No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  “Holy water, what nonsense,” said Gabriela.

  “If it didn’t do any good, at least it caused no harm.”

  “Modesto Zupichín.”

  “Lucil Lucifora.”

  “Lomolino Lomo.”

  “Abramo Lomazo.”

  They recalled the list of names for their babies which they had found in the pages of the Buenos Aires telephone book, betting to see who could find the most absurd one, Dora Lota, Lubli Lea, Tufik Salame, Delfor Malanga.

  “Delfor Malanga, flower name,” said Gabriela. “And to think that you ended up naming the kid Mateo.”

  “And you, Mary, maybe because of the many rosaries that we prayed in San José de Flores.”

  “Can you handle the iron?”

  “I am a tigress with the iron, mi papito lindo had a seamstress’s shop.”

  “In the days of your papito lindo there were no steam irons.”

  “I am a tigress with the steam iron.”

  “You know who I still see occasionally, Tina, do you remember Tina?”

  “Tina, the one from the elevator, how could I not remember. How is Tina?”

  “She has two grown sons, both college graduates. She is now retired from teaching. She was a teacher.”

  “She must have been older than us. Five or six years older. Have you ever asked her about it?”

  “About that? She told me without my asking. She said she had felt a sense of relief.”

  “Relief?”

  “Yes, relief.”

  “Madre mía.”

  “She said that when she saw that the cana was behind her and got into the elevator, she thought he’d been following her and that it would be her fault that her comrades in the floor above, waiting for her to begin the meeting, got nabbed. She says that at the time she wanted to die, and therefore when the guy raped her, then got out of the elevator and ran away from the building, among everything else that she felt was that: relief. She had been raped but she was alive, and the ones who were waiting for her were still alive, had not disappeared, had not been murdered. And she felt relief.”

  “You think so?”

  “It’s what she told me.”

  “Could it be—”

  “Do you remember Tebas, the one who always came to the meetings with a younger brother, Nandito, who was severely retarded?”

  “Tebas was disappeared, that I heard.”

  “He was the last disappeared one of the party, at the time the military junta was about to fall. I don’t know if you know about Nandito. They grabbed him with Tebas and disappeared him as well.”

  “Bastards. He must have been the most innocent of all the victims. He had such a sweet expression, Nandito.”

  “Sweet, yes, but he masturbated in front of people.”

  “Hush, what?”

  “I swear, you don’t know what a fuss it caused during the meetings when he started up with that. Tebas suffered tremendously, but what could he do, he couldn’t very well bind his hands.”

  “As if that would warrant it.”

  “Crazy, right?”

  “And Felicitas, do you remember her? The lawyer I introduced to you once.”

  “Yes, quite the number that one, from Barrio Norte, she was wearing a red fox coat that one time we saw her, imposing with her Gucci handbag and suede boots.”

  “Yes, that one. We became good friends. But just friends, no politics, friends to go to the movies with, talk about books and such. And last week I was with her and guess what, she told me that during that time she defended money launderers. I would never have suspected it, would swear she had nothing to do with anything, until recently, when she told me.”

  “Just look at her—”

  “That’s exactly what I told her. I told her that she looked so elegant in her aristocratic office, I wouldn’t dare open my mouth around her. She told me that she’d never been left wing and wasn’t part of the resistance, but that on becoming a lawyer she had sworn to uphold elementary principles, as old as the French Revolution, and could not stand idly by before farcical trials and arbitrary sentences.”

  “Who’d believe it, with that red fox coat?”

  “Well, look, that famous red fox coat was her lifeline, her bulletproof vest. She told me that thanks to the red fox she went in and out of the superior court of the armed forces without arousing suspicion of being a lefty.”

  “She, since she’s tall, white, thin as a sigh; if I put that thing on I would be stopped right there for being a fox and a red.”

  “She said she did suspect that I was involved in something, that it was strange that I had no phone, never specified exactly where I lived, that if she wanted to invite me to something, she could never find me. That had seemed weird, but she didn’t dare ask or bring up the topic.”

  “Nobody dared, that’s the truth. We all knew everything but pretended not to know, even to those we considered close. Those who say they were unaware in fact did not want to know, because no one went without an acquaintance or relative who disappeared. For me, the first rattling was the disappearance of Mariana, my best friend from childhood, just because her name was in the address book of a militant. We were all witnesses. We knew that others knew, but never said anything. I had to do militant things hidden from my husband, and that should tell you everything.” Gabriela confessed that she was now separated from the bank employee.

  “He sympathized with the junta, your husband?”

  “Not at all, but he was fucking scared.”

  Fear: another thing that no one dared mention. No militant ever said he or she was afraid, ever. As if simply by not naming it, you could escape it.

  Lorenza told Gabriela about the days with her mother, who had come to Buenos Aires to be with her for childbirth, and her life with Mateo as a newborn and beyond, Mateo taking his first steps, and then confessed that, at that stage in her life, she had felt afraid. To be able to continue their work in the resistance, she and Ramón had decided to enroll Mateo in day care from the time he was three months old, the Jardín Pelusa on Avenida Santa Fe, and every afternoon, took turns picking him up at four o’clock.

