No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  Also by Laura Restrepo

  PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH

  Isle of Passion

  Leopard in the Sun

  The Angel of Galilea

  The Dark Bride

  A Tale of the Dispossessed

  Delirium

  To Payán, by his side

  Contents

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Everyone has the right to

  think his father is a good guy.

  FÉLIX ROMEO

  As for me, right now I’m

  not in the mood to listen

  to heroics.

  ELIAS KHOURY

  “I NEED TO know how it happened,” Mateo tells his mother. “The dark episode, I need to know exactly how it happened.”

  “I’ve already told you a thousand times,” she responds.

  He was the one who had given it that name, the dark episode, partly because it had been so painful but also because it was buried under a mountain of half-truths. The worst part was that he had no memory of it because he had been too young to remember. Blindly stabbing—an expression he had heard. That’s how he felt, like a blind man trying to jab his way out of a story that he did not understand, but in which he played a part and which snared him in its net.

  “Come on, Lolé,” Mateo says, softening his voice and addressing her by the name he had always used when he was a child. Now he prefers to call her by her given name,

  Lorenza, and when he is irate with her, simply Mother. “Come on, Lolé, tell me again. Let’s begin with the park.”

  “You were two and a half. It was a Thursday afternoon, and you, your father, and I were in Bogotá. At the Parque de la Independencia.”

  “And he was wearing a thick wool sweater.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “From the pictures I know that he liked to wear thick wool sweaters.”

  “Not sweaters, pullovers.”

  “What are pullovers?”

  “Sweaters, but that’s what he called them. Pullovers. We Colombians call them sweaters; in Argentina they call them pullovers. Ridiculous really, since they are both English words.”

  “But what I want to know is if he was wearing a thick wool sweater that specific afternoon.”

  “Who knows? But I do remember his hair was long. In Argentina he always had to keep it short, the dictatorship did not tolerate hippies. But when he got to Colombia, he let it grow. If you want to know what your father looked like then, Mateo, look in the mirror and add a dozen years. That’s how he looked.”

  “Not true, I don’t have wide shoulders. Uncle Patrick told me that Ramón’s shoulders were wide.”

  “Soon yours will be just like his.”

  “Okay, back to the afternoon, in the park.”

  “Ramón and I stroll, hand in hand with you. The sky is hydrangea-blue, like it is in Bogotá when—”

  “I don’t care about the color of the sky in Bogotá,” Mateo says. “I want to know what happened.”

  Sometimes Lorenza tells her son that the most horrendous thing about the dark episode is that it happened exactly when she thought the horrors had all but ended. They had left the Argentinean dictatorship behind, and she and Ramón had survived living underground. After five years together in the resistance movement, they had distanced themselves from the party and left Argentina for Colombia, as bewildered as monks who abandon the cloister and poke their noses out into the world. For Lorenza, who was Colombian, the change had not been too difficult; after all, the return to Bogotá had allowed her to be with her people again, in a world that she knew well and that she took to without much drama. But for Ramón, an Argentinean, the move left him in limbo. He grew contemptuous of everything around him. He found her family abominably bourgeois and began to treat her like some unfathomable creature who had little in common with the woman he had fallen in love with in Buenos Aires. Once the complicity that had bound them during their years in the underground was broken, they became strangers to each other.

  “In Bogotá, your father became invisible to me,” Lorenza confesses to her son.

  “What do you mean ‘invisible’? Nobody really becomes invisible.”

  “Maybe I was too busy with you, with my job, with my family, maybe just busy with myself. Besides, this does happen with people who have grown very close during times of danger. The danger passes and they quickly find out that it was the only thing keeping them together. You see, I no longer had a place for your father, like having to wear a thick coat in the middle of summer.”

  “A woolen pullover in the middle of summer.”

  “You don’t know what to do with such a thing, it doesn’t belong on you. But Ramón didn’t help either; he began to behave in a manner that, let’s just say, was unusual. He couldn’t come to grips with life outside the party. But wait, it was worse than that, he couldn’t come to terms with how to live outside the dictatorship, without having an enemy right in his face that he had to destroy before it destroyed him. All this made living together an incurable headache, so we separated.”

  “Stop, Lorenza. We separated? You say ‘we separated’ and that’s it, you’re free and clear? Who separated? Whose idea was it?”

  “Mine.”

  “You wanted to separate?”

  “Yes.”

  “And my father didn’t want to?”

  “No. He didn’t.”

  “That’s very different than ‘we separated,’ no?”

