No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  “It was a piece of cardboard with big red letters announcing FORD TRUCK FOR SALE.” Forcás had given it to Gisella to hang on the front door if there was ever any sign of strange things going on in the tenement or the neighborhood while they were out. Something strange—Forcás had not explained this further and she had not asked him to. She only said that she understood, and that he could count on her. Such things could be done because there was some complicity between people, a kind of understanding that was given to this or that, by sign or smell.

  “What if you were wrong?”

  “There was a margin of error, but it was difficult to go too far wrong. You could see in a person’s face whether he was for or against the dictatorship. Chatting for five minutes with someone beyond fútbol and the weather was enough to more or less know where they stood.”

  “Did you live in Coronda when I came along?” Mateo wanted to know.

  One spring afternoon, Aurelia had come running into the house in Coronda with a paper in hand, a certificate that she had just been given. She handed it to Ramón for him to read aloud: “Laboratory Clinical Analysis, Dr. Juan Manuel Rey, Immunological Test for Pregnancy: Positive.”

  “Ramón was thrilled, Mateo. He went off to cry and was very excited,” said his mother.

  “Really?”

  “Really. What I saw that day was a man who was happy.”

  “Then who knows when it ran out for him.”

  In the months that followed, Coronda was populated with dreams, sometimes Aurelia dreamed, sometimes Forcás. Some were pleasant and full of good omens, while others were stifling, and recounting them to Mateo, Lorenza asked herself how they dreamed in that room, when they could barely sleep from the excitement of the news of the pregnancy, on that narrow bed, the noise of the trucks and the comings and goings of Azucena, her slippers shuffling to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the bathroom, before leaving for the factory, and then to top everything off, Miche, who burst in offering breakfast. Not to mention the negligible noise of any night, which at that time could easily be confused with something more alarming.

  “You can’t really sleep when even the sound of a cat on the roof seems like a dire threat,” Lorenza said. “And yet we dreamed, Mateo. We dreamed about you.”

  Ramón dreamed one night that the child was born while he was away and that on his return he could not find him. Crazed, he wandered here and there asking about their newborn, until someone told him that the woman who looked after him had carried him in her arms to the sanctuary of Luján. In the dream, Ramón, who had not yet seen his child and therefore didn’t know what it looked like, had to search in a crowd of pilgrims walking on their knees to the shrine.

  Some time later, it was Aurelia who awoke, shaken by a nightmare. Her child was born and had a serious and beautiful face; he didn’t smile but his features were perfect, yet his body was elongated like that of a lizard. She wanted to hug him, to wrap him in a blanket so he would not be cold, but the baby-lizard wriggled away.

  “I suspect that when sleeping, your father and I recognized what we could not even ask ourselves when we were awake. How were we to care for you, Mateo, if we had made a profession of not taking care of ourselves? How to defend your life without knowing how long our own would last? Your birth was to be a success against all evidence, an urgent reclamation of life from within the gears of death that surrounded us.”

  It had been three weeks since they had learned of the pregnancy. It was Saturday, about one in the afternoon. Azucena was not there, and Miche had left that day with the announcement that he’d return to prepare an eggplant lasagna for dinner, provided they buy the ingredients. Aurelia and Forcás went to the market to get what they needed: pasta, eggplant, tomatoes, mozzarella, Parmesan, garlic, and olive oil.

  They did not return directly but wandered around the neighborhood as was their routine, a stop at the pharmacy, another in the deli to assemble the charcuterie, as Forcás said: black olives, salami, poultry, and mayonnaise. They lingered a moment, smelling the jasmine on Primera Junta, then bought and leafed through the newspaper and magazines at the newsstand, the whole trip and back about an hour long. Returning by Alberdi, they turned into Coronda and approached the house. Forcás was reading something in the newspaper when she caught sight of the sign on the door, FORD TRUCK FOR SALE. Her heart kicked in her chest. She grabbed Forcas’s arm and instinctively tried to turn around, but he forced her to keep walking forward. Slowly, calmly, without fuss.

  Do not run, Aurelia, the first thing to do is not to run. Pale, with their hearts in their mouths, they passed in front of the house without even turning around to look at it and kept on going, reaching the back entrance of the market.

