GOYENECHE ARRIVED at the café on Florida Street, where Lorenza had agreed to meet him. They had seen each other every day during the time that they had been party comrades on the front lines, but during that hour that they shared in the café, Lorenza found out more about him than she had ever known from the years in the resistance.
He was wearing a dark shirt, a black leather coat, his hair was already graying and balding, but smoothed and gelled back like a tango singer’s, just like it had been during the years of the dictatorship. He told Lorenza that his real name was Luis Antonio Méndez, the brother of the Arturo Méndez who had been disappeared in ’74, that he wasn’t Argentinean but Uruguayan, and that after the fall of the dictatorship he had finished medical school and specialized in gynecology. Who would have thought it? Goye, a gynecologist!
“Even though Goye is not your name anymore,” she told him, “you still look like a tango singer.”
“A very old one who never knew how to sing.” He smiled.
In the old times, Goye played the flute and now, in the café, they laughed remembering the mess he had caused for doing just that, the day he hadn’t shown up to a meeting, and had spread panic everywhere because he had been so absorbed with this sweet flute that he forgot the time.
“Damn it, Goye,” Lorenza said. “You scared the hell out of us. You dispersed us to such an extent that it took us a month to round up everybody. Do you still play the flute?”
“After what happened, are you crazy? The flute for me was like it was for the czar’s musicians,” he said. And he told her how if they played well, the czar ordered that the instruments be stuffed with gold, and the flautists ended up fucked, and that if they played badly, the czar ordered them to stuff their instruments up their asses, and the flautists ended up fucked.
Lorenza had sought out Goye for a specific reason; apparently he knew about Ramón’s time in prison. And not through the political grapevine but through a chance circumstance: his wife was the first cousin of Forcás’s girlfriend at the time he was detained.
Mateo had not wanted to go with her to the meeting at the café. He had decided instead to go shopping in the stores on Florida. A present for a friend, a girl, he told his mother. But he refused to tell her who the girl was.
Goyeneche, or Luis Antonio Méndez, told Aurelia, now Lorenza, that his wife’s cousin, a girl named Marisa, who worked as a professional makeup artist, had suffered tremendously when Ramón had been arrested. At first, they had accused her of being complicit, since they had a stable relationship, but later they found her innocent. Goye had already left when Mateo returned from his shopping trip and showed his mother the cherry-colored leather change purse that he had bought for his nameless friend.
“Do you like it?” he asked. “I also bought another one, a green one.”
“For another girlfriend?”
“No, for you. Or would you rather have the red one?”
Lorenza took the green change purse and planted a loud kiss on it, which she would rather have planted on Mateo, but he would have resisted. Then she told him what she had learned from Goyeneche.
The prison incident had nothing to do with politics but with some shady scheme, for which Ramón was the brains, along with his only brother, Uncle Miche, who had come up with the idea and was the main player. It involved a good deal of cash transferred monthly from a bank in the provinces to Buenos Aires by a moving company. The money would arrive at its destination in the middle of the night and would be placed in a high-security deposit safe until it was picked up the following morning. But it wasn’t the only delivery that arrived, since the moving company had other clients aside from the bank. So Ramón sent, from some town in the interior, a huge wooden box addressed to himself that was scheduled to arrive on the same day as the bank’s money.
“So wait … my father sent himself a big wooden box,” Mateo said. “This is getting interesting.”
“Yes, he was both the sender and the recipient.”
“I bet it wasn’t an empty box.”
“Right. But see if you can guess what was in it. Believe it or not, your uncle Miche.”
“Uncle Miche? Inside the box?” Mateo laughed. “You’re telling me that my uncle Miche was the merchandise? And what shit was he up to inside that wooden box?”
“Your uncle Miche was to arrive sealed in the box to the deposit safe. He’d come out of his hiding pace in the middle of the night, switch the bags of money for fake ones, keep the real ones with him inside the wooden box, which he would reseal and wait … for your father to claim him the following day.”
