No Place for Heroes

by Laura Restrepo

  “You’ll call him tomorrow.”

  “Do you really think the Virgin of Luján saved those two?”

  “No, Mateo, I don’t really think so.”

  “IT’S NOW OR never. I’m going to call him,” Mateo announced as soon as he awoke, and Lorenza thought that this time he was really going through with it. “Where is it!” he screamed, suddenly giving his mother a horrified look.

  “Where is what, for God’s sake? Why do you get all worked up like this?”

  “The notebook, Lorenza,” Mateo declared in a lugubrious tone. “The notebook where I wrote down what I was going to say.” He fell back on the sofa, defeated, and she started to look for it. In a few minutes, she discovered it, mixed up with some magazines.

  “You found it?” he asked surprised, as if a miracle had just occurred. “Ramón Iribarren, I am your son, Mateo Iribarren. I have come to Buenos Aires to meet you,” he read in a loud voice for the thousandth time since they had arrived. He knew the passage by heart, but kept repeating it nevertheless, like a mantra, like a spell. Lorenza had been watching him closely. Her son was readying himself for the encounter with his father as if it were a ceremony. Or a duel.

  “Now or never,” Mateo repeated and stared at the phone like a viper hypnotizing its prey before pouncing. But instead of picking up the receiver, he opted for the remote and turned on the television.

  “I’ll call in a little while. I swear,” he assured his mother, as if he owed her anything. “Shit, the Rolling Stones! A concert right here in Buenos Aires. I can’t believe it. Look, look, they’re going to be at the River Plate Stadium. Let’s go, Lorenza. Can we go? Are you even watching? This is historic, the chance of a lifetime. Damn, I love the Stones! I’d rather see the Stones a thousand times more than Ramón. Fuck Ramón, Lolé, let’s go see the Stones. That would be enough for me. I swear that if I get to see them I’ll return in peace to Bogotá and I’ll stop bugging you about my father and Buenos Aires. It’ll be a lot cooler to tell my friends how I saw the Stones than bore them with how I met some bald guy who’s my father.”

  So they went to the stadium in the Belgrano District to see the Stones, who were touring with Bob Dylan. Aurelia had to settle for very expensive tickets from the hotel’s concierge, the only ones left on the planet because the concert was sold out. When they arrived, Mateo bought himself a Bridges to Babylon T-shirt and on the way out couldn’t stop talking, he was so excited.

