I go several times to see the Señora. The green cloth folded in half, which was on the coffee table that first afternoon, is always there. She keeps the pack of tarot cards inside it. Each time, she peels the cloth back carefully, as if uncovering a sleeping child. She asks me to cut the deck into three. Then to shuffle each third, moving the cards in a circle, seven times, with my right hand. She forms a stack again and we hold hands over the freshly shuffled deck, saying aloud the name and surname of the girl we want to ask about. Then she draws cards and lays them on the cloth one by one. I see the figures upside-down. It makes no difference because I don’t know what they mean.

Other times, the girls get in ahead of the cards.

One afternoon she says she can’t breathe and raises a hand to her throat. She stays like that, her eyes closed. I sit still. All I can do is wait until whatever’s happening to her stops happening. When she comes to, opens her mouth and takes a breath, her eyes are shining.

I couldn’t breathe, I was suffocating, it was so intense. Pressure here and a pain here, she says, pointing first to her neck and then between her legs.

It’s María Luisa, strangled and raped.

Poor little thing. Pulled up like a reed. She was still so young, with so weak a hold on life. Like the reeds that grow beside lakes, she says to me.

I remember the photos I saw of María Luisa. The one her brother showed me of her body in the morgue, swollen, muddy, with parts of her face eaten by birds. And another two I saw in the case file.

One is also of her body, in the place where they found her. It’s taken from a short distance away, and it’s in black and white. It shows the body of a woman floating in the water. This photo reminds me of the painting by John Millais, of the dead Ophelia. Like the character from Hamlet, María Luisa is floating face-up. Like in the painting, the flat green reeds curve over the lake, and the surface is covered in tiny aquatic plants. Not the purple flowers Queen Gertrude calls dead men’s fingers, and that Ophelia wove into her crowns, but others, known as duckweed. A tree, not the willow young Ophelia falls from, but one with a low, squat canopy, casts its shadow over María Luisa’s body. Death, for both of them, shot through with anguish.

The other photo is in colour and in it María Luisa is alive. It’s a family photo, of a group of women. Maybe it was taken on someone’s birthday. On the left is her little sister, then her mother in a fancy housecoat, then one of her sisters-in-law holding a baby girl, and finally María Luisa. All the others, even the baby, are smiling at the camera. But not her. She’s wearing a white vest that stands out against her brown skin, and she’s not smiling. Under her thick fringe, her large, serious eyes look slightly downwards and off to one side. She seems sad.

No one forced María Luisa. She went on that trip, or whatever it was, because she wanted to. Maybe she was invited by the boy her brother saw her with, maybe they were going out or she was in love with him, or maybe her friends convinced her. But it wasn’t a kidnapping. She wanted to go. Then, for some reason, it all went to pieces. She’s not annoyed. I don’t think she understands what happened, even now. She was still so young. For her, everything was new: the new job, the new friends, that boy...

I think we have to find a way of reconstructing how the world saw them. If we can understand how people saw the girls, we’ll be able to understand how they saw the world, does that make sense?

Teenagers or even children having jobs was common in towns in the interior, at least until the eighties. You didn’t have to be from a particularly poor family. Girls from working-class homes, whose mothers did the housework, were sent out to work by these same mothers from when they were very young.

My best friend in those days had a job as a babysitter from the age of ten, when she was barely older than the kids she looked after. My mum had also worked from when she was young, and because of that we weren’t allowed to. Strangely, I felt a bit jealous of my friend’s situation: she earned a wage, not much of one but a wage all the same, which meant she had money of her own; she had responsibilities, she spent a lot of each day out of her house, and what’s more, she went to school and got good grades, like me. In my eyes my friend was superior. Confident, streetwise.

And yet my other friends didn’t see her that way. To them, my friend was beneath us: she had to work and we didn’t. Even though the most those girls could aspire to was qualifying as teachers and marrying kind, hard-working men.

Andrea didn’t have to work as a girl either. The only person in her house who worked was her father. In a meat processing plant. She was able to study because her boyfriend paid for it. If he hadn’t come along, maybe Andrea would have ended up working in the Vizental like most young people in San José, who finished secondary school, if that, then put their names down, took a seat and waited to be called. Plant worker or secretary. Andrea, being pretty, would have got a job in the admin department. Well-dressed, well-groomed and always sweet-smelling, even in the fetid black cloud of boiled meat, the secretaries typed on typewriters and did sums on calculators and strode down the corridors with their arms full of files and their feet falling neatly in line, that elegant gait. Ogled by the workers, who, as they sawed up hooves, tails and heads, and separated skin from flesh, felt as frisky as bulls and dreamed of mounting the secretaries like cows.

