No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  Aurelia had calmed down somewhat when Sandrita knocked on her bedroom door. She had forgotten to tell her that the meeting with Forcás had been postponed until the following Monday, at six in the afternoon. The leader, Aurelia thought. She muttered that Forcás was definitely headless, and Sandrita took it to mean something else, saying, you have to understand he has a thousand other things to worry about, he’s not here just to attend to you, it’s not that he doesn’t have a head on his shoulders.

  “Let’s go to sleep,” Aurelia implored. “It’s almost three in the morning.”

  “You’re going to tell me what time it is?”

  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  All this and Sandrita didn’t even know yet that Aurelia had left the shawl she had borrowed at the Colombians’ place … Aurelia realized she didn’t have it way too late, not until she went to bed just before the damn reprimand. Shit, she thought suddenly, the shawl, I left the shawl at that house. Her pulse quickened and the blood beat against her temples. Did I leave it there with Mamaíta’s friends, or had it fallen off while I was imprisoned in the building? If it was in the building, it was gone, but if it was with Mr. and Mrs. Right and Human, they might send Humberto to return it to my supposed apartment in Recoleta, and then they would discover the pile of bullshit that I’d been feeding them, and they would call Bogotá to pass on the rumors, you’ll never guess who has become a subversive.

  They were such toadies that they would probably whisper her name to the Argentinean authorities. Such things were not unheard of, such was the state of panic, even with those in the right, meaning they would do anything to kiss the military’s ass. Lorenza would never go there again. She had to tell Mamaíta not to send anything else there. And what if she had left the shawl in the Mercedes, and Humberto found it?

  “She was a little anal, that Sandrita, look at the state she had you in,” Mateo suggested.

  “Not anal, disciplined. And she was right, if I remained so flighty, I was going to get us both killed. You had to learn how to move, Mateo, and it wasn’t easy. You spent your time trying not to get caught in the web of deceit that you had to weave around you.”

  Finally alone and shuttered in her room, she decided to get Aurelia out of her head for a while, that beast Aurelia, that is, her fiery nom de guerre, that brave warrior who did nothing but screw up and ignore all the warnings. So she decided to think about the land that Papaíto had left her, beautiful San Jacinto, and she closed her eyes to summon giant purple flowers that appeared on the artichokes if they were not harvested on time, of the manna grass that sprouted on the hills and had to be cared for like an open eye so that it doesn’t dry, the adobe bread oven that Papaíto had built behind the kitchen. She thought for a long time about that oven and the breads that came out of it, which generally ended up, according to Papaíto, soused. And who knows what he meant by that word, because he used it when the breads came out not fully cooked, but also when they were overcooked, when they stuck to one another and when the dough collapsed. What do you think, Papaíto? And he always responded: A disaster, soused again—which must have meant any of these categories: uncooked, burned, stuck together, or deflated. The truth was, they had never mastered the secrets of the adobe oven.

  “If you’re talking about good bread, we never quite got there, Mateo. But the faint aroma escaping from that oven on cold mornings was always gratifying. Come to think of it, I suspect that it wasn’t really the bread that interested Papaíto but that aroma. And the slow, milky air that flooded the fields of San Jacinto at night. Did it come down from the hills, or was it more likely the hot breath of the cattle mingling with the freezing air?” Alone in her bedroom of the apartment on Deán Funes, Lorenza continued to dwell on these memories: Papaíto lighting the coal stove, removing bits of iron and blowing on them with the bellows; Mamaíta, who stirred the hot chocolate, wearing a poncho over her nightgown; the old copper water tank, which began to rattle as soon as the water got hot; her sister Guadalupe and herself still under the blankets, testing the harshness of the cold that awaited them outside with the tips of their noses; the times when they would lay down a foundation of bricks to add another bedroom to the house, or crawl about on all fours weeding the garden.

  “And they were also the years of the literary boom. In San Jacinto, we devoured novels by Carpentier, Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes. Cortázar’s short stories and Gabo’s Autumn of the Patriarch. We had barely finished reading one when they would be already coming out with another, a new prodigy.”