“Brilliant! But where did it go wrong?”
“Goye says that according to his wife’s cousin they had done a practice run of the whole thing, in a different shipment, not the one with the money, and everything had gone without a hitch. Uncle Miche had spent the night in the deposit safe without being noticed and on the following day Ramón had successfully claimed him. So far, so good.”
“What a bitch of a life!”
“I know, it’s unbelievable. They repeated the operation, this time for real, on the day the money was sent. But because Uncle Miche is no taller than five feet three inches or so, the box he was in was very heavy, and this time the movers dropped it. Your uncle Miche suffered a tremendous blow to the head and lost consciousness. It seems that he was out when he arrived at the deposit company, and that he only started to come to the following morning, and he groaned.”
“Of course, they heard him. The weird case of the groaning wooden box.”
“They heard him and figured out what was going on, but they didn’t say anything at first. They waited for the recipient to come and claim him and they snatched your father as well.”
“It’s like an episode of the Three Stooges.”
“The two stooges.”
“Typical Ramónism!”
“The moral of the story: don’t hit your head while you’re heading a heist,” she said, and the two broke into fits of uncontrollable laughter.
Ramón and Uncle Miche spent a few months behind bars. Nothing serious, since Miche had never gotten his hands on the money, they couldn’t prove much. Don’t hit your head while you’re heading a heist, Mateo repeated on the way back to the hotel, amused. But when they arrived he suddenly grew morose.
“Don’t laugh anymore, Lorenza. It’s not funny. I would have preferred if Ramón had been a real criminal,” he said. “And that the sentence had been many years. At least that way I could have believed that he never looked for me because he couldn’t, because he was in prison and they wouldn’t let him. A great thug, or a famous underground political leader, someone sentenced to high-security solitary confinement for many years, thinking about me every day, like I think about him. Someone who was sure that as soon as he was let go, the first thing he would do is look for that son he had lost. I swear, Lolé. I had held out such hopes until today. I think I’d rather he was dead. So that I could forgive him. Do you understand? But no, now it seems that he is alive, jailed for some buffoonery.”
WHY HADN’T RAMÓN ever looked for Mateo? The question kept Lorenza awake that night. In her insomnia, near dawn, she wanted to put these thoughts to rest and started reading the novel by Bernhard Schlink that she had bought a few days earlier on Avenida Corrientes. And by chance she came upon a passage that perhaps held the only answer to that impossible question. Why hadn’t Ramon looked for Mateo all those years? “There are some things you do just because,” Schlink wrote, “because the conscience dozes, becomes anesthetized, not because we make this or that decision, but because what we decide is precisely not to decide, as if our will is overwhelmed by the impossibility of finding a way out and decides to stop pedaling and idles while it can.” Perhaps the reason Ramón did not look for Mateo was simply because he did not look for him. Perhaps there was no other answer but that, leaving a void where the boy so much wanted answers.
Lorenza read Schlink’s passage several times, thinking that she
would have to read it to Mateo. Or maybe not, it would be too difficult for him. She had always tried to protect her son from the pain of the past, as if she could suppress it by simply not naming it. Silencing words had been her main tool, and perhaps it was for that, more than the acts themselves, that Mateo could not forgive her. He couldn’t forgive her for minimizing the past, making it seem unimportant, trying to neutralize it, avoiding the topic, not reacting to it. It was possible that Mateo felt that when she came between him and the raging bull of his abandonment, she prevented him from seeing it fully, and left him defenseless against its charge. It was possible that Mateo believed that by denying the loneliness of abandonment, instead of exorcising it, she helped to multiply it, leaving him even more alone. Or was it her own fault, her role in everything which she tried to camouflage with euphemisms?
At breakfast the following morning, all these questions had been reduced to the phantoms of her sleeplessness, truths intuited but not fully integrated. The insomniac night once again constrained her to futile gestures and truncated language, because how could she name such things without deepening the wound, where could she find rhyme or reason? There are never good enough reasons for a father’s abandonment, and that made it unnamable. Idling, the Schlink passage said, how well it applied to Lorenza.
