No Place for Heroes (31 page)

“It had been quite a task hiding it, loosening the boards of the shutter and then readjusting them.”

“And the Revlon?” Gabriela asks. “I have to know, the Revlon?”

“I had buried it days before. Away from the cabin. Fearing Mateo would inadvertently find it and begin to play with it.”

She went down the stairs with the child in her arms, pausing again at each step, as if life depended on the slowness of her movements. She did not ask herself if she wanted to or had to do what she was doing; she acted like one obeying a command. She put the apples, the package of crackers, and a pacifier for Mateo into the bag. She looked around, peered out the windows, and saw that the world was motionless. No one approached. Then she did it, she took the keys, which as if by magic were still there on the table, waiting for her. Heroes
or buffoons, she said as she was leaving the cabin, and taking Mateo by the hand, she walked toward the Impala. She took the time that was necessary to remove frost from the windshield, buckled Mateo in the backseat, put the briefcase next to him, and when she shut the door was startled at the possibility that the noise would have betrayed them. She looked around again. The footprints of Ramón and the other men were being erased by the snow that was beginning to fall. The entire universe seemed calm.

She sat at the wheel with the parsimony that comes with any inevitable decision, releasing the emergency brake, shifting the gear into neutral, and then the immense Impala of its own volition, as if it knew exactly what was expected of it, gently rolled down the slope, gently complicit, mute as the snow, invisible in the falling snow, lovely as the mantle of snow that gave them camouflage. Twenty minutes later, the Impala pulled up to the road crossing. She had not expected much traffic, but when she saw a Volkswagen headed toward the village, she got out of the Impala and made some hand signals. The woman driving stopped immediately and offered them a ride, asking if the car had broken down, and thus saving Lorenza the need to make up excuses. Without looking back, knowing instinctively that no one had come after them and acting as if the day belonged to her, Lorenza left the keys in the Impala and the window half closed, so that Miche and Ramón wouldn’t have any problems when they found it. She got into the Volkswagen with the child and the bag. On the way, the women spoke about the dangers of winter driving on
such a bumpy road, and she thanked her when she left them in the central square of San Carlos de Bariloche, in front of the town hall.

Until then everything had been suspiciously easy, but suddenly Mateo began to cry, a rare thing for him, who until recently had done so little, but just at that moment he unleashed a fit of disconsolate and uncontrollable weeping, as if leaving a path of tears that Ramón could follow until he found him. He didn’t stop crying when they stopped to pet a sweet dog who waited for its owner at the entrance to a shop, or when Lorenza bought a cupcake decorated with yellow-and-pink icing, or when she sat him by the window of the bus that would take them along Lago Nahuel Huapi and through ancient forests to Puyehue, at the Chilean border, where authorities would let them pass after stamping the false documentation that Lorenza would give them. Mateo only calmed down and stopped whimpering when his mother pointed to a herd of deer on the shores of the lake, searching for something to graze on under the snow.

E
VERY NIGHT, FROM
Gabriela’s apartment, Lorenza called Mateo at the hostel where he was staying with his group. She wanted to know if Bariloche brought back memories for her son, if the mountains seemed familiar to him, but he was kept very busy and nostalgia wasn’t his thing. Sometimes he didn’t answer the phone because he’d gone dancing
with the others at a nightclub, or there was such a racket in his room that he couldn’t hear a thing, or he was already nodding off to sleep after a long day of skiing, or he was in a hurry because they were waiting for him to go ice-skating.

When they finally spoke, during the brief minutes when they could talk, Mateo told her how he’d gone down the red runs without a problem, but not so much the black-diamond one, although he had dared to try a short but terrifying stretch of the black-diamond run.

“A crazy cliff, Lolé, you know, I said to myself, heroes or buffoons, and threw myself behind others to see what the hell would happen. And nothing happened to me, I swear, on that mother of black runs I was a hero. Well, I did lose a glove, so there was a little bit of the buffoon, too, sorry. Lolé, what crap, I lost one of the great thermal gloves that you bought me, but I went on skiing and by the afternoon, my hand was numb and all purple.”

“How can you ski without gloves, Mateo, why didn’t you tell the instructor that you lost it?”

“Do you think Ulrica goes around with a bag of spare gloves?”

“Ulrica?”

“My instructor. She’s an Olympic champion, Lorenza, what do you think? Well not anymore, now she teaches, but when she was younger, she was on the Argentinean team and competed in the Winter Olympics. Don’t worry, tomorrow I’ll see what I can do.”

“Buy another pair, Mateo, promise me not to go skiing
without gloves. It’s crazy, your fingers will freeze off, no one can ski without gloves.”

“I’m not going to buy more gloves. They’re very expensive here, I’m not going to waste money on that.”

“Listen to me, Mateo, buy some gloves, don’t start torturing me,” she tried to tell him, but he said goodbye because they were calling him for dinner.

“Guess what, Lorenza?” he announced to her that night, when they finally managed to talk a little longer. “Can you believe it? I found a glove and fixed the problem.”

“You found a glove? Incredible, kiddo, really incredible. And was it the right hand?”

“Yes, the right hand, and my size.”

“Lucky Mateo, it only happens to you, now you can ski to your heart’s—”

“No, you don’t get it! I found my glove, the one I lost yesterday, but I hadn’t lost it, it was stuffed in the bottom of my pocket and I didn’t realize it.”

