No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  “No. He was miserable. We had left Argentina at my request, distancing ourselves from the party. You were going to be two, we had gone through three tyrants, one after the other and each with his blood spilling—the generals Videla, Viola, and Galtieri. I couldn’t take it anymore. The anguish over the fact that something might happen to us before four in the afternoon, and that no one could pick you up from the sitter, was killing me. That was the worst part of the fear, that it would be four o’clock and no one would be there to pick you up at the sitter.

  “For your safety and for my peace of mind, Ramón agreed to move to Bogotá and distance himself from everything that was his, the party, his comrades, what he liked to eat, and the only job he knew how to do. And in Bogotá, I forgot about him and left him very alone and isolated. For some reason, I remember with an almost photographic memory each of the objects that we had in Coronda and not even one of the objects we put up in the apartment in Bogotá; except for the poster in your room, I don’t remember any of them.”

  One of the lines in that letter from Ramón that she did not read, the one that he left for her during the dark episode, said “exiled from everything, even your love.” And, “I’m taking the boy, the only thing that is mine.”

  “Then you did read the letter.”

  “No, only those lines.”

  “I need a screwcork to pull information out of you.”

  “Corkscrew.”

  “Yeah, that. You know, there are times I would like to forgive him.”

  “Wanting to forgive is already a form of forgiving, I suppose.”

  “But no, no, he was a bullshitter, I wasn’t the only thing that he took with him. He also took that money that wasn’t his.”

  AURELIA HAD BEEN in Coronda for only a brief while when Forcás announced that the leadership of the party wanted to meet with her. Aside from Forcás himself, Águeda and Ana would be there, two of the party’s historic directors. They were known to be powerful and mysterious, and spent most of the time outside of the country, from where they pulled strings, and their methods were known to be relentless.

  “It was very rare that they would attend a meeting,” Lorenza told her son. “To meet Águeda and Ana was quite an opportunity. Ninety percent of the party membership had likely never seen them in person, only in photographs.”

  “So it was like meeting Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp at the same time, huh?” Mateo asked.

  “I couldn’t even begin to imagine what task I would be assigned or where they would want to send me. On the day of the meeting, Forcás accompanied me to the place, but didn’t divulge anything. Apparently he already knew how I was needed, but he didn’t want to tell me anything. I kept my eyes lowered, looking at the ground so as not to figure out the exact whereabouts of the meeting, although this precaution was superfluous, since there was no way I could figure it out.”

  When she could look up again, she was inside a darkened house where someone had smoked a lot, the smell of cigarettes was the first thing she noticed. But it also smelled like garlic, so they must have been cooking. Forcás led her into the kitchen, which was unlike the other rooms, bathed in daylight coming in from a window that faced an inner courtyard, and the comrade who was cooking there said, “It’s gnocchi with ham broth, che, I hope you like it.”

  Seated at a table, in front of an ashtray filled with butts, were the two women. The one who introduced herself as Águeda was older and wore her hair so short that her ears were completely visible, two gypsy-like monstrosities hanging from them. Ana, the quieter one, her lips painted red, had a face like an otter, but was good-looking nevertheless. Both rose to welcome her with a hug and immediately began to ask her questions about the political situation in Colombia and about the functioning of the solidarity with the Argentinean office in Madrid.

  “And then I thought, That’s what they want,” Lorenza recounted to her son. “They want information on the international work, and it even occurred to me that they had wanted to meet with me to ask me to relocate, to return to Madrid. But no, it wasn’t that.”

  “Listen, piba,” Águeda had told her, and Aurelia had listened, and on hearing what they wanted had gone cold. Her mouth grew dry and she couldn’t respond.

  “I know what they wanted, you told me once,” Mateo said. “They wanted you to turn over San Jacinto to the party.”

  “It’s called cotizar, to give up for the general welfare.”

  “Yeah, cotizar, for you to give up San Jacinto for the general welfare.”

