"Life is Brief": A song wisdom, sung nightly in the salon of Señora Mami in Buenos Aires. Yet one can live many times, many more or less long lives. Juan María Brausen, a disillusioned copywriter at an advertising agency, experiences after a serious operation on his wife that he is not condemned to a single existence. Behind the thin wall of the neighboring apartment, he hears the life expressions of the prostitute Queca, and in his thoughts, he becomes Juan María Arce, her brutal lover. At the same time, he imagines himself as Dr. Díaz Grey, the main character of a screenplay he is writing. When Queca is murdered by her pimp, Brausen identifies with the murderer and flees, as Juan María Arce, to Santa María, the city he has envisioned, where his path intersects with that of Díaz Grey. "The Short Life," published in 1950, has Onet.