  Lorenza also thought about, or should have thought about, the ass they kept, woolly and purplish like the hairy leaves of the espeletia and the flowers of the sietecueros that flourished up above, in the icy air of the páramo. Papaíto had christened the ass the Philanthropist because he was affectionate and spoiled and followed them around everywhere, even sneaking into the house if they left the doors open. He was fascinated with animals, Papaíto was. Lorenza had never met such an animal lover. And it had been that way since he was a child; all you had to do was look at the pictures from that time to prove it. When he wasn’t hugging a goose, he was riding a dog or a horse, not a regular riding horse but a scrawny one, picked at by cattle tyrants, from the breeds used to frighten foxes.

  That night on Deán Funes, Lorenza couldn’t stop thinking about those days, especially about the purebred Aberdeen Angus cattle that her father had imported from the United States and put out to graze in the fields of San Jacinto, in hopes of going into the beef business. They were tiny and squarish, looking more like bovine ponies, with dreamy eyelashes and resplendent black hair. Needless to say, in no time at all, they were no different than the Philanthropist, eating sugar cubes from human hands. Papaíto, who knew each of them by name and spent hours brushing their hair, was of course incapable of sending them off to the slaughterhouse when the time came, so the only thing that perished was his beef business, and the Aberdeen all lived to an old age after a long life as unproductive as it was peaceful.

  She thought and thought, about these and other things, until she fell asleep when it was almost dawn, perhaps dreaming about Papaíto, because during that early time in Buenos Aires she dreamed about him a lot, maybe because his death was so recent, or because she refused to accept it. In one of those dreams he was working on a jigsaw puzzle, something that in real life they often did together at night in San Jacinto by the fire. But the jigsaw puzzle of the dream, whose subject was a blue lake, was so big that it fell off the table.

  “It was difficult to piece together, Mateo, rather impossible since the whole of the picture was blue, only blue, different hues of blue, the water blue and the sky also blue, so that in my dream, Papaíto was very still, perhaps flabbergasted, looking first at the nascent puzzle and then at the pieces piled on the side, without even trying to put a piece in place because they were all the same, all of them blue, any of them could have fit anywhere in that realm that was blue from beginning to end.”

  So she was now the inheritor of San Jacinto? That’s what it looked like. The papers that certified this were on her night table. And yet she awoke thinking that if Papaíto wasn’t there with his soused breads, his overindulged ass and cattle, then she wasn’t quite sure what it was that she had inherited. A bit of fog, nothing more, another lost piece of blue in the middle of the jigsaw puzzle.

  “FORTUNATELY, I DIDN’T inherit my father’s legs,” Mateo said, and asked his mother if it was true that Ramón was bowlegged. But he didn’t let her reply. Tired of walking and suddenly irritated that he didn’t know where they were going, he hailed a taxi. Once they got in, he opened the window and then claimed it was cold.

  “Roll up the window,” Lorenza proposed, but he ignored her. “Roll it up just a little bit then.”

  “Ramón never said goodbye to me before he left, right, Lolé? I don’t remember him saying goodbye. The last time I saw him was on the lake in Bariloche. There were red mountains all around. The mountain
s reflected on the lake seemed real, and the ones that were real were so far away that they seemed fake. Ramón was there with us and then he was lost, lost like the Turk in the fog,” Mateo said. And Lorenza thought, but did not say aloud, that the scene he was describing was not so much from memory but from a photograph, the last one she had taken with Ramón, on the shores of Lago Nahuel Huapi. “Or maybe what I remember is only from a picture,” Mateo realized on his own. “But I am definitely sure that he never said goodbye. It was only much later that I began to suspect that he was not coming back. With you it was different. I think that when I was little I would cry sometimes when you went to work or traveled. I remember I hated your hair dryer and I used to hide it from you, because if you dried your hair, it meant you would be going out for the night. But the next day you would be there when I woke up. But I didn’t miss Ramón at first. Maybe I didn’t even realize he was missing for years, or I realized it for a moment and forgot it just as quickly, until one day I discovered how much I had needed him without even realizing it. If he had said goodbye, everything would have been much clearer. I would like to know, Lolé, why do you think he was imprisoned?”

