No Place for Heroes (18 page)

Her curiosity about that Molino Azul of her memory had made her, years before, place a call from Bogotá to Felicitas Otamendi, one of her best Argentinean friends, at her law offices in Buenos Aires, to ask for a strange favor. When she had a second, would she drop by that telo named El Molino Azul to tell her what it looked like? Could it still exist? No, Lorenza did not remember what street it was on, she just said that it was an ugly, gray cement building, five or six stories high.

Felicitas agreed to go right away and sent Lorenza her first fax: “This is too juicy, my dear! I have found not only that El Molino Azul still exists but that they offer different types of rooms. Do you want the cheapest one? Or deluxe? A Scottish shower or a Roman bath? It’s on Salguero Street and yesterday I passed by to check it out from the outside. It’s definitely still there, but the façade isn’t gray like you remember, but a milky mulberry color. I’m going back on Thursday, this time to go in the rooms, with a friend who has agreed to come just to play along. Ciao, Felicitas.”

So the façade was not gray. Maybe they’d painted it. Or was it those rainy afternoons that were gray? Definitely the first time they had met up in the telo it had been raining buckets, Lorenza could at least swear to that. Buenos Aires had disappeared under the downpour.

Less than a week later, Felicitas was sending a detailed report:

“The front door is discreet,” it said. “There are no signs or anything else that would identify the place as a transitory lodging. But on one of the outside walls, there’s the painting of a great windmill, obviously blue. You first go into a small room with the cash register on the left, behind a mirrored glass which hides the cashier.” Right, right, now that Felicitas mentioned it, it was as if Lorenza were watching the anonymous hand that would slip them the key through a slot in the smoked glass. The key to happiness? For a while anyway, because after a couple of hours the noise of a bell would startle them: either they left the room or they would have to pay double. Felicitas described a plaster fountain with a tiny angel, somewhat metaphorical, holding an amphora that poured out a stream of froth over a seashell. Felicitas and her friend had paid the cashier the equivalent of ten dollars, which had secured them one of the deluxe rooms for an hour. “It smelled like cheap and cloying air freshener, a mixture of marmalade and disinfectant, a smell characteristic of all the telos in the world, as I know from experience,” she had written.

Yes, that must have been the smell. But the angel, the froth, the seashell? They must not have been there back then, or she didn’t remember. “The room is about five meters by five meters wide and is decorated in shoddy art deco.” Once they were inside, Felicitas and her friend had amused themselves taking pictures that they eventually sent to Lorenza. They posed in front of the painted cardboard faux-stone, both very tall and very marvelous in their coats, boots, and scarves, on the bed, in the bathroom and facing the mirrors,
specifically a huge, hexagonal mirror, with uneven sides, that by all accounts was the pièce de résistance of the set. Those afternoons in El Molino Azul, in the Buenos Aires of the dictatorship. The memory of a long line of couples slowly returned to Lorenza, very young men and women, just as they themselves must have been. They waited for their rooms embracing each other or holding hands, chatting in low voices, not betraying any shame, or need for secrecy, or modesty, as if they were waiting in line at the movies. During the week it wasn’t very crowded, but Fridays and Saturdays there was a long wait. In general, they didn’t see too many bosses with their secretaries, or prostitutes with their johns, or adulterous affairs; what they saw was mostly students, the type who still lived with his parents and saved up during the week to take his girl to a refuge as far removed from parental control as possible. There was no one there who would insult them, who would point an accusing finger or create a stir. That telo with its wine-dark satin blankets, its cups of cold tea, its disinfectant smells, had been for them a liberated land amid the demoralizing violence of those times. Because of the occupational hazards of the resistance, Aurelia and Forcás could not know where the other lived, and so for many afternoons, El Molino Azul took them in as if it were their home.

Two details of Felicitas’s report made Lorenza uneasy: for one, “the bathtub is discreetly hidden behind a frame of frosted glass,” and “the bedspread is a plush peach with assorted pillows.” Plush peach bedspread and frosted glass? Could her most detailed memories be trusted, the satin sheets
and the shower curtain? She had to admit it, the room in Felicitas’s photo was not the same as the one from her nostalgia. It was disheartening to have one’s memories modernized, she thought, but what could she do, she had to accept the fact that El Molino Azul had opted for an upgrade and undergone a furious renovation. And why not, for even the seediest hotels update their decor now and then. So let them do what they wanted, Lorenza would keep what she had: a pair of young lovers, a green plastic shower curtain, and wine-colored satin sheets.

G
OYENECHE ARRIVED
at the café on Florida Street, where Lorenza had agreed to meet him. They had seen each other every day during the time that they had been party comrades on the front lines, but during that hour that they shared in the café, Lorenza found out more about him than she had ever known from the years in the resistance.

He was wearing a dark shirt, a black leather coat, his hair was already graying and balding, but smoothed and gelled back like a tango singer’s, just like it had been during the years of the dictatorship. He told Lorenza that his real name was Luis Antonio Méndez, the brother of the Arturo Méndez who had been disappeared in ’74, that he wasn’t Argentinean but Uruguayan, and that after the fall of the dictatorship he had finished medical school and specialized in gynecology. Who would have thought it? Goye, a gynecologist!

