No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  “Very romantic. But I think Spinetta came later, Spinetta is not old enough.”

  “You’re wrong there, kiddo. Bones Spinetta was idolized at that time, with Almendra and Sui Generis! My favorite, the one I adored was Sui Generis’s ‘Scratch the Stones.’”

  “If you put on a record by Sui Generis at a party these days, they’ll toss you out on your ass. So don’t get any ideas.”

  “It’s so weird, isn’t it? So many years later finding out the real names and real lives of people you had been so close to.”

  “Yeah, as if Batman and Spider-Man got together in a pizzeria and took off their masks and revealed their secret identities to each other,” Mateo said. “And to top everything off, they start bellowing ancient songs. Did you talk to your comrades about me?”

  “Of course, isn’t that why I was with them in the first place?”

  “What I don’t get is how you found them if you didn’t even know their names.”

  Lorenza explained that the reading for a novel is a public event that is announced in newspapers, so that anyone who wants to attend can come, and that’s how they had found out she was in Buenos Aires.

  “Yes, I know that. But how did they know that Lorenza So-and-so, who writes books now, was the Aurelia who had been in the resistance with them?”

  “One of them figured it out and passed the word along.”

  In the middle of the reading, the bookstore manager had handed her a piece of paper folded in half. “It’s from the audience,” he whispered, and she flushed when she read the first word: Aurelia. No one had called her Aurelia in years, nobody even knew that once, in Argentina, that’s who she had been. The note said, “Aurelia, do you have time for a coffee with your old comrades?” She couldn’t see them from the stage because the houselights were dimmed, but before she finished her presentation she said into the mike, “I know that some of my old friends are here, and I want them to know that yes, I have all the time in the world to have coffee with them.”

  “But that’s not the part I want to talk about, Mateo. I have news.”

  “Don’t tell me: Ramón was there,” he asked, almost begging, and she noticed how pale he suddenly grew.

  “No, he wasn’t there, I told you.” But she had asked a lot of questions and gotten some clues. A metallurgist for an auto syndicate, who was called Quico—or who had been known as Quico in the resistance when he lived in Córdoba, and now was called something else, did not live there anymore, and had retired—had confirmed that Forcás had been in prison, not because of politics, for by the time he had been arrested the military junta had already been overthrown some years before, but because of money problems. Quico thought that after a few months in jail, Ramón had been released and had gone to Bolivia. Gabriela had also been at the pizzeria, and Gabriela, the Gabrielita who had been by her side during the commerce protests, her best friend in those days, told her that she had heard that Forcás had returned from Bolivia and had settled down in La Plata, where he had opened a bar.

  “A bar?” Mateo asked his mother.

  “That’s what Gabriela said. Do you know what it felt like to reconnect with Gabriela? We both found out we were pregnant about the same time, and we would go together to El Once barrio, both with bellies like globes, to the meetings of—”

  “And where is this bar?” Mateo interrupted.

  “According to Gabriela, in La Plata.”

  “I don’t buy it, Lolé, that detail seems off. I am almost sure that Ramón is in Bariloche. He must be wandering those mountains like a Steppenwolf, or at least that’s what I think.”

  “Stop. Let me tell you about La Plata. Gabriela thinks that the bar thing hasn’t gone well for Ramón, but that he keeps at it, trying to forge ahead. She doesn’t know that much more, but she gave me some leads to a comrade in La Plata who might know.”

  “Ramón is not in La Plata, Lorenza. Why do you insist on this? It doesn’t sound right … La Plata. And the bar thing, even less so. Ramón must be in a cabin buried in snow, in Bariloche.”

  “SPIT, LOLÉ,” Mateo ordered his mother the following morning, as she brushed her teeth. “Spit out whatever you have in your mouth, it drives me nuts when you talk with all that foam in your mouth. Besides, Ramón is in Bariloche. I’m sure he is in Bariloche, where I last saw him. He likes the mountains, like me. Do you think I got that from him, the fact that I love the mountains?”

  “Don’t go loopy on me, kiddo, he is not in Bariloche. Were you listening when I told you that he was in La Plata?”

  “Are you going to spit or not?”

  “Turn the TV down so we can talk.”

  “I’ll turn the TV down if you spit the foam out.”

