No Place for Heroes (24 page)

During commercial breaks, the girls from Bagley forgot about Renzo, the time had come for plotting. They turned up the volume, lowered their voices to a whisper, and the clandestine meeting took place. Rumba, who belonged to the internal committee, reported that in the nineteenth century the “law of the chair” had been approved, which their employer no longer respected, but which they should start fighting for again: for every hour on their feet, they had a right to fifteen minutes of sitting.

Then Renzo and Adriana de Astolfi pledged to love each other forever through a Gypsy blood rite, and during the commercials that followed Aurelia had them read excerpts from the party newspaper and talked about the articles with them. You should have seen how those girls hurled curses and insults in low voices at the military junta, at the executioners of Triple A, at the federals of coordination, against the Marquis Farnesio and his abject hunchback. And you should have heard how they pledged their lives and swore to overthrow them, all of them, to restore freedom to Renzo and to all the missing and kidnapped. Because if Evita were alive, she would not have allowed these criminals to fuck with our lives like this. If Evita were alive, if Renzo the Gypsy, if the Countess de Astolfi really existed …

I
N THE THIRD
room in Coronda, the one right next to Miche’s, lived a paralyzed man.

“How paralyzed?”

“Very paralyzed. He got around in a wheelchair, never went out, and could barely fend for himself.”

That man was married to a much younger woman named Gisella Sanchez, who helped him with everything and certainly also supported him, because he could not work at all and she did, as a florist. Gisella Sanchez left early in the morning and returned at night, and if her husband needed anything while he was alone, he banged the end of a broomstick on the ceiling, which could be heard in the brothers’ rooms, so whoever was there dropped by to help him. Maybe he had dropped the paper, and they would pick it up for him, or he had finished the bottle of water or had run out of toilet paper, so they went to the market to get it for him. Sometimes the wind twisted the antenna of his television and Miche or Forcás would climb on the roof to straighten it. Gisella Sanchez was very grateful for everything they did, and would bring them back flowers from the shop as gifts.

Forcás had never talked openly about politics with her, and yet they had agreed upon a pact as a matter of survival. More than a pact, it was a favor, a risky one that she had agreed to do for them if there were ever any problems. Lorenza did not know whether the husband, the paralyzed man, was aware of the agreement.

“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.

“D
O 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.”