No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  “You can take that out if you want, or change it to ‘a big hug’ or something like that?”

  “‘A big hug’? Are you crazy, Mother? How can you suggest that? Don’t you realize how awful it sounds? If you want, I’ll take out ‘sincerely,’ but don’t ask me to send a big hug to a man who has had nothing to do with me. The only thing he has caused us is harm, and now you want me to send him a hug?”

  “Forget it, Mateo, don’t send him a hug. I only suggested it because you asked.”

  “Bad suggestion, Lorenza, possibly the worst suggestion ever. I think I’m going to leave it just how it is, ‘Sincerely, Mateo Iribarren,’ and stop fucking around with it, it stays the way it is.”

  The boy chose only the words that seemed most precise and discarded the rest, not wanting to overdo it and yet not wanting to leave anything out. His message had to create a certain effect, produce results, and he weighed the possibility that there would be no answer to the telephone call he was about to make, like someone tossing a message in a bottle into the sea.

  “What if Ramón doesn’t answer, Lolé?” he asked for the tenth time, his voice betraying his fear. “What if his answering machine malfunctions and he can’t understand the message? What if something like that happens and then when Ramón wants to call me, he can’t, because the message is garbled, or maybe he doesn’t even remember me. Lolé, do you think he even remembers me?” He imagined a thousand different scenarios of the doomed encounter, as if on this particular Buenos Aires morning he could undo so many years of absence with the sound of his voice alone, with a mere paragraph that he rehearsed again and again. Yet he was unable to pick up the phone and dial his father, whom he had seen for the last time when he was two and a half years old and his father had taken him away.

  They had not heard from Ramón since, not a single phone call, or a letter, or only a few letters at first and then nothing, only the vague and contradictory reports that reached them by luck and through third parties. That Ramón had been imprisoned, that he was bald and had lost a tooth, that he lived with a Bolivian girlfriend and was busy helping Bolivian miners organize, that he was now a labor director in one of the poor sections of Buenos Aires. But they never knew his whereabouts, because he did not try to find them and they did not try to find him. Or to put it exactly, Lorenza did not look for Ramón and he did not look for her and their child. They could not include Mateo in this tangle because he had never been given the opportunity to voice his opinion on the matter, not until the moment of this enraged demand, the sorrowful insistence that had forced Lorenza to fly to Buenos Aires to be with him.

  After the dark episode, years had followed filled with suitcases, roads, and airplanes, but the two of them had never run into Ramón. Never even came close. On the contrary, she had imposed upon herself, as a matter of destiny, the urgent task of pushing the son far away from his father’s influence. She warned him that if his father had taken him once, he could easily try it again. But she never spoke ill of him as a person to her son or suggested that he was a bad person. That she would never do.

  “Tell me about this man, Lolé,” Mateo asked over and over. “Come on, Lorenza, tell me about him.”

  She told him that he was a moody man, but convinced of his ideals, a vibrant and intelligent man. She assured him that he was courageous and good-looking, and that they had been happy in the years that they lived together. But every time that Mateo asked how he could find him, she made up excuses and found ways to stall him.

  “You have to be a little older, Mateo,” she said to him. “It’s not so easy.”

  “What’s not so easy?”

  “Your father, your father is not easy. You have to be a little older and grow strong. And then we’ll go looking for him.”

  Mateo relented willingly, so careful not to hurt her, and determined to accept whatever man was living with them at the moment as his father, and that man’s children as his siblings. This is the one, Lolé, he’d say, with this one we can create a family and be happy, and yes, she’d agree, this one will stay forever.

  But there was always another one, a new one. And the routine of everlasting love would begin again, the rented house in some neighborhood in another city, and the illusion of domesticity crafted by taking the bus to school and regular visits to the dentist, the assurance of ordering a favorite dish at the neighborhood restaurant every Sunday, the peace of mind that came from knowing friends’ phone numbers by heart, friends who would always be friends. Mateo and Lorenza put up pictures of horses on the walls of his room, planted flowers in pots, adopted a cat, and got hold of a secondhand bicycle, which they painted to look like new, because this was it, here they would settle forever.