LORENZA AND MATEO had a couple of bad days following that, dejected and keeping their distance from each other in reverse, the boy holed up in his dark mood and not coming out of his room, and Lorenza sleepless at night and struggling to work while dozing off during the day. On returning to the hotel, all she had to do was see the PLEASE DON’T DISTURB sign hanging on the door to guess that inside the beds would be unmade, towels would be strewn on the floor, the drapes drawn, and in the middle of the shipwreck her son, in his pajamas still, hair uncombed, subsisting on chocolates, potato chips, and Coca-Colas from the minibar, and in a catatonic state in front of his PlayStation, which would be spitting smoke from hour after hour of continual use. She had always been afraid of the PlayStation. It sounded ridiculous, the idea of fearing such an object, a toy. But that’s how it was. The way that Mateo allowed himself to be devoured by the thing made her anxious. It put her on edge—the repetitive little electronic music that invaded him and transported him to a distant world, hyperkinetic and overpopulated with kicking and punching cartoons, who fired machine guns, jumped over barrels, climbed towers, fell over dead, came back to life, crossed through labyrinths, drowned in a moat, and tossed grenades, always at an unsustainable ultrahuman rhythm that was in stark contrast with the statuesque stillness that was Mateo, because aside from his dancing pupils and his thumbs, which punched at buttons in sync with the frenzy on the screen, everything else about him was stillness, absence, hypnosis. And of course, the frightening thing wasn’t the game but what Mateo did not say, what he avoided, what he denied when he sat down in a lotus position, like a boy Buddha, in front of that strange illuminated altar. After Mateo learned about the circumstances surrounding his father’s prison sentence, he decided to close his ears and mouth and wanted to know nothing more about him, about Buenos Aires, but also nothing more about his mother.
He announced that he would return to Bogotá as soon as they could get a plane reservation, and she could find no arguments to dissuade him. There was no way she could get him to allow them more time to find a less disheartening finale to the trip that they had undertaken with such great hopes.
“Do you want to talk, Mateo?” Lorenza asked him, but her son was so absorbed in the game that he did not even respond.
“Son, don’t you think we should talk?” she insisted.
“No, Lolé, anything you say will make me feel like shit. I don’t like the way you talk to me.”
“I’m doing what I can, kiddo, telling you about things as they happened—”
“That’s the problem, you are Wonder Woman and the whole story is like a screenplay for an action film. Your Ramón is a comic-book hero. He does this thing here. Zap! Wap! Does that thing there. Boom! Shoom! He falls, he gets up. Krak! Crock! He’s arrested, released, fights against the villains, against the good guys. It doesn’t make sense, Lorenza, do you understand? That fiction has nothing to do with the Ramón who is my father. My father is a weirdo, a shitty crook, a frustrated one at that, who doesn’t have the balls to show his face, to come offer me some explanations. What does your wide-shouldered warrior have to do with that bastard who erases himself, who disappears? Riiiiiiiiing … Riiiiiiing … Hello? Who is it? No one, nobody, no response, I don’t know, wrong number, who gives a shit.”
“Couldn’t you wait for me a few days, Mateo, until I finish my duties here in Buenos Aires, and then we can return together to Bogotá?” she asked. “Or if you want, you can go tomorrow morning to Bariloche, and do some skiing until I come pick you up.”
But Mateo refused outright. The only thing he wanted was to be left alone and in peace, submerged in his PlayStation, lost to the world.
ON THE THIRD day of Mateo’s isolation, Lorenza decided to cancel all her appointments and stay in the hotel with him, playing with him on the PlayStation, to see if she could reestablish some sort of contact in this manner. If Muhammad can’t go to the mountain, the mountain is going to have to sit down at the PlayStation.
“Can I play with you?” she asked.
“No, you don’t know how.”
“You can teach me.”