  They hid in the aisles, weaving through the vegetable and meat counters until they reached the front entrance facing Rivadavia. From there they walked to the Primera Junta Station. Mixed in with all the other people, they waited for what seemed a century for the subway to arrive, they took it, making several line changes and then resurfacing somewhere that was unfamiliar to Aurelia. They would never return to Coronda.

  “DO YOU KNOW how long a person can go without sleep?” Lorenza asked Mateo. “Twenty days and nights. You’re going to say that this is not possible, but I know that it is. I know from experience. Twenty days and nights I had not slept, and weighed ten kilos less, when the call from your father finally came.”

  “Just follow his lead,” she’d been told by Dr. Haddad, an expert on kidnapping who knew how to handle a call from an enemy who has your loved one in his hands. “If he says he loves you, you tell him that you love him. If he says that he misses you, tell him that you miss him. If he cries, you cry. But if he’s angry, do not get angry. Cry anyway, that always works. Tell him you’re sorry, that you need both him and the boy badly. Don’t forget that, both him and the child: don’t skip him. Don’t lay the blame on him, blame yourself. Lie consistently and without scruples and pretend that what matters here is that communication is not broken, which will be prolonged and narrowed, the thread that leads you to the child.”

  To Lorenza’s ears, the voice of Ramón arrived both as a saving grace and improbably, like a miracle. The same drone voice, the same hurried pronunciation that, years later, Mateo was to hear recorded on the answering machine. Where was he talking from? Lorenza did not find out. Ramón did not say, and she did not ask him.

  “I didn’t want to pressure him or make him uncomfortable,” she recounted to Mateo. Haddad had said it would be like dancing with a partner, she’d have to keep up with the beat and not fall too far behind or leap forward.

  “And why didn’t you do it like in NYPD Blue, install a tracking system that in three and a half minutes finds out where the call is coming from?”

  “I did. But it was like in the movies, after three minutes, he hung up.”

  It seemed to her that Ramón was speaking from another world, that other world where her son was, a slippery world, almost unimaginable, almost nonexistent, which had been lost in space until the voice of Ramón told her, without telling her, that there was a specific point on the map where her son was. No longer in the nebula, or in a vacuum, or in death, but in a city or a village, in a hotel or a house where there was a physical point, a phone, and probably a table and a bed. A real place. It was terrible not to know where it was, but at least Lorenza knew that such a place existed. And if it existed, she could get there.

  The call lasted three minutes and seven seconds, as Guadalupe timed it and recorded it. And then Lorenza hung up and she was able to master the shock. Together, they listened to the tape again and again, lest any data, hint, or nuance escape them. During the three minutes and seven seconds, Lorenza had not protested or insulted, had not said anything off script. During the first two minutes, she had simply asked how Mateo was.

  “Very well,” said the voice, and she thought she felt the presence of the child, believed to guess his breath, trying to quiet the noise of her own heart, which thundered
in her ears, lest it prevented her from hearing the boy’s heart, which would be beating on the other side.

  “He’s happy, eating well, sleeping well, has learned two new words and repeats them every hour. I’ll put him on in a moment so that he can tell you what they are himself. But he’s driving me crazy repeating them.”

  Ramón’s voice sounded natural, almost festive, as if nothing had happened, as if it were simply the voice of a father who has taken his child to spend the weekend on a finca, like he was supposed to do, and was making a routine call to the mother to catch her up on things.

  “Put him on,” Lorenza implored, trying not to sound too much like she was begging, trying to attune her voice to Ramón’s, trying to sound like him.

  She was gleeful, almost happy, playing the same game, following Ramón’s lead like Haddad had indicated, as if nothing had happened, as if she had not dropped ten kilos, as if she had not remained awake for twenty days and nights, as if she were not a death in life, which only the presence of the son could resurrect, as if she were any mom who has packed the suitcase for her son, including his warm pants, a couple of toys, and teddy bear pajamas, because the son has gone with his father but only for the weekend.

  “What words,” she openly pleaded now, “tell me what words Mateo has learned.”

