This article proposes that Fauna and Desplazamientos by Mario Levrero, written during the military dictatorship, mark a period of transition in his work. The Uruguayan author lived those years as an entrance to the catacombs, a suffocating environment that encouraged self-censorship and precipitated his self-exile to Buenos Aires, where he published both texts in 1987. Fauna emerges as a fictional transposition of an attempt at therapy. Desplazamientos, the dark novel, is a fiction of money that addresses the miseries of the father’s ghost and works as a closure that enables the writing of La novela luminosa.