  “All right! There! I spit it out. But from now on everybody brushes their teeth whenever and however they damn well feel like it.”

  “Good. So no more nagging about yellow teeth and cavities or counting the days since I brushed them last. And so, did you always trust your comrades?”

  “Pick up your clothes, kiddo. Room service is bringing breakfast and I don’t want the room to be a mess,” Lorenza ordered, but it was like speaking to the air. “Come on, Mateo, pick up a little bit. And yes, I did.”

  “You did what?”

  “Trust the comrades in the party. Isn’t that what you just asked?”

  “Even if they were tortured to get them to name names?”

  “Well, I was never denounced. In general, those in the party did not betray each other. There was a high moral standard among the comrades. A high moral stan-dard, that seems like such a dated phrase, but it was true, a very high standard.”

  “Were you ever tortured?”

  “No.”

  “And if you had been tortured? Would you have denounced others?”

  “Torture is a pretty fucked-up business. Who knows how much you can take?”

  “And what did they ask? The torturers, what did they want to know?”

  “Names, addresses … sometimes they were after something specific, and sometimes they just asked general questions. Other times they had no idea who they were torturing or why they were torturing him, and then they didn’t even know what to ask.”

  Years later, after she had returned to Colombia and had been writing for La Crónica for some time, she interviewed an ex-sergeant who had been a torturer in Argentina during the dictatorship. He told her that they would jot down any information that they ripped from the prisoner on scraps of paper, which they would more often than not misplace.

  “Maybe we should just go to La Plata to look for your father,” Lorenza said. “I can’t tomorrow or the next day, but Thursday I can. I’m free Thursday through Monday, so we can take a bus to La Plata, and if nothing turns up there we’ll look for him in Polvaredas, where his grandparents lived.”

  “Why don’t we just look him up in the Buenos Aires phone book?” Mateo grabbed the tome and began to leaf through the pages. “Let’s see I … I … Irigoyen … shit I went down too far, here, Iribarren Armanado, Pablo; Iribarren Cirlot, Dolores: Iribarren Darretain, Ramón! Here it is, Lorenza, Iribarren Darretain, Ramón—”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No, look, Iribarren Darretain, Ramón.”

  “It can’t be, Mateo, let me see. There it is, a Ramón Iribarren. It has to be some other person. It can’t be him.”

  “What other person, Lorenza, with those two surnames? It’s him.”

  “Maybe it’s a joke, so prosaic, the enigmatic Forcás easily reachable and in alphabetical order. I don’t buy it, going from the underground resistance to the phone book. Shit, so these are the fruits of democracy?”

  “Behold, my father, after so many years of mystery,” the young man said, and both broke into laughter because there was nothing else to do.

  “Let me see again,” Lorenza said, grabbing the phone book.

  “Iribarren Darretain, Ramón,” Mateo recited. “It’s there. Who else can it be?”

  “Does it say wher
e he lives?”

  “What? Here, in Buenos Aires. It’s the Buenos Aires phone book, right? Shit, that’s so fucked up, Lolé. Maybe he lives right next door. What a disaster, what a shock. Let go of the phone book, leave it wherever it was. And shut it, I beg you, I don’t know what got into me to go looking in it.”

  “Let me at least write down the number—”

  “Come on. Lorenza, let’s get out of this room.”

  “But I just ordered breakfast.”

  “Cancel it. Let’s get out of here. Cancel the order, Lorenza. We can have breakfast downstairs.”

  “You’re still in your pajamas.”

  “Then hide that phone book. Put it under the bed, wherever, I just don’t want to see it. Come, come,” he said, going to her, and putting her hand over his tightly shut eyes, like when he was a child and afraid of something, “cover my eyes, Mommy, please, please, cover my eyes.”

  WHEN LORENZA RETURNED to the hotel room late that afternoon, she found her son still in his pajamas, his hair tousled, sitting beside the phone.

  “Did you call?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Come on, kiddo, just get it over with,” she tried to encourage him. “What are we, heroes or buffoons?” The question was her papa’s. Anytime that he had to take a risk he’d said it aloud: Heroes or buffoons?

  “I’d rather be a buffoon,” Mateo said. “The heroes can all go to hell.”

