Perhaps this was why Jorge and Alejandro de Marenas liked to fish. They would pack up the fishing-rods, take Jorge's big four-wheel-drive to the airport and catch a flight to Brazil to spend two, maybe three days flexing their muscles against this cichlid, then go home with satisfactorily broken tackle, bloodied hands, having satisfied some elemental sense of man's eternal struggle against nature. It was a biannual pilgrimage for them, not that they would have described it as such. It was the one place, Alejandro often thought, that they felt truly at ease with each other.

Jorge de Marenas was a plastic surgeon in Buenos Aires, one of the best: his client list contained over three thousand names, many prominent politicians, singers and television personalities. Like his son, he was known as Turco, due to his rather Middle Eastern appearance, although when it was said of him, it came more often with a reverential sigh. The women came to him increasingly young, for higher bosoms, slimmer thighs, noses like this television presenter or bee-stung lips like that starlet. With a manner as smooth as the skin he re-created, he satisfied them all, injecting, hauling up, filling and smoothing, often shaping and reshaping the same people over the years until they resembled more startled versions of themselves ten years previously. Except Alejandro's mother. He would not touch his wife. Not her plump, fifty-year-old thighs, her tired, furious eyes, camouflaged by expensive makeup and the religious application of expensive creams. He didn't even like her dyeing her hair. She told her friends proudly that it was because he thought her perfect as she was. She believed, she told her son, that, as with builders and plumbers, the job waiting at home was always the last to be considered. Alejandro himself could not say which version was correct: his father seemed to treat his mother with the same detached respect that he treated everybody.

For while his mother was almost stereotypically latina operatic, passionate, prone to dizzying highs and lows he and his father were an emotional disappointment, both unusually even-tempered and, especially in the case of Alejandro, possessing what was often described as an almost offputting reserve. His father defended him against this (frequently made) charge, saying the men of the Marenas family had never felt the need to communicate as they did in soap operas, with angry, posturing confrontations or extravagant declarations of love. Possibly this was because Alejandro had been sent to boarding-school from the age of seven, possibly it was because Jorge himself was not a man who vented emotion easily the very attribute that made him such a good surgeon. That biannual fight with the gamefish was the one occasion on which both father and son would let loose, emotions briefly unbuttoned in the swirling waters, laughter, anger, joy, desperation all expressed from the safety-net of waders and a waistcoat full of hooks.

Usually, anyway. This time, for Alejandro at least, the uncomplicated physical pleasures of the trip had been muted by the conversation that was yet to come, the knowledge that although his chosen career had been considered by his family the worst hurt he could inflict on them he was about to do worse.

The trip had been complicated from the start: Jorge was unsure whether he should be seen to go, conscious that many of his friends were not just missing their own fishing trips and a retreat to the family estancia but, faced with devalued fortunes and inaccessible savings, were now considering ways to leave the country altogether. He was doing okay, he said, but he didn't want to put his friends' noses out of joint. It didn't do to gloat about one's good fortune when so many were suffering.

Maybe I am about to even things up a little, thought Alejandro, and felt a stab of anxiety.

Alejandro had meant to tell his father on the walk from the lodge, but Jorge had been preoccupied by a bite that had made his foot swell and caused him discomfort while he walked, so Alejandro carried his things and said nothing, his hat tipped low against the sun, his mind whirring with projected arguments, anticipated confrontation. He had meant to tell Jorge when his father had tied on his plug, a gaudy thing the size of a horseshoe, with the decorations of an Indian festival, the kind of lure that made European anglers shake their heads in disbelief until they hooked their own bass, of course.