  “I had gotten a job as a journalist, and when I left him, I took you with me to my mother’s. Ramón stayed in the apartment that we rented in the center of the city.”

  “So we suddenly became upper class, and he remained in near poverty.”

  “Not exactly. You and I were in a guest room, and he had his own apartment.”

  “Let’s go back to the park.”

  “We’re in the park. Thursday, five in the afternoon. He lifted you up to one of the horses on the carousel, and we stood on either side to hold you and talked. A surprisingly quiet chat, I would say, nothing like the heated arguments we had before the separation. Ramón asks me if I am sure that the separation is what I want. A few days earlier he would have screamed such a thing at me, but now he poses the question in a neutral tone, like a notary clarifying some detail. I tell him yes, I’m sure, that the separation is over and done with, that it doesn’t make sense to reopen the discussion. He says he didn’t mean he want
ed to discuss anything, he only needs to make sure that there’s no going back. Yes, I say, there’s no going back. He doesn’t persist and changes the topic. He says he’s going to take you on a trip to a finca for the weekend. He’ll pick you up early the next morning, Friday, and bring you back Sunday before seven at night. It’s a finca near Villa de Leyva, and your father says that I should bundle you up because it will be cold.”

  “Don’t you ask whose finca it is and where it is exactly? Don’t you even ask for the phone number of where I’ll be?”

  “No. I don’t want him to think that I am questioning his life. He is an excellent father, who adores you and cares for you well, and at that moment it seems to me the most natural thing in the world that he wants to spend a few days alone with you. I also remember thinking that if he was already organizing trips, it was because he had grown used to the idea of the separation. We each take you by the hand, and as night falls, the three of us stroll again through the park. At a certain point, you fall and scrape your knee and cry a little, not long though, nothing major. The strange thing is that Ramón and I chat agreeably, but about nothing in particular. For the first time since the quarrels of the separation began, we have a nice time together. I start to feel that perhaps we can function as a separated couple who share a son amicably, and that makes me happy.”

  “Okay,” Mateo says. “And now to the dark episode.”

  “Friday, I get you up early, bathe you, dress you, and ask your grandmother to make you breakfast.”

  “You said before that you made me breakfast.”

  “No, your grandmother does. I pack your suitcase for the cold, a pair of corduroy overalls, a sweater—”

  “Pullover.”

  “A pullover, socks and undershirts, your teddy bear pajamas, which are the warmest, your raincoat and galoshes. At seven thirty, Ramón rings the bell, and I turn over the child—that’s you—and the suitcase to him. You’re very happy, you enjoy being with your father and are glad to see him. I also give him another bag stuffed with Choco Quick, some apples, powdered milk, a box of Rice Krispies, and two of your toys.”

  “Do you remember which toys?”

  “I remember each detail with a terrifying clarity. I put a green clown in the bag, one we had given you for Christmas, and a pair of long woolen ropes that you loved to drag on the floor. You say that they are serpets, and we can’t take them away from you, even to launder them. Serpets? At first we didn’t know what you meant or why you were always dragging them on the floor, until we realized the serpets were serpents. Inside the bag, I also put a small bottle of disinfectant for Ramón to put on the scrape you got in the park. This I give to him at the last minute, after he has left the apartment, taken the elevator, and is crossing the lobby that leads to the street. I yell at him to wait, and run after both of you, barefoot and in my robe. I put the small bottle in the bag and I take advantage of the moment to give you a last kiss. You go to throw yourself into my arms, but your father holds you back. I say you are going to enjoy your trip very much, and you ask if there will be cows. You mean horses; you called horses cows. Ramón responds that yes, there will be cows and you will be able to ride them.”

  “Cows, horses, serpets. Can we move on to that night?” Mateo asks.

  “I work in the national politics section of La Crónica, a new weekly that has quickly gained some renown. Friday night is the closing deadline and the newsroom is swarming with people. Ministers, lawyers, opposing political leaders, and friends of the house all stop by. Anybody who has a fresh story, or wants to participate in the discussion about what will be published, comes by and joins the conversation. And out of that swarm of activity, the weekly articles emerge, always down to the wire.”

  “I don’t want to hear about your journalism, Mother.”

  “Fine, but don’t call me Mother.”

  “But you are my mother.”