  “They had found out that I inherited a finca in Colombia and they had come into the country to talk to me about how in the party we all lived with what we needed and gave up the rest for the general welfare, the good of the party. They said that this was the Bolshevik and proletarian thing to do, ‘the bolche and the prole,’ and that Homero had offered his mother’s apartment when she had passed away, and that La Gata had turned in the whole of her inheritance, and that Rafael, who was the owner of a factory, had given it to the party and now lived on a laborer’s salary.”

  The bolche and prole, prole and bolche, and Aurelia before them mute. She hadn’t said yes, or no, not even maybe; she couldn’t say a thing. San Jacinto was the only thing she had left of her father. More than a finca, for her it was a collection of Sunday mornings, afternoons of hot chocolate and fritters, trips to the countryside, and whole nights by the fireplace. San Jacinto was a handful of animals with proper names and soft hair. How do you give up animals and memories for the national welfare?

  “But most important, it was a finca, damn it,” Lorenza told the boy, “good land that was worth a few million pesos, in the end my only inheritance. And I couldn’t say a word. My ears were buzzing and their voices grew distant. I turned around to look at Forcás, as if begging him for help. Up to that moment, Forcás had remained silent, and when he opened his mouth it was to agree with them, the Bolshevik and the proletariat on one side and on the other the fucking petite bourgeoisie.”

  She knew she didn’t want to, but she couldn’t avoid it, she had to say yes, of course she would give up the finca for the general welfare, but the words got caught in her throat. The worst thing in the world was to be a petit bourgeois, and she wanted with all her heart to be bolche and prole, but she heard those voices as if they were an echo, that So-and-so turned in his car, Such-and-such her marriage ring, and she was unable to hear anything but her own inner turmoil, as if she were chomping on raw carrots. Where could she find the words to explain to them that Papaíto baked bread in the oven, that San Jacinto was where his pampered cows grazed, that she had never received the dress he sent to Madrid? How could she tell them that her mother had sent her Bally shoes, that she had used the box to hide some dollars, and that Forcás had never given them back, although she reminded him of it every day? These were the only arguments that came to her head in defense of San Jacinto, and something told her that they weren’t going to sound very convincing to the ears of the two monuments carved from living rock who were sitting there, inheritors of the purest and hardest worker’s code, Águeda and Ana.

  “So what did you say?” Mateo asked.

  “That first I would have to go to Colombia to take over the inheritance, because it had not yet been transferred to me and I couldn’t do it from Argentina.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “To think about it, that it didn’t have to be right away. Then the comrade who had been cooking served the gnocchi with bread and red wine and sat down to eat with us, and they talked to me a long while about the difference between a dilettante and a professional militant. When they said goodbye, they told me that I had to decide whether I wanted to cross over, or that I had to burn some bridges, or something about bridges and crossings, one of those irrefutable metaphors.”

  Up to then, Lorenza had always thought that she would hold on in Argentina as long as she could, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, well, back to where she came from. She would stop being Aurelia an
d return to Colombia and that would be that, her mission completed and duties fulfilled in the resistance. But after the meeting with Águeda and Ana, her whole stay in Buenos Aires didn’t feel so much like theater or some adventure anymore. She left that kitchen feeling that she was now bound by a deep commitment and there would be no going back.

  “It all makes sense, Lorenza,” Mateo told her. “The turning over of one’s inheritance is a test that any hero has to pass. Like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, how can you not see these things? The hero has to renounce his former life and his blood ties in order to begin clean and pure on his quest, without prior ties to his new family, which is the secret society. And he has to give up his former name. It’s so much like in the movies, that going from Lorenza to Aurelia, from Ramón to Forcás … Like Darth Vader, which is the name that the Sith give Anakin Skywalker when he joins them. You were fulfilling all the prerequisites, Mother, and you still don’t even realize it; change of name, truncated identity, coded language, secret society, danger of death, superior ideals, the renunciation of the previous life.… Do you see any of this? You were fulfilling all the prerequisites of the initiation ritual.”

