The Desert and Its Seed opens with a taxi ride to the hospital: a recently- separated wife’s face is disintegrating from acid thrown by her ex-husband while they signed divorce papers. Mario, their son, tries to wipe the acid from his mother’s cheeks but his own fingers burn. What follows is a fruitless attempt to reconstruct her face— first in Buenos Aires, thereafter in Milan. Mario, the narrator, becomes the shadow and witness of the reconstruction attempts to repair his mother’s outraged flesh.…