bosses who would veto or approve them. Although he couldn’t have said why, he immediately imagined a man, a Mr. Rose who thoughtfully chewed the end of his pencil in a glass-walled cubicle, a patient prober of illusions, a thorough detective of vague and contradictory desires, perhaps a disgruntled yet methodical poet, an admirer of Oulipo combinatorial pursuits silently building this unending, modest, and secret oeuvre of labels yielded up to Disorder. Esteban thought that perhaps only he, through the chance of her request, would see that oeuvre in all its prodigious arborescence, read the whole of it. This made him wonder how women searched through this same drawer. Undoubtedly, they sifted through the bottles looking mainly for a hue or sheen that caught their eye and barely glanced at the words on the label, or overlooked it altogether. And yet, if that were the case, he objected to himself, there would be no Mr. Rose on the payroll with his thoughtful pencil. On the other end of the spectrum, he couldn’t believe anyone would choose a nail polish based on those words, like a magical invocation, or a placebo for one’s self-esteem: some of them even seemed insulting given how dithyrambic or ridiculous they were. But then, what was the subliminal charm, the invisible trick? He suddenly noticed a woman with her arms folded, apparently waiting for him to hurry up and finish. Earlier, he had seen her wander near the drawer and walk away, but now she was standing close enough for him to notice her. He felt like an intruder in a world that did not belong to him, like he’d been looking at something almost lewd, and although he hadn’t gotten through even half the bottles, he stepped back. He knew he couldn’t come back later: if the woman picked up or moved even a single bottle in there, he would have to start his search over from scratch. Hopeless now, he went over to one of the counters and asked another employee with a more welcoming face if he could order a nail polish he hadn’t been able to find. Yes, he could, the girl informed him, it would just take three or four days for it to arrive from the factory. Esteban shook his head: he wouldn’t be in the city that long, although . . . what if he went to the factory? Was it very far? Would they give it to him there? The girl looked at him, a bit taken aback. She supposed they would, if he had the number from the catalog. The factory wasn’t far, in White Plains, in the East Bronx, and one of the three commuter rails out of the city went there. But it was a bit of a desolate place, and she advised him not to carry any valuables.
Outside, the snowstorm had only gotten worse. Esteban turned up the lapels of his coat again and ran back to the hotel. Now his shoes sank hopelessly into the whitish mud that covered everything, and the freezing water seeped through his socks until it bit at his ankles. Back inside the hotel, waiting for the elevator, he felt violent, irrepressible shivers that rocked him like electric shocks and made his teeth chatter. As soon as he got to his room, he turned up the heat as warm as it would go and took a hot shower, but he suspected it was already too late: an ache had settled into his left ear, silent and discreet but worming its way into him, waiting for nighttime. He got into bed, but even curled up with a thick comforter over him, he couldn’t get the heat back into his body or stop the spasms, though he felt, like a contradiction, that a fever was already burning in his forehead. He reached for his Blackberry. Reception in the room was weak, just one bar, but he didn’t feel well enough to go down to the lobby. He sent a message, and she replied immediately. Why had he taken so long to get in touch? What had he been doing all afternoon? He’d gone out to look for her nail polish, he wrote, lamenting the fact that the message couldn’t vibrate with the offended tone and shakiness of his fingers as he typed it. All afternoon to get a bottle of nail polish? So, she didn’t believe him. All afternoon, yes, and he hadn’t even found it. But how many places had he tried? Just one, he wrote, and immediately regretted not lying. He imagined her exploding on her end: Just one? Then a whole line of question marks appeared. He tried to explain as best he could the unfathomable drawer and the snowstorm. He told her they’d given him the address for the factory and he’d go get it the next day, if he felt well enough. If he felt well enough? What did that mean? Then Esteban told her he was in bed now with a fever and an earache. The signal was spotty, and he couldn’t know, in the pause that followed, if she was writing a reply on her end, or deciding whether or not to believe him. Finally, two sentences appeared one after the other, filled with loving concern. Even so, she seemed to be holding on to some secret distrust, perhaps believing, for some absurd reason, that he might weasel his way out of the errand, as if her request would prove their true connection while he was away. I hope you’re not coming up with an excuse not to go tomorrow. Of course not, he wrote, he was dying to bring her back that nail polish. Then he asked how she was doing. Not very well. What had happened? She wrote a whole paragraph in one go. Her mother had called to say she had to find another home for the cat. He had torn up the upholstery on both her sofas, and when she tried to put him out on the patio, he’d jumped at her face and scratched her forehead and arms. So she’d given her an ultimatum, but no matter how much she racked her brains, she couldn’t think whom to give him to. Esteban knew perfectly well what she was insinuating, and he also knew that he had to resist. When I get back, we’ll think of someone together, he wrote. That seemed to bother her, and she said goodbye soon after, in a way he found cold, almost curt. I’ve still got some work to do. Sleep well and good luck with your lecture tomorrow.