  “Forever, Lolé?”

  “Yes, my love, forever.”

  And then one day signs would begin to crop up, the long-distance phone calls for Lorenza, the whispered responses, Lorenza in some other world when he tried to show her his drawings or tell her a story. Soon Mateo would realize that it was time to give the cat to the neighbors, abandon the bicycle on the patio, pack the suitcases, and wake up in the house of strangers.

  Mateo would take out his colored pencils and concentrate on his drawings during the long airplane flights, desperate to know: Why, Mother? Why did we have to leave if we were fine where we were?

  “Switching bicycles was the easy part, Lolé,” he would confess to her later. “It was switching cats and fathers that was difficult.”

  She would have liked to explain why things had to be the way they were, why they led such a life, which perhaps was later to blame for his infantile, jumbled handwriting. Why such a parade of absences and shocks, of moves from schools and houses and countries, so many fearful nights, partings from friends, having no father or too many fathers, so many whys, which in time cast a pall of confusion over his childhood and prolonged it unnaturally. She wished she could have given him detailed reasons that could be condensed into a paragraph.

  “Maybe it’s better if you don’t tell me,” he confessed to her sometimes, because his mother’s political tales sounded alien and her love stories just plain bad.

  “You have always dragged me through your issues, Lorenza, and I have never known what those issues are.”

  And then one day he was taller than she was, and he stood before her, committed and defiant, having grown so big and his mother so tiny beside him, and he gave her an ultimatum.

  “This is it, Lorenza, I want to meet my father. If you don’t take me, I’ll go by myself.” He rummaged through the things he had stuffed on an upper shelf of his closet and pulled out a Basque beret, which he had been saving for a long time to give to Ramón on the day that he saw him again.

  “My father and I are Basque,” he always said proudly to whoever might listen. “Well, we’re Argentinean, but with Basque roots.”

  Realizing how Mateo had struggled through his adolescence and with the ongoing tug-of-war he had with his identity, Lorenza had begun to understand the implications of raising a child whose father was no more than a phantom, someone who vanishes after inflicting his harm. She would help him look for Ramón, but first Mateo needed to understand the language of the old story, be brought up-to-date on each episode, to help him create a whole out of the fragments he already knew. They would have to give it some serious thought, talk to each other a lot, and work together as a team so as not to be led astray. They would also have to rely on their own strength alone, for no one else could help them in this search.

  So the decision had been made and they were now in Buenos Aires. But how was Lorenza to begin to look for Ramón Iribarren, if when they lived together, they had mastered the art of hiding so as never to be found? How could she search for someone whose daily life with her had been taken up with changing their names, counterfeiting personal identifications, remaining invisible in the places where they lived, and creating jobs that they did not have?

  “Tell me, Lorenza, tell me how you found out that my father’s
real name was Ramón,” Mateo asked, although he already knew, because that was a part of the story that she had told him many times, just like the old tales about the cat with raggedy paws, except that this cat had raggedy paws and its head was screwed on backward.

  “Do you want to hear it again?”

  “Go on, tell it to me again, the story about Ramón’s name. Again.”

  “It was a whole month after living with him that I discovered that your father was named Ramón, and only because an electric bill arrived with his name on it. When I realized what I had stumbled upon, it felt as if the envelope would burn my fingers. It would have been better if I had never read what it said, but there was nothing I could do. The bill fell into my hands and before I could stop it, that ‘Ramón’ slipped into my vision, which turned out to be his name, and also the last name, which would one day be yours, that ‘Iribarren,’ which revealed his Basque roots.”

  “It’s all very strange.”

  “For security reasons. I couldn’t know his name for security reasons. That’s the way it was in the underground.”