  “He’s going to tell you himself,” said Ramón, but he never put the boy on. “Just calling to tell you that Mateo is well and to ask how you yourself are.”

  “I’ve been through hell but I’m fine now that I have heard from you,” said Lorenza, and wished she could insist that he put Mateo on. But Guadalupe was standing beside her, stopwatch in hand, making peremptory signs not to go there and putting before her eyes a paper with writing in big letters, the passage that they had calculated might precipitate the trip: Today, a man came looking for me demanding that I pay the money from a check. Tell me what to do, Ramón, that man is going to kill me if I don’t pay the money back.

  Lorenza read what was written on the paper, word for word, trying not to make it sound like a reproach, but a matter of great concern.

  “It was the same for me with my notebook. You also wrote down what you had to tell Ramón over the phone,” Mateo said.

  “You see, you’re not alone in trying to tame tigers with words on paper.”

  “That’s good, to get in the tiger’s cage and hit him over the head with a notebook. But go on, Lolé, what did the tiger say?”

  “He said, tell him you’ll pay him next week and don’t get all heated up about it, this has all been well thought out.”

  “Well thought out?” repeated Mateo. “How about that, my dad, on top of everything, well thought out? That’s his thing, trying to head a heist and ending up with a hit on the head. Did he say ‘heated’? What is heated?”

  “He said not to get heated up, not to worry about it. I looked at Guadalupe, indicating that, yes, we had touched some nerve.”

  “I see,” said Mateo. “According to him, you would not have to worry about paying that money because you would no longer be in Colombia when the narco lost his shit. But I don’t know, Lorenza, I think that Ramón’s motives were a little more entangled. Was he going to bring you to Argentina so that the narco would not kill you, or was he taunting the narco so that he’d force you to flee to Argentina?”

  “Whatever it was, I clasped on like a tick and told your father in my most forlorn voice: ‘But that man is demanding that he be paid right away, Ramón, don’t leave me alone in this—’”

  “I’ll call back tomorrow,” he said, and hung up without waiting for an answer.

  “Swear, swear that you’ll call me tomorrow,” she pleaded, if only to the telephone because communication had already been cut.

  She asked Guadalupe to leave her alone and began to weep like Mary Magdalene. Now you finally cry, enough to fill seas, praying, calling, cursing, crying, crying, crying, and choking on tears, burning her eyes with tears of salt, outside of any script and beyond any calculation, still stuck to the telephone as if to let it go were to let go of the three minutes and seven seconds of the Mateo she had recovered. After much weeping, she was finally able to fall asleep. She could get some sleep, because the prophecy of Haddad had begun to come true.

  “And what were those two words I had learned?” asked Mateo.

  “Ook, snu.”

  “Ook, snu?”

  “Look at the snow. But to find that out, I had to wait another three days.”

  “GISELLA SÁNCHEZ THOUGHT he was a guerrilla fighter,” Mateo told Lorenza during one of the musical teas offered after five under the glass dome of L’Orangerie, at the Alvear Palace Hotel, amid potted ferns, large vases filled with roses, and a quartet that played Brahms, watering it down to background music, and waiters in white gloves, coming and going as they deployed silverware, served finger sandwiches, warm scones, and mini gâteaux. Lorenza had dragged Mateo to this spot through the circuits of her nostalgia. She had stayed at the Alvear Palace as a girl and then as a teenager, when she visited Buenos Aires with her family.

  “Who was a guerrilla?” she asked Mateo.

  “Forcás, who else?”

  “Forcás was not a guerrilla, who believes that?”

  “I told you, Gisella Sánchez believes that.”

  “But why do you say that?”

  “Because she told me.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I told you, Gisella Sánchez, your Coronda neighbor. Today I went to talk to her.”

  “What?”

  “Today I went to talk to her.”

  “What do you mean you went to talk to her?”

  “Today. At lunchtime.”

  “What? Yesterday you didn’t even let me ring the bell—”

  “It’s better without you, Lorenza,” Mateo said, while searching among the tarts on the pâtisserie cart for one with no fruit. “I found out things. The paralyzed man was named Anselmo and has since died. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  “And Gisella Sánchez?” she asked, still perplexed. She could not believe that Mateo, who only a few days ago had been paralyzed before the PlayStation, suddenly had decided to embark on a mission to track down his father. “Well, kiddo, good! You don’t know how happy I am that you went … And Gisella, what did you find?”