He had meant to tell him when they hit the water, but the sound of the rushing creek and his father's intense concentration had distracted him, forcing him to wait until the moment was lost. Then, on their favoured quiet stretch between the derelict shack and the standing timber pile, just as Alejandro found himself choking on the words, that were fully formed in his mouth, his father had hooked a great brute of a thing, whose eyes, briefly visible, caught theirs, even from thirty feet, with The same mute fury as Alejandro's mother when Jorge announced he would be late home again. (It didn't do to get too angry, she said, after she had replaced the receiver. Not with things the way they were, and he the only man they knew still making money. Not with all those putas floating around him with their plastic grapefruit tits and adolescent arses.) This tucunare, as the Brazilians called it, was big even by Alejandro's father's standards. He announced its arrival with a yelp like that of a surprised child, as the plug was assaulted in the water with a sound like an explosion, and motioned his son over with a frantic head gesture he had needed both hands on his rod just to keep it in his grasp. Whatever conversation had been planned was swiftly forgotten.

Alejandro dropped his own rod and sprinted for his father, his eyes fixed on the furious commotion just under the water. The bass leapt from the water, as if better to assess its opponents, and both men let out a gasp at its size. Then in the split second in which they were stunned into immobility by what they had seen, it bolted for the maze of rotting tree-trunks, sending the drag into the high-pitched screech of an aircraft plummeting towards earth.

'Mas rapido! Mas rapido!' Alejandro yelled at his father, as the older man strained against his line, everything but that combative fish forgotten. Shaking its head, the bass dislodged at least one of the hooks from the bait, its bright orange and emerald green scales shimmering as it fought the line, the gold-rimmed black eye of its caudal fin taunting them as it flashed above the water, as aggressive and alluring as the peacock's tail after which it was named. Alejandro felt his father falter a little, his mind spun by the sheer ferocity of their battle, and clapped him on the shoulder, glad for once that it was his father who had lured the magnificent fish, glad that it was he who had a chance to display his superiority in the water.

That said, it was not a swift victory. In fact, for a while they were not sure whether it was going to be a victory at all: reeling it in and out, taking turns to haul on the line as each grew weary. In and out, nearer and nearer the fish came, shaking its vast head to dislodge the coloured hooks from its mouth, thrashing ever more angrily, turning the glassy surface of the water to foam, as it was brought to the shore.

At one point Alejandro held his father's waist, feeling his broad back hard and straining with the effort of holding on, his feet struggling to keep purchase on the slippery riverbed, and it struck him that he could not remember holding his father before. His mother was all hands and lips so much so that in his adolescence she had occasionally repelled him but now he understood that she needed something his father had refused, whether out of genuine inability or bloody-mindedness, to give her: occasional male attention, a mildly flirtatious respect, love. Given the disappointment he had been to her in other areas, it was the least he could do.

'Mierde, Ale, have you got your camera?' Finally, spent, they half sat, half lay together on the riverbank, the fish like a sleeping baby between proud new parents. Jorge caught his breath, then struggled to his feet. As he held it, still blank-eyed and furious in death, his middle-aged, tanned face was illuminated with hard-won triumph, a rare unguarded joy, his arms sore and flexed under each end as he held it up to the gods. It was the best day, he said, that he had had in years. A day to remember. Wait till he told them at the club. Was Ale sure he had the pictures?

Alejandro asked himself several times, afterwards: How could I have told him then?

Jorge de Marenas was going to pop into his office before going home. The traffic headed out to the Zona Norte was always terrible at this time, and since the trouble had started, even a man like Jorge didn't feel safe sitting in a jam.

'Luis Casiro got his new Mercedes stolen, did I tell you? Didn't even have time to get his gun from his jacket before they had pulled him out. Hit him so hard he needed fourteen stitches.' Jorge shook his head, gazing out at the traffic around him. 'Fernando de la Rua has a lot to answer for.'

To the right, through the smoked-glass window, Alejandro could see the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, their headscarves white against the greenery around them, embroidered with the names of the Disappeared. Their apparently peaceful demeanour was deceptive, belying the thousands of photographs that had decorated the park for over twenty years: sons, daughters, whose murderers, each knew, might have passed them in the street. The economic downturn had not deterred them, but it had given the rest of the city's inhabitants a new focus, and they looked tired and ignored, upholders of yesterday's news.

Alejandro thought briefly of the girl baby he had delivered almost three months ago, those he had seen handed over subsequently, their births christened with tears, then pushed the thought from his mind. 'Pa?'

