No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  “Idyllic,” says Gabriela.

  If there was no Miche, then no Impala, Lorenza thought. It was going to be crazy, the Escape from Alcatraz on the frail, old horse. Another thing: she did not see a phone, but dared not ask, since the purpose would have been all too obvious.

  “Then he immediately told me, no phone, and his voice no longer sounded so friendly, as if he had read my thoughts and was offended. Or maybe not, maybe he wasn’t offended, because he came and went, placing the food on the table. It was exhausting to be trying to even minimally gauge all his signals.”

  There was bread, ham, lamb, goat cheese, and something which he said was traditional winter pears with raspberry sauce. Ramón went to fetch wood from the huge pile outside, then crouched to stoke the fire, and next went looking for wineglasses. She was helping him, but meanwhile she measured his steps and movements, and scrutinized every corner of the house.

  “That place was a prison, so coldly polite and calculating,” she says to Gabriela. “A prison with doors that led nowhere. But we ate well, all three of us, and I did what I never do, I had two glasses of wine.”

  “You don’t drink wine?”

  “Not red, it gives me a headache. But that day I did, and we even toasted.”

  “Hard to imagine, that toast. I hope it was for happiness.”

  “Fortunately, no. We toasted Mateo, and we both left it at that.”

  The cottage had a kerosene stove on the lower level, the table where they ate and a couple of chairs facing the fireplace, and an attic-like loft that was reached by a ladder, where there was a double bed and another small one, toward the back. Ramón had placed the small one there, against the wall, and the double perpendicular to it, blocking it. So that Mateo did not go headfirst over the railing if he got up in the middle of the night and wanted to go looking for the horse, he said, adding that he would have to pass over them.

  “There’s sawdust, there must be termites in the beams,” said Lorenza, shaking the blankets, but she was thinking that she too would have to pass over Ramón if she tried to take the child at night. Even with that, he was calculating. Zero chance of not waking him during the operation, unless she used the Revlon needle. The best thing would be to keep the briefcase with the cosmetic bag beside the bed. All of her instruments within reach. But he was quite sturdy, Ramón, she had forgotten just how sturdy. If she decided on the Revlon, she would have to do it viciously, she thought, or else it wouldn’t even tickle him. “So I would sleep in the double bed, as well. Apparently it had already been decided.”

  Did Ramón not remember, would not remember, that they were separated, that they no longer lived together, no longer slept together? Lorenza chose not to protest. She too would play dumb, as long as it was necessary.

  “At that instant, Mateo appeared with a package bigger than himself. I unwrapped it and it was a pullover for me. Handwoven by village women, said Ramón. Lovely, really. Open in front, a deep black, with blue-and-white trinkets.”

  “If it was open it wasn’t a pullover.”

  “A sweater?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I don’t know what the hell it was.”

  “A cardigan. It must have been a Scandinavian cardigan, back stitch. In Bariloche they make divine ones. I have some from there. Look at this scarf. It’s made with Scandinavian backstitch. For the front to come out right, you have to hold the thread through the back. It’s really not that complicated.”

  “But they also gave me a black cap, which I used for many years, who knows where I lost it, and snow boots, fur-lined. Well chosen, wouldn’t you know, just my size. My heart melted to see Mateo’s enthusiasm, the jumps and hops when he saw the three of us with our outfits on, looking like forest gnomes. I hugged them. Both of them. They had caught me by surprise with this generosity, Gabriela, how was I not going to celebrate it.”

  “I see where this is leading. He was always a charmer, that Forcás.”

  Hikes were still possible because winter had not yet descended on the region, and that same afternoon they went out to make a brief trek around the property. A short one, Ramón had decided, not going too far, just to warm up, with the kid riding on the horse, held by his leg from below to prevent him from falling. Although Lorenza was determined not to be impressed by anything that would muddle her resolve, the beauty of those snowy heights left her agape and it took her breath away when they contemplated from a peak the entire universe spread at their feet. But she also noticed how deserted the surroundings were. They were alone at the end of the world, and it was neither metaphor nor reassurance. They started to come down the mountainside in the afternoon. Mateo dozed, as if enraptured with the rocking of the horse, and the last rays of the sun spread golden streaks on the locks that escaped from under Ramón’s cap. You can’t deny it, she thought, the son of a bitch has very pretty hair.

