No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  After this incident, Lorenza made it a point to take Mateo to the French Basque country, so he could discover the birthplace of his paternal grandparents and the origins of the blood in his veins. The opportunity arose when she was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on literature at the film festival in neighboring Biarritz. So she dragged Mateo along.

  From the tiny and beautiful village of Ascain, in the heart of Euskal Herria, Mateo sent a letter to his aunt Guadalupe.

  It seems that this is where my grandparents were born, he wrote. We are on one side of a magnificent black stone, sharp as a blade, that’s called La Rhune, the sacred mountain of the Basques. Lorenza says that if my grandparents weren’t born in this village, they were born in one just like it. That’s exactly the kind of things that she says, convinced that it solves all my problems. Yesterday I watched some men play a game called frontón, throwing a ball violently against a wall, and then I bought a black beret, like the one Che Guevara wore. They told me that it was a Basque beret, exactly like the one all the locals wear around here. I had thought that it was only Che Guevara who used it, being who he was. But Grandfather Pierre also used to have one. Lorenza said that he always wore it, so she never saw the top of his head. I asked her if Forcás wore one when he was in the resistance, and she replied that it would have been an idiotic thing to do, that no one in the resistance was stupid enough to go around in a Che Guevara costume.

  Before night fell, we went to the cemetery to look for my grandparents’ names on the tombstones. But we didn’t have any luck, although we looked carefully, tomb by tomb, just because it occurred to Lorenza that they may have wanted to die in their homeland. If they are even dead, which we don’t know for sure. We have asked in town about them, but no one knows of them.

  I met an old man wearing a Basque beret at a bar who told me that many people had left for America and never returned. I told him that my grandfather had been a logger. He replied, if your grandfather was a logger, then it probably went very well for him in America. There are trees to spare there because there are no cities and no roads, land is a never-ending forest. I was going to argue with him that there were cities and roads, but it wasn’t worth it because Basques are very stubborn, like Forcás, and like me. And Lorenza is more stubborn than any of us, even if she isn’t Basque. She brought me to look for my grandparents in France, where it would be a miracle if we find them, but she has never wanted to look for them in Argentina, where they are surely still living. I asked her why, and she said that it was precisely because of that. She says that in Argentina we might run into them, and my father might be with them. It was best if I didn’t get mixed up in that mess.

  My grandparents immigrated to Polvaredas, a region of Argentina that I don’t know. And it’s true, my grandfather was a logger. He used a chain saw and they paid him by the felled tree. Lorenza says that she saw very few trees during the times that she visited my grandparents. Maybe my grandfather had cut them all down. He must have been very strong, like Ramón, if he had to work with something as heavy as the chain saw all day.

  There was also a story about bunny rabbits. They kept rabbits. Maybe they still do, if they are still alive. My grandparents, not the rabbits. Who knows? Maybe Pierre and Noëlle are still in Polvaredas, maybe they miss me and are looking for me. But that’s unlikely. If they had looked for me at all, they would have already found me. When I was a baby, they visited me and brought dead rabbits to make stew. Ramón put them in the freezer and they never came out because my parents didn’t know how to make rabbit stew, and besides they thought it was disgusting to handle the reddish, skinned rabbits. My grandparents would call later from Polvaredas and Ramón would tell them that I had eaten the whole rabbit and that I was growing into a giant.

  When it grew dark and La Rhune was no longer visible, we walked back to the store with the Basque berets and I bought another one, for Ramón, to give it to him when I see him again.

  WHEN LORENZA ANNOUNCED in Madrid that she was willing to be transferred to Buenos Aires to aid the resistance from within, she was quickly assigned her first mission, to smuggle microfilm, passports of various nationalities, and cash, she didn’t remember how much, but a lot, what had seemed to her an enormous sum then. She was to hand it over to him, to Forcás. How do I find him? she had asked, and they told her that he would find her.

  “Daaaaamn!!” Mateo said. “My papa, the Indiana Jones of the revolution. What movies have you been watching, Mother?”