'Don't tell your mother how much we had to drink last night. My head is sore enough as it is.' His father's voice still carried the satisfaction of the catch. Beside them, a colectivo, visibly belching diesel fumes, slowed to four or five m.p.h., just slow enough for its departing passengers to hit the pavement running, while those waiting launched themselves on board. One man, tripping and failing, yelled and shook his fist at the departing bus.

'I think she is going through the change,' his father said, meditatively. 'Women often become irrational then.'

'I need to talk to you.'

'She's got so paranoid about security she will hardly leave the house. She won't own up to this, of course. Not even if you ask her. She will make excuses, say the ladies are coming round for her charity works, or it's too hot to go out today, but she's no longer leaving the house.' He paused, still cheerful. 'And she's driving me mad.' The size of the fish had made him garrulous. 'Because she's not going out, she's dwelling on things, you know? Not just the economic situation. Not just the security situation, which I grant you is bad. You know you're more likely to be mugged in the Zona Norte now than in the slums? The bastards know where the money is, they're not stupid.' Jorge exhaled, his eyes still fixed on the road ahead. 'No, she's become obsessed about where I am. Why am I ten minutes late back from the office? Didn't I know that she feared I'd had an accident?'

He glanced in the mirror, unconsciously checking that the coolbox containing the fish had not tipped over. 'I think she thinks I'm having an affair. Whenever she asks me why I'm late, she immediately asks about Agostina. Agostina! Like she's going to give a second glance to an old man like me!' He said it with the confidence of someone who didn't truly believe his own comments.

Alejandro's heart was heavy. 'Pa, I'm going abroad.'

'Everything is magnified, you know? Because she has too much time to sit and think. She has always been the same.'

'To England. I'm going to England. To work in a hospital.'

Jorge had definitely heard him now. There was a lengthy silence, not sufficiently interrupted by the traffic reports on the radio. Alejandro sat in the leather seat, his breath held against the coming storm. Eventually, when he could bear it no longer, he spoke quietly: 'It's not something I planned . . .' He had suspected it would be like this, but still felt unprepared for the weight of guilt that had settled upon him, for the explanations, apologies, that were already begging to be spoken. He stared at his hands, blistered and criss-crossed an angry red from the nylon lines.

His father waited until the traffic report was finished. 'Well . . . I think it's a good thing.'

'What?'

'There is nothing for you here, Ale. Nothing. It is better you go and enjoy life somewhere else.' His head sank into his shoulders, and he exhaled in a long, weary sigh.

'You don't mind?'

'It's not a question you're a young man. It is right that you travel. It is right that you have some opportunities, meet some people. God knows, there's nothing in Argentina.' He glanced sideways, and the look was not lost on his son. 'You need to live a little.'

The words that sprang to Alejandro's mind seemed inadequate so he closed his mouth on them.

'When are you going to talk to your mother?'

'Today. I got the papers through last week. I want to go as soon as possible.'

'It's just . . . it's just the economic situation, right? There's nothing . . . nothing else that makes you want to leave?'

Alejandro knew that another conversation was hovering between them. 'Pa, the state hospitals are on their knees. There are rumours that they don't have enough money to pay us by the end of the year.'

His father seemed relieved. 'I won't go to the office. You need to talk to your mother. I'll drive you.'

'She's going to be bad, uh?'

'We'll deal with it,' his father said simply.

They traversed the three sides of the square and sat in traffic before the government buildings. His father placed a hand paternally on his leg. 'So, who is going to help me hunt peacock bass, eh?' The unforced animation of before was gone. His father's professional mask was back in place, benign, reassuring.

'Come to England, Pa. We'll hunt salmon.'

'Huh. A child's fish.' It was said without resentment.

The Mothers of the Disappeared were ending their weekly march. As the car began to head back, Alejandro watched them as they folded their laminated posters carefully into handbags, adjusted embroidered headscarves, exchanged greetings and held each other with the loose affection of long-standing allies before they headed for the gates and their lonely journeys home.