  “That was the face of fear for me,” she confessed. “I became obsessed with the idea that if something happened to us one day, to Ramón or me, that four in the afternoon would come around and there’d be no one to pick up Mateo.”

  She had taken to thinking about it all the time and, as much as she tried, could not get the idea out of her head. She began to panic and picked up Mateo from the crib, to hug him, and then he’d wake up and she had to put him to sleep again. “Until then I hadn’t known what anxiety was.” Not the time that she had to escape from her house through the roof, nor when she’d granted San Jacinto to the party, signing the notarized papers and saying goodbye to her only inheritance.

  She didn’t remember having been afraid during the twenty-four hours she had been detained at a police station in Icho Cruz, convinced that she would not walk out alive. Shock, yes, and adrenaline by the bucketful, also heart palpitations and vertigo at the adventure, all that. But not fear. Fear, what is really called fear, that shadow of the enemy that invades you and defeats you little by little from within. That she had never experienced. Until Mateo was born.

  Thereafter, the image of the abandoned child at the Jardín Pelusa, of the hundreds of children who were taken from prisoners and given up for adoption to military families, the possibility that something similar could happen to Mateo, gradually became a terror that sapped her strength. She bore it as well as she could, without a word, until Mateo was two years old and on the day when the boy blew out his pair of candles, she announced to Ramón her decision to take him away for a while. Much to her surprise, Ramón agreed. Not only did he not argue, nor reprimand her, or call her weak, or insult her, but he told her that he would go with them. For Mateo. For Mateo to grow up far away from the circle of death and breathe air that was free of threats. A month later, the three set off for Colombia, having made the
decision to leave the party and to stay away at least a few months.

  Amid clouds of steam and fuzz, the sputtering steam iron, and the hum of the sewing machine, they continued their chat laden with secrets that had never been revealed and indeed would never be mentioned again. The sheets, embroidered and ironed, piled up, and they had to be sorted into sets—fitted sheets, flat sheets, and pillowcases—then wrapped in tissue paper and placed carefully in a box. And it was there in Gabriela’s apartment where Lorenza thought she finally had found the tone that would allow her to write, now, yes, that chapter in their history. She needed to put into words this story that had been so far marked by silence. She had always known that sooner or later the task would have to be taken up, there was no way around it, because the past that has not been tamed with words is not memory, only a sort of spying.

  The problem had been how to tell it, and now she thought she had figured it out: simple, intimate as a conversation between two women reminiscing behind closed doors. No heroes, no adjectives, no slogans. In a minor key. Without delving minutely into major events, keeping just the echo, to wrap it in tissue paper, like the sheets, to see if it finally stopped beating and, little by little, began to yellow. Yes, wrapped in the silky tissue paper, maybe that’s exactly what was needed: for the chatter, the laughter, the interweaving of moments and pains, the small confessions—these would smoothly envelop the old fear, reducing it to the realm of everyday gossip.

  “I GET OUT of the car in the middle of the snowy mountains that I knew only through Ramón’s dreams, a place that for me was not part of any map, but from the stories and songs he improvised as nursery rhymes for Mateo,” Lorenza tells Gabriela. “And suddenly out of nowhere there comes a horse, and on that horse is Ramón, and Ramón has my child. And he gives me the child. I swear, not even when he was born did I feel such a commotion, as if I was giving birth again, but after a much more difficult labor. There he was with me, my baby Mateo. I kissed him and hugged him; poor little one, he must have been suffocating from so much squeezing, but I couldn’t stop, I had to be convinced that this was real.”

  It was the only real thing in that landscape of an imaginary postcard holiday, where snow bleached everything and settled everywhere, hiding the face of things. But there was her son. Everything else faded around her, like during a dizzy spell or a hallucination. But Mateo was laughing, he had learned to say new words, and was wearing a red cap: he was amazingly real. Fortunately real.

  “I kissed his nose, his eyes, his hair, his hands, his laughing strawberry mouth, his soft skin. I planted kisses even on the yellow boots he wore.”

  “Mateo has been waiting for you,” came the voice of Ramón.

  “I couldn’t look at him, Gabriela. At Ramón. I couldn’t do it.”

  “How you must have hated him.”

  “That wasn’t the problem, hatred in the end can be handled. But it wasn’t pure, it was mixed with gratitude, even reverence, that ruinous gratitude, the odious veneration that you bear your abuser when you pardon him. That’s why I didn’t want to look at him.”

  “I explained to Mateo that we were on vacation, him and me,” Ramón’s voice said, “and that you would take some days to catch up with us because you had a lot of work, but that you were coming.”

  “I realized then that Mateo didn’t know,” Lorenza told Gabriela, “and I felt a huge relief. If the boy was happy it was because he didn’t know about the drama and behaved as if he were on vacation, fascinated with the snow and the horse, with the fire in the hearth and the water of the lake. Ramón told me things. He told me that Mateo was in love with the horse, that the first night he had wanted to bring the horse into the cabin so that he would not be cold, and that he had no choice but to go out and show him the stable where the horse was asleep. The stable at the neighbor’s place, from whom they rented the horse. I noted the fact, neighbors nearby, I might ask them for help. And there were horses. They might not be Bucephaluses, but they had four working legs. If I couldn’t get hold of a car, I would flee with the boy on the horse.”