If the possibility ever crossed her mind, it can’t have been very appealing. The memory of her father coming back from the slaughterhouse every afternoon, smelling of blood and disinfectant, must have turned her stomach.

Sarita also started work young. She had no choice, because in her family they were very poor. The last job she had before getting married was as a cleaner in a doctor’s house. They treated her well there, almost like a daughter, and encouraged her to study. But she fell pregnant and got married. She was too pretty for her husband to send out as a maid again, all that beauty going to waste in a haze of cleaning products. So he sent her out as a prostitute.

Andrea wanted something different, the Señora says. It’s not true that she dreamed of getting married, having children and qualifying as a teacher. If Andrea hadn’t been killed, she would have upped sticks. She wanted out. She didn’t see any future where she was.

In the tarot cards a lover appears, an older man. In the case file, too.

I knew him. He lived a few blocks from my house at the time of the murder. But I knew him from before. He was called Pepe Durand and he was a driver with the El Directo bus company, which made short trips from my town to nearby towns and cities. Sometimes, when I went to visit my grandparents in the countryside, I’d take the bus there with my aunts and he’d be driving. He was a good-looking guy. At least, my aunts liked him, especially the youngest, who’d deposit me in a seat with the bags then go off and spend the whole journey chatting to him. Standing behind his seat as they talked, leaning on the backrest and laughing loudly, a high-pitched laugh like a whinnying colt. Sometimes she also prepared mate and passed him the gourd. I don’t know if anything ever happened between them, but I’m sure my aunt had a crush on Pepe.

Despite being so popular with women – sometimes I took the bus alone or with my parents, and without my aunts, and I’d always see another girl standing behind the driver’s seat, also shrieking with laughter – Pepe was a man of few words, and not very sociable.

People said he was odd, with that inflection they put on the word when they meant a person wasn’t quite right. Sometimes he went to the boliche, a bar called El Ombú. Boliches were the meeting places for lower-middle-class men who couldn’t go and get drunk in the Jockey Club like professionals and the children of respectable families. According to the Ombú regulars, when Pepe went to the bar he never sat with anyone, he just drank alone while watching whatever game was showing on TV. He didn’t get involved in the talk about politics, football or women. If they ever tried to include him, he nodded from where he was sitting, without opening his mouth. An odd guy. Not quite right.

When he moved into a house near us, he brought a younger woman with him – he’d have been around forty at the time. No one knew anything about her, because she was from out of town and kept herself to herself. The mystery couple were the talk of the neighbourhood. And when he was linked to Andrea’s murder, the whispers multiplied like flies around a carcass.

Pepe drove the bus that took students from Villa Elisa, Colón and San José to Concepción del Uruguay, for the teacher training programmes and other vocational courses taught in that city. Andrea was one of the students who travelled with El Directo every day.

In the case file, some people who used to take the same bus said the driver and the girl were romantically involved; that when everyone else got out at the terminal, she stayed on the bus with him, and that sometimes they saw the pair having dinner by themselves in a little retaurant nearby. The owner of a boarding house by the terminal also said she rented him a room, which she’d seen him going into with the murdered girl. And a girl who studied with Andrea said he’d shown up at the teacher training college one evening that year. They were in class and he called to her from the courtyard. Andrea went out and they spoke for a bit, and when she came back in, the girl asked if her father had come to find her because something had happened at home. Andrea said it was nothing, and that he was a friend, not her father.

When summoned to give a statement, he denied all involvement with her beyond the bus journeys. He knew her by sight, as he did most of the students he took there and back, maybe they’d chatted once or twice or she’d borrowed the kit to make herself some mate. But that was it. The night of the murder, he said, he’d gone for a walk with his wife. Since it was so hot, they spent a long time sitting in the square, then headed home because a storm was brewing. His wife never contradicted him.

Still, it was a long time before the police left him alone. In the months that followed, I often saw patrol cars driving slowly around the dirt roads of my neighbourhood. We all knew who they were watching.

He didn’t kill Andrea. He was in love with her, says the Señora. In some ancient cultures, it was thought that the soul lived in the eyes, you know? And so lovers swapped souls by looking at each other: I’d give you mine, and you’d give me yours. But when one person stopped loving the other, they’d get their soul back and keep their lover’s soul as well. When one of them dies, it must be the same. Andrea took Pepe’s soul with her.

He said he heard about Andrea’s death the same way most people did, on the radio that day, on the 7 a.m. departure from Villa Elisa to Concepción del Uruguay. It must be awful to learn of the death of a loved one like that, to have to keep driving the bus as if the news, the worst you could ever receive, were just another of the countless daily misfortunes that always happen to other people.

One morning a couple of years ago, Pepe was found dead. He hanged himself from a roof beam in his house.