  “Ini-ti-a-tion.”

  “Right, that.”

  “But look at it from a more practical point of view,” his mother proposed. “To go around doing what we did using your real name would have been pretty stupid. And as far as San Jacinto … how else do you think an unarmed resistance can survive, but by the voluntary donations of those who ran it and supported it? Right? So let’s just leave it at that and say that the gnocchi was one damn expensive meal.”

  “DID YOU LIKE Azucena?” Mateo wanted to know.

  “She smelled like cookies.”

  Azucena, Miche’s girlfriend, worked at Bagley, a cookie and cracker factory south of the city, on Avenida Montes de Oca, near Barracas. Her job consisted of taking cookies out of the oven, tray after tray of cookies, exposed to high temperatures and sweating buckets, until the smell got into her skin and impregnated her hair. At the end of the shift, she showered at the factory with hot water, scrubbing herself with soap and shampoo, but she could not completely get rid of that sweet, penetrating smell.

  “She arrived at the house smelling divine, of cinnamon and butter and flour.”

  Lorenza remembered her sitting on a stool on the patio, trying to paint her toenails a dark red, with balls of cotton between each toe, and frustrated because she couldn’t hit the target precisely with the nail-polish brush.

  “I should have helped her do it, who knows why I didn’t,” Lorenza said. “In fact, it wasn’t that easy to approach her. She was always tense, her movements sudden bursts of electricity, as if there was some kind of short circuit inside her. Maybe her blood pressure was a little high after a whole day of toiling at the factory, or maybe her illness influenced her inability to hit her target with the nail-polish brush.”

  Azucena’s personality had been a mystery to Aurelia until Miche secretly confessed that he bought her Epamin tablets to prevent seizures. Epilepsy? Miche said yes, a mild form of epilepsy.

  “What were they like?” asked Mateo.

  “What was what like?”

  “The seizures.”

  “I never saw her have one. She was thin, a good body; I’d say pretty, if she didn’t comb her hair to look a bit like Betty Boop, and her eyebrows were plucked so thoroughly that they had almost completely disappeared. But she was pretty, although she had a strange and feverish way of looking at you.”

  At first she said she didn’t want to know anything about politics, but Azucena ended up introducing them to a pair of workers from the Bagley factory, and thus, in that way, began raising the political consciousness in the food industry. And even though Azucena eventually stepped aside, these two workers presented them to another, and then someone from Terrabusi and from Canale, the other two traditional cookie factories, and so they started to put a small group together. To avoid using their real names, they decided they’d use the name of the cookies they were responsible for on the production line. So one was Criollita, another Smile, the others Two Smiles, Temptation, Merengue, Rumba, Twin One, Twin Two, even Twin Three during their busiest seasons.

  “Good noms de guerre,” Mateo said. “I would have enjoyed being in a subversive cell with Smile, Rumba, and Merengue.”

  The girls took at least an hour between the whistle announcing the end of their shift and when they showed up in El Chino, a little hole-in-the-wall bar a few blocks from Bagley, where on Mondays and Thursdays Aurelia waited for them to arrive at the group’s secret meeting.

  They would appear there without aprons or gray plastic caps, freshly bathed, their hair brushed and blow-dried, meticulously made up, in tight jeans and high heels. The minute was that they were getting together to see Amor gitano, the soap opera that was the craze then. They took Aurelia to the rooms they shared in the tenements of Barracas.

  “Creaking wooden floors, twin beds, flowery quilts, a stove, a good-size TV, and a large picture of Evita in the most prominent spot,” Lorenza told Mateo. “Nothing more, nothing less, those were their treasures. You couldn’t miss the picture of Evita, with plastic flowers and lit candles, or I should say the altar to Eva Perón, dead so long but still on her throne.”