  “The underground, I don’t like that word. That’s one of those terms you use. But answer this in your own words. Before you saw the electric bill, what did you think Ramón’s name was?”

  “I had no idea. I called him Forcás, which was what other party members called him.” Lorenza had grown so used to that fake name, that the surprise of coming upon the envelope was almost painful, at first seeming to refer to someone she did not even know, some man with another identity, a Ramón who dwelled in worlds from which she was excluded because they were grounded in his childhood, his family, his past, that is, in everything that was truly him, the history of his private life, a whole swath of it in which she had no part and which she should not pry into. How then should they begin to look for Forcás, so many years later, when she didn’t even know the real names of his comrades in the party? Who could she possibly ask about Ramón Iribarren, a name that his old friends in the party likely had never heard, since they all knew each other by their pseudonyms, what in those days they called noms de guerre.

  “It’s a great name, Forcás,” Mateo said. “It sounds like a warrior. I like it better than Ramón. In fact, I don’t like Ramón at all. It’s the name of some stranger. What about you, Lolé, your nom de guerre? I know, of course: Aurelia. They called you Aurelia. It still sounds so bizarre, all of it.”

  “A cat with raggedy paws and its head on backward,” his mother tells him. “But let’s see, kiddo, let’s see what we can do to turn it back around.”

  Everything seemed to indicate that searching for Ramón would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but in the end it proved quite simple. After years without knowing a thing about him, it took them only a few days to discover his whereabouts.

  TWO NIGHTS BEFORE, Lorenza had returned late to the Claridge Hotel and dashed into the room to tell Mateo that she had seen them, that they had returned to the country. She had found them, their old comrades! But she had to hold her tongue when she found him asleep. He always complained about her insomnia. She not only did not sleep, he claimed, but she didn’t let anybody else sleep. So she said nothing and satisfied herself with watching him sleep.

  Mateo’s sleep was not peaceful. It had never been. He talked in his sleep, was restless, often so entangling himself in the sheets that in the morning the bed would be stripped bare. Lorenza wondered to what distant lands her son journeyed and how lonely he must be in his travels. Of all the languages in the world, it was the language of her son’s dreams that she most yearned to understand, but she realized that its jargon derived from the grammar of other worlds, a dialogue in the dark with a stranger, someone she did not even know.

  “Who are the Maccabees?” Mateo had asked her once, still completely asleep. “The Maccabees, who are the Maccabees?”

  She didn’t really know. A people from the Bible, right? That was as far as her expertise went. Fortunately she did not have to elaborate because her son just as suddenly fell back into a deep slumber and the sleep-talking episode ended. But Lorenza remained uneasy. What is he doing in the middle of the night, she remembered thinking, with these Maccabees?

  When he was asleep, he looked exactly like Ramón. She remembered being shocked to discover the unmistakable features of a grown man on her son. He was no longer a child, no longer a boy, almost a stranger. This illusion persisted until he awoke, when the mark of his father vanished from his face and those gestures that she recognized as genuinely his livened his face again. He then seemed such a different creature that she could see herself in her son, as if looking at a clone, he as her only son, she as his only mother. Only then was she able to reclaim that son who had always been so exclusively hers and so little Ramón’s.

  Mateo sensed her presence and half opened his eyes for an instant.

  “What’s wrong?” he murmured.

  “Nothing, kiddo. There’s nothing wrong. Go back to sleep.”

  “You have news for me.”

  “Later, you’re half asleep.”

  “Not anymore I’m not. Come on, tell me.”

  Lorenza sat on the edge of the bed and told him about them, their old comrades in the party, how just a few hours ago nine of them had shown up at a reading of her new novel and had searched her out afterward.

  “Was Ramón there?” Mateo asked, bolting upright, but when she said no, he threw himself back on the bed and covered his face with the blanket.

  “Can you hear me from inside that cave?”

  “Barely.”