  “Spectacular, truly genius,” he repeated as they tried to move through the crowd, which was leaving the stadium in droves. “Not to lessen the experience, but it’s pretty strange to go to a Stones concert with your own mother, for how can you get all worked up and crazy with your own mother right there? Although, if you think about it, the Stones are probably more from your generation than from mine, Lolé. It’s funny how you knew all the lyrics better than I did. And what a drag, they didn’t play ‘Paint It Black,’ even though we yelled, they pretended not to hear, but Dylan did play ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ he wrote that, that song, he wrote it, and then the Stones took the name, I think that’s how it was, and then they had a falling-out with Dylan and that’s why tonight’s reunion is historic, Lorenza, once in a lifetime, the Stones and Dylan are friends again and I got to see it! Do you understand? Me, Mateo Iribarren! But you’re a geek, Mother, how can you have liked the small stage better; what a loser, you showed your age there, you’re definitely ancient, liking that little retro stage because it was more like the ones from your era, but the fucking real show was on the big stage, pulling out all the technological stops, blasted with light, and you ecstatic over that pathetic little stage. The best part was the blue hoop, exploding during the fireworks while they played ‘Satisfaction,’ and everything else turned blue. Didn’t you love that blue hoop of light? Unbelievable … you know what I’m talking about, right, Lorenza? The blue splendor when they sang ‘Satisfaction,’ or didn’t you notice? What could you possibly have been thinking about, Mother, it was impossible not to notice that blue light, I don’t know why I brought you, waste of money there. Don’t laugh, it’s not funny, at my age it’s a complete mistake to go to a concert with your mother. You don’t notice these things, but right next to me there was a pretty girl, a very, very pretty Argentinean girl, and she kept looking at me and I was horrified, trying very hard for her not to notice that I was with my mother, or for her not to think you were my girlfriend, my older girlfriend, that would have been even worse. But why the hell should I care if she thought I was some loser who went to concerts with his mother? Everything got screwed up, so what, I was never going to see her again anyway. It was cold as a bitch, right, Lolé? But inside it wasn’t so bad, and once I got jumping and screaming, I was sweating like a horse. Shit, I think I ruined my Bridges to Babylon shirt, it’s drenched, it probably stinks. You think it’ll be all right if I wash it in the hotel? Or maybe I can send it to the dry cleaners. Yeah, maybe I’ll just send it to the dry cleaners to be safe. You know inside we were all warm and bunched together, but now I’m freezing to death. Are you? What did Forcás say? If this is how cold it gets for the living, how must it be for the dead? I already told you, Lorenza, I’m not zipping up my coat. If I zip it up, you can’t see my new shirt, so what’s the point? Thank you, thank you, thank you for inviting me tonight, it was the best, Lolé. The bad thing is how much money we spent. But it was worth it, right? Everything was worth it, a thousand times worth it, a million times, and thanks for my T-shirt, too, this has been the best part about coming to Buenos Aires, the Stones. Bob Dylan is so tiny, right? He looks like a gnome, right? But he’s a giant. A little old, but still a giant. What, you don’t like my T-shirt? So the fabric is a little sticky, so what? Only a mother could find fault with a Bridges to Babylon T-shirt because the fabric is a little sticky. Stiff? The fabric is stiff? Yeah, a little bit, but it doesn’t matter. Does Ramón like the Rolling Stones, Lolé? I think he likes them. I think if he liked Argentinean rock, the Rolling Stones are up his alley, they’re from his era. And to think we were in the stadium of the Río team, the archrivals of Boca Juniors, the team Ramón is crazy about. You told me that Ramón was a Boca fan and that he went to fútbol games at La Bombonera. You didn’t make that up, did you? What would Ramón say if he knew we went to the River Plate Stadium?”

  “YOUR FATHER USED to say that when he had a son he was going to name him César, in memory of el negro César Robles, a friend and classmate whom he cared for very much, and who had been murdered by the Triple A during the time of Isabel Perón. So César, and Cesárea if it was a girl, I used to tell him, but I thought it was nonsense, this wanting children in a life so full of danger.”

  “Ma-te-o Cé-sar I-ri-ba-rren,” Mateo said. “What a name I got, César for el negro César, and Mateo for what?”

  “I picked it.”

  “I would have liked to have met César, tell him I have his name. Or at least have gone to his grave.”

  “I don’t know where he’s buried, but we can find out. We can also look for his children. He was a tough man, a union director in Córdoba, he led the strike in—”

  “I just want to know if he was really black,” Mateo interrupted.

  “He was dark-skinned, dark-skinned people are affectionately called negro, like calling white people white, even though they’re rosy, or Asians yellow, though they’re really white.”

  “All these years I thought that Father gave me the name of his best friend who was black and now he was just dark-skinned? Those kinds of things shake me up inside.”

  “Shake you up inside?” Lorenza laughed.

  “They confuse me. I don’t know anything about my father, and the little I do know is wrong. I’d like to visit the grave of el negro César, Lolé.”

  “Let’s find out where it is. Although it’s possible that it’s nowhere.”

  “It has to be somewhere.”

  “No. It’s possible that they never returned his body.”

  “And so the chil
dren of el negro César may still be looking for their father. Like I am with mine.”

  “The difference being that yours is somewhere out there, alive and kicking.”

  “Alive and kicking, and he’s completely forgotten me.”

