No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  “What about my son?” she asked the rector. “What happened to him in the fight?”

  “Not much, signora. He took a few blows and has some bruised ribs.”

  “My Mateo is a good boy, signor direttore, and I understand that this Joe Ferla is a malandrino.” The word malandrino was perhaps excessive for the occasion, but it was the closest to bully that Lorenza could come up with from her limited Italian vocabulary.

  “Malandrino, no,” the rector corrected her affably. “To be precise, let’s just say that Ferla is a boy with certain behavioral issues. And as such, he is on probation for repeated acts of aggression against other students. For Mateo, on the other hand, this is the first time he has ever been involved in this type of mischief.”

  “There you are. So it doesn’t surprise me that a good boy like Mateo could end up losing his patience with Ferla’s … behavioral problems.”

  “The fact that he hit Ferla is not what gives us serious concern here, but the brutality with which he did so. Please, if you may, read the medical report.”

  Fractured clavicle, hematomas on the face, a cut two centimeters long over the left eyebrow. In other words, Mateo had given Ferla a first-class beating.

  Lorenza tried to justify. “He has spurted up physically in the last few months. He went in a flash from being a child to being a grown-up. I don’t think he understands yet how strong he is.”

  “That could be the case, signora, but that wasn’t even the worst part, perhaps our most serious concern is over the callous way he reacted when I tried to apprehend him.”

  “I’m very sorry, signor direttore, but can you tell me what Mateo said?”

  “When I told him that I would have to call his father to tell him what had happened, he replied in an insolent tone, ‘Se vuol lamentarsi con mio padre, dovrá andare a cercarlo in carcere.’”

  “Mateo wasn’t trying to offend you, signor direttore, he was simply stating the truth. We don’t know where his father is, but we suspect he is in prison. Still, I apologize for anything my son might have said or done that was disrespectful.”

  “Before you leave, signora,” the rector said, when she was almost out the door, “I want you to know that there was something good in all this. Mateo has just barely started to learn Italian, but he spoke that phrase with a proper accent and perfect syntax.”

  “I LIKE THAT part of the story, Lolé, at the airport in Ezeiza, when your comrades tell you that you might as well recite an Our Father because there isn’t a story that will save you now. I like that, the formality of ‘recite’ is very Argentinean. It’s a line from a movie. And now tell me about the newspapers again.”

  “What newspapers?”

  “How they warned you not to read newspapers on the airplane, and later in the café and on the metro, because any woman who read a newspaper was immediately suspicious. And so what happened, in the end, at the airport, with the microfilms and all that?”

  For the length of the flight, Lorenza had put off thoughts of her father’s death by wrapping herself in a kind of stupor, as if her mind had shut off during those hours suspended in the clouds. She was cradled in her lethargy, like before the onset of a migraine, when she remained quiet and still, almost invisible, waiting for the enemy to forget her and pass her by. But when they landed, the lurch of the plane on touching the ground jolted her awake. They were in Argentina. It was only then that she grew concerned and asked herself what the hell she was doing there, realizing how stupid she had been to get involved in such a mess. Suddenly her role in the entire drama seemed unreal, as if someone were playing a joke on her, and fear paralyzed her. One of the last missions that she had helped organize in Madrid was demanding to know the whereabouts of a couple and their two daughters, removed from a plane by force just before it was about to take off for Sweden.

  Morituri te salutant, she was saying in her head as the plane taxied into the wolf’s mouth. Nevermore, here’s where the current has dragged you, this is the end, my beautiful friend.

  “Fear paralyzes, Mateo. Have you ever seen it?” she asked him. “It’s not a metaphor, it can really happen.”

  She felt as if she could not move her legs. Her head, which was more decisive, ordered her to go on, to do what had to be done. But her legs had a different idea. They wanted to stay just where they were, in that airplane seat, and they began to search for accomplices in their mutinous mission. They coaxed the hands not to undo the seat belt, and tried to win over the rest of the body, sending out specious messages. This plane is your final protective capsule, they warned, much better to stay here, don’t move from this seat. She must have lingered in this state for a few minutes, like someone at the edge of a diving board searching for the courage to jump.

  She soon got herself together and when she went through customs she was calm again, surrendering to the lethargy. She didn’t grow agitated, even when they searched her, which they did only perfunctorily, nor when they questioned her, which also was nothing beyond the routine.

  “It was all thanks to Papaíto’s death. It had blindsided me. And I arrived in Argentina convinced that nothing worse could happen to me after what I had gone through.”

  Her first days there had been like that, she did things as if she were gliding from one to the other and it wasn’t exactly she who was involved in such things. She felt as if she were an actress onstage, and that strange feeling of playacting stayed with her for the first few months.