  “Then I’ll call. Just to confirm that it’s his number,” she proposed. But he screamed no, not to do it.

  “Don’t stick your nose in this, Mother. I have to take care of this on my own, by myself.” He grabbed the phone from her, but immediately settled down and handed it back. “Fine, call, Lolé. But I forbid you from saying anything. Just see if it’s his voice and hang up right away.”

  She promised that she wouldn’t say anything, that he had nothing to worry about, she knew that the words had to come from him, from Mateo, and only him. Then she dialed the number and let it ring a few times, as he obsessively twisted the lock of hair that fell over his brow with his index finger, like he always did when he was nervous.

  “No one picks up?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe Ramón doesn’t live there anymore,” Mateo said, and she realized how badly he was tormented by doubt. “Maybe he leaves early for work and doesn’t come back till late at night.”

  “We won’t know unless we call,” his mother said, and waited until a machine picked up, the recording asking for the caller to leave a message because there was no one home at the moment. She listened to the voice and hung up without leaving a message, just as they had agreed.

  “It’s him,” she told him. “It’s your father’s voice.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Did he say his name? Did the voice say that it was Ramón Iribarren?”

  “No, not in so many words, all it said was, I am not here to take your call, or something like that. But I know it was him.”

  “Well, at least we know that he is alive. That’s something, right? Unless, of course, he died after he recorded the message, but no, no, that would be too Gothic. And what exactly did he say: I am not here to take your call, or we are not here? You have to remember, Lorenza.” Mateo grew impatient when she claimed that she couldn’t really remember, and he shot her an angry glare.

  “You’re right, wait a second, let me think,” she responded. “But don’t give me that murderous look.”

  “So just tell me then. It’s very important. If Ramón said, I am not here, then he could live alone. But if he said, we are not here, then he probably has kids, another wife. Do you think that he would speak to his other children about me?”

  “If you want, I’ll call him.”

  “That’s not the point … with that expression.”

  “What expression?”

  “No expression at all, that’s the problem. How many years has it been since you heard Ramón’s voice? And now you hear it, and it’s like nothing, and you answer my questions like a robot. I don’t even know if you still love Ramón or despise him.”

  “I neither love him nor despise him. I keep him in mind.”

  “I know, so he can never harm me again. Yet you do me more harm, robot face,” Mateo said, with an affectionate nudge to his mother’s chin that landed a little too rough. He began to shadowbox around the room like Muhammad Ali, dancing like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. “Shit, fuck, shit,” he chanted, throwing jabs and uppercuts in the air. “Are you sure, Lorenza?”

  “Of what?”

  “That it was his voice.”

  “I could pick it out from a million other voices, that muffled and guttural voice was his. Besides, it’s almost exactly like yours, Mateo. You both mumble and speak so low that one can barely understand what you are saying.”

  “So you’re saying that his voice hasn’t changed at all.”

  “Not at all, not even a little bit. It’s exactly the same voice of the young man I knew. Yours, on the other hand, changes day by day, and there are times now when you sound just like him.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mateo said, continuing to shadowbox against some invisible foe. “There’s nothing about me that resembles Ramón. I don’t want to look like him. Shit shit, what a bitch son of a fucking shit,” he went on, and his fist assaulted a pillow until it began to spit out its down. It was not rage but a swarm of uncertainty that needed release.

  “All right, take it easy, Cassius Clay,” she implored and passed him the phone receiver. “Stop monkeying around and make the call.”

  “No! What if he’s come back home and answers? What if the real him answers?”

  “Tell him you’re in Buenos Aires.”

  “And then hang up?”

  “No, then you talk to him, if you want.”

  “That’s not what I want,” he said but dialed the number anyway and listened closely. “You’re right, this guy really mumbles, you can barely understand him. Besides he sounds like such an Argentinean … he is so Argentinean.”

  “Relax, Mateo, you’re revved up like a squirrel.”

  “It’s true,” he laughed, “I must look like a fucking electrocuted squirrel. Do you remember, Lolé, the time that the squirrel crawled up my pants and shirt and perched on my head. I think Ramón was still with us then.”

  “No, that was much later, at the Parque de Chapultepec. In Mexico.”