  “Who knows what mischief he got into?”

  “You say mischief and it sounds almost charming. My charming father and his mischief. Oh, Lorenza, you chose the bastard and I covered up for him,” Mateo said, and they both laughed. In spite of everything, there was some comedy in it.

  SANDRITA AND AURELIA kept the apartment on Deán Funes clean and orderly, completely unlike the pigsty apartment in Madrid, or the “war sty” as they had called it, where a whole gang of people lived, all of them Latin American—a Chilean woman, three Argentineans, and Lorenza. When a Brazilian couple moved in above, they christened it the war sty.

  All of them, except Aurelia, had been fleeing one dictatorship or another, for at that time the Southern Cone was infested with dictatorships and that apartment was a refuge for exiles. People came and went. The living room functioned as a backstage of sorts, with a lot of romance and episodes in the beds, the kitchen became a deposit box for flyers and newspapers, and the ashtrays were always replete with butts. Those butts were the most difficult part for her; and waiting for your turn to use the bathroom, or walking into your room and realizing you no longer had a blanket because it had been allotted to someone else.

  In Buenos Aires, on the other hand, they had to keep up appearances, and so they tried to eat at proper hours and keep the refrigerator stocked. Not like in Madrid, where there was never anything in the fridge but a dried-up onion and few cans of beer. Things in Buenos Aires were strange as well because other people in the party never set foot inside your home. For security reasons they didn’t even know where it was. Also, you had to keep your windows and door wide open for the neighbors, so they would take no interest in you. Step right up, lady from 4B; come on in, renter from 2A. Would they like some coffee while they went on about the leak that was soaking their carpet? Of course, señora, of course, señor. Let them look all they wanted, let them sniff out and discard any suspicions. Let them walk away with the best of impressions, so they would have nothing to rat to the cana about. Let me help you with those grocery bags, señora from 4B. Do you want to borrow an umbrella, señor from 2A, it’s drizzling?

  “Then how would you meet up with other party members to conspire?” Mateo asked.

  “Only in public places, in cafés mostly, meetings which were never arranged by phone. Using phones was playing with fire, so meetings had to be arranged by intermediaries who sometimes took weeks to deliver a message. At least three-quarters of our time was taken up with these details.”

  “Tell me about the day that you met Ramón.”

  “If you want, we can go to Las Violetas tomorrow and I’ll tell you there.”

  Las Violetas didn’t exist anymore, the receptionist of the hotel would inform them the following day. It was a shame that she could not take her son, Lorenza thought. How precisely she remembered the languid air of that place, the rhombus designs in the marble floor, the lilac-and-mauve rosettes in the stained-glass windows, and even the golden hue of the tea they served in white porcelain cups. And yet how deceitful the memory of that girl she once was, who Monday afternoon waited for a young man she did not yet know, a man who in a couple of years would become Mateo’s father. Lorenza tried to envision Aurelia seated there in Las Violetas, checking her watch obsessively, restless, looking up at the door and then again at her watch, self-conscious that the three boxes she had with her were too conspicuous.

  “Three boxes? I thought there were two,” Mateo asked.