  With no electricity, the fireplace was the only source of heat they had. The chimney rose on the wall against the headboards, warming the loft space. It was night, the first one the three of them would spend together in the cabin. Lorenza put pajamas on the boy, who failed to drink his milk before he fell asleep, and she set him down in the small bed. She lay down, wrapped in blankets and without taking off all of her clothes, on the side of the bed nearest Mateo, keeping near the edge, as close as possible to the child, to feel in the darkness his sweet breath. Ramón remained downstairs.

  “I didn’t want to fall asleep,” Lorenza tells Gabriela. “Mateo was with me and I wanted that long-yearned-for moment to last forever. I didn’t want to fall asleep, but eventually I did.”

  The mixture of absolute fatigue and a restored sense of calm made her let her guard down. At least for this night, they would not escape, not even in her dreams could she take Mateo from that heated refuge into the frozen night and across the snowy field to fly through the curtains of sleep on an old horse or in a white car. At some point, she was awakened by the cold.

  The fire must have died out. She felt Ramón’s body stretched out beside her, facing away. Mateo had crawled to the big bed, leaving the three huddled tight like in a den, with her in the middle.

  “And I felt good, Gabriela. What a difference from those tormented sleepless nights that I had spent alone. In times like that I forgot the monstrous things that Ramón had done. Well, and also the monstrous things I’d done to him as well in Bogotá.”

  But soon enough she remembered the disaster she was in and began plotting an escape. In the end, that cabin was just a trap, a baseless illusion, an untenable, extravagant situation that Ramón had pulled out of his hat to mend things. She would have to raise an invisible barbed-wire fence between them. But she felt his body against hers, and appreciated its warmth.

  “Wait a minute,” Gabriela said. “I still don’t understand what had happened in Bogotá. What do you mean when you say that you were guilty of monstrous things as well? Which ones?”

  “Ignoring him, leaving him alone, tossing him to the side when I should have supported him, as he had done with me in Buenos Aires, like he was trying to do again in Bariloche.”

  “But the measure of the two wrongs is so different. Come on! Taking a child from his mother! Even though it is his own father doing it, it’s a brutal tactic that bears some resemblance—some, right?—to what the enemy did. I don’t understand how you didn’t throw it in his face. If it was me, the first thing I would have done was beat him senseless. I’d smash his teeth, shit. You didn’t even reproach him for the money?”

  “I’ve told you, it would have screwed everything up. Words were dangerous, Gabriela. I had to avoid them. He did too, he knew the settling of accounts would have ended the game. We talked about other things. About Mateo, mainly; about the cuteness that made Mateo Mateo. The two of us were crazy about the child and there we had no disagreement. And politics, of course. That was during the Falklands War. And we were up there, stuck with our drama and listening to the little battery-powered radio about the godforsaken me
ss developing below. Our ears glued to that little radio, keeping up with the news, we talked all day long, the two of us alone but like at a party meeting, arguing about whether we should support the Argentinean army in its just claim of a piece of national land. But how could we support such patriotic bluster from the junta, which was only looking to tame the domestic crisis; we shit on the junta but also the imperial vigor with which Thatcher mobilizes the Royal Navy, its Gurkhas, and task forces to continue their dominion over a few coin-size islands that were not theirs and were an ocean away.”

