No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  When I was eight, I asked my mother for the first time to take me to Argentina to meet Ramón. She said no, not for the moment, we needed to wait until I was older. The last thing I knew about him was that he was in jail, and I think he’s still there. Someone who knew him back then told me that he had been charged with political offenses.

  Lorenza (that’s my mother’s name) thinks maybe that’s why he disappeared from our lives. But there’s something about that story that doesn’t quite add up. If this was the case, why hasn’t Lolé come to his aid? If he’s a prisoner, he must need our help. But she insists that we can’t go looking for him until I am older—not before that, no matter what. Anyway, the image I have of my father is rather positive. In addition to those qualities allotted to Ramón by my aunts and my grandma is the suggestion that he was some sort of superhero in the war against the dictatorship. And since I am obsessed with the Greek myths, I imagine him chained to a rock like Prometheus, wailing and desperately trying to free himself so that he can come see me. I also see myself much later, already eighteen and equally heroic, in the shape of a bull like him, going to Argentina to rescue him.

  Lorenza (I don’t know if I already mentioned that she is my mother) and Ramón (that’s my father’s real name) were in the underground resistance against the gory dictatorship. That word is very much Lorenza’s, gory, or I should say very much of her generation, a generation obsessed with repression, another one of their favorite words, and with talking about gore. They say the gory dictatorship, the sanguine dictator, rivers of blood, bloodstained country. When I criticize her for it, she says that I have a point. Today it’s not appropriate to talk about blood and gore, unless you’re a surgeon or a butcher.

  I’ve never known the date or place of Ramón’s birth. In one of Lorenza’s old albums I found a picture of him when he was nine years old, dressed like a Prussian soldier for a play at school. In another one, he is already a teenager, playing fútbol in a team uniform. It seems as if he might have been the captain, from the vigorous gesturing toward his teammates with his arms. But who knows, it could easily be that Ramón was as big a flop at fútbol as I was. When they told me how he had joined the party at twelve, I thought it had something to do with some party thrown by his fútbol teammates. Later, I learned that it was a political party and that he was nicknamed Redboy. Who knows when it changed to Forcás. By fifteen, he had left school to dedicate himself to the struggle, Lorenza says, and I wonder if she would be using the same admiring tone if it was me she was talking about leaving school.

  “TELL ME ABOUT the dark episode,” Mateo asks Lorenza, and she says that she will, but suddenly she can’t, impossible all of a sudden for her to remember, as if the memory of it were a black box lost in the sea after a midair accident, unwilling to give up its information. “What happened that early morning after you had found out that Ramón had kidnapped me?” Mateo presses her.

  “Kidnap is a strong word.”

  “Then what would you call what he did?”

  “It doesn’t have a name.”

  “Why do you strip the names from the things that Ramón has done?”

  “You mean the Ramónisms?”

  “Not funny.”

  “Yeah, I can tell you don’t think so.”

  That morning Lorenza had plunged into an anguish so all encompassing that it robbed her of the faculty of thought, hence the difficulty in trying to put the moment into words now. Instead of words, echoes were all that remained, resonating within—one in particular, the odious echo of premeditation, the scene in the park, the previous afternoon, when she had had no idea what was about to happen. Naturally Ramón had known the course of events down to its last detail. It was so well planned that he even asked her to pack a suitcase for the boy. Lorenza, oblivious to the misfortune that she was helping to engineer with that macabre ritual, packed everything the boy would need for the journey: his clothes, his food, his clowns, and the serpets.

  “During the first hours after the news sank in, the image of each of those objects of yours enlarged and shrunk in my head,” she wanted to explain to Mateo. “Enlarging and shrinking like hallucinations, as if I were in the throes of a high fever.”

  How could she possibly transform that maniacal anxiety into a peaceful memory to put into words? Not only had Lorenza voluntarily given away her son but she had helped set up, step by step, the unimaginable sacrifice of losing him forever. She had relinquished her son as one relinquishes an expiatory victim. It had been a deadly ritual, and she herself had officiated. She had approved it, given her permission, her blessing, right there in the park the day before. When Ramón had asked her if she was sure she wanted to separate, she had said yes, sealing her own misfortune; then, when Ramón had asked her if there was any way around it, she’d replied that there wasn’t, that there was no going back. Another ritualistic gesture on Ramón’s part, to let her call that sinister coin toss, which she had lost without even knowing it. He forced her to bet, without warning her what she was risking. She had naïvely, stupidly, sentenced herself. She could have stopped everything with a single word, but had failed to do so.

  “You didn’t know,” her mom tried to reason with her on that miasmic morning. “How could you have known? It’s not your fault. You could never have guessed.”

  “Yes, I could have,” she barked back. “I could have known. I should have known.”