“You’re too old, you don’t have the reflexes.”
“So try me.”
“All right, but let’s play Dynasty Warriors.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Lock the door and hang up the sign, so no one interrupts.”
“Who’s going to interrupt?”
“Just hang the sign, will you? Dynasty Warriors is my favorite of all the PlayStation games. You play in steps, and the more you advance, the more skilled Wei-Wulong becomes and the more powers he acquires,” he explained, suddenly very talkative. Speaking of Wei-Wulong filled him with pride, as if he himself were the one who possessed those powers. Lorenza hung the sign on the doorknob and they entered, Wu, Shu, and Wei, the three kingdoms of Dynasty Warriors, where everything was brutal and luminous. Here there was no resting, but also no fatigue; the battles were ferocious but devoid of blood and bodies, because when an enemy was eliminated, all it did was flash and disappear right away. Mateo barely blinked, everything about him was concentration, tension, and alert reflexes, his vision good only for the vertiginous slashes of the swords. Lorenza noticed how amid those brilliant, sparkling colors, the room vanished and the other world slowly shut off, a slow and boring thing. At this moment, Mateo does not exist, she thought. Wei-Wulong has taken possession of my son.
“Didn’t you say you were going to show me?” she asked, and her voice startled Mateo, who had completely forgotten she was there.
He replied that he would, and began to explain the game to her, not handing over the controls yet, telling her when she should bring out the catapults, when she should use the drawbridges, how to score points. Finally, she got him to turn over the controls, but because she played horribly he quickly grew impatient, upset with her and with her incompetence, and made her turns shorter and shorter as he made his longer. His explanations, at first very enthusiastic, became more sporadic and succinct, until he again immersed himself fully in what seemed like a religious silence.
Lorenza soon opened the door and left the room, and Mateo did not even notice.
“EXACTLY FIFTEEN DAYS afterward Ramón left with you,” Lorenza begins to tell him.
“He didn’t leave with me, Mother. He kidnapped me.”
“Fifteen days after that—”
“It’s not called ‘that,’ it’s called disappearing a kid. You, who tell the story of the disappeared in Argentina so often, are afraid of the word when it deals with your own son.”
“It’s not the same, Mateo, you know that.”
“It’s not the same, but it’s very similar.”
> “Similar, perhaps, but not really. Let me go on. Fifteen days later I found out that just as I had expected, he had fled with you to Argentina. It was confirmed by a very unexpected source.”
“Slow down, Lorenza. Slow down, you’ve never told me this part.”
“So be patient and you’ll hear it.”
That whole week passed without a call from Ramón. They called her, however, from La Crónica. The director of the magazine, who had given her as much time off as she needed, and who did anything he could to help her, told her that a very serious-looking man had shown up in the newsroom asking for her and saying he had news about her husband. A funny word, husband, which Lorenza never used to refer to Ramón, and that those who knew them well would not have used either.
She was there in less than an hour to meet a man who gave her a business card that said he was Joaquín Alberio Pinilla, Attorney. But clearly not just any attorney, his smile shone revealing gold fillings and extremely white porcelain implants, his extremely black curls were just beginning to go gray, and in front of the building he had parked an exceedingly silver Toyota, of the kind that narco traffickers owned. When she had investigated and written about organized crime, Lorenza interviewed some of these lawyers, who acted as spokespersons and representatives for the Mafia.
“If I am not mistaken, you signed this,” the man said, pulling out of his pocket a check for one hundred and fifty thousand pesos, a very large sum for her then, considering that her salary was twenty-eight thousand a month. The check was signed in her handwriting and had come from her checkbook. It was dated the day before. “Your husband, the Argentinean señor, gave it to my boss a month ago, postdated, shall we say. Yesterday the date came up and my boss sent me to cash it, and I’m sorry, it was returned for lack of funds. I understand that your husband is no longer in Colombia, so with all due respect, you are going to have to answer for this.” The man fanned himself with the check while he proffered smiles and variant courtesies.
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