No Place for Heroes (11 page)

“Yes, yes, Lolé, but it still doesn’t sound like it was accomplishing anything.”

“It’s hard to say how much we did accomplish. But aside from being a foreigner, I was just a low-ranking militant, you have to remember that. Fucking low-rank, like we said. I moved in the trenches, while those in charge moved in wider circles. Besides, we had labor leaders who were in the thick of it, in the very mouth of the wolf, trying to saw off the legs of the dictatorship from within the syndicates. The matter was infinitely complex and infinitely infinitesimal.

“Every month, the party put out an underground newspaper, taking great risks and facing a whole range of difficulties. They distributed it one by one, a task that took a few hours.
They’d remove the wrapping from a box of cigars, empty it from the bottom, then roll up each of the eight pages of the newspaper until it was the size of a cigarillo. Then they’d fill half of the box with fake cigarillos and half with real ones, and wrap it back up. It was an old trick that marijuana dealers used and they adopted it to mock the regime. One newspaper at a time, to one contact, often having to go all the way across town to deliver it.

“There were a lot of words in those eight pages, Mateo, do you understand, words which were in such short supply. Imagine that we were pizza delivery boys. Ring, ring, yes, with mozzarella and anchovies, and off we would go with the newspaper, rain, thunder, or lightning. And sometimes it didn’t say anything new and it arrived wet and cold, but we would be there to deliver it.”

“The newspaper story sounds like it was true, but that thing about the whitecaps, the stevedores waiting for you in the fog, you made that up.”

“No, there was fog. There still is. You’ll see it for yourself in a bit.”

O
N
S
UNDAY,
forty-eight hours after the dark episode, Lorenza was still wrapped in the straitjacket of her own anxiety.

“You’re going to go crazy if you don’t look for help,” Mamaíta told her. Lorenza didn’t hear her or respond, but
paced the house back and forth like a caged lion, her heart beating a thousand times a minute, her blood pressure rising, and her hands like ice. She hadn’t been able to sleep, not even to lie down for a moment. She could not eat because it felt as if she were choking. In a picture taken a week afterward for her travel documents, she has the fiendish eyes of a caged animal and sharpened features due to the half a kilo she was losing daily. Although she refused to see a psychiatrist, Mamaíta and Guadalupe persisted and somehow they got her into the office of the well-respected Dr. Haddad, who specialized in treating family members of those who had been kidnapped. Although it was a Sunday, he had agreed to see her right away.

Lorenza walked into the office at eleven in the morning, her eyes darting everywhere but resting nowhere. She wouldn’t even sit down, and let her mother relate to the doctor what had happened.

“I don’t want to tell you my story or listen to your theories. I just want to find my son,” was the only thing Lorenza said.

“Why were you being so obnoxious, Lolé?” Mateo asked. “What had that man done to you?”

“Nothing, I didn’t even know him. But it was like I was possessed. It was either that afternoon, or the next day, that I slugged your uncle Patrick.”

“Shit, really? Why?”

“Because he said something or didn’t say something; because he did something, or didn’t do something. Who knows?”

“Did he slug you back?”

“No, of course not. He was there trying to help, and everybody coped as well as they could. I was hypersensitive, a vulnerable and unhinged thing. But I didn’t even want to go see that psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, or whatever the hell he was. Not that one or any of them, not then or ever; to this day, I won’t sit still on a divan. Not that I sat on one then, I remained standing, trying to keep myself together so I wouldn’t explode with impatience, so I wouldn’t scream at that doctor that I thought talking to him was a waste of precious minutes.”

Dr. Haddad made them return to the waiting room for a moment. When they went back in, ten or fifteen minutes later, he had his glasses on and in his hands were the pages of Forcás’s farewell letter, which apparently he had been reading in the interlude.

“You had given it to him?” Mateo asked.

“No, no, I told you I was not all there. I imagine my mother had given it to him, or Guadalupe.”

“So what did he say?”

“He said the weirdest thing. I don’t know what stopped me from jumping him and slugging him as well, because what he said was like a kick to the kidneys.”

This is a love letter, he said.

A
URELIA HAD BEEN
in Buenos Aires twelve days, sharing an apartment on Deán Funes with Sandrita, the bundle of
dollars still in her suitcase, the microfilm in the toothpaste tube, and the passports under the mattress. Sandrita was growing restless; she said that all it took was one raid and they were dead.

“Forcás was nowhere to be seen. I was starting to doubt his existence, like in that play by Ionesco where the characters yearn for the arrival of the Maestro and the Maestro doesn’t show.” When the Maestro finally arrives, the others realize that he has no head. Maybe Forcás had no head.

“That would explain a lot,” Mateo said. “Forcás has no head.”

Through an agent, he told Sandrita to tell Aurelia that soon, very soon. But another week passed and nothing. And then one Saturday, Sandrita came home with two boxes of ravioli, and when Aurelia asked her why two when one was enough for both of them, she said that they weren’t for eating, but to hide what she was turning over to Forcás the following day. That is, at noon on Sunday, Aurelia finally had an appointment with him. And they had to set things up. They emptied the boxes and repacked them, first a layer of ravioli and on top a pair of passports, another layer of ravioli, another two passports, a double layer of ravioli, and the top. And a string to make it look good. Sandrita told her to relax, no one would notice a thing.

“But I also have to give him the dollars,” Aurelia confessed.

“Why didn’t you tell me, we’ll have to put them in the box.”

“There are too many bills.”

“How many?”