  Fearful of having to deal with personal issues, they busied themselves with hiking, mountain climbing, chopping firewood, clearing the snow from the road with a shovel, walking beside Mateo on the horse, rowing on the lake: anything that used their muscles, until they collapsed from fatigue. It was the only way they could be together, their busy bodies then less likely to turn aggressive or vengeful, more likely to go with the flow. Ramón, who knew all the ins and outs of those mountains, took them to visit places that had become legendary, since she’d previously heard of them from him, the cave where Slovenian nuns hid, the glacier called Black Snowdrift, the slopes of Cerro Catedral, which led into the waters of Lago Gutiérrez, the peak of Cerro Otto, where they witnessed cosmic sunsets with a cup of hot chocolate in hand. When their excursions brought them to steep cliffs, they’d leave the horse behind and Ramón would carry Mateo on his shoulders.

  They paused to dig a crib in the snow, which they lined with fur, so that the child could drink his milk and take a nap. This crowned their eight- or ten-hour crossing, from sunrise until reaching the refuge of the high mountains, which remained open to every traveler seeking shelter, firewood, and blankets at night. From peak to peak and cliff to cliff, they skirted the depths, like a devil’s nose, standing on huge black rocks looking over the void. With one little push, Lorenza thought when she saw Ramón nearing the edge, just a little push and that would be the end of their problem. But he thwarted the initiative as his eyes countered hers, seeming frightened and strange, as if he were plotting exactly the same.

  The days succeeded each other, pleasant against all expectation. Not since Coronda had a house welcomed them as this cottage made of tree trunks, where they could shut themselves in while the world turned on the outside. At times Lorenza thought that she was with the handsome and confident Forcás of earlier times, so different from that other grim, jealous, moody one she’d had to deal with in Bogotá. A honeymoon, she thought, somewhat amazed, it’s as if we are honeymooning. Who would have thought?

  “A somewhat macabre honeymoon. Moreover, there’s no honeymoon without sex,” says Gabriela.

  “There was sex, of course. Not at first, but a bit later, there was. Yes. Good sex.”

  “I couldn’t have done it. In that kind of situation, forget it.”

  “We never talked about the sex, and even in bed the silences were killing us. But the rest worked, perhaps because I was always outside the physical battlefield. I remember one occasion in particular. We had eaten dinner and we were listening to the radio transmitting these madly triumphant communiqués, which only confirmed that we were losing the war.”

  The people, who had originally celebrated the recovery of the islands with enthusiasm, now cried out against the slaughter of hundreds of teenage conscripts, poorly trained, badly fed, and dying from the cold, whom the inept bureaucratic superiors abandoned to their fate when the British moved in with all their firepower. The Argentinean patriotic fever became a wave of disappointment and anger in the streets. Rage against deception, against the inefficiency and bravado of those who behaved as butchers domestically but like lambs when facing a foreign army. The media, which just the week before had been bound by censorship, began to ridicule General Menéndez, the military governor of the Falklands, who had just signed the surrender to Moore, commander of the British troops.

  “We were there, listening in,” Lorenza told Gabriela, when the voice of a Uruguayan journalist from Buenos Aires reaches us, claiming to be on the corner of Diagonal Norte and Florida, where a group of people had taken a policeman’s hat and began playing with it, putting it on their heads, passing it from hand to hand. No more fear, we said. And we hugged. Now the dictatorship will go down because the people are not afraid. Buenos Aires had become the burning Troy. People screaming toward Plaza de Mayo. The police responded timidly, not dispersing the crowd or locking anyone up. General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri, head of the junta at the time, who besides being the ideologue of the defeat was an alcoholic, came out drunk on the balcony of Government House, responding to the claims of the crowd with a delirious speech. ‘Those who fell are alive and will be sculpted in bronze,’ he shouted, and assured them ‘that we will be complete masters of our entire destiny total and will light torches as the highest values.’”

  “Just that week I had been hospitalized for a stomach ulcer,” Gabriela says. “But my sister Alina was out on the streets, even though she didn’t understand anything about politics, nothing, and she came to visit very agitated to tell me that something was happening. She was startled, feeling that things were out of control. Suddenly we heard a ruckus outside and I asked Alina to open the window. Madre mía, we heard, it’s over, it’s over, the dictatorship is over.”

