No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  “That’s what he said. He must have already known where I was from.” Aurelia knew right away that the man beside her smoked, it was the first thing that her nose registered when she met a person. But she noticed another smell as well, one that she liked, the smell of raw wool from the heavy pullover he wore.

  “His famous thick wool pullovers.”

  “This one seemed woven by hand, and it emitted an aroma that inspired confidence, a pleasant animal smell.”

  “A pleasant animal smell or the smell of a pleasant animal?”

  “A smell like sheep. I’m just trying to tell you that he was wearing sheep’s wool. But your father also smelled like a third thing. He radiated energy and youth, and that smells too. It smells strong and is alluring.”

  “It’s called testosterone, Lolé.”

  “I wouldn’t have called it that. But now that you’ve said it, he was a hunk of a man, your father. Of course he exuded testosterone.”

  “If anybody questions us, let’s just say that we met in your country, last year,” Forcás proposed, to get their minute straight.

  “Got it,” she responded. “And what were you doing there?”

  “I have an export business.”

  “What do you export?”

  “Leather goods: When we parted there, you said you would call me as soon as you arrived in Buenos Aires, so that I could show you the city.”

  “Nice. And who introduced us in Colombia?”

  “Someone in your family. You tell me who.”

  “My brother-in-law?”

  “Your brother-in-law was my contact for the sale. Give him a name.”

  “Patrick.”

  “Patrick what?”

  “Patrick Ferguson. Let’s say he’s an Australian.”

  “If they ask you anything else, say we’re just getting to know each other and don’t know a lot about each other.”

  “Not even names?”

  “You’ll say my name is Mario.”

  The place was loud, and Forcás spoke very softly and with a pronounced Buenos Aires accent, so she had trouble understanding everything and had to lean in closer. Maybe it was because of this that at first she smelled him more than watched him. A little bit later, when she leaned back and adjusted her angle of vision, she noticed that indeed his shoulders were wide and his hair was pretty, not exactly the color of honey, more a light chestnut, but it was the same, it was still handsome, everything about him was handsome, Sandrita had not lied about a thing.

  “So then it’s true, my father has wide shoulders like Patrick always said. But you didn’t tell me what happened with the chat.”

  “What chat?”

  “The one you left in Humberto’s Mercedes.”

  “Shawl, kiddo, shawl, the scarf.”

  “Right, right, shawl.”

  “I never found out. Since I never saw them again, I never knew what became of the chat.”

  “And the boxes?” Mateo asked.

  “The boxes?”

  “The ravioli, Lorenza, the ravioli.”

  “That’s exactly what your father asked on the day we met at the table in Las Violetas. He asked me what was in the boxes, and it surprised me that he was surprised.”

  “Oh, I just brought you this vaina. It’s ravioli,” Aurelia told Forcás.

  “Ravioli? Are you nuts? Who would be stupid enough to walk around with boxes of ravioli on a Monday?”

  “You see, Mateo, why I was so sure that our first meeting was on a Monday?”

  “What was wrong with ravioli on Monday?”

  “Very bad. When Forcás threw it in my face like that, I started blubbering, embarrassed that I had screwed up again. ‘But she told me,’ I tried to explain, ‘yesterday my contact told me … ’”

  “Listen, yesterday was Sunday, nena,” Forcás whispered in her ear. “The ravioli would have been good yesterday, but not today. The pasta makers are closed on Mondays. It’s suicide to walk around with that on Monday. Except for you, there’s no other retard walking around Buenos Aires with boxes of ravioli. No one eats ravioli on Mondays here.”

  “You’re the one who switched Sunday to Monday, how was I supposed to know? How should I know what they eat here on Mondays, as far as I am concerned they eat shit,” she exploded. Sandrita had already lectured her and now this Forcás was copping an attitude from the start. “Besides, I’m warning you,” she told him, “don’t start calling me stupid, or petit bourgeois, and definitely not retard or nena, because I am not a nena, and will not put up with this shower of insults, I’m up to here with all of it.”

