A profusion of flyers bearing the picture of Constantinu Iliescu were pasted on the walls of the different schools. They appeared at the train stations in Bellaterra and Cerdanyola, on the campus buses, in cafés, libraries and the lobbies of the Vila apartments. Flyers also showed up, though not quite as profusely, on the facades of some buildings near Cinema Verdi in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona and on the stairs of the metro stations of Fontana and Lesseps.

The flyers on letter-size paper – it was obvious they were homemade – had a photograph of Iliescu and some personal data: a Romanian student, 21 years old, 5' 9", stocky build, shaven head, blue eyes. Beneath these references, in gigantic capitals, was the word: "DISAPPEARED." Informers were to call the phone numbers printed at the bottom.

These flyers were created by two friends of Iliescu's: Laura Cremona, the Italian girl who was waiting for him the day he vanished, and Marcel Bru, one of Laura's few friends who was not an Erasmus scholarship student. Both Laura and Marcel kept their cell phones switched on day and night in the hope of receiving a clue to Iliescu's whereabouts.

There were many calls. Some merely inquired whether there would be a reward for whoever could offer a lead. Others, in blatant bad taste, came from idle idiots eager to poke fun. There were even some from xenophobes who claimed they were happy Catalonia had one less immigrant. Some called and hung up without a word which really annoyed Laura and Bru who expected to hear a ransom demand or at least get some information that would throw light on the matter Only two calls dealt with the issue in a direct way, both to Laura's cell phone, and they came from phone numbers with the prefix of the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona where Iliescu, Cremona and Bru were all enrolled.

The first call was from Professor Rosa Casasaies, the adviser to the Erasmus students in the School of Letters, expressing dismay at not having been informed of Iliescu's disappearance before it was made public, especially in such an overwhelming and probably useless display. In those days, the school was almost empty due to strikes. Casasaies was annoyed but made an effort to be kind. Not being able to place Laura by her name, she insisted on knowing what courses Laura had registered for. She wanted to make sure the affair was for real, not a macabre joke that someone was playing on the Romanian student. After all, the school had been occupied by a sit-in protest against the new Bologna legislation for university studies, and for at least one week and a half, the general ruckus had plunged the university into chaos.

From their conversation, Casasaies was convinced that Cremona was telling the truth and had a justifiable reason for not having asked the adviser for help as she had assumed the university would not want to get involved in Iliescu's disappearance. The registrar's office where the students had sought to consult their friend's transcript had refused them the information. They claimed nobody but the student himself could access those private documents, even though all his friends wanted to know was where he stayed when he arrived in Barcelona and his parent's address so they could contact them.

"And from this you get that the university would just wash its hands of the matter?" Casasaies asked with a perplexed inflection in her voice, considering once again the tendency of the young to confuse things. It was one thing for the registrar to have strict orders not to disclose transcripts, but why would academic authorities ignore a student's disappearance?

She got no answer. The professor took advantage of the silence and insisted on the fact that the situation seemed absurd to her. Of course, they had the right to look for their friend, but it was better to act in collaboration with the faculty. To take the frying pan by the handle in a unilateral way, she added, would lead them nowhere.

"Do you understand what I'm saying, Laura?" She asked, attempting to establish a certain complicity by using the student's first name. "Did you understand? Do you know the Catalan idiom 'to take the frying pan by its handle'?"

"I do not," Laura replied drily. "I still haven't learned all the idioms ..." Now her voice sounded less arrogant and showed her Italian accent. "What we want is to find Constantinu," she continued, "as soon as possible. If you can help us, all the better."

"Of course, we want to help. How long has it been since you last heard from him?"

"He disappeared six days ago. We waited four days before putting up the flyers," she said in a tearful voice.

"Please come to my office and you can tell me everything calmly," Casasaies proposed.

"I can't go to your office because I'm not in Bellaterra," Laura said, recovering her blunt and aggressive tone which the professor pretended not to hear.

"Come on, honey," Casasaies encouraged her. "You'll see that everything will be all right. I will speak to the dean right away. We'll get in touch with Iliescu's family and you can come by tomorrow morning. I have office hours from eleven to one o' clock. Do you know where my office is?"

* * *

Rosa Casasaies had long been a professor at the School of Letters. When she started, her students could have been her siblings. She still went out to dinner once in a while with some of her initial students and a few of them had become close friends. In contrast, she had trouble understanding today's students who by their age could be her children; in fact Cristina, her daughter, was twenty. She didn't get along great with Cristina either, despite her efforts to make life at home bearable. She often had to pacify her husband who thought their daughter was a fool, spoilt by her mother right from the start. Spoiled and egoistical, she had built around herself a kind of wall. It was the same wall Rosa sensed in her conversation with Laura Cremona which made her think that communication with the Erasmus students was a sinking ship. But why? What had the school done wrong? It looked like the orientation sessions and the pep talks by the academic authorities telling them to feel at home and not hesitate to ask their advisers for anything they needed had been a waste of time.

The second call, barely an hour after Casasaies', was much shorter. It came from the dean's secretary. The dean was calling a meeting of the Erasmus students and advisers to discuss the measures to take regarding Iliescu's disappearance. The meeting was set for the next day at ten o' clock in the morning in the dean's office.

When Rosa Casasaies informed the dean of her conversation with Laura Cremona, the dean told her that she had just learned of Iliescu's disappearance. It was Professor Bellpuig who, running into her in a hallway, had mentioned the case; he was curious because the Erasmus kid was one of his students.

The dean had not noticed the flyers even though they'd been up for two days.

For more than a week, Dolors Adrover had walked from the parking lot to her office, intent on looking straight ahead. She did not want to see the graffiti related to the new order demanded by the strikers or the banners with insults to the president and to herself under portraits of Hitler and Franco – a clear accusation of fascism.

Being herself a vocal opponent of the Franco regime, Adrover, whose parents had been loyal supporters of the Republic and suffered...