The Marenas house, like many in the Zona Norte, looked like neither the flat-fronted, Spanish-influenced shuttered manses of central BA, nor a modern glass-and-concrete structure. It was a curious, ornate building set back from the street and, in architectural style, most closely resembled a Swiss cuckoo clock.

Around it, carefully manicured borders fringed sculpted hedges, which disguised the electric gate, the newly installed bars on the windows, and hid from immediate view the security booth and guard at the end of the road. Inside, the wooden floors had long given way to shining expanses of cool marble, upon which sat expensive French rococo-style furniture, polished and gilded to within an inch of its life. It was not a comfortable-looking house, but while the front rooms spoke of a cool social superiority, inviting guests to admire rather than relax, the kitchen, where the family spent most of their private time, still housed a battered old kitchen table and several shabbily comfortable chairs. Their disappearance, Milagros, the maid, had sworn, would mean the immediate end of her twenty-seven-year tenure with the family. If they thought that after a hard day's cleaning she was going to squeeze her backside into one of those modern plasticky things, they had another think coming. As it was widely agreed that Milagros was often the only thing standing between Alejandro's mother and the sanatorium, the chairs stayed, to the unspoken satisfaction of all parties. And the kitchen remained the most used room in the seven-bedroom house.

It was here that Ale chose to speak to his mother, while his father supposedly busied himself in his study, and Milagros shuffled backwards and forwards across the marble floors with a mop to eavesdrop on the conversation and make the occasional pertinent exclamation. His mother sat upright at the table. With her helmet of blonde hair, she was unrecognisable as the dark-haired beauty of the wedding photographs in gilt frames that littered the house.

'You are going where?' she said, for the second time.

'England.'

'To train? You have changed your mind? You're going to be a doctor?'

'No, Mother, I'm still going to be a midwife.'

'You're going to work in a private hospital? To advance your career?'

'No. Another state hospital.'

Milagros had stopped all pretence of cleaning, and stood still in the centre of the room to listen.

'You are going to the other side of the world to do the same job that you do here?'

He nodded.

'But why there? Why so far?'

His answers had been rehearsed so many times in his head. 'There are no opportunities here. They are offering good jobs in England, proper wages. I can work in some of the best hospitals.'

'But you can work here!' There was a rising note in his mother's voice that spoke of panic or hysteria. 'Is it not enough that I lose one child? Must I lose two?'

He had known it was coming but that did not make the blow any lighter. He felt the vaguely malevolent presence that he always did when Estela was discussed. 'You're not losing me, Mother.' His voice was that of a doctor speaking to his patient.

'You're moving ten thousand miles away! How is that not losing you? Why are you moving so far away from me?' She appealed to Milagros, who shook her head in sorrowful agreement.

'I'm not moving from you.'

'But why not America? Why not Paraguay? Brazil? Why not Argentina, for heaven's sake?'

He tried to explain how English hospitals were short of midwives, how those from other countries were being offered substantial financial rewards to fill the gap. He tried to tell her that it would be good for his career, that he might end up working for one of the famous teaching hospitals, how the neo-natal care was among the best in the world. She was always going on about their European ancestors it would be good for him to experience Europe.

He considered telling her of the three babies he had watched handed over at birth because Argentina's economic collapse meant their parents were too poor to keep them, of the anguished cries of the still-bloodied mothers, the painfully set j aws of the fathers. Of the fact that while he had chosen to work with the city's dirt poor, to witness the mind-numbing misery that occurs when poverty and disease grasp hands, nothing had prepared him for the lingering sorrow, the sense of unwilling complicity he felt at the handing over of those children.

But he and his father did not talk to her of babies. They never had.

He knelt and took her hand. 'What is there left for me here, Mama? The hospitals are dying. I could not afford to live in a slum on my salary. You want me to live with you until I am an old man?' He regretted the words as soon as he had spoken them, knowing she would be perfectly happy with such an arrangement.

'I knew you doing this this thing would bring us no good.'

When he had initially gone into medicine, his mother had been proud. What professions were of a higher status in Buenos Aires, after all? Only plastic surgeons and psychoanalysts, and there were one of each in the family already. Then, two years in, he had returned home to announce a change in career: he was not at home among the doctors, he had realised. His future lay elsewhere. He was going, he said, to work in obstetric care.