  “Did the comrades harass you too much?” Forcás asked, softening his voice to placate her and unleashing his seductive smile.

  “That’s all they’ve done lately.”

  “There must have been other fuckups like this one. It’s stuffed, this one with the ravioli. What about the other box?” Forcás asked, half mocking.

  She turned red again because she knew he was right, she had to be more careful or there would be a catastrophe. By then he would have lit one of the green-label Particulares 30, which he sucked on willfully, as if eager for cancer.

  “Okay, so now tell me why they called my father Forcás. Aside from the sheep smell, what else made him seem like he was from the country?”

  “Just that, the sheep smell. I learned later that your grandmother Noëlle knitted those pullovers for him, using wool from the different types of sheep they raised at the farm in Polvaredas.”

  Maybe if she had observed Forcás with a more prophetic eye, she would have even then picked up on how aggressive he was, which was evident in the violence of his movements and his intransigent opinions. Although it had to be that way, more so because he was a soldier than because he was from the country. The truth was that on that first day, Aurelia didn’t see him as someone from the country, perhaps because all she noticed was that he was the most attractive man she had ever met. She never found out what time he had arrived at Las Violetas, or if he had already been there when she arrived, watching her and waiting until the last minute to appear. The thing was that he was there now, seated beside her, gazing at her with those presumptuous eyes and quizzing her on why she had brought so many boxes.

  “There are a lot of boxes because there are a lot of vainas,” she replied.

  Forcás wanted to know what else there was aside from the passports, and she explained that there was microfilm and money, dollars.

  “I thought it was only passports,” he said. “I had no idea about the rest. Why would they send all that with one messenger? It’s crazy.”

  “I did what I was told without asking questions. In fact, I was told not to ask questions.”

  “You’re right, it’s not your fault.”

  “That would be the icing on the cake, if it were my fault.”

  “True, true, the noose is tight around our necks. But what balls, those sons of bitches comrades in Madrid, they were making you walk the plank, sending you with all that.”

  “Are you sure that’s how my father spoke?” Mateo asked. “With that accent and those exact words.”

  “Yeah, well, something like that. I don’t know how to do the Argentinean accent.”

  “It’s all right, go on. But maybe just do his part in a normal accent. It sounds a little forced the way you’re doing it.”

  “I’ll do it however I want, kiddo, don’t pressure me. Besides, it’s almost over. Or do you want to leave the story there?”

  “I want you to finish, but without an accent.”

  Aurelia asked Forcás if they had not told him that she would be bringing all this and he said that they had talked over the phone with Europe but that he hadn’t quite understood everything—there were so many codes to throw off the enemy that they were themselves thrown off.

  “And that’s how the first story ends, Mateo. Nothing else happened,” his mother said. “We couldn’t linger there because of all the ravioli and dollars in our possession. We had to go.
The best thing was for each of us to go our own way as soon as possible. But it was evident that both of us wanted to stay, we felt good together, more than good, I imagine we were both already half in love.”

  “Already?”

  “Well, let’s just say we were hooked. Chemistry, they call it. Chemistry, what else? Because when it comes down to it, we had barely talked. Some flirtatious gestures, a tap on the shoulder, a graze of the knees, a goodbye kiss, a few minutes chatting about contraband, goodbye again, a kiss again, ciao, ciao again, ciao, for real this time.”

  “You go first,” Forcás suggested when it was no longer possible to prolong their goodbyes, and she went for her wallet to pay for her tea and his coffee.

  “Don’t even think about it. Put that away, nena.” There he went with the nena again, but this time it didn’t irk her as much. “You evince yourself if you pay, sorry. You have to let the man pay at these meetings.”

  “Evince?”

  “Make evident, betray yourself.”

  Aurelia was almost at the door leading out to Rivadavia when she turned around and walked back toward the table where Forcás was still seated.

  “I forgot to tell you that the microfilm is in the bottom of the shoe box,” she whispered in his ear, taking a last whiff of that rich sheep smell, and he grabbed her by the arm as she was about to go. “Can I see you next week?”