“Even though Goye is not your name anymore,” she told him, “you still look like a tango singer.”

“A very old one who never knew how to sing.” He smiled.

In the old times, Goye played the flute and now, in the café, they laughed remembering the mess he had caused for doing just that, the day he hadn’t shown up to a meeting, and had spread panic everywhere because he had been so absorbed with this sweet flute that he forgot the time.

“Damn it, Goye,” Lorenza said. “You scared the hell out of us. You dispersed us to such an extent that it took us a month to round up everybody. Do you still play the flute?”

“After what happened, are you crazy? The flute for me was like it was for the czar’s musicians,” he said. And he told her how if they played well, the czar ordered that the instruments be stuffed with gold, and the flautists ended up fucked, and that if they played badly, the czar ordered them to stuff their instruments up their asses, and the flautists ended up fucked.

Lorenza had sought out Goye for a specific reason; apparently he knew about Ramón’s time in prison. And not through the political grapevine but through a chance circumstance: his wife was the first cousin of Forcás’s girlfriend at the time he was detained.

Mateo had not wanted to go with her to the meeting at the café. He had decided instead to go shopping in the stores on Florida. A present for a friend, a girl, he told his mother. But he refused to tell her who the girl was.

Goyeneche, or Luis Antonio Méndez, told Aurelia, now Lorenza, that his wife’s cousin, a girl named Marisa, who
worked as a professional makeup artist, had suffered tremendously when Ramón had been arrested. At first, they had accused her of being complicit, since they had a stable relationship, but later they found her innocent. Goye had already left when Mateo returned from his shopping trip and showed his mother the cherry-colored leather change purse that he had bought for his nameless friend.

“Do you like it?” he asked. “I also bought another one, a green one.”

“For another girlfriend?”

“No, for you. Or would you rather have the red one?”

Lorenza took the green change purse and planted a loud kiss on it, which she would rather have planted on Mateo, but he would have resisted. Then she told him what she had learned from Goyeneche.

The prison incident had nothing to do with politics but with some shady scheme, for which Ramón was the brains, along with his only brother, Uncle Miche, who had come up with the idea and was the main player. It involved a good deal of cash transferred monthly from a bank in the provinces to Buenos Aires by a moving company. The money would arrive at its destination in the middle of the night and would be placed in a high-security deposit safe until it was picked up the following morning. But it wasn’t the only delivery that arrived, since the moving company had other clients aside from the bank. So Ramón sent, from some town in the interior, a huge wooden box addressed to himself that was scheduled to arrive on the same day as the bank’s money.

“So wait … my father sent himself a big wooden box,” Mateo said. “This is getting interesting.”

“Yes, he was both the sender and the recipient.”

“I bet it wasn’t an empty box.”

“Right. But see if you can guess what was in it. Believe it or not, your uncle Miche.”

“Uncle Miche? Inside the box?” Mateo laughed. “You’re telling me that my uncle Miche was the merchandise? And what shit was he up to inside that wooden box?”

“Your uncle Miche was to arrive sealed in the box to the deposit safe. He’d come out of his hiding pace in the middle of the night, switch the bags of money for fake ones, keep the real ones with him inside the wooden box, which he would reseal and wait … for your father to claim him the following day.”

“Brilliant! But where did it go wrong?”

“Goye says that according to his wife’s cousin they had done a practice run of the whole thing, in a different shipment, not the one with the money, and everything had gone without a hitch. Uncle Miche had spent the night in the deposit safe without being noticed and on the following day Ramón had successfully claimed him. So far, so good.”

“What a bitch of a life!”

“I know, it’s unbelievable. They repeated the operation, this time for real, on the day the money was sent. But because Uncle Miche is no taller than five feet three inches or so, the box he was in was very heavy, and this time the movers dropped it. Your uncle Miche suffered a tremendous blow to
the head and lost consciousness. It seems that he was out when he arrived at the deposit company, and that he only started to come to the following morning, and he groaned.”

“Of course, they heard him. The weird case of the groaning wooden box.”

“They heard him and figured out what was going on, but they didn’t say anything at first. They waited for the recipient to come and claim him and they snatched your father as well.”

“It’s like an episode of the Three Stooges.”

“The two stooges.”

“Typical Ramónism!”

“The moral of the story: don’t hit your head while you’re heading a heist,” she said, and the two broke into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

Ramón and Uncle Miche spent a few months behind bars. Nothing serious, since Miche had never gotten his hands on the money, they couldn’t prove much. Don’t hit your head while you’re heading a heist, Mateo repeated on the way back to the hotel, amused. But when they arrived he suddenly grew morose.

“Don’t laugh anymore, Lorenza. It’s not funny. I would have preferred if Ramón had been a real criminal,” he said. “And that the sentence had been many years. At least that way I could have believed that he never looked for me because he couldn’t, because he was in prison and they wouldn’t let him. A great thug, or a famous underground political leader, someone sentenced to high-security solitary confinement for many years, thinking about me every day, like I
think about him. Someone who was sure that as soon as he was let go, the first thing he would do is look for that son he had lost. I swear, Lolé. I had held out such hopes until today. I think I’d rather he was dead. So that I could forgive him. Do you understand? But no, now it seems that he is alive, jailed for some buffoonery.”