  Everything had been evident from that afternoon in the park. The signs were there, exposed, a warning siren should have gone off in my head. Everything pointed to what Ramón was about to do, even Ramón. All one had to do was look and listen to realize it.

  “I wandered from room to room like a madwoman,” Lorenza tells Mateo, “convinced there was nothing we could do. My head was a battered mess that repeated one thing over and over: There is nothing to do.”

  Like a robot, and only because her mother insisted, she made the few phone calls that she could make, knowing beforehand that they would prove futile. She dialed the three or four numbers of the people who knew Forcás, though it was all too clear that he wouldn’t be hiding anywhere she could so easily find him. And of course those friends knew nothing. Ramón? The boy? No, they hadn’t seen them. They had no idea where they could be. It’s no use, Lorenza told her mother, who still pushed her to keep on trying. It was no use.

  Ramón’s parents didn’t have a phone in Polvaredas, but she was able to reach one of the neighbors, who called them over. She heard the voice of Grandpa Pierre on the other end of the line, and could sense the old man’s excitement on hearing from his grandson, his son, and his daughter-in-law.

  “How are you?” the old man asked. “When are you coming to visit us? Grandma is down in the dumps. It’s been a long time since she has seen her grandson. Send some pictures, will you? Let me get Noëlle, the old coot has been complaining that you people don’t write, don’t keep us up-to-date. Let me get her, she’s going to be thrilled.”

  Obviously, Grandpa Pierre and Grandma Noëlle did not have a clue about Forcás’s whereabouts. They could not even begin to suspect the calamity that had just occurred. Of course not. Forcás would have never chosen his parents’ house to hide Mateo. Now Lorenza had no one else to call. And because in Argentina they had never known anyone’s real name or their phone numbers, she had no way of getting in touch with their friends there.

  “Wait, Lorenza, you’re skipping over some very important things. Tell me about the conversation with my grandparents. It must have been the last time you heard their voices.”

  “Right. After that, we never talked again, nor did I hear anything about them.”

  “So tell me about it, then. That was the last conversation.”

  “I can’t remember, Mateo. After I realized that you weren’t with them, I wasn’t even listening.”

  “Did you speak with both of them, or just my grandfather?”

  “With both of them, first with him and then with her.”

  “Did you tell
them what had happened?”

  “No.”

  “But they must have asked for me and for Ramón.”

  “I suppose I told them that you were fine and that Ramón wasn’t around, so I couldn’t put him on. Something like that.”

  “And that was your farewell to them?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “So then Ramón took me from you, and you took my grandparents from me.”

  “I didn’t know any better.”

  “Me neither. Don’t worry, Lolé, you and I are a team.”

  She could have prevented it and yet did not. She could have noticed, could have realized, and yet did not. She could have stopped it and yet did not. The mocking refrain haunted Lorenza back then. She could have her son in her arms, and she didn’t. Her thoughts got all tripped up on that fact and couldn’t move on, a cat with raggedy paws and its head on backward, a cat without a head, without paws. It drove her mad to realize, at such a late point, the devious rituals in which she had been inducted, the trap that Forcás had set for her to make her both responsible and complicit, a trap that only someone like her, who refused to see the obvious, would have fallen into.

  At seven, she contacted the publisher of her magazine, an influential man who might be able to help her. She made a great effort detailing to him exactly what had happened in a most coherent manner; and through him they gained access to confidential information from several airlines, which gave them access to the passenger lists of flights that had left Bogotá during the last twenty-four hours. It was a futile task, however, since she knew that Ramón would have used false names.

  Flights where? they asked Lorenza. Flights to anywhere. Domestic or international? Domestic and international, it could be any of them, or none of them. It was also possible that he had not left Colombia, or even left Bogotá, although the likeliest scenario was that Ramón had taken Mateo to Argentina, where he knew the land like the back of his hand. It was rather obvious. He wasn’t going to take off to France, or Australia, with a small child in tow, almost no money in his pocket, and ignorant of the language. He had probably returned to Argentina, but he also could have gone anywhere else.

  The head of security at the airport did not think they had boarded a plane and escaped by air. And he tried to reassure Lorenza that no one, not even the father of a child, could take such child out of the country without the express written permission of the mother, a notarized letter from her authorizing the minor’s trip. But nothing was easier for Forcás than falsifying a letter of permission. That would not have been an impediment. The only thing that was evident to Lorenza was that there was so little she could do. There’s no going back, she had told Ramón in the park. She herself had uttered her sentence, there’s no going back, without understanding the weight of its full meaning. Never again, Ramón’s letter said. Never again would Lorenza have her son. Never again. In what corner of the world could she start looking for him, if he and his father could be anywhere at this point? Existing as if in another time, their fingerprints rubbed off, their lives recast.

