No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  This last scenario tormented her. She couldn’t help obsessing over the possibility of such a fatal swap, taking him in place of her.

  “That’s part of the torment.” Lorenza wanted to explain to Mateo that because tyrants and torturers don’t show their faces, the victims end up blaming themselves. It was useless to warn Lucia not to get trapped in the cruelty of that cycle, that the pain of the loss itself was enough without adding the burden of guilt.

  The only thing that Lucia knew for sure, because a neighbor who had witnessed the scene from her window told her, was that they had taken Piper out of the house blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, and his head bathed in blood. And that he was screaming something, something he wanted heard, even as they struck him to silence him. The neighbor had seen him scream, but she couldn’t tell Lucia what words, she apologized, explaining that her window had been shut, that fear seals the ears, and that at that moment some road workers were drilling on the asphalt. From then on, Lucia never stopped wondering what Piper’s last words had been, which the noise from the street had swallowed. What message had he wanted to deliver, maybe some clue that would make the effort to find him possible.

  “What do you think Piper was screaming, Lolé?” Mateo said. “I want to know as well.”

  “Generally those who were sequestered screamed their names at the last moment, so that at least there would be witnesses, somebody in the street to hear what was going on and could report the disappearance.”

  “So you mean Piper came out screaming, I am Piper! I am Piper, they are kidnapping me!”

  “Probably more like, I am Horacio Rasmilovich, his real name.”

  After that Lucia learned nothing more about him, as if the earth had swallowed him, and both she and her mother-in-law devoted all their days and hours to looking for him, to reporting his kidnapping to whatever international organizations they could reach, to asking about him in the military tribunals, the general staff of the army, and the Government House. They went together to the archbishopric and to the newsrooms of the dailies, not parting from each other day or night, so that Lucia eventually moved in with her mother-in-law. They consoled each other and conducted a one-topic relationship, talking about Piper at all hours, remembering him, crying for him, plotting strategies to find him, and so on year after year, not letting the passage of time weaken their resolve, on the contrary, each day growing more stubborn, more defiant, marching every Thursday with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

  “This exact plaza, Mateo. I wanted you to see it for yourself,” Lorenza said, the two of them standing next to the obelisk that had been erected in the plaza’s center. “Here is where dictatorship began to fall, because of the shove the Mothers gave it. Every Thursday, right here where we are standing, women wearing white handkerchiefs on their heads would gather and march around this obelisk, demanding the return of their sons alive.

  “Can you imagine what courage it must have taken, Mateo? In those terrible times, they were the ones who dared. And they did it here, right in front of the Government House, across the square. They marched with the eyes of the murderers on them and in the face of the fear and indifference of most of the rest of the populace.”

  Among the Mothers were Lucia and her mother-in-law, carrying, come rain or shine, a picture of Piper on a placard, his friendly face and thick glasses, so fitting his occupation as a translator, but so incongruent with the bold red letters on the placard that announced how he had disappeared. There they headed, lining up one by one, getting up at dawn to march in front of the government offices, Lucia and her mother-in-law, enveloped in their grief, separated from the world, the only inhabitants of a lost planet called Piper.

  Every time that Aurelia ended up with Lucia, because of shared party activities, she listened to her talk about her husband with a love and devotion that was gripping. It seemed as if their married life had been a joyful one. She described him as a shy and reserved man, but affectionate, with a sophisticated sense of humor and vibrant inner life. Lucia was very pretty, tall and willowy with an exceptional angular face. And Aurelia knew, because plenty of others confided in her, that more than one comrade would have liked to approach her, invite her to the movies, become friends with her, keep her company in her calamity. But no one had dared. Given her unconditional loyalty to the memory of Piper, any such attempt would have been a transgression. It was all but certain that Piper was dead by that point, there were even some clues that this was the case, like the testimony of another prisoner who had seen him horribly tortured in solitary confinement and who did not think he could have survived. Of course, that likelihood could not be mentioned to Lucia, who was absolutely convinced that Piper was still alive, and that if she persevered in her efforts to find him, sooner or later, she would be successful. Lorenza confessed to Mateo that despite the enormous respect she had for Lucia and the sympathy she felt for her situation, she had not failed to pick up on the hint of madness in her obsession, which, plainly, affected her mother-in-law as well. They kept his things intact, his favorite armchair, his history book, open to the page that he had been reading when they seized him, his clothes laundered and folded in the armoire. Aurelia knew all this because Lucia herself had told her. She told Aurelia that it had to be that way, because any day now Piper would return. Faithful to such convictions, neither of them ever left the city, not on weekends, not on holidays, not on vacations, because what if just at that time they handed him over, what if he reappeared, or if someone showed up who could offer them a clue, someone who might know something, who, careless, might let some hint escape, even the slightest.

  “All very understandable,” Lorenza commented. “The death of a loved one is a terrible thing, but in the end there is some closure, it’s done for, no going backward or forward. But a disappearance is an open door to eternal hope, toward questions without answers, uncertainty, the hallucinatory, and there’s no human head or heart that could suffer through it without, at least to some degree, facing madness.”