  Although he pretended not to listen, she told him about hugging her old comrades in the middle of the street, now at last with nothing to fear, the whole gang raising a ruckus, not having to look over their shoulders to see who was following them, or lower their voices lest someone overhear. She told him that they all went to a pizzeria called the Immortals, its walls covered with photographs of legendary tango artists.

  “Quite a name, the Immortals, and all of us there moved by the occasion and teary-eyed, reminiscing about the disappeared; el negro César Robles, Pedro Apaza, Eduardo Villabrille, Charles Grossi,” Lorenza recited the names. “Imagine that, Mateo, our dead, and there we were remembering them in a place called the Immortals. We shouted over one another trying to catch up on everything that had happened since the fall of the dictatorship. It was very strange to talk of these things out loud and in a public place, given that before we could meet in groups no larger than three, whispering in some bar for no longer than fifteen minutes at a time.”

  But on that night, so many years later, they had reunited with no need for aliases and nothing to fear, to celebrate the end of the nightmare with pizza and beer—or rather, to celebrate with her, Aurelia, now Lorenza, because they had already celebrated among themselves. They had been a long time in coming out of the hole in their struggle to rejoin the living, adjusting to the light of day, to what had begun to be called a democracy.

  “But Mateo, the thing is, I had left Argentina before the end of the dictatorship and have been gone all this time. Do you see? For me those days have long been frozen in time. And then on the very night you decide you don’t want to accompany me, look what happens.”

  “Did you talk to them about Ramón? Did they tell you where he is?” Mateo’s voice rose out of his cave.

  “Yes, we talked about him, and no, they don’t know where he is, but they gave me some idea. Nothing too exact, but let me tell you the whole story, moment by moment.”

  She had found it amusing when they had revealed their true names and professions, like Dalton, who had been imprisoned, a skinny towhead, a good guy who had been director of the magistrate and who, he told her at the Immortals, was really called Javier something—a Javier, who would have guessed, that name didn’t suit him at all—and taught classes at the university and had three kids; or Tuli, a driven black woman, who during the days of military rule offered support to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, and who in re
ality was Renata Rocamora, a double bassist for a tango quartet, which that very week was performing at the Café Tortoni.

  “If you want, we can go,” Lorenza proposed, to which Mateo growled like a bear. “What a joy to learn that Tuli is devoted to the tango. I asked her if she had played during the time of the military rule, and she said she did. Strange, because in our group at that time nobody really seemed to care about the tango. The music of the resistance was Argentinean rock, what we called rock nacional.”

  “Argentinean rock was part of the left?” Mateo seemed suddenly interested. “I thought it was more the music of pothead hippies.”

  “Potheads? No, what are you saying? That music was ours. Or maybe it belonged to the potheads as well, but it was mostly ours. Case in point, at the Immortals, Dalton told the story of how there came a time when he had hit bottom in prison. He wanted to die. And the only thing that saved him was discovering a phrase that another prisoner had scratched on the cell wall, down low in a corner, almost unnoticeable. It was a line from ‘Song for My Death’ by Sui Generis, the one that goes, ‘There was a time when I was beautiful and truly free,’ although Dalton said that the only thing that was legible was ‘and truly free.’ But with the mere discovery of those three words, he no longer felt alone or wanted to die.”

  “Like in Night of the Pencils,” Mateo said. “I’ve already seen the movie.”

  “Well yeah, it’s nothing new. In such endgames, whatever happens is like the story of the cat with raggedy paws, it’s been told time and again. But at the moment it happens, it carries great significance. Anyway, Argentinean rock was the music your father liked. The first time I went to his place, he showed me his records as if they were some kind of treasure. And, of course, when Dalton told the story of the lyric scratched on the wall, we burst into the song in its entirety, and this led to others, the songs of Charly García and Fito Páez, León Gieco, Spinetta. You can’t imagine how good it felt to sing like madmen after so many years of silence.”