  “Aurelia, me? Aurelia in the underground resistance in Buenos Aires? The whole thing seemed too theatrical.” The first time she felt the presence and hold of the dictatorship, it was a physical thing, like a slap. The first time she confirmed that behind all the pomp and ceremony the monster’s breath poisoned the air was not because she saw the military police flattening a house, or taking someone in, or firing their weapons. It was rather an ordinary afternoon in a run-of-the-mill café about a week after she had arrived, when she noticed the disapproval and rage with which some older folk glared at a young couple kissing at a nearby table. Not long afterward, she was strolling down a street during a late-fall afternoon, and since it was hot, she wore a light cotton skirt that must have been somewhat see-through, outlining her legs, though just barely. The moment she stepped onto a bus she heard the insult from a man across the street. Sharp-tongued, brimming with indignation, he yelled: “Get dressed, you whore. Why don’t you go to some strip club to show off those hams?” She then knew that the dictatorship was not only enforced by the military but also by citizen upon citizen, and that it was not only political oppression but also moral, like putrid water that slowly seeped into everything, even the most private folds of life.

  “SO WHAT WAS Ramón doing in Bariloche, I mean, before you met him?” Mateo asked.

  “He had worked there as a mountain guide, seasonal work, I imagine. I think that it was the only job he had done his whole life, aside from the resistance.”

  Ramón had rocked the newborn Mateo to sleep with stories of the mountains of Bariloche. His lullabies were about his time there. He told tales of giant boulders of ice that came loose from Tronador peak with a thunderous noise, and of a tavern at the peak of the Cerro Otto from which you could contemplate the whole world, everything covered in snow, while enjoying hot chocolate beside the fireplace. He told the child about a natural cave where a group of Slavic nuns had sought refuge from an avalanche, emerging with their lives four days later.

  “But I couldn’t have understood those stories,” Mateo said.

  “No, how could you have? You were a baby. But he would tell them to you still. And I heard them and later retold them to you when you were old enough to understand. I think that aside from his nostalgia for the mountains of Bariloche, your father was a man without memory.”

  He had said next to nothing to her about the town where he was born, the friends of his childhood, his teenage girlfriends. He either did not remember or had chosen not to tell her. Or he did tell her, and it was she who had
forgotten. And maybe that was why it now proved so difficult to tell her son what his father was like. By that point, she didn’t even know, or perhaps she had never known. At the end of the day, it was not so unusual that Forcás had no memories. It was a thing that a lot of them had in common. It wasn’t a time for remembrances; too much anxiety to be tending to those interior gardens.

  “I have come up with a story, or I should say made up a memory about Ramón. A memory I like,” Mateo said. “Maybe it’s real, I don’t know. There is a very prominent figure with big hands who must be him and he puts me down in a crib made of snow. But I am not cold, but rather toasty. The large figure gives me a pacifier and I notice the many bright lights.”

  “That happened just as you remember it. Your memory is real. When the three of us were in Bariloche, you were already two and a half. He always carried you on his shoulders on our long walks through the mountainside. There was snow, not a lot, but also sun, and when we climbed a tall peak, he liked to dig a hole in the snow and make a crib, using his wool coat and mine to line it, to lay you there so you could drink your milk and sleep awhile. And I have another image engraved in my mind of you and your father in Bariloche, both wearing wool caps and leather boots, and in the background the splendor of the aurora borealis.”

  “There you go again with your exaggerations. I have one nice memory, just one, and off you go dressing up the story with blazing lights. Even a loser like my father lights up, as if he had a saint’s halo. You just make shit up, Lorenza. You can’t even see the aurora borealis in Bariloche. The lights that you see near the south pole are the aurora australis.”

  Mateo then grew quiet, looking anywhere but at her. He had grown disgusted with his mother, as usually happened when they talked about Ramón. It always started out fine, continued fine for a while, but things soon heated up and continued to heat up until he exploded, which was followed by long periods of silence.

  “All right, no more auroras or blazing lights,” she said, after letting a prudent amount of time pass.

  “You just don’t want to admit to yourself that my stories about my father are not happy ones. There’s a lot of pain there, and you are not allowing me any pain—and that in itself is very painful.” Mateo’s angst got him all tangled up in tongue twisters.

  “And there’s another thing that doesn’t exist at the south pole,” he said after some time had passed. “Polar bears.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, I would swear on it. No polar bears and no aurora borealis. Although I don’t think Ramón would be out this late, considering how cold it gets there. He is probably already inside his house with a fire going in the fireplace. The little house that he rented that time in Bariloche had a fireplace, right?”

  “It did, and we had to keep the fire going all night because there was no other heat source. Sometimes it went out while we slept, and the freezing air would wake us. If the living have to suffer through this sort of cold, what must it be for the dead, your father said. Who knows where such thoughts came from, but he said it every time it was cold.”

  “If the living have to suffer through this sort of cold, what must it be like for the dead,” Mateo repeated, now cheery. “Is that really what my father said, Lolé? And in Bariloche we split wood for a new fire when the old one had gone out. Maybe at this exact moment, Ramón has run out of firewood and has gone out into the woods to look for a supply that will last him the night.”

  “But what about if he is in La Plata, you crazy kiddo? Or if he’s here in Buenos Aires like the phone book says?”

  LORENZA TOOK MATEO out to Puerto Madero on the shores of the river, a popular place, resplendently lit, full of people, cafés, and restaurants. She told him that it had once been the main port of Buenos Aires, and that she’d had secret meetings there with stevedores.

  “Who were the stevedores?”