'You're going to be an obstetrician?' his mother had said, faint concern creasing her brow.

'No, I'm going to be a midwife.'

It was only the second time Milagros had seen her mistress faint clean away. (The first was when they told her Estela had died.) It was not a suitable profession for the son of Buenos Aires' most prominent cosmetic surgeon whatever he thought his so-called calling was. It was no profession for a red-blooded man, no matter what was said about equality and sexual liberation these days. It certainly wasn't the kind of thing she felt comfortable discussing with her friends, to whom her son was only ever described as being 'in medicine'. It wasn't seemly. More importantly, she believed it might be, she confided to Milagros, the real reason why her beautiful son never brought girls home, why he didn't seem to display the arrogant machismo that should have been shot through the first-born son of such a family. His male instincts, she confided to the maid, had been corrupted by repeated exposure to the more brutal side of feminine biology. Then, even worse, he had chosen to work in the state hospital.

'So, when are you thinking of going?'

'Next week. Tuesday.'

'Next week? Next week coming? Why so much hurry?'

'They need staff immediately, Mama. One has to take opportunities when they come.'

Shock had made her rigid. She held a hand to her face, then crumpled. 'If it had been your sister who wanted this profession, who wanted to move continents . . . that I could have coped with. But you . . . It's not right, Ale.'

So what is right? he wanted to ask. Isn't it right that I have chosen to spend my life bringing children safely into an unsafe world? Isn't it right that my professional currency is in emotion, real life, real love when the whole country in which we are living is built on secrets, and celebrates what is false? Is it right that, no matter what you choose to believe, the second most common surgical procedure my esteemed father carries out is supposedly to make a woman's most private parts more 'beautiful'? As always, he said nothing. Alejandro closed his eyes, and braced himself against his mother's hurt. 'I'll be able to come back, two, maybe three times a year.'

'My only son will be a visitor to my house. This is supposed to make me happy?' She didn't look at Alejandro but appealed to Milagros, who sucked her teeth. There was a lengthy silence. Then, as he had expected, his mother broke into a noisy burst of sobbing. She reached a hand across to him, her fingers waving vainly in the air. 'Don't go, Ale. I promise I won't mind where you work. You can stay at the Hospital de Clinicas. I won't say a thing.'

'Mama-'

'Please!'

She heard the certainty in his silence, and when she next spoke her voice held an edge of bitterness. She blinked against the tears. 'All I wanted was to watch you succeed, get married, look after your children. And now you don't just deny me this, you would deny me yourself!'

Their impending separation made him generous. He knelt and held her hand, her jewelled rings cold against his skin. 'I will come back. I thought you might see this as an opportunity for me.'

She frowned at him, pushed his hair back from his eyes. 'You are so cold, Ale. So unfeeling. Can't you see that you're breaking my heart?'

Alejandro was unable, as ever, to answer his mother's forceful logic. 'Be glad for me, Mama.'

'How can I be glad for you when I am grieving for myself?'

And that is why I am escaping from you, he said silently. Because all I have ever known from you is grieving. Because my head is full of it, always has been. And this way, finally, I might get a little peace. 'We'll talk later. I have to go out now.' He smiled, the patient, detached smile he reserved for his mother, and left her, with a kiss to her brow, sobbing quietly in the arms of her maid.

Considering that their sole purpose was to facilitate sexual excess and impropriety, the Venus Love Hotel, like other such establishments, was excessively bound up in rules and regulations. While any number of sexual aids might be ordered along with the room-service menu, and any kind of debauched proclivity catered for on the many adult videos available for private hire, the hotel was curiously prudish when it came to maintaining its code of conduct, its air of respectability. The building had the sober facade of a private house; its name was not even advertised on a hoarding outside. Neither man nor woman was allowed to wait in a room alone, despite the inconvenience caused to illicit couples forced to rendezvous in nearby cafes, not so safe from prying eyes. A smoked-glass screen at Reception meant that neither receptionist nor visitor could accurately gauge the identity of the other.