  “I know,” said Mateo. “You invent things, start coming up with explanations that grow crazier and crazier. It happens to me with Ramón. Ramón is my ghost. If the dictators had disappeared him like Piper, I would have had someone to blame at least.”

  The whole thing was atrocious, starting with the very phrase “the disappeared;” instead of “kidnapped,” or “tortured,” or “murdered,” they christened them “the disappeared,” as if they had vanished on their own, no one’s doing, or maybe their own doing because of their volatile nature.

  The dictatorship disappeared people and then denied that there were disappeared ones, and so disappeared even the disappeared. Like some cruel magic trick.

  “Now you see it, now you don’t. Now it’s here, now it’s disappeared,” Mateo said.

  That was Piper’s state when Aurelia stopped seeing Lucia. Since the compartmentalization of the party was so strict, once you lost contact with someone, that person was gone, like a ring in the sea. And that’s what had happened with Lucia. Time passed. Lorenza left Argentina and went on with her life, the military junta fell, and a few years afterward, at a dinner in New York, someone introduced her to an Argentinean oncologist who had been a Montoneros sympathizer. Chatting with him, quizzing him about his experience during the dictatorship, she found out that Piper’s mother had been one of his patients and an old family friend. Lorenza immediately wanted to know about Lucia. Was she still waiting for Piper?

  “Yes, she’s still looking for him,” the oncologist told her. “With less conviction than before, but she still lives in her mother-in-law’s house—the señora passed away. And as far as I know, she’s never had another romantic relationship. Deep down in her soul, she goes on waiting for him.”

  Then Lorenza said something about how happy their marriage had been, and the doctor gave her a surprised look. “You mean you don’t know?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Lucia and Piper were separated when he was kidna
pped,” he explained. “They had been separated for at least a year and a half. He was already with someone else and so was she. By the time he was kidnapped, their relationship was a thing of the past.”

  A WEEK AFTER their first meeting in Las Violetas, Aurelia met with Forcás again, picking up things just as they had left them. The same café, the same minute, but the situation was a little more tense the second time, perhaps charged with premeditated expectations on each of their parts. It was also nighttime and the nocturnal mise-en-scène made for an awkward setup. Let’s just say that Aurelia was too dressed up, let’s say she had chosen her outfit very purposefully, and that she had blow-dried her hair, and that he for his part was recently bathed and emitted an odor of cologne, one of those virile dark ones that go for the kill, Drakkar Noir or something just as withering, in all truth, to Aurelia’s disappointment, who all week had yearned for the stable smell of his wool sweater. Now on the same note, Aurelia was no better off; in those days when she went out at night, she put on a double dose of Anaïs Anaïs, a frenziedly floral perfume. She must have strolled into Las Violetas like Botticelli’s spring, trailing a wake of lilac and jasmine. So the reason for the tension was simply that unlike the first time, this time there was a motive. The whole thing had been reduced to its common denominator, a bold flirting where conversation could not flourish. If they had met in Bogotá or Madrid, they would have broken the ice talking about Trotskyite matters, like the antagonism in Angola among the MPLA, UNITA, and FNLA, or the denunciation of the Spanish Socialist Party by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra, or the foreseeable split of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. But in Buenos Aires, they could not talk of such things. In public places they had to avoid those topics—their topics, their passions—and the nervousness was leading them into a series of phony questions and cutting replies. But the seduction was already having an effect on Aurelia, the pretty hair and the broad shoulders, so much so that she didn’t seem to mind the smoke from the Particulares 30. And just when his Drakkar Noir and her Anaïs Anaïs stopped repelling each other and began to mingle, a group of men in dark outfits and buzzed skulls burst through the door, five or six in all.

  “It’s like I’m reliving that entrance into Las Violetas, which was like elephants stomping into a fine glass shop,” Lorenza told Mateo. “Another Argentinean saying: Elephant in a glass shop.”

  Everybody froze right where they were, even the waiters, as if it were the palace of Sleeping Beauty and the only thing awake was Aurelia’s own heart, which began to beat like mad.

  “Just keep to our story and nothing will happen,” Forcás said, trying to soothe her nerves.

  They could see in the mirror in the back that the men forced two señores who shared a table to get up from their seats. They shoved the taller one to a corner of the room and the other one to an opposite corner. A few minutes later, three of the cana approached Aurelia and Forcás, who had attracted them like iron shavings to magnets. They asked for their identification papers. Around them, everybody else camouflaged themselves in a stillness that they hoped made them invisible, guiltless. If I’ve seen you, I don’t remember, and if I remember, I’ll forget. No one dared to turn and look, but they did look, if not with their eyes. Two of the men took Forcás to the door leading out to Medrano and the other one took Aurelia by the arm and pushed her toward the back, to the staircase leading to the bathrooms. That’s how they did it, they would interrogate one in one corner, who are you with, where did you meet him, what were you talking about; and the other person in the opposite corner, who introduced you, what were you talking about, when did you see each other last. Oh, there was a contradiction? Well, you’re fucked, you sons of bitches, that means you are subversives and are conspiring, we’re going to bust you open.