“A lot.”

The meeting was at the confectioner Las Violetas, on the corner of Rivadavia and Medrano. So that Lorenza had to go to a spot on the map called Rivadavia and Medrano, and Lorenza who had no idea how to get anywhere. Sandrita took her that afternoon, on Saturday, as if they were scouting out the territory, so that Aurelia could find it the next day without problems.

“And what about Forcás? How do I recognize him?” she asked.

“Right before noon, you go into Las Violetas and sit at a table. But not with your back to the door. Never sit with your back to the door, always with your eyes on the door, in case the
cana
show up. You don’t want them to grab you unexpectedly. You sit at a table in a spot where he can see you. You put the boxes of ravioli on the table, and you wait for him to come to you.”

“And how will he know who I am?”

“Don’t worry about him. He’ll know what you look like, and if he is not sure, the boxes will tip him off; he knows that you’re bringing him ravioli.”

Second rule for those types of meetings, the margin of error is ten minutes. If at twelve ten one of you is not there, the other one will suppose that you have been taken and will go, to prevent from being grabbed as well. Third rule, after a meeting, never go straight home or to another meeting before
taking a subway or walking a few blocks heading in an opposite direction, to make sure that you’re not being followed. Fourth rule, always carry identification. Always. Never go anywhere without an ID, not even to buy some bread next door.

“All right, I got it. Now tell me, what’s he like?” Aurelia asked.

“What’s who like?”

“Forcás. What’s he like?”

“He’s good-looking, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“All Argentinean men are good-looking.”

“But this one is twentysomething, eyes and hair the color of honey, wide shoulders. Good-looking guy, I’m telling you.”

“Any specific details? Defects?”

“No one’s perfect. He’s not very tall and he’s bowlegged, as if he just jumped off a horse.”

Las Violetas, a confectionery from the turn of the century, seemed to Aurelia a little too romantic a spot for a political rendezvous. It was truly an art-nouveau jewel, as delicate and ornate as a box of fine chocolates. She felt nervous, and attributed it to what she had to do the following day, or to the lit stained-glass windows of Las Violetas, or to the realization that night was falling at that moment over Buenos Aires. Or maybe because of Forcás, whom she was finally going to meet after so much waiting.

After they had tea in Las Violetas, Aurelia and Sandrita walked a few blocks and went into a café where they had some more tea, during a short informatory meeting with a
comrade from the regional directive. He told them about the rumors spreading of the fiasco that had befallen the head of the military junta, General Jorge Rafael Videla, during a trip to Italy. The gossip around Buenos Aires was that the pope had thrown the forced disappearances of hundreds of persons in Videla’s face, and that the Italian press had greeted him by divulging the existence of
chupaderos
.

On their way back home, meandering to fulfill the rigorous regulations for vigilance, Sandrita and Aurelia took deep breaths of the night air. It was an unforgettable evening when the silence that had always sheltered the dictatorship began to melt, drop by drop, like the snows on top of Monte Tronador.

At a certain point they separated, and Aurelia took a cab to Belgrano R, one of the wealthier neighborhoods in the city. She rang the bell of a Colombian couple who were friends of her mother, to whom her mother had mailed from Bogotá some papers that Lorenza had to sign and return as soon as possible by certified mail. They were inheritance documents relating to the finca that her father had left her in the countryside outside Bogotá.

“A finca called San Jacinto that you never got to see,” Lorenza told her son. “It was a lovely place, a little valley covered in mist in between two blue mountain ranges.”

Along with the documents, Mamaíta had sent money and a letter in her clear and beautiful handwriting, words made uncertain by grief. She had also sent a pair of high-heeled Bally shoes, made of grape-colored suede, which so
many years later Lorenza still remembered as if she were holding them in her hands. Ever loving Mamaíta, to think about presents at such a time. And Bally shoes at that, how crazy, who would think of such an extravagance? Of course, in the Argentinean party the women had to dress up, not like in Bogotá or in Madrid, where they all went with the complete identikit: faded jeans, military vest, native backpack, and lace-up boots with thick rubber soles, like those of a construction worker, what her father had called her little communist boots. In Argentina, one had to adopt almost the opposite type of disguise: comb your hair neatly, wear perfume, put on stockings and other feminine accessories. They even wore nail polish, which Lorenza applied with great care. But no Ballys. The Ballys didn’t fit the profile, they were too much.

“That’s funny, so now you were a landlord with this property in San Jacinto,” Mateo teased her.

“I would have done anything for the comrades not to look at me as some well-off girl playing at revolution. But that’s probably how they did see me.”

“And the Colombians?”

“What Colombians?”

“The husband and wife who gave you the shoes you didn’t like.”

“I did like them, they were divine, but I wasn’t going to risk wearing them.”

The Colombian couple wanted Lorenza to have dinner with them, a simple meal, they warned her, just family, and
they served a cheese and mushroom omelet. Of course, they knew nothing of her activities in Buenos Aires. They thought she was in school because that’s what Mamaíta had told them. During dinner, as they chatted about nothing in particular, dogs and horses, the wife mentioned in passing that Videla was a great horseman, an outstanding example, and that she admired him because of his role in restoring Argentinean values. A piece of omelet got stuck in Lorenza’s throat, but she remained quiet, and bit by bit the conversation returned to the safe territory of animals and Colombian soap operas, and the icy rain that fell over the Bogotá savannah. The husband seemed to be somewhere else, dozing off, but suddenly he would jolt up and interrupt his wife.