  “They were the ones in charge of loading and unloading cargo from ships, well, the ships that still came in, every once in a while. Right here where we are standing now, right around here. Back then the port had been mostly abandoned, a haunted place, all the docks half empty.”

  She explained that the redbrick structures that were everywhere were called docks, or warehouses, now all transformed into huge restaurants. The dock where she had met up with others was nothing more than a graveyard for cranes, useless hulks and empty wooden boxes scattered everywhere, the remnants of the rich Argentina that with its exports called itself the world’s granary. She would meet up there with the stevedores, amid the rusted iron and the whitecaps. Generally there were six or seven of them, unemployed and rusty themselves. They waited for her bundled in their thick, black coats, their hands buried in their pockets. And they had their meetings right there.

  “And if anyone saw you meeting and denounced you, wouldn’t you end up disappeared or something?”

  “Something like that. But so that we wouldn’t be noticed we had our cover story, the grill. Whoever passed by there and saw us, all we were doing was roasting, we were just grilling some meat.”

  “You pretended to eat?”

  “We did eat. We set up some coals, put a grill over it, and threw some chorizos on, which we would eat with bread and cheap wine. Meanwhile we would talk in low voices about what was happening, what the press wasn’t saying. They would tell us their troubles and we would tell them ours. We would be conspiring, in other words.”

  “So that’s what conspiring is like? What possible harm could you bring to the military junta, hidden there, eating chorizos and speaking ill of the regime?”

  “A lot of harm, though you may not believe it. The dictatorship needed silence like you need air. The very act of getting together and talking about things was a way to resist.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “We told them about the chupaderos, for instance, makeshift morgues where the military tortured and killed detainees out of the public eye. Or we brought them up-to-date on the insurrection against Somoza in Nicaragua. The press would say nothing about that, and it was the news that the stevedores liked best. They’d ask us, Comrade, are the Sandinistas on the move? They found it unbelievable that it was possible to get rid of the tyrants, that in another part of the world people had risen against tyranny and defeated it. Some of them would even give me money. They would say, Make sure this gets to them, the ones fighting in Nicaragua.”

  “Yes, yes, Lolé, but it still doesn’t sound like it was accomplishing anything.”

  “It’s hard to say how much we did accomplish. But aside from being a foreigner, I was just a low-ranking militant, you have to remember that. Fucking low-rank, like we said. I moved in the trenches, while those in charge moved in wider circles. Besides, we had labor leaders who were in the thick of it, in the very mouth of the wolf, trying to saw off the legs of the dictatorship from within the syndicates. The matter was infinitely complex and infinitely infinitesimal.

  “Every month, the party put out an underground newspaper, taking great risks and facing a whole range of difficulties. They distributed it one by one, a task that took a few hours. They’d remove the wrapping from a box of cigars, empty it from the bottom, then roll up each of the eight pages of the newspaper until it was the size of a cigarillo. Then they’d fill half of the box with fake cigarillos and half with real ones, and wrap it back up. It was an old trick that marijuana dealers used and they adopted it to mock the regime. One newspaper at a time, to one contact, often having to go all the way across town to deliver it.

  “There were a lot of words in those eight pages, Mateo, do you understand, words which were in such short supply. Imagine that we were pizza delivery boys. Ring, ring, yes, with mozzarella and anchovies, and off we would go with the newspaper, rain, thunder, or lightning. And sometimes it didn’t say anything new and it arrived wet and cold, but we would be there to deliver it.”

  “The newspaper story sounds like it was true, but that thing about the whitecaps, the stevedores waiti
ng for you in the fog, you made that up.”

  “No, there was fog. There still is. You’ll see it for yourself in a bit.”

  ON SUNDAY, forty-eight hours after the dark episode, Lorenza was still wrapped in the straitjacket of her own anxiety.

  “You’re going to go crazy if you don’t look for help,” Mamaíta told her. Lorenza didn’t hear her or respond, but paced the house back and forth like a caged lion, her heart beating a thousand times a minute, her blood pressure rising, and her hands like ice. She hadn’t been able to sleep, not even to lie down for a moment. She could not eat because it felt as if she were choking. In a picture taken a week afterward for her travel documents, she has the fiendish eyes of a caged animal and sharpened features due to the half a kilo she was losing daily. Although she refused to see a psychiatrist, Mamaíta and Guadalupe persisted and somehow they got her into the office of the well-respected Dr. Haddad, who specialized in treating family members of those who had been kidnapped. Although it was a Sunday, he had agreed to see her right away.

  Lorenza walked into the office at eleven in the morning, her eyes darting everywhere but resting nowhere. She wouldn’t even sit down, and let her mother relate to the doctor what had happened.

  “I don’t want to tell you my story or listen to your theories. I just want to find my son,” was the only thing Lorenza said.

  “Why were you being so obnoxious, Lolé?” Mateo asked. “What had that man done to you?”

  “Nothing, I didn’t even know him. But it was like I was possessed. It was either that afternoon, or the next day, that I slugged your uncle Patrick.”

  “Shit, really? Why?”

  “Because he said something or didn’t say something; because he did something, or didn’t do something. Who knows?”