  “But you always say it with an attitude. Look, let’s not fight. Let’s go back to the newsroom at La Crónica. At about one thirty in the morning, we put the last touches on the edition, and it is after two when I get back to my mother’s. She hears me arrive, gets up, heats a vegetable stew for me, and keeps me company while I eat it in the kitchen. As we’re saying good night, she tells me that an envelope arrived for me and that she left it on the bedside table. She goes to her room and I brew some tea and go to the guest room, which has two beds, yours, which is empty, and mine. All I want at that moment before going to bed is to take a long bath in very hot water, to soothe the frenzy that overwhelms me after the closing of each edition. Every day you wake me up before six, but this weekend I will be able to sleep in.”

  “So do you open the envelope that someone has left for you?”

  “No, I don’t even look at it. When I go into the bedroom, I don’t even turn on the lights. My back hurts, so I throw myself on the bed, in the dark without taking off my clothes, thinking that in a few minutes I will get up and bathe. But I fall asleep. A few hours later, I’m awakened by the cold. In the haze of dawn, I can see the clock, it is almost six. I undress, put on my nightgown, and because I’m thirsty I look for the cup of tea, which is sitting half full on the night table. That’s when I see the envelope. I would have ignored it but for one detail that catches my attention, it is scrawled with your father’s handwriting. It says, ‘Please give to Lorenza.’ A note from Ramón? That seems odd, but not entirely. Let’s just say that I open it unsuspectingly, and quickly realize that it is not a note, it is a handwritten letter, several pages long, and this does make me grow uneasy. Your father’s handwriting, which is small and muddled, makes me reach for my glasses in my purse. I put them on and read.”

  “What does the note say?”

  “It’s not a note. It’s a long letter. What does it say? It says, ‘I am leaving forever and taking the child. You will never see us again.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “No, there are a lot of explanations, pages and pages of explanations, justifications, and accusations. In short, he asks forgiveness for what he is about to do, and then goes on to blame me for everything.”

  “Tell me exactly what the letter said. I need to know what explanations my father gave.”

  “I couldn’t read any more at that moment. I had just realized that my son had been taken from me, and I was shattered.”

  “So you read the whole thing later.”

  “No, I never read it all the way through, I didn’t care about his reasons. Only those cruel words: ‘I am leaving forever and taking the child.’ After I read it the first time, everything went black and I had to hold on to the side of the bed not to tumble over. Then I began to howl, the wild howls of a she wolf whose litter has been taken from her.”

  “Grandma says they were like the howls of the night during the dictatorship years. She says that when they woke her up, she thought someone was murdering you.”

  “It was worse than that.”

  “And then?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember, or you don’t want to remember? That morning, what do you do?”

  “Howl, suffer, die several times over. Your father is an expert at living underground, at counterfeiting passports and tickets, forging signatures. He’s used to changing his identity time and again. To hide and disappear, that’s your father’s talent. And he has just disappeared with you.”

  Ramón Iribarren, I am your son, Mateo Iribarren. I have come to Buenos Aires to meet you. If you get this message, you can call the Claridge Hotel, room 506. I am going to be here until the end of the month. Thank you very much. Sincerely, Mateo Iribarren.

  On a sheet of notebook paper, in his uneven handwriting, this is what Mateo wrote and signed, years after the dark episode, after his mother had just gone over parts of the tale with him again.

  Lorenza read the paragraph and asked herself how it was possible for her son, now an adolescent and taller than her, to have such awful handwriting, long-legged scrib
bles crowded together, climbing and falling from the line at will. The contrast between the childlike penmanship and the sober and dignified tone of the content made a knot in her heart. “Ramón Iribarren, I am your son, Mateo Iribarren,” Mateo read in a loud voice, and asked his mother, “Is it okay, Lorenza?”

  She had to go out for a few hours and leave him alone in his trance. She had no choice but to fulfill the obligations that had purportedly brought her to Buenos Aires, although she had truly come for something else. She had come to keep a promise she had made to her son years ago, to be with him when the time came to look for his father. She knew that once she left the hotel room, Mateo would remain seated by the telephone, fiercely focused on what he had written in the notebook, going over it again and again, to memorize it, so that when the time came, the words would not fail him. Ramón Iribarren, I am your son, Mateo Iribarren. I have come to Buenos Aires to meet you.

  “‘I have come to Buenos Aires to meet you’—you think I should say that, Lolé, ‘to meet you’?” he asked, when his mother was already at the door.

  “Yes, I suppose you can say that.”

  “But I already know him. He’s going to say that we already know each other. Maybe I should say ‘to get to know you again.’ No, I don’t like that, either, it sounds weird. And the ‘sincerely,’ you think I should say ‘sincerely’?”