  She was not to carry lists of contacts or phone numbers. She had to go to a certain hotel and wait until the organization contacted her. They told her that a comrade named Sandrita would pick her up, that she would be her liaison, take her to her lodging, and let her in on what she needed to know to begin work. Forcás would show up later, when she had safely passed through her first days there.

  They also told her that she had to come up with a whole minute. When she asked what that was, “a whole minute,” they told her that it was any likely story to justify her trip there, in case she was questioned. They decided that at first she would say that she wanted to study literature at the University of Buenos Aires and that she had come to figure out the procedure for enrolling.

  “Do you remember the Gila monster?” Mateo changed the subject, like he always did when he was sick of his mother’s stories about the resistance. She was more than glad to abandon that minefield, which she always had to cross so vigilantly, because even the slightest misstep ended up making him more vulnerable and he set off the mines. In the wings of all this, they had a gallery of shared memories that did not involve the battlefield. One of them was that Gila monster that they had once seen when they lived on the isolated ranch in the Panamanian jungle. It appeared early one morning in the kitchen, up above, hidden in a corner between the wall and the ceiling. It was a fat, rosy lizard, with little hands. The Panamanian comrades had warned them that it was called the Gila monster, and that its bite was deadly, so they wanted to catch it, but it had escaped.

  “It looked like an ugly little baby,” she said.

  “An ugly little poisonous baby. It bites and doesn’t let go, the son of a bitch. And on top of that it chews,” Mateo said, “or I should say it breaks the skin so the poison penetrates and drops you dead right there. So many nightmares about imaginary monsters and right there in Panama I found the real one. And do you remember the suicide serpent? That was the most incredible thing I ever saw.”

  It was at the same ranch in Panama. They were asleep in their hammocks and were awakened by a whistling noise, as if someone were cracking a whip. It was a long, green snake, a meter and half at least, that was flogging itself against the wall; a demented, terrifying creature to be doing such a thing. Mateo and Lorenza watched it with eyes as big as plates, frozen in their hammocks, while a few steps away that mad thing rose above the lower quarter of its body, as if to stand up, and cast itself against the wall with the speed of a whip, as if it wanted to commit suicide. When he was little, Mateo told the story, saying that eventually the comrades had to do hand-to-hand combat with the snake to get it out of there, as if snakes had hands.

  “My friends don’t believe me when I tell them that I once saw a suicidal snake in my own house. Because we did see it, Lolé. Maybe it was trying to shed its skin. One day, I would like to ask a biologist just what that beast was doing.”

  MATEO AND LORENZA left La Biela and headed toward Corrientes, to stroll among booksellers and music vendors and coffeehouses. Lorenza wondered where all the books had been during the time of the dictatorship, she didn’t remember seeing them, or buying any, or even stopping to peruse, maybe because she never had any money or because it wasn’t safe to do such things, or maybe she had done it, but that was one of the many things that had not been made part of the official register. Her memories of that time were confined to the events of the main plotline. They were simple and directly related to what had happened, no props or scenery, and strangely enough, almost
without words.

  “Do you smell that, Mateo?” she asked. “It’s mold. That’s the smell of Buenos Aires.”

  It was a rancid smell that had an aristocratic whiff. She had experienced it when she had come with her father, and years later when she had lived with Ramón, and now again, here with Mateo. It wasn’t ubiquitous or all-pervasive, but engendered in the dark humid corners of the city, the shady parks, the salon hairstyles of the old señoras, the subway trains, the stacks of used books, and diffused through the streets in small whiffs.

  There it was … coming out from under a railing like steam. There again, clinging to the jacket of a passerby. That old smell. Dictators had come and gone, but Buenos Aires always smelled the same, like a broadtail fur coat stored in a basement. When you are here, it is not very noticeable because the nose gets used to it. But when you leave, it goes with you, and wherever you go and open your suitcase, it jumps out at you so that you can’t mistake it. That’s when nostalgia hits.