  The cana knew that a lot went on in the cafés and that’s how they exerted control, techniques learned at the School of the Americas, or tricks learned from the gringo military in Panama.

  “And they were right, kiddo,” Lorenza told Mateo. “The cafés of Buenos Aires were the epicenter of the conspiracy; one day they will have to build a monument to them.”

  One of the cana wore a tiny medal on his lapel, a likeness of the Virgin of Luján. He cornered Aurelia against the wall, and since he was tall, his coat scrubbed against her cheeks, so she had a perfect view, the Virgin of Luján: she wore a mantle and crown emitting rays, a half moon under one foot. She was no different than most Virgins, but the one from Luján had the national coat of arms at her feet. Except for that medal he was a typical cana. Lorenza remembered his heavy breath on her face, the dark glasses concealing the eyes, and the coarse leather of his black coat.

  “It was actually funny the way that they liked to disguise themselves,” she told Mateo. “Bastards dressed as bastards.”

  The first thing he asked her was who she was with. And she told him about Mario, whom she had met a few weeks before in her own country, and she did it with confidence, because she knew that in the opposite corner of the confectionery, Forcás would also respond that he was with a girl he had met in Colombia. Then the cana asked her what Mario was doing in Colombia, and while she responded that he had a leather business, she knew that Forcás was saying that exact thing. It was like a symphonic game between them, between Aurelia and Forcás, tossing the ball from one corner of the confectionery to the other, softly, with precision, not tripping up, not missing each other, he in his corner, she in hers, each in the other’s hands, each answering questions with the certainty that the other would back it up. Who introduced you? My brother-in-law. What is his name? Patrick. Patrick what? Would Forcás remember that it was Ferguson? Aurelia had chosen it, but it could have been any other name just as well. And yet now their lives depended on the fact that both he and she would say exactly that, Ferguson, and no other. They had agreed on it last week during their first meeting, but had not gone over it this time, all they said was, “Same story? Yes, of course, same one.” So of course he would remember. Aurelia was sure he would remember and that over there in his corner, he would be calmly responding, the brother-in-law’s last name is Ferguson. And what are you doing here? We are going to go hear some tangos, she said. I am taking her to go see the city, to hear some tangos, foreigners love that, he said. And what had he been doing in Colombia? I told you, he has a leather business with my brother-in-law. And way on the other corner, like an echo, Aurelia couldn’t hear but she guessed: I traveled to Colombia to set up the export of some leather goods with her brother-in-law. The cana who was questioning Aurelia lifted his sunglasses and fixed them on the crown of his head. They were common eyes, nondescript, maybe coffee-colored, undoubtedly myopic, and while he scrutinized her, she tried to look over his shoulder to find Forcás. At first she couldn’t see him, he was hidden behind the thick granite columns, but then she spotted him, he too was looking for her and he smiled as if nothing was happening. Everything is good, he said with his smile, and she smiled back, yes, yes, everything is good.

  The incident with the cana had been nothing, a little confrontation, routine, but it had been the ceremony that sealed the alliance between Aurelia and Forcás. She had committed herself to a pact of complicity with that man who went by the name of Forcás, and from then on she knew that her fate would be entwined with his, whatever happened. The cana ordered her to stay where she was. He put her passport in his pocket and zipped up his coat, then went to look for his buddies, obviously to compare stories, and he returned less worked up, apparently because they had passed the test. With a tone somewhere between cloying and paternal, he warned her not to mingle with strangers, you are a foreigner, he said, there are a lot of bums who will try to woo you with their stories so you take off with them, and instead of listening to tangos, you end up in a mess with some undesirable. Just go home, you seem like a good girl, go home.

  “So the one who questioned you had a leather coat?” Mateo asked.

  “I seem to remember that he pulled up the zipper of h
is coat, yes. But who knows. The only thing I know is that he was wearing something with lapels, the little medal was hanging from a hook on the lapel.”

  “Did he keep your passport?”

  “No, before he left he gave it back.”

  “Then why didn’t you say that?”

  “What?”

  “That he gave it back. That soon afterward he came back in, walked up to your table, and handed you your passport.”

  “Sorry, kiddo, I forgot that detail.”

  “You are also forgetting to tell me what happened with those two other guys they interrogated.”

  “When the cana left, I began to sweat. I felt as if a wave of heat fell over me and soaked my shirt, as if I could no longer hold back whatever involuntary physical reaction. And then your father told me that they had taken the two men, and I saw that indeed their table was now empty.”

  “What happened to them?” Mateo asked, yawning.

  “They took them in a patrol car. But go to sleep. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

  “Just tell me now.”

  “That’s it. They took them. We never found out who they were.”

  “They didn’t scream their names, like Piper? I am So-and-so, I am being kidnapped, help me!”

  “No, they didn’t scream anything. Maybe they figured that the Virgin of Luján would help them—”

  “Stop joking around, Lorenza, tell me what you think happened.”

  “That’s it, kiddo, go to sleep.”

  “Another day and I still haven’t called Ramón.”