  “Two raviolis and one from the Bally shoes.” Since everything hadn’t fit in between the layers of ravioli, they had decided to build a false bottom in the box with the Bally shoes, with her Mamaíta’s pardon, where she hid the dollars and put the Ballys back on top. It was finally six o’clock. Six? Was that really the time of their first meeting? Suddenly Lorenza wasn’t so sure. She was sure it had been a Monday, there was no doubt about that, and Mateo would soon see why there was no doubt. She arrived a few minutes early and had a furtive look around. There were about thirty or forty people there, no more than that, so the place was not full, a lot of ladies, a few older men, some girls, and a couple of young men, one to her right and another in front of her, much farther away. Either one of them could have been Forcás. But neither of them was alone: the one on the right was with what appeared to be his girlfriend and the other one with a woman whose face Aurelia could not see. And if they were coupled off they couldn’t be Forcás. Although, come to think of it, no one had told her that he would come alone to meet her. In the end, all he had to do was pick up a package. She shouldn’t forget that this was not a blind date but the perpetration of a tiny act of war. She should also not ignore the fact that if they had set up the meeting there and not in some other place, it was solely because a busy confectionery would arouse less suspicion, and because the location, on the corner, had two exits, one to the avenue, which would make an escape easier if things got ugly. That is, it had nothing at all to do with her, or with the encounter of the two people fast approaching, or with the small napkins with violets embroidered in the corners, or the Bavarian creams and éclairs that whizzed by on trays to various tables, or with the pretty white tablecloths with the stained-glass reflections. What a shame, this elegance is not for me at all. Being in the resistance still felt like a game to her, or being onstage. Bit by bit she would come to terms with what it meant to live one’s whole existence completely in secret, alienated from the day-to-day routine, on the margins of everyone else’s normal life. Although who knows, who can say that anybody else’s life is so normal, or what strange things they’re up to. Even right there in Las Violetas, there was likely someone else with a plan similar to hers, somebody about to whisper some banned information in another’s ear, or slip a mimeographed sheet under the table, or perhaps an informant who feigned ignorance while jotting notes about everything.

  In any case, it bothered her that she had built all these false hopes around Forcás, although truly, she had no idea what sort of hopes they were, maybe the hopes of good conversation over a cup of tea, or even more to fulfill the need to confess to someone that her father had died recently and she felt terrible about it, or the longing for some affection that would ground her in this city that was so beautiful and so full of spies. And besides, why shouldn’t she build up her hopes about meeting a man whom she considered more or less a hero.

  “A hero, Lorenza? That’s ridiculous, to call somebody made of flesh and bone that.”

  “A little bit yes, but a little bit no.”

  “A little bit hero and a little bit buffoon.”

  “Like all of us.”

  At eight minutes after six, she began to think that she shouldn’t linger too much longer. She would ask for the check, wait two more minutes, and if no one arrived she’d be off. Then she focused more intently on one of the two young men who were sitting t
here, the one whose reflection she could see in the mirror in the back, and realized that he was looking at her as well, also dissemblingly through the mirror, as his girlfriend continued talking to him.

  He was rather good-looking, or at least better-looking than the one on the right, who was ugly, plain and simple. The one in the mirror could be Forcás, must be Forcás, although his hair and eyes weren’t really honey-colored, and Sandrita had been emphatic about those traits. Well, as for the eyes, who knew what color they were. It was impossible to tell from far away. And the hair? The hair did not have a trace of honey, but was more or less dark, you could say black. And until he stood up, who knew if he was bowlegged. But if it was Forcás, why didn’t he come up to her? If he wasn’t Forcás, why was he looking at her? Maybe the poor man had nothing else to look at, and was rattled that she was looking at him so much. Aurelia shifted her eyes to the door because she sensed that now someone was walking in, and her instincts told her it was him; but no, not so, it was a group of señoras, so Lorenza decided she would stand up now, because the period of waiting had expired. She would take her boxes, drop them off at home, and go to the control meeting to warn them that something must have happened to Forcás.

  “You brought me that vaina?” he asked from behind her, almost brushing her nape, a hoarse voice that of course was his, you didn’t have to be a magician to figure that out. She jumped. She hadn’t expected it to happen like this, that he would surprise her from behind, and she must have grown suddenly, because when she said hello, her voice sounded like an impostor’s, like theater parley. He, on the other hand, was very calm as he sat beside her. He was, in fact, grinning.

  “A pretty smile,” Lorenza told Mateo. “Your father had a pretty smile.”

  “He hadn’t lost the tooth yet,” Mateo cut in. “He used the word vaina? You’re saying Forcás told you vaina? He used that exact expression, You brought me that vaina? It’s so Colombian.”