Except that one particular customer was known to the man behind the screen now, had paid him generously on more than one occasion to ensure discretion. This customer had appeared in the gossip magazines enough times to be recognisable even from behind the twin barriers of smoked glass and sunglasses.

This meant that, with only a nod to the silhouette before him, Alejandro was able to skip up the stairs two or three at a time and, at the appointed hour, knock on the discreetly numbered door that had been a private haven two or three times a week for almost eighteen months.

'Ale?' Never anything romantic. Never anything like amor. He preferred it like that.

'It's me.'

Eduardo Guichane was one of Argentina's highest paid television hosts. On his chat show, which aired several times a week, he was flanked by several near-naked South American girls who made frequent, badly scripted references to his legendary sexual appetite. He was tall, dark, immaculately dressed, and prided himself on a physique seemingly unchanged since his years of playing professional football. Argentina's favourite gossip magazine Gente repeatedly featured 'stolen' pictures of him squiring some young woman who was not Sofia Guichane, or speculating as to whether, as was the case with his previous wives, he was being unfaithful to the former Miss Venezuela finalist. All planted by his publicist. 'All lies,' Sofia would mutter bitterly, lighting one of her omnipresent cigarettes. Eduardo had the libido of an armchair. Although his most frequent excuse had been exhaustion, she was wondering if his interests didn't lie in other directions.

'Boys?' said Alejandro, cautiously.

'No! Boys I could cope with.' Sofia blew smoke at the ceiling. 'I am afraid he is more interested in golf.'

They had met at his father's surgery on a day after rioting when Alejandro had come, at his mother's request, to check that his father had made it to work safely. Sofia was on one of several visits: having been celibate for four of the six years of her marriage, she had laboured under the belief that a smaller, higher backside and several inches off her thighs might reignite her husband's passion. ('What a waste of American dollars that was,' she said afterwards.) Alejandro, struck by her beauty and by the shining dissatisfaction in her face, had found himself staring, and then, leaving, thought no more of her. But she had bumped into him in the foyer downstairs where, staring at him with the same curious hunger, she announced that she never normally did this sort of thing, then scribbled her number on a card and thrust it at him.

Three days later they met at the Fenix, a spectacularly lascivious love hotel, where intricate prints of the Kama Sutra decorated the walls and beds vibrated at will. Her mention of their meeting-place had left him in no doubt as to her intention, and they had come together almost wordlessly, in a frenzied coupling that had left Alejandro dazed for almost a week afterwards.

Their meetings had gradually achieved a pattern. She would swear that they could not meet again, that Eduardo suspected something, had been quizzing her, that she had only got away with it by the skin of her teeth. Then, as he sat beside her, comforted her, told her he understood, she would weep, ask why she, as a young woman, should have to endure a sexless marriage, a life free of passion, when she was not even thirty. (Both were aware that this was not strictly true the age at least but Alejandro knew better than to interrupt.) And then, as he comforted her again, agreed that it was unfair, that she was too beautiful, too passionate to grow stale and dry like an old fig, she would hold his face and announce that he was so handsome, so kind, the only man who had ever understood her. And then they would make love (although that always sounded too gentle for what it really was). Afterwards, smoking furiously, she would pull away and tell him that this really was it. The risks were too high. Alejandro would have to understand.

Several days, or occasionally a week, later she would call again.

His own feelings about the arrangement had often verged on the ambivalent: Alejandro had always been discreetly selective when it came to sexual partners, uncomfortable with the idea of falling in love. While he felt a sympathy for her predicament, he knew he didn't love Sofia; he wasn't even sure he always liked her. Her own protestations of love, he sensed, were a way of legitimising to a good Catholic girl her illicit actions: while her view of her religion might just accommodate romantic passion, carnal lust was clearly stretching things. What they shared, and what neither had ever been quite brave enough to acknowledge, was a fierce sexual chemistry; it ratified Sofia's enduring belief in her own desirability, and lifted Alejandro out of his habitual reticence, even if his exterior did little to suggest it.