  “Unbelievable, the only thing that I remember about Ramón is not Ramón but a yellow cur that he picked up in the park and named Malvina. I know I played with her, but I can’t remember what city it was.”

  “That was in Bogotá. We lived in an apartment in the Salmona towers. Not the one we live in now, a smaller one we rented with your father.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to that doggie. You think Ramón took her with him? Or maybe he let her back out on the streets where he found her. Do you know why we didn’t keep Malvina with us? Or, I don’t want to know,” Mateo said, throwing another punch in the air. The memories he had of his father were in truth not his but his mother’s, and having to continually ask her was worse than asking to borrow a toothbrush.

  He dialed the number again, listened for a moment, and hung up again.

  “I just wanted to know if his voice really sounded like mine. It’s weird listening to Ramón again after all these years,” he murmured, and a cloud of frustration dimmed his gaze.

  “And?” Lorenza asked. “What does he say exactly?”

  “There’s no one here to take your call, that’s all, there’s no one here.”

  Mateo fell on the bed. He leaned back against the pillows, turned on the TV with the remote, let the tension escape his body, and was soon engrossed with Thundercats, a cartoon that he had loved as a child and that on that afternoon in Buenos Aires, so long afterward, hypnotized him once more. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and Mateo did not move, not really there, silent, his
eyes fixed on the screen, lazily twirling the same lock of hair with his index finger.

  “Aren’t you going to call again, Mateo?”

  He said that he would, but not at the moment, later.

  “Then get dressed, and if you want we can go out and grab a bite. You must be starving. Hello? Knock, knock. Is anybody home?”

  Lorenza tapped him on the head to see if he had heard her.

  “Okay, Lolé, but not now, later.”

  THE SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST once asked Mateo to write a profile of his father. The title was “Portrait of a Stranger,” and this is what he wrote:

  My name is Mateo Iribarren and I don’t know much about my father. I know his name is Ramón Iribarren and that he is known as Forcás. Sit, Forcás! Stay, Forcás! It is a good name for a dog. Ironically, the dog that we adopted with Forcás, he christened Malvina. Not Lassie or Scooby-Doo, not even Lucky, but Malvina, like the islands that the Argentineans were fighting for, tooth and nail, against the British. That’s what interested my parents, political conflict and class struggle.

  Ramón Iribarren left when I was two and half years old. My grandmother, my aunt, and my mother explained to me that he’s in Argentina.

  A year later we received his last letter, and I’ve never heard anything about him since. My grandmother tells me that after he disappeared, I began to hate vegetables and grew fearful of the dark. I’ve gotten over this, at least the darkness phobia. But even now, before going to bed, I jam a chair against the closet door, because who knows what can come out of there when everything is black.

  To imagine what my father looks like, I think of characters that I have seen on television, like the powerful buck king with enormous antlers who appears at the end of the movie Bambi. And why not? We all have a right to think that our father is a good guy. Félix Romero, one of the kids in my class, always said that; maybe because everyone accused his old man of being a mafioso. And if Romero thinks well of his father, I have the right to think that mine is a buck. The problem is that Ramón does not belong to the real world, and talking about him is like trying to paint the portrait of a ghost. I carefully collect the reflections of those who knew him, so as to make a collage of who he may have been. When all this gives me a headache I think again of the king of the deer, which is a lot easier. You are allowed this kind of leeway when your father is an enigma. The only clue he left me was his last letter, a piece of paper in which he drew Smurfs and frogs and squirrels climbing a flowering tree. It looks like something sketched by a preschool teacher. Your father had thick wrists and a very broad back, like a bull, my uncle Patrick, my aunt Guadalupe’s husband, often told me, and he threw back his shoulders and puffed his chest to complete the imitation. Every time I asked him about my father, he said the same thing, and always ended it with the same pantomime. My aunt Guadalupe assured me that my father was an intelligent man, always up-to-date with the news. It seemed that he knew what was happening in any part of the world and spent all his time reading history and economics. He was a sweet papi, Nina used to say, closing her eyes and sighing. Nina was an ancient nanny who cared for me and my cousins when we were infants. Those details are important, the image of the buck with huge antlers has evolved to a figure who has become a supermacho he-man. According to what everyone has told me, my father was an intelligent, strong, and good-looking man. What more can you ask for?