  Aurelia began to understand whom these girls resembled, whom they dressed, moved, and talked like. Who else could it be but Evita, prim and shaken by the country, ready to become martyrs if such a thing was necessary. If Evita had been a laborer … for Evita, and under her protection, the girls from Bagley would go up against anything, they would dare to confront anyone who got in their way, starting with the cunt of your mother’s dictatorship, as they said: those military bastards and those bitch mothers who gave birth to them.

  “But you weren’t a Peronista,” said Mateo.

  “I was a Trotskyite, and they accepted me as the leader in their get-togethers, but if I had made one peep about their Evita they would have slammed the door in my face. And all for what, we were supposed to stand united against the dictatorship, no?”

  Already locked in the room, seated three to a bed, they passed around the maté and got the ball rolling by talking about the quality of different brands of panty hose, about the varicose veins they got from standing on their feet for so long, about creams for dry hands, the prices of things, dastardly men, the miracles of saints, and the delays in menstruation. But at the stroke of seven, as if by magic, they all went silent at the same time. In the tenement, in the neighborhood, apparently in all of Buenos Aires such silence was imposed, because that’s when the soap opera started. A new episode of Amor gitano.

  Criollita, Smile, Rumba, and Temptation affixed their eyes on the screen, madly in love with Renzo, the Gypsy, as handsome as he was masculine, with eyes so deep. Impulsive and courageous, he had been unjustly convicted of a crime he had not committed and thus deprived of the love of the beautiful Countess de Astolfi, herself a victim of an infamous tyranny in a realm from an indeterminate place and time—but much like present-day Argentina—a place dominated by cruel villains such as Count Farnesio and his vile lackey the hunchback Dino, perhaps even crueler, and scattered with dungeons and secret passages and forest ambushes, where young and green-eyed innocents like Renzo were locked up in inhumane Islands of the Damned.

  During commercial breaks, the girls from Bagley forgot about Renzo, the time had come for plotting. They turned up the volume, lowered their voices to a whisper, and the clandestine meeting took place. Rumba, who belonged to the internal committee, reported that in the nineteenth century the “law of the chair” had been approved, which their employer no longer respected, but which they should start fighting for again: for every hour on their feet, they had a right to fifteen minutes of sitting.

  Then Renzo and Adriana de Astolfi pledged to love each other forever through a Gypsy blood rite, and during the commercials that followed Aurelia had them read excerpts from the party newspaper and talked about the articles w
ith them. You should have seen how those girls hurled curses and insults in low voices at the military junta, at the executioners of Triple A, at the federals of coordination, against the Marquis Farnesio and his abject hunchback. And you should have heard how they pledged their lives and swore to overthrow them, all of them, to restore freedom to Renzo and to all the missing and kidnapped. Because if Evita were alive, she would not have allowed these criminals to fuck with our lives like this. If Evita were alive, if Renzo the Gypsy, if the Countess de Astolfi really existed …

  IN THE THIRD room in Coronda, the one right next to Miche’s, lived a paralyzed man.

  “How paralyzed?”

  “Very paralyzed. He got around in a wheelchair, never went out, and could barely fend for himself.”

  That man was married to a much younger woman named Gisella Sanchez, who helped him with everything and certainly also supported him, because he could not work at all and she did, as a florist. Gisella Sanchez left early in the morning and returned at night, and if her husband needed anything while he was alone, he banged the end of a broomstick on the ceiling, which could be heard in the brothers’ rooms, so whoever was there dropped by to help him. Maybe he had dropped the paper, and they would pick it up for him, or he had finished the bottle of water or had run out of toilet paper, so they went to the market to get it for him. Sometimes the wind twisted the antenna of his television and Miche or Forcás would climb on the roof to straighten it. Gisella Sanchez was very grateful for everything they did, and would bring them back flowers from the shop as gifts.

  Forcás had never talked openly about politics with her, and yet they had agreed upon a pact as a matter of survival. More than a pact, it was a favor, a risky one that she had agreed to do for them if there were ever any problems. Lorenza did not know whether the husband, the paralyzed man, was aware of the agreement.