The lecture tomorrow. Esteban hadn’t given it another thought, and now it was speeding toward him, like a billboard growing larger as you drive down the highway. He’d put his papers and slides on the desk in the room when he arrived so he could go over what he’d say one more time, but he felt overtaken by the fever, unable to turn on the light and get out of bed. Everything was dark in the early night. Outside, through the window, he watched the silent snow fall, but he didn’t feel strong enough to get up and close the curtains. He only managed to set the alarm an hour early for the next morning and cover his head with one of the pillows, as if that could somehow smother the throbbing pain in his ear. The fever, at some point, took hold and pushed him mercifully into sleep.
When he woke up the next morning, the noises coming from the hallway and the adjoining rooms reached him in a strangely muffled way. At first he thought it must have something to do with the landscape of snow he saw through the window—the dazzling, mute strip of white that was the carless street—but when he turned on the tap to brush his teeth, he realized part of that silence was inside himself: he couldn’t hear out of his left ear, as if an insidious bit of cotton was wedged inside and he couldn’t get it out. He also saw in the mirror that something of the fever was shining in his eyes. He told himself he was turning into a true mathematician, like so many of the colleagues he’d run into at conferences over the years: the burning, feverish stare, the squinting eyes, half-deaf to the world. He felt weak but lucid. When he went down to the dining room, he ran into Erika and asked her for an aspirin. She looked at him with concern and put an unexpected hand on his forehead, but he assured her he would be fine and then barricaded himself behind his papers and a jug of coffee at a table off to one side. The lecture, which luckily had to be held in the conference room in the hotel, went quite well. He had only two uncomfortable moments: the first, near the beginning, when he tried to decipher a covert signal that Erika was making to him again and again until he realized he was speaking too loudly because of the problem with his ear. The second occurred when he went to the chalkboard and looked through the colored pieces of chalk; he suddenly remembered the drawer of bottles, and like a torrent of murmured voices unleashed to confuse him, the names on the labels came back to him in their apparent chaos of contradictions, that small, banal, absurd mystery that nonetheless clamored inside him once more, demanding his attention. He tried to quiet it to get back to his demonstration, but again and again, with a kind of secret and obsessive mockery, the faceless image of his elusive Mr. Rose cut in, laughing softly to himself with his pencil on high. If that impatient woman hadn’t banished him from the drawer, he thought, if he’d been allowed to see it through to the end, perhaps he would have been able to decipher the hidden matrix, the entire classification system. Although, that afternoon, he said to himself, he could ask for the catalog at the factory. Yes, there must be a catalog. This idea, which came to his aid out of nowhere, was enough to calm him, and he was able to grab hold of the thread, return to the surface, and finish his lecture without further incident.
Erika and Francedo came over to congratulate him and wanted to drag him off with the group forming in the lobby to have lunch at Delmonico’s. Both were taken aback when Esteban said he’d pass on lunch because he had to go buy a gift. Another gift? Well, well, looks like it’s serious this time, Erika laughed. Esteban didn’t stop to explain: he’d calculated that the trip would take an hour and a half, and that if he left for White Plains as soon as he finished his lecture, he could be back in time to hear the conference on Raymond Queneau in the afternoon session. He took care to leave his passport, cards, and nearly all his cash in the safe in his room, and to bring his hat and enough warm clothes this time. He was carrying only fifty dollars, his notebook with mathematics notes, and his Blackberry, which he would not resign himself to be separated from for even a moment during his trips. He wrote her a very short message from the lobby to tell her that everything had gone fine with his lecture and then stepped out into the street without waiting for her to reply.