Sunday came and the trips ended: Mateo’s trip to Bariloche, and their joint trip to Argentina. Lorenza was upset because she couldn’t get in touch with her son. They had to plan things well for the next day, carefully plot the moves from airport to airport, and meet up to take the plane together back to Bogotá.

“No use, that child is not answering,” she complained to Gabriela, then the phone rang. It was Mateo.

“Good God, kiddo, you were scaring me, I couldn’t get in touch with you and I had to—”

“Guess who’s here.”

“Who?”

“Guess.”

“I can’t, I don’t know the names of your friends. Oh wait, I know. Ulrica.”

“No.”

“Come on, kiddo, tell me, I have things to do. I bet you haven’t even packed yet.”

“Ramón.”

“What?”

“Ramón. He’s downstairs. I called him the other night, that number in Buenos Aires.”

“Can you repeat that for me?”

“Ramón. I called and he came. He drove down with his family.”

“You’re kidding—”

“I swear. You know what he says? That he let us go. That time, when we escaped from the cabin. He says he let us go. That he could have stopped it, but he didn’t.”

“…”

“Lolé?”

“Huh?”

“Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No, not entirely.”

“He’s lying, right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s true. It was too easy, wasn’t it?”

“Aren’t you angry? I am.”

“I’m not. I took you with me. I’d gone to get you and I took you with me. The rest is not my business.”

“But why would he let us go?”

“What did he tell you?”

“He didn’t tell me anything. He cried. He said nothing.”

“It could be for two reasons. At least that’s what I’ve always thought.”

“The first?”

“He realized that it was no use. Things were not going to fix themselves by force.”

“That wouldn’t have been too difficult to figure out. The second?”

“The second? He ran out of money.”

“The Mafia money?”

“I imagine that he used it to pay for that.”

“For what?”

“The whole operation in Bariloche. End of money, end of happiness. But you have him right there, you can ask him yourself.”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t talk much. He just cries.”

“Tell me what’s going on, son. How are you holding up? Jesus Christ, what a reunion that must have been … So you called him, kiddo, who would have thought. You waited to get rid of me to call him, damn you. Did he just arrive?”

“Nah, he got here last night.”

“How could you not have called me!”

“I called, I swear. I called your friend’s house and no one answered.”

“Oh damn, we were at the movies. But tell me, has he been nice to you? Does he look old?”

“He’s got a belly. But it was true about the wide shoulders.”

“How is it for you? Do you like your father?”

“For the moment, I like my sister. Yesterday, we went sledding.”

“So you have a sister. How old is she? What’s her name?”

“She’s eleven. Her name is Eleonora. And there’s a baby called Diego.”

“There’s also a baby?”

“Eighteen months old.”

“Did you give your father the Basque beret?”

“No. I left it in Buenos Aires, in the black suitcase.”

“What the hell, kiddo, how long have you had that gift … Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to get it to him later.”

“No, he doesn’t seem the kind of guy who wears a beret.”

“Have you been able to talk to him, tell him things, like you imagined all this time?”

“Not much. There’s no privacy.”

“Oh.”

“There’s his wife and children. We haven’t been able to talk one-on-one. I like his wife too. She says that in the kids’ room there is a picture of me hanging on the wall. From when I was a baby. Lies, right? Last night, he and I did talk
alone for a while, but about neoliberalism. He does not like it at all, neoliberalism.”

“And you, what did you say?”

“Nothing, he didn’t ask for my opinion. Just as well, I don’t have an opinion about that. But I must tell you something, and then that’s it, because I promised Eleonora that I would help her put the baby to sleep. It’s her responsibility to put the baby to sleep every night.”

“Wait, Mateo, wait. We have to coordinate everything, because tomorrow you and I have to move with the precision of a Swiss clock. You’re coming to Buenos Aires, I’ll wait for you at this airport, we take a taxi to the international airport, and from there we’ll board the flight to Bogotá together. There is plenty of time, so don’t worry, but we have to have our headlights on so there’s not a hitch.”

“That’s why I called you, Lolé. You better go alone to Bogotá. Is it all right?”

“Is it all right? What are you talking about?”

“I’m staying with Ramón. Everything’s taken care of.”

“What!”

“The beret is for you. You can have it.”

“Wait, Mateo, this is serious. What do you mean you’re staying with Ramón, you can’t just make that decision on your own, you know I—”

“It’s only for two or three weeks, just until the end of my school vacation.”

“But, Mateo—”

“Don’t worry, I’m not two and a half years old anymore. If I smell a Ramónism, I’ll take off running, and this Ramón will never catch me. I’m half his weight and a head taller. Trust me, Lorenza. I’ll find out who this man is, and when I’ve figured it out, I’ll come back.”

A grant from the Guggenheim Foundation helped to finance part of the writing of this novel.

a note about the author

Laura Restrepo is the bestselling author of several prizewinning novels published in more than twenty languages, including
Leopard in the Sun
, which won the Arzobispo Juan San Clemente Prize;
The Angel of Galilea
, which won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in Mexico and the Prix France Culture in France; and
Delirium
, for which she was awarded the 2004 Alfaguara Prize, with a jury headed by Nobel laureate José Saramago, and the 2006 Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2007, Restrepo currently divides her time between Bogotá and Mexico City.