  “In Plaza de Mayo, the drunkard Galtieri was haranguing his nonsense while the people in the street were screaming in his face that it was over. It was almost over, Gabriela, and we were so far away, with those shitty little radios, full of interference and static, so that we couldn’t quite hear. Or maybe yes, maybe what we heard was the roar of the collapse.”

  The war was lost, the dictatorship was being overthrown, and Lorenza and Ramón were gripped by bittersweet feelings—gripped, on one hand, by the euphoria at the ridiculous manner in which the tyrants had perished, on the other, by regret over the conscripts who had been sent to die. On the one hand, victory: the Falklands had overthrown Argentina’s military junta. On the other, defeat: it had assured Thatcher’s reelection.

  “This was turning into a porn movie,” Gabriela reminded her, “and now you’re telling me a war story.”

  “Sorry, now for the porn, but it’s going to be much shorter. No, nothing; just that we made love that night, how would you say, intensely but with great melancholy, as if that encounter would be our farewell. Ramón knew, that night I realized that he also knew. End of movie.”

  In keeping with the performance they were each giving, Ramón played his role as lover and father flawlessly. But it was clear that he could not trust her. He never closed his eyes. Miche began to visit often, bringing bottles of water and other provisions, helping with whatever was needed, and during his visits, the Impala was parked out in front of the cabin. But the keys always disappeared. Lorenza had noted that when Miche left them on the table, not five minutes would pass before Ramón put them in his pocket.

  When they went down to the town, Lorenza managed to get a few minutes and would memorize street signs and gather information, sometimes she was even able to ask questions, checking bus stops and timetables, car rentals, nearby hotels, maps and roads. Chile had become her secret obsession. If they could only cross the border, they’d be outside his scope. But during these brief breaks, she was never alone with Mateo. Ramón never left them alone, not in the cabin, or walking, or on the street.

  At the cabin, Lorenza played for hours with Mateo, told him stories, doing housework, sitting and reading by the fire. Without feeling any urgency, given this contrived but, after all, placid stagnation of time. Time. Let time run by. After much reflection on the possibilities of escape, she had come to understand that the only thing playing in his favor was the weather. With Mateo already by her side, she would be happy to wait. The magazine had given her an indefinite leave from work. She could wait. Another week, two more weeks, a month. Sooner or later, Ramón would become neglectful. I have been isolated, she thought, but not defeated. If space is your tool, the weather will be mine. And let
the hours run, always waiting for the right moment.

  Now and then she was surprised to wake up and the father had already dressed the child and fed him breakfast, or taken him out for a ride. One of those mornings, she heard male voices down below the loft. A neighbor had come to ask for help, some repair in his cabin. Lorenza opened her eyes and saw the thick sky through the window. Strange thing, it always dawned clear, but a little later the sky always seemed lower, woolly, heavy. Heaven’s donkey belly, she thought, that’s what they call this kind of sky in Lima. Ramón came up. “Here’s Mateo. Keep an eye on the baby, I’m leaving him here with you,” he said.

  “Are you going to see about the neighbor?”

  “No, Miche is going to help him. I put cookies on the table, apples and tea, go down to breakfast anytime.”

  “Donkey belly, donkey belly,” she tickled Mateo on the tummy.

  Getting out from under the cold blankets, she felt how cold the house was. The fire must have died out. Strange, Ramón always kept it going.

  “Ramón?” she called to him several times, and getting no answer, threw a blanket over her shoulders and went down with the child to stir up the fire.

  “It went out,” Mateo said, and it was true.

  Ramón was not in the house, but he had to be around. She left the child on the carpet, entertaining himself with his old serpets, and looked out the window, feeling strange about the silence. The snow that had fallen during the night had erased the line between sky and land, leaving everything in a single confused vagueness. Large footprints, of three pairs of feet, moved away from the house and were lost to the left. Lorenza went out to examine them closely. These were Ramón’s, she was sure, recognizing the zigzag marks they left with their imprint and the little circle with the make in the center. There was no mistaking it. Unless Miche was wearing them … and then where was Ramón? Lorenza looked around the cabin and did not see him.