  THE LORENZA WHO came out of the doctor’s office was a completely different person than the one who had gone in just an hour before. He’s going to call you, he had assured her. And those words, which translated into the possibility of getting her son back, were enough to regain her trust in the human condition, giving her a backbone with which to stand tall, a head to decide and to act, and a heart not only for anguish but now also for courage. Her mother, her sister, and her brother-in-law took turns waiting by the telephone, which nevertheless did not ring that afternoon, nor that night, nor the following day or the one after that. Meanwhile there were a thousand tasks to perform. Lorenza accomplished them, one by one, following a list she had written up with the help of her sister. She worked on it coldly, systematically, analyzing and calculating, giving herself the order not to falter, and keeping her hopes focused on the conviction that sooner or later the telephone would offer up an Ariadne ball of thread that would lead her out of the labyrinth and to Mateo. Once she knew his whereabouts, she’d have to go get him alone. If Haddad was right, this was one of those battles you had to fight on your own. If Ramón’s weakness was his love for her, that would be the flank she would attack.

  “The first thing I needed was money,” she told Mateo, “a lot of money, for the tickets, hotels, travel documents, contacts. And for other things, but basically those. Mamaíta was an angel. Strong and supportive, as she was anytime there was a crisis in the family. I told her how much money I was going to need and she found it right away and handed it to me. Then I had to take care of a bunch of legal matters that would help me if there was to be a custody fight. It was likely to happen, and being a foreigner, the law was not going to be on my side. I also had to get passports. My legal one and a fake one for you, in case Ramón decided to keep yours, plus two other sets of pictures of you, of me, names and nationalities changed and with all the necessary seals. Your father was an expert at falsifying papers and I wasn’t. But in Colombia it is as easy as pie to buy a passport. So all that on one end. Ah, and the suitcase. I found one with a double compartment. You should have seen this suitcase, Mateo, this was no toy, but a thing for professionals. So there, ready and sitting by the bed, I kept a suitcase with my clothes and extra clothes for you, because I knew you’d need them. And to top off our grand scheme, Guadalupe and I racked our brains for alternative escape routes out of Argentina, not only by air but also by land. Across the border into Chile or Uruguay, and finally across the border into Brazil. That, plus the contacts at different points, friends who were willing to help. It was a well-planned operation. I had learned something from my clandestine meanderings in the resistance.”

  All this would only work if Mateo was indeed in Argentina, which was only a guess. But the signs pointing to it were plenty. First of all, it was obvious that Ramón would want to return to his own country, where he would be the local and she the foreigner. Second, Ramón had asked her to pack cold-weather clothes for the boy, and though many parts of the world were getting ready for summer, in Argentina it was the start of winter. Third, Haddad thought that if Ramón’s goal was to win her back, he was going to do it on his own territory. In Colombia, things had gone so badly for them that the relationship had shattered. But in Argentina, they had been in love. It was likely that he would want to lead her to the place where they had been happy.

  “Smart guy, that Haddad,” Mateo said.

  “Yes, but another assumption came into play there, that Ramón’s letter was a love letter.”

  “And if it was a love letter, why set up such a Mission Impossible to save me?”

  “That’s the thing, kiddo, his letter might have been about love, but his actions were acts of war.”

  “Great way to put it, Lolé, I’m really liking this movie.”

  “Wait, now is when it gets ugly.”

  SOON AFTER THE incident with the police in Las Violetas, Aurelia began to meet Forcás at El Molino Azul, a telo in Buenos Aires—tel-ho: ho-tel backward, a hotel by the hour for couples. What a whimsical contraption memory is! She remembered the exterior details of the building, a cement bunker, a kind of eternal monument to momentary love. But inside? Completely a blank. She strained to remember a single object, however insignificant, which would bring back the atmosphere of those afternoons. A blanket, say, a stiff blanket cold to the touch, the color of a dark sea. Or like red wine? Why not. It could well have been a satiny old thing the color of wine, or fading raspberry. A depressing thing under any other circumstance. And the plastic curtain in the shower. It should be yellow or a yellowed white. Or was it green? Pistachio green with printed bubbles, that’s what it was. How tenaciously that green curtain had lurked in the dark corners of her memory. But Lorenza was able to snatch it out and she kept casting her line to see what else she could catch in that miraculous fishing expedition, until the pair of teacups appeared, delivered by room service through a gyrating window, pale lukewarm water barely darkened by the musty tea bags and sugar cubes. But not that much else.

  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.