  Her small child was lost in the immense world, out of her reach. Her son, Mateo, had become a droplet in the ocean. Her son had been snatched from her. What the dictatorship’s henchmen had not been able to do to her, Forcás had just accomplished.

  Since it was Saturday, most of the offices were closed, but hour after hour of that entire day, with her mother perennially at her side, Lorenza was in contact with a lawyer and a government official, the former having the grace to meet her in his own apartment and the latter at his country house. Not that she believed anything would come of her efforts, on the contrary. She knew with certainty that those superficial gestures would yield no results. Ramón must have already gone under and was now moving below the surface.

  Her sister and brother-in-law did whatever they could, and the magazine assigned an investigative team to the case. But by that evening, they still were empty-handed. There was no trace of the boy or of Forcás. Hours had passed and they were still right where they had begun. Everyone they had consulted had advised that she should immediately report the kidnapping of her son to the Argentinean authorities, so that they could garner public support for the case. Her family had the contacts to do it, starting with one of her father’s old friends who had been ambassador to Argentina and who offered himself to make the gesture before the military junta.

  “No,” Lorenza said, “no, no, no, no. I will not cross that line. Those criminals don’t find children, they make them disappear. No.”

  Although the decision might appear incomprehensible and abhorrent: No. Betray Forcás to the dictatorship? No. She couldn’t go there. She wasn’t going to ally herself with her enemies to chase the man who had once been her closest ally. She would not let the position they had put her in drag her through that degree of depravity. Should she look for her son relying on criminals who had abducted hundreds of kids, children of female prisoners they had executed? Not even the loss of her son would force her to cross that line.

  “Very nice, Mother,” Mateo said disdainfully, and the resentment trembled in his voice. “Congratulations, very much like you, your political convictions always before anything else.”

  “Wait a second, Mateo, just wait a second, and listen to what I’m saying.”

  “I don’t want to know any more,” he said, leaving the room, walking quickly down the hallway and just reaching the elevator as his mother caught up to him.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she said, blocking his way. “You’re staying right here and listening to me. You wanted to hear the story, right? Now you’re going to let me finish. Come on, let’s go back to the room. Would you like an ice-cold Coke, to cool off a bit?

  Mateo did not reply but followed her, and once inside the room, filled a glass to the rim with ice and poured himself a ginger ale from the minibar.

  “Good, now look me in the eyes,” his mother told him. “There was also something else to consider, Mateo, something of a very practical nature. Think, Mateo. What could it be?”

  Mateo drank his ginger ale sip by sip and then took his time chewing on the ice.

  “They would have never found him,” he said finally.

  “Exactly, that was the practical consideration, it would not have helped us. If the dictator’s henchmen had not been able to round up Forcás for all those years, they weren’t going to do it then. Asking them for help was not only a repulsive and grotesque thing to do, but in the end it would have been a colossal mistake. I risked everything if I played that hand. I was desperate, but not so blind that I didn’t see these things.”

  LORENZA WANTED TO take advantage of what was left of the beautiful sunny afternoon. Mateo had not even showered, so content in those pajamas, which almost had a life of their own by now, the same pair of socks that he had nearly worn out on the hotel carpet. He finally went to shower, taking forever, and when he reappeared in the bedroom, amid clouds of steam and cologne, he looked very handsome and dazzling, like new.

  He came out crooning the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” with razor nicks on his face, minty breath, his hair washed with jojoba shampoo, conditioned and rinsed and slicked with a double dose of gel, a clean shirt, black fitted Levi’s, a pair of custom-made Clarks shoes instead of his usual ratty Converses, a confident smile, and a sudden interest to go out and get to know Buenos Aires.

  He had been struck by relentless hunger pangs and he wanted to jump into the first diner they passed, but Lorenza convinced him to wait until they reached La Biela, a bar in the heart of the Recoleta neighborhood, next to a splendid park that she knew well from family outings in Buenos Aires when she was a teenager.

  They chose a table by the window to watch the passersby, and Mateo, who seemed to have decided to act according to the mores of a man of the world now, pulled the chair back for his mother. Then he put on his best adult voice and in a tone suitable for ordering a double whiskey at the bar, asked the waiter for two glasses of milk.
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br />   “Do you want both of them at the same time?”

  “Yes, please, if it’s not a problem.”

  “Wow, kiddo, sleek!” Lorenza lauded him.

  On the sidewalk, a family passed by with a puppy, a Bernese mountain dog, on a leash, a spongy and irresistible ball of bouncing and nuzzling fur, with a pretty black head and white snout. Mateo, who was a dog lover, got up from the table, went out on the street, and asked the owners the name of such a handsome creature and if he could pet it, and he stayed with them for a while. He returned eager to tell his mother that the puppy was named Bear, but she jumped in first and with a big smile announced that she had ordered two plates of roasted pork loin with pineapple, which had been one of her father’s favorite dishes.