He went down to the subway at Fulton station and emerged very soon after in the colossal, echoing hall of Grand Central Station. The only train going to White Plains was a local with a dozen stops that would take nearly an hour. Esteban settled into the clickety-clack, the white landscape uniformed by snow, the benign ray of sun that came in through the window making him sleepy. Harlem, Melrose, Tremont. In the end, it wasn’t so different from the train he’d had to take every day to the university during his time as a student. He felt the fever return in an almost beneficent wave, or was that the sun warming his face? His ear didn’t hurt, but he also hadn’t fully regained his hearing, and the world around him, inside the train and out, was tempered by something fluffy and serene. Fordham, Woodlawn, Wakefield. The announced succession of stations reminded him of the labels, and he thought, half-asleep, that he had to ask her how she chose her nail polishes and if she’d ever been convinced by the words on the bottle. Crestwood, Scarsdale, Hartsdale, White Plains. His body became alert again. He’d arrived. He stepped onto the deserted platform and crossed the station toward streets still covered by snow, also empty. In one corner of what looked like an abandoned parking lot, he saw a large rusty barrel giving off smoke, with a few people huddled stiffly around it. A confused shout reached him, perhaps meant for him, but he didn’t turn around. He walked more quickly and suddenly saw the fortified façade of the factory with its iron grates, a tall line of windows also secured by bars, and a single shielded teller window facing outside. He leaned in toward the freckled face of a very young woman who looked at him from inside with a note of surprise and then flipped a switch to be able to hear him. Esteban unrolled the slip of paper with the name of the nail polish on it and pressed it against the window. I was told you’d have this here, he said, unsure of how loudly to speak. The girl gestured for him to wait, picked up a phone, and spoke in a low voice for a few seconds. Esteban saw her mouth form the name Penny Thought a couple of times, saw her give him a brief smile as he waited on tenterhooks, and then her expression of disappointment upon hearing the final answer. She turned the microphone back on and moved her face close to the glass with an apologetic look.
“If you can believe it, we sent out the last one this morning. I’m really sorry, it’s a very popular color. But we do have a very similar one, from the new winter collection: A Million-Dollar Thought. Same price,” she said, as if trying to make a little joke.
Esteban was confused for a moment, stunned. He wasn’t so much irritated at having made the trip for nothing as he was at Mr. Rose’s deplorable defection. A Million-Dollar Thought made him feel indignant. What would come next? All the intervening numbers, by the thousand, and then the fractions? Three-Quarters Thought? At the same time, something inside him wanted to forgive the man: it must be very difficult, after the first hundred thousand labels, to come up with an ingenious or truly original combination. The girl was looking at him a bit impatiently. Well? He decided to buy it, if only to show her that he’d gone all the way there and had tried everything: he hadn’t managed to bring her back a penny thought, he could say, but at least he’d brought her the million-dollar one. The girl half raised the window so he could hand her the bill, inspected it carefully, and deposited it in the metal box on a small dumbwaiter that sank down behind her. Then he asked her about the catalog. A catalog with all the colors of nail polish? From the beginning of time? she asked, surprised. No, they didn’t have anything like that. And she laughed: it would be a book the size of a Bible! If he wanted, she could give him the brochure from last season: the fall-winter collection. Esteban glanced at the line of lit-up windows and made one last attempt. Who was in charge of thinking up the names on the labels? Did the firm have its own creative team and marketers? Did they work in the offices upstairs? The girl looked at him with some alarm now. She couldn’t give him answers to any of that, she said. Why not? Esteban asked, surprised. Well, you could be a spy, she said. Do I look like a spy? he asked, amused. The whole idea is that spies don’t look like spies, she said with an ambiguous smile and left the conversation there. The dumbwaiter had come back up with a pneumatic whistle; in the metal box was the little bottle along with his change. The girl handed it to him without a bag of any kind and shut the window.