  “Put your nose to that book you just bought,” she told Mateo. “Do you smell it? It’s Buenos Aires. You have in your hands the very essence of the city.”

  “You sound like a tourist guide, Lolé. Why don’t you tell me about the content of those microfilms you were supposed to hand to Forcás, instead?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I already told you that it wasn’t worth knowing. In any case, we concealed them inside an emptied tube of toothpaste. And I wondered what ‘minute’ I would have to invent if they discovered such a thing at the airport in Ezeiza. The comrades told me that if it happened, to say an Our Father and hope for the best, because no minute would explain away such a thing.”

  “Have you ever read Foundation?” Mateo asked, and without waiting for a response went on to recount the entire, endless plot, like he always did when he had read something, or had a nightmare or saw a movie. Once he started, he couldn’t stop until he reached the grand finale, and this time was no different. He only stopped chattering when his mother told him they were as lost as a Turk in a fog.

  “Is that what they say in Argentina, a Turk in a fog?” he asked.

  “It’s a saying.”

  Lorenza cursed her poor sense of direction, that hopeless flaw that Trotsky called topographical cretinism, which makes any city into a labyrinth. Unfortunately, Mateo had inherited this trait, a tendency to roam endlessly for lack of an internal compass. The good thing about being so out of it was that you never even realized you were lost. Ayacucho, Riobamba, Hipólito Yrigoyen, they had followed the whim of their feet for hours, and the streets of the city center danced around them. Tucumán? Virrey Cevallos? Sarandí?

  They didn’t hold hands anymore. It had been a few years since they had last done so. Before that, the boy’s hand fit in hers as if they had been made for each other, a big hand and a small hand, and they liked to pretend to fit them together like pieces of Lego. But by the time it was her hand that fit into his, Mateo did not want anything to do with this old game. He peeled away from her indignantly when she tried to hug him and he looked all around to make sure that no one had caught them in such a compromising position. Then Lorenza would restrain herself not to anger him, but she recognized a bit of herself in that distance that her son put between them. As a child, he had always clung to her, the two huddled together like ferrets in their burrow—if it was after midnight, the nightmares chased him to her bed; if they were at the beach, he wanted to fight like sharks; if they were on the street, he zigzagged in front of her, stepping on her with his oversize, thick-soled sneakers. They were like some creature with two heads and eight limbs. And how often had they found themselves in the narrow changing room of a store, as she struggled to try on the clothes and he played with his Transformers on the floor? Or even at home, as she tried to write while he practiced a jujitsu hold on her arm, or he watched his favorite TV program and she force-fed him spoonfuls of soup, or he tied knots in her hair, or she combed his and he pushed her away? At some point, Mateo became ruthless when it came to delineating his personal space and setting distances. He drew a Maginot Line between them and would not allow her to cross it by even a centimeter. And that’s how it should be. Lorenza understood that, as well as the fact that Mateo was no longer her child, no longer a kid, hers or anyone’s, and she realized how much it upset him when she ignored this truth. Mateo was justified in his territorial claims, it was only natural. But that hardness made tears well in her eyes, tears which she was allergic to.

  “Do you think Ramón has arrived at his house in Buenos Aires,” he asked, “or at that cabin in the snowy mountains—”

  “Or at his bar in La Plata. If you want, you can call him from the public phone. I have the number in my pocket.” He shook his head. Before they realized it, it was past eleven and they found themselves in front of the obelisk, which split in two the red splendor of a giant Coca-Cola billboard and speared upward toward the darkness. How had it become so late? It was something that often happened to them. Although they no longer walked holding hands, their conversation was still as entangling as any embrace and time passed them by unwittingly and the rest of the world remained in the wings. And so they kept on walking, by God’s grace, at times entertaining each other and at others simply gazing at the ground, and when she thought she recognized Santa Fe, they had returned to the Avenida de Mayo.

