When she was on the bus she took it out of her handbag again and wound her watch just to be on the safe side.

And I'll tell you one thing, even though it's on yellowed paper, a summons always looks real serious that's why Maria Elena had examined it over and over again at home with its green stamp round the illegible signature, and with her time and place. That's what it said in the summons, a procedure that concerns you, and there we were just waiting for 'em. So it was the same routine every day, we'd arrive with the papers, old Lopez would bring round the first coffee, and a bit later they'd begin to turn up for the procedure. Plenty of time for our coffees and the favourites in Sunday's races, and the boss was the first to come round for a tip 'cos Skinny Bianchetti's were always dead certs. If you wanted courtesy you'd come to the right place, mate, the boss said so again and again and it was true, everything timed so smoothly that we put IBM to shame, well greased our machine was, no bleedin' rush, no move up there, make more room. To be honest, they never caused us trouble, the boss had picked offices which were just the job so there wouldn't be no scrum, and we dealt with 'em one by one, textbook stuff, just as long as we needed. Of course, they weren't to know that we were waiting for 'em - and we sure were - everything had to be done without any fuss, don't worry, you just get on with it, that's what the boss said, and he'd repeat it every now and again just in case anyone forgot, take it nice and easy, all in all it was dead simple, if something went wrong nobody was going to take it out on us, the buck stopped with the high-ups and the boss was a straight bloke, don't worry lads, if there's any trouble it's me who takes the flak round here, but one thing, don't you go and get me the wrong punter, first you check so there's no foul-up, and then you go right ahead. We was just hanging around waiting for 'em, they each knew their time and day, but one thing I'll tell you, it was all nice and relaxed, we could have a good slow smoke, and every now and then old Lopez would bring round coffee and we'd have a break, discuss what was new, almost always the same things, the boss's visit, any changes higher up, the horses' form out at San Isidro. Subsequently the narrative moves to the female voice of Maria Elena and then to that of other characters, returning at the end to the bureaucrat. The first one-and-a-half paragraphs are narrated in the voice of an uneducated male bureaucrat who employs typically Argentine slang. This story is largely written in colloquial Argentine Spanish.

Casa tomada [Cuento] by Julio Cortázar