Esteban walked back across the lot until he was out of her view, and standing on the corner without having fully given up, he looked back up at the row of windows. The sun’s reflection kept him from being able to see inside, but behind one of those panes of glass, he imagined the slow and measured movement of a man in an office chair. Engrossed as he was, he didn’t see the two figures approaching from behind until they were on top of him. One of them, huge and ragged, his eyes cloudy with alcohol, stood in front of him and raised an unquestionable knife to his eyes. His partner, just a kid, much shorter and smaller, danced around him with a clownish air and gave him little pats on the shoulder with mocking squeals. Look at him now, man, look how scared he is, I bet he’ll say hi to us now, he said in Spanish with an indecipherable Caribbean accent, and jumped with a shout toward his face: Hello, Mister! Esteban, petrified, murmured back in Spanish that he only had about thirty dollars on him and pulled from his pocket the change he’d just been given. Argentinian? the kid asked him with some disbelief, and when he nodded, he laughed as if that were particularly funny: Argentinian boludo, and he squealed again as he gave him little open-handed slaps on one of his cheeks. How come you didn’t say hi, Argentinian? Look at you now. Give me that little phone you’ve got there. Esteban held the Blackberry out to him, and the kid seemed to inspect it before putting it away, as if it were something that could work in his favor. For a moment, Esteban thought it might all turn out all right. What have you got in that other pocket? Esteban pushed his hand down toward the bottle of nail polish and, handing it to him, thought she’d never believe him when he showed up empty-handed. The kid looked at the bottle curiously in the light and burst out laughing. A Million-Dollar Thought! You really are an Argentinian boludo to come all the way here for this. Cut him, man, cut him for being an Argentinian boludo. Was it a joke or not? Esteban looked at the inscrutable face of the huge man in front of him, with his fearless knife, and something in his body made him turn away in escape. He’d always considered himself fast, but now he sank into the snow, slowed by it, like in a nightmare. The kid caught him quickly and jumped atop him from behind. He squealed with savage joy, as if he’d mounted a pony. Esteban managed to see, as he tried to free himself, that the boy had the knife in his hand, and he felt him plunge it into his back before letting go and running away. Esteban fell to his knees, turned to one side, unable to get up, and fell face down. He remembered how thick his coat was and thought that maybe the kid hadn’t hurt him very badly. He just had to make an effort to get up and get back to the train. Luckily, he’d bought a round-trip ticket. He’d make it back to the hotel somehow or get to a hospital. It was also lucky he’d left his passport in the room. You’re not going to believe what happened to me, he’d tell her, and he could show her the wound. He was sure she’d have brought the cat to the apartment, but he’d be more patient this time, they’d sort it out one way or another. Still, numbed by the cold of the snow, he couldn’t get his body to make that little effort to get up. He watched as, high up in the row of windows, one opened and someone leaned out to smoke a cigarette. It must be Mr. Rose, he thought, taking a break from his work. Maybe he’d see him and rescue him. He raised his hand, but he couldn’t wave it in the air or call out to him. His hand hung there, weak, on high, for a moment. Far away, Mr. Rose raised his hand, too, as if waving back. He would have liked to get to know him, he thought. He seemed nice. 
Guillermo Martínez (Argentina, 1962) lives in Buenos Aires, and has pursued postdoctoral studies in Oxford, UK, in mathematical logic. He is the author of the short story collections Vast Hell and A Repulsive Happiness, and of several novels, some of them translated into English, including Regarding Roderer, The Oxford Murders, and The Book of Murder. He has also written Borges and Mathematics, a book of essays. The Oxford Murders has been translated into thirty-eight languages and made into a film by Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia, starring Elijah Wood and John Hurt. His short story “Vast Hell” has been published in The New Yorker.
Mallory Craig-Kuhn (New York, 1986) is a Buenos Aires–based literary translator and writer. She holds master’s degrees in literature from Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia) and specializes in science fiction, new weird, and crime fiction. She has translated works by authors from Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, and England, and has published academic articles and book chapters in the United States, Colombia, and Argentina.
Illustration: Tom Ralston