  “All right, stop, Lolé,” Mateo said. “I want you to explain to me why you fell in love with Forcás. Was it his pretty hair, his wide shoulders, the wool smell?”

  “What a question! Let’s see. First, because he was a party member. At that time, I would have never fallen in love with someone who wasn’t.”

  “So you liked him because he was a laborer?”

  “He wasn’t a laborer.”

  “From the country, then.”

  “Originally from the country. But that wasn’t a social class that we cared much about, we favored the industrial laborers. As you know, the muzhiks betrayed the October Revolution.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, never mind. Second, I liked that he was the complete opposite of any boyfriend that Papaíto would have wanted for me. And third, pure old-fashioned attraction, I guess.”

  “Sexual?”

  “Yes, but he also seemed like a very interesting guy.”

  “Did he seem like he would be a good father?” Mateo aimed the question point-blank and it caught his mother off guard. She felt embarrassed to have gone on about such trivialities, such dreadful tomfoolery. She remained silent for a moment because she did not know how to respond, anything she said would have been inadequate.

  “A good father? No, Mateo, I didn’t think to ask myself that. I didn’t even ask myself if he was a good man.”

  IT’S A LOVE LETTER, Dr. Haddad had said after reading the pages that Ramón left her at the beginning of the dark episode. A love letter? Lorenza was enraged. How the fuck is that a love letter? He took away my son, that’s not a love letter. She would not even bother to discuss the matter with this Dr. Heart. They commit the vilest imaginable act against you, the most treacherous, and that’s a love letter? It announces that you will never see your son again, your two-year-old baby, that creature from your entrails, and that’s a love letter? He steals a child using false papers, forging your own signature, even having tricked you into packing his suitcase, and that’s a love letter? All the psychiatrists in the world were famous for dishing mountains of shit and this Dr. Heart was the worst of all. Lorenza turned to scram out of there, leaving Mamaíta to say goodbye and thank the man for his time.

  “Did you read it, Lorenza?” She came to a complete standstill. For a moment she couldn’t move from the door, as if she were making up her mind whether to leave or come back in, and apparently she opted for the second option because she turned around, found a chair in front of the doctor, and sat down. She thought he looked like a cricket, and the cricket was challenging her with his gaze.

  “No. Not the whole thing,” she replied. “The first paragraph, that’s all. I am not going to read the rest of it.”

  “That’s fine,” Haddad said, and there was an imperceptible triumphant shift of tone in his voice, as if the fish had bitten and all he had to do was hook it. “It’s better that way. Don’t read it. But I have read it, in between the lines.”

  “In the actual lines it says that I will never see my child again. What does it say in between the lines?”

  “This man doesn’t want to take your son from you, Lorenza. This man just wants you back.”

  She did not have to ask him to repeat himself to realize that he had just inspired her to have a revelation. Finally something concrete, something to hold on to! A trail, a light, a possibility. The haze of anguish that had dulled her thoughts day and night lifted in one swoop. After speaking with so many people who had offered nothing, someone had said something worth listening to. Lorenza took a deep breath. She was being offered a path that would lead her to her son. She straightened up in the chair, like a marionette whose strings are pulled, and examined the doctor at length. He was a small man with big hands. Bald. Thin. Prominent nose. Definitely Arab, even in his Western clothes. Although it was a Sunday, he was not dressed informally. On the contrary, his suit, his tie, and white shirt were strictly formal, one could say impeccable. But there was something in his demeanor that was plain, dry, and angular, and it was that, plus the big dark eyes and the bald head, that reminded her of a cricket. Lorenza’s voice was very different when she asked Haddad to please repeat and elaborate on what he had said.

  “The man who wrote this letter is in love, and he does not want to take your child from you, he wants to win you back. So be ready, Lorenza, because he will call. Do everything you have to, so that when that call comes, you are ready. You know best what you have to do. But he will call you, you can count on that. When? I don’t know. In a week, two weeks, a month. When he feels that he is in a safe place, at that moment, he will call you.”