  “It’s no use, Mateo, we’re going around in circles.”

  “But you lived here, Lorenza, for years. How can you get lost?”

  “So what? I still get lost in Bogotá. Wait! Do you smell that? That corner smells like Buenos Aires again.”

  They ended up in a dirty and crowded street full of theaters and nightclubs, which they found out was Lavalle. Apprehensively, they made their way past the pale neon lights which failed to make the air warm, sidestepping hands that offered passes for the strip shows.

  “Let’s get out of here, Lorenza. This place is like a frontier. Or look, let’s go into this theater, it looks like a horror film.”

  The movie was terrible, but Mateo didn’t care. When his mother suggested that they leave, he said he wanted to see the ending. She thought her son would do anything, even sit through some vile movie, as long as it stalled the return to their hotel room where at some point he had to make that call which he had no idea how to make.

  “RAMÓN MUST THINK I’m weak,” Mateo said. “A weakling without any character. He must think that because he didn’t raise me, I turned out soft. I need to tell him how I smacked a kid named Joe Ferla in the face in Rome. And when I tell him, you confirm it, tell him he has to believe me because it’s the truth.”

  When they lived in Rome, the rector’s secretary from the institute where Mateo studied had called Lorenza one day to tell her that her son had a scontro di una inammissibile aggressività with another student, and the rector needed to see his parents. It sounded unbelievable to Lorenza. Ever since he had been a child, her son had known how to defend himself, but he would never set out to purposefully harm anyone, or to go after anybody with his feet or kicking. The years of unmitigated rage would come later, with adolescence, but as a child he had been peaceful and compliant. The institute was the Esposizione Universale Roma, and during the long metro ride from the city center to see the rector, Lorenza thought about the only other incident in Mateo’s life where he had revealed a violent side. It had happened years before, at the school he had attended in Mexico City.

  “Here it is,” the Mexican teacher had told her, indicating a display laid out on a table, all the drawings that Mateo had done during the semester. “There isn’t one without weapons, wars, aggression, and blood …”

  The drawings made an impression on Lorenza, but mostly because of their vibrant colors and beauty, and she said so: “He’s a good artist, my Mateo …”

  But the teacher wasn’t interested in aesthetic judgments, what alarmed her were the violent impulses that flowered in the pieces, indicating the urgent need for a psychological evaluation. She sai
d that Mateo must have been affected by some very grim events, those were her words, which perhaps he had lived through in Colombia. Lorenza did not respond. She gathered the drawings, one by one, with the devotion of any mother handling the artwork of her child, as if it belonged in a museum.

  That same night, she spread the drawings on the floor of the living room to look at them again with Mateo, who at that time must have been around seven.

  “Your teacher says that they are violent,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “Violent, what do you mean?”

  “Well, she says that these figures here are attacking—”

  “They’re not attacking, Lolé, they are defending themselves. That’s very different.”

  It was a reasonable interpretation. There was definitely a war being played out in those drawings, a bloody one at that, this much at least she had to concede to the teacher. But it was also true that all the figures were indeed in defensive stances, which also worried Lorenza. She couldn’t sleep that night thinking about what it was that her son had to defend himself against with such zeal. The following morning she asked him about it at breakfast.

  “Why so many defenses and armaments, Mateo? I mean, in your drawings … all those shields and helmets.”

  “You never know what will happen. It’s always good to be prepared.” His reply was rather vague, so she decided to broach the subject from another angle.

  “And do you think that your characters know how to defend themselves? I mean, will their protections work?”

  “Don’t worry, Lolé, they are im-pen-e-tra-ble,” Mateo said, careful not to skip any of the syllables of that difficult word, and he took off toward the bus that he rode to school every morning.

  The director of the Rome institute told Lorenza that he had hit a classmate named Joe Ferla. She knew who he was, more than once Mateo had returned from school discombobulated because Ferla had put a cigarette inside his desk and almost burned all his notebooks, or had stabbed him with a pencil.