  “I was told she had remarried, but not another paralyzed man. This time it was a dentist. I found her at the florist, she still works there. I think she now owns the business. It’s called Flowers and Gifts.”

  “And did you go that far, in what, a taxi?”

  “Yes, a taxi.” Mateo asked the waiter to bring him milk instead of tea. “Lie, I took the subway.”

  “How did you know where her flower shop was? I didn’t even know that.”

  “I asked around. I got to the florist and a saleswoman thought I wanted to buy flowers. It was Gisella Sánchez.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I said I was the son of Forcás and was looking for my father, but she kept with the flowers and said if they were for my father she would suggest some white roses, and began to pull them out. I tried to explain that I did not want flowers, that I was looking for my father. Then she asked what Forcás, she knew no one by that name. She reacted differently when I explained that Forcás was his nickname, his real name is Ramón Iribarren and he lived in Coronda. I told her that I was his son, Mateo Iribarren. From then on, she understood everything I was talking about.”

  “No more, what a great investigator, you’ve become a tiger, kiddo, and to think that yesterday you pretended ignorance. And how is she, describe her.”

  “She is a señora with the face of a señora.”

  “It must be her. But why did she think that Ramón was a guerrilla?”

  “Because he listened to rock argentino, I guess. I explained that he had not been a guerrilla. I told her that he was a Trotskyite who was against the armed struggle and that during the dictatorship had been part of the underground but without weapons.
It’s good, right, Lolé? Did I tell it right? She told me that from the very beginning she knew that he was involved in something because revolutionary music came from his room. That’s what she said. Then she suffocated me with kisses, and said, You, the son of Ramón, a spitting image.”

  “Did she ask about me?”

  “I told her that I had come alone to Buenos Aires, looking for my father. She said that she had not seen him in years, but she’d seen Uncle Miche. Uncle Miche lived for a while longer in Coronda, with Azucena. Did you know that, Lolé?”

  “How?”

  “After the Ford Truck for Sale incident. She remembered the story of the sign, that part was the same. But you don’t know half the story. When you saw the sign, Forcás and you went into hiding. So far the two versions match. What you don’t know is that Miche did not leave. Ramón didn’t tell you that. See? You know nothing, Lorenza. Not even that. You did not know what happened right there in the house of Forcás, but he knew that you had inherited a farm far away in another country.”

  Gisella Sánchez told Mateo that one Saturday at noon, she was walking home from the florist when she saw at the corner of Centenera and Guayaquil two guys who had seized Azucena, her neighbor, and were dragging her toward the house. Azucena looked very ill, pale, wilted, with blood dripping down her face and staining her shirt. Gisella Sánchez believed that it was two cana who had beaten her so that she would denounce the others, so she hurried to hang the sign on the door as she had agreed to do for Ramón.”

  “That could be,” Lorenza told Mateo. “So we scrammed out of there and never came back. How could we?”

  “Listen to what I’m saying, Mother: Miche returned. He continued living there. Those two guys were not cana, Lolé. They were just two ordinary types passing by, when they saw Azucena fall to the ground because she was an epileptic. They wanted to help, that was it. Two strangers. One put a handkerchief in her mouth so she did not swallow her tongue, and after the attack happened, she said she lived at 121 Coronda and they took her there. Gisella Sánchez had mentally created her own movie of the situation, believing that the men were cana and had beaten Azucena, so she got ahead of herself and put the sign up. When she realized her mistake it was too late; Forcás and you had seen it and had left. Miche arrived later, and there was no longer the sign up and he went in as usual. Inside he found Gisella Sánchez, who was caring for Azucena, who with the attack had fallen hard and had a wound on her forehead. That’s the thing, Lorenza, and thus they continued to live there. Miche and Azucena adopted the cats. Gisella Sánchez says that some time later, Miche was able to contact Ramón to tell him that it had been a false alarm. They lived there until three years ago, do you see? And then moved to a place called Villa Gesell.”