  Lorenza, who knew that Dr. Haddad had years of experience dealing with kidnapping cases, had meticulously studied his appearance and now looked all around, scrutinizing his office.

  “I studied it with such intensity,” she told Mateo, “that although I never returned there, to this day I remember every detail.”

  Boxy furniture upholstered in gray, wood floors, white walls, and on the walls three posters from art exhibitions. On one of them was a bronze sculpture by Archipenko, Woman Combing Her Hair, according to the description beneath. On another one, an abstract figure in blue, gray, and black by Malevich. On the third, a series of lines in plum and brown by Rothko.

  “Don’t tell me that at that critical moment you started looking at posters,” Mateo objected.

  “I wanted some sign. I was looking for clues, something that would allow me to take that decisive step: to trust him. To be able to act I needed to believe in that man, it was a matter of life and death, to trust him, and I was searching for some confirmation. For instance, a copy of a Renoir would have been an unfavorable clue.”

  There was something syrupy about reproductions of Renoir. The art displayed in the office, however, was in keeping with the message that the doctor wanted to get across, intentionally or not: clarity, conceptual rigor, simple forms, and mechanical precision. Everything was good then, but it was also impersonal. Something else was necessary for Lorenza to lower her guard resolutely, something that would allow her to make contact, that would engage her emotions, and she saw it on the doctor’s desk: a framed photograph. It was not of his wife or their kids, that would have been equivalent to a Renoir, or of Freud or Jung, that would have just been clearly offensive. It wasn’t a postcard, either, or a piece of art. It was a plain black-and-white photograph of an olive tree in the middle of a rocky field. Presumably the doctor himself had taken it, in his land of origin. It was just what Lorenza needed.

  “Why? What did that have to do with anything?” Mateo asked.

  “It had
nothing to do with anything. Don’t ask me why, but I interpreted it as a green light. I could trust that man, I was going to trust that man. I was going to prepare for that call he had talked about. When Ramón’s call came, because it would come, I would be ready to take it.”

  “Wait a second, Lolé, wouldn’t it have been better to read the letter yourself?” Mateo asked.

  “No. Listen to what you’re saying. Reading Ramón’s letter would have just caused anger, or contempt, or guilt, and in the best imaginable scenario, compassion or sorrow, and it was essential that I feel nothing. Nothing at all. This doctor was a third party, an outsider to the case, who had read it coldly and had given, let’s say, a diagnosis. Or maybe he had smacked me in the head. Or a sort of prophecy? He had told me, he will call you, and all of a sudden, everything made sense, the pieces of the puzzle interlocked in an unexpected but logical procession, and I found it important to believe his every word.

  “From that moment on, that phrase, he will call you, would become my certainty and my compass. I was too emotional to make judgments on my own without becoming delirious, too involved in the drama to be even moderately objective. So I would let the cricket set the guidelines, and from those directions I would devise a plan of action for the only thing I cared about, to get you back.”

  “Like a robot,” Mateo said.

  “Yes, like a robot,” Lorenza replied. “But you don’t even know what kind of robot. Thanks to Dr. Haddad I emerged from my paralysis and became Tranzor Z.”

  AROUND THE TIME that Aurelia met Forcás, she also met Lucia, a comrade in the party who still bore the scars of a recent tragedy. A few years before, four days after the military coup, they had disappeared her husband, who was also in the resistance, but only obliquely, since politics wasn’t really his thing. His name was Horacio Rasmilovich, and he was known as Pipermín, or Piper, and although Aurelia never got to meet him, little by little, from what she learned from Lucia, she felt she got to know him. Piper was a translator from Portuguese to Spanish, so he was never very busy with work, which was fine by him, because he could devote himself to his true passion, reading history books, especially those about World War I. Lucia was never entirely sure if her husband had been kidnapped because they confused him with someone else, or because they had their eyes on him, or because they had really been after her, and on not finding her grabbed him.