The Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City reflects upon the retrieval of the past as a prerequisite for healing from national trauma. If postdictatorship countries are to implement a transition to democracy, their citizens must confront the past. The denial of national trauma perpetuates tyranny. Taken together, the many fragmented stories in Piglia’s novel can be viewed as a metaphor for the process of retrieving a repressed history. The central trope of the novel is Elena, a gendered machine made responsible for integrating Argentina’s past dissociations and making healing possible.