  “Great,” said Gabriela, “with your eyelashes frozen like in Doctor Zhivago.”

  “It was cold as shit, and very dark,” Ramón’s voice kept saying, “you couldn’t see a thing, and Mateo and I at midnight, with the flashlight, looking for the stable.”

  There was a flashlight, Lorenza registered; she had to figure out where he kept it. She looked around and saw no electrical wires. Doing all this while making efforts to look at Ramón, to say something nice.

  “Something nice? With how you were feeling?” said Gabriela.

  “Anything, that I had missed him, or that the scenery was beautiful, whatever, but nothing came out. I had come to play in the cold and I wasn’t succeeding. I had to overcome it, to make him think that I was glad to see him.”

  “But what could he expect of you? He couldn’t really believe that everything would be as before.”

  “I knew exactly what I expected of him: nothing. I had gone there to get my son, period. Now what he expected from me, I don’t know, I’d have to guess at it.”

  “Did he believe that this was really a reconciliation?”

  “Difficult to say, Ramón is anything but naïve. Oh yes, maybe he was acting in good faith. Like I said, I was a little out of it. I needed time to devise a way to take Mateo with me, and meanwhile I had to remain on good terms with Ramón. On good terms, by his lights, of course, that is, in tune with this love story that I was supposedly starting over.

  “It was all very strange, Gabriela. My head was a mess. How could I make sense of the fact that the boor, who a month before had taken my child and put me in grave danger by stealing money from the Mafia, was this loving father, this Prince Charming who came out to meet me like in a fairy tale. What logic was there in that? And while he looked at me, I felt that he couldn’t take his eyes off me, and that he was in the same situation, with horrible doubts about me. We both tried to appear spontaneous but we were walking on eggshells. He didn’t have a full advantage, either. I relaxed a little when I realized that.”

  “You can rest easy,” the voice said. “Mateo didn’t have a single bad moment, all that was missing was his mother, and here she is.”

  It must have been true, she saw no signs of anxiety or discomfort in Mateo. He looked as radiant as ever. He seemed very proud of his wool pullover, red with green-and-blue dolls and a matching cap, clothes that she had never seen, which the father must have bought. It was clear that of all the marvels in Mateo’s unexpected paradise, the father was by far his favorite. And now also her, the mother, who came without his ever suspecting that she might not have made it there.

  She had to remain lucid, have a clear picture of the place, and make decisions quickly. But it was hard to think. Her head sent her contradictory messages, as if Mateo’s unexpected joy cast a light on the dark episode. Because if things had not been, after all, as atrocious as she had imagined, she could well have made up the whole nightmare.

  “You’re skinny,” Ramón said, shattering the illusion. He had dropped the phrase as if it were not his fault, as if every kilo lost was not a result of the agony of waiting.

  “He asked if I wanted to eat,” she tells Gabriela. “He said he was going to pop open some burgundy to celebrate my arrival. Impudence, I finally saw it in his face as he spoke. I told him I’d rather unpack first.”

  “Great.”

  “It was really something. And he said: Come, I’ll show you the cabin, you’ll see, it’s like the house of Hansel and Gretel.

  “And he takes my suitcase out of the Impala along with the briefcase with the double bottom, false passports, and the Revlon cosmetics bag with those lethal drops. My blood half froze, but my bag did not give me away, I told you it was a vaina for professionals. Now, the cabin was beautiful, tiny and cozy with the fireplace going, something out of Robinson Crusoe. Ramón’s comparison maybe had not been well thought out; in the story of Hansel and Gretel, the sweet li
ttle house turns out to be a place of terror.”

  Lorenza felt that everything there was fictitious, someone putting on a show. She had just spent twenty days and nights preparing for war, had come resolved to confront her enemy, and her enemy was playing the fool.

  He received her with open arms as if the matter were forgiven—even worse, as if there wasn’t anything to forgive.

  “And here I was, coming prepared to poison him.”

  “Did you really think about the possibility of poison, with the drops?” Gabriela asked.

  “Well, no. Not poison him, but leave him dazed. Or in as deep a slumber as Sleeping Beauty, at least. Wouldn’t you kill for your Mary?”

  “Ah, yes, I would, but I’m crazier than you.”

  Lorenza sat by the fire, still clutching the child to her chest, thinking of how to break free and carry him away from there. She soon realized that Miche and the white Impala were gone.

  “Bad start,” said Gabriela.

  “Very bad. I wanted to show Mateo what I had learned from my gringa girlfriends in the Washington winter, that if you throw yourself back on the snow and move your arms up and down, you leave behind the stamped figure of an angel with big wings. The first time I saw that I was dazzled, not that I really thought it was an angel. Mateo did not grasp the subtlety of it, however, and thought it was about wallowing in the snow and that seemed fine to him.”

  “Where’s Miche?” Lorenza asked as they walked in, and Ramón replied to forget about Miche, that he’d told him they wanted to be alone, this wasn’t Coronda with him coming and going as he pleased. Finally, they had the whole house to themselves.