He told her that he respected her and simultaneously disrespected her by addressing her using the familiar Lorencita, a little verbal manhandling that she decided to allow faced as she was with that compromising check and no funds.
“My boss reads La Crónica and admires you very much. He recognizes that you are a top-class journalist, and precisely because of that does not want to proceed with a court case, shall we say. The amount of the check is not the problem, but we’re talking about principles here. My boss doesn’t like to be … toyed with. Do you understand?”
“I do understand, Mr. Pinilla, but tell me, what was my husband’s check for?” asked Lorenza, already guessing.
“The equivalent in dollars, ma’am.”
“There you are, Lorenza, you’ve told me about his wide shoulders a thousand times,” Mateo jumped in. “But you never told me that he swindled a drug cartel leader.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“But why not till now?”
“Do you want me to go on or not?”
That lawyer, without knowing it, had just offered her another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that she was putting together. And now Lorenza knew what money Ramón was using to survive. The check must have been one of the many blank ones that she’d signed for him while they lived together, to pay the rent or other services. Lorenza made a mental calculation. If after getting Mateo back she kept on living with her mother and turned over her entire salary to this guy, she could pay the debt in four or five months. And it would be much better to give up her salary for a short while than to postpone such a debt.
“Look, Mr. Pinilla, please tell your boss that I am going on a trip very soon, but that as soon as I return I will pay him the money, as long as I can do it in a few installments.”
“But he’s not going to like that, miss. My boss is not going to like that you too will be taking off for Argentina—”
“Argentina?” Lorenza’s heart jumped. “Did you say Argentina?”
“Well, that’s where your husband went, Señora Lorenza, and you must understand that my boss—”
“I do understand, Mr. Pinilla, but you must trust that I will pay the full amount. But tell me why you said Argentina?”
“Argentina, that’s where your husband went, as you well know.”
“I guarantee you that you know a lot more than I do. Tell your boss that my husband stole money from him, but he stole my son from me. Tell him to trust me, because we are actually on the same side.”
Pinilla accepted this and sent his regards to Lorencita’s mother, asking if she still lived on Ninety-fourth below Ninth.
“You mean Pinilla knew Mamaíta?” Mateo asked.
“No, kiddo, of course not. He was threatening me, just in case I decided not to pay back the debt.”
But before the lawyer had left, cordially saying his farewells, Lorenza pulled him to the side.
“Just one more thing, Mr. Pinilla. How do you know that my husband went to Argentina?”
“You’re a journalist and you have your sources, right? We have ours.” Pinilla smiled from ear to ear. “We are also similar in that way, how about that!”
“So once again, my father the crook, with his little swindles,” Mateo said. “He grabs the boy, grabs the money, and leaves you in the lurch, owing those animals.”
“That wasn’t his plan. Before Pinilla said goodbye, I knew for sure that Ramón would call sometime soon.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“It says a lot about who your father is. He had fled from the mafioso, and must have had everything in place so that I too could flee.”
“Okay, that makes sense, then you must have run home to take his call.”
“Not yet. If the game was so dirty, then I had one round left to play. And now the minutes were ticking down.”
When it had been suggested to Lorenza that she report Ramón to the Argentinean military, she made a decision—not that. Now she had just made another decision: except for that, anything.
At the magazine was a worker named Botero, known as Botas, a judicial investigator with whom she got along well. It always paid off to team up with Botas, who knew how to infiltrate even the worst dens of iniquity, in order to find out some detail. There were no hot spots, hidden spots, or whorehouses that escaped Botas. Lorenza thought, this is my man, and went to his desk. Botas made a few phone calls and fifteen minutes later the two were in a taxi, headed toward a lower-middle-class neighborhood west of the city. They rang the bell at a yellow house with a front yard, a metallic fence, and three enraged dogs, those who kill and then eat their kill. A little old woman who came to the door in sandals screamed at the dogs to shut the fuck up and chained them so that they couldn’t bite anyone, but still remained ready to attack, in the little living room where they sat to wait. The old woman brought them some coffee in miniature cups and after a brief wait made them follow her toward one of the rooms on the second floor, where they were greeted by a man in a white robe.
“A doctor?” Mateo asked.
“I never knew if he was a doctor, or a chemist, or a secret abortionist. I never knew, never asked. In any case, he wore a white lab coat and was very pleasant. When Botas told him why I needed what I needed, he refused to take money from me.”
“You bought a gun. Is there a gunfight with my father that no one has ever told me about? Confess it now, you killed Ramón.”
“Hush, loquito. You’ll never guess what he gave me.”
“A … murderous knife.”
“No.”
“A bulletproof vest.”
“No.”
“An ax, a stick of Acme dynamite, like Wile E. Coyote uses against Road Runner? I don’t know, Lorenza, I give up. What did he give you?”
A coffee-colored eyeliner kit, made by Revlon. You pulled off a clear cap that protected the end, like any eyeliner, but you could also unscrew it and pull off the end, to reveal a needle, much shorter than a syringe’s needle but just as thin. In the body of the pencil there was a small tube with a thick liquid.
“A few drops will knock him out, a lot of drops will kill him,” the man in the white robe had told her.
“Oh, shiiiiiiiit, Lolé,” Mateo said. “And you hid that vaina in the false bottom of the professional suitcase?”
“That wasn’t necessary, I put it in with my other makeup.”
EVENTUALLY, MATEO shut off the PlayStation and sat down to write a letter to Ramón.
“You can give it to him after I leave for Bogotá,” he told his mother when he was finished. “If you see him, that is, or see someone who can give it to him.” On the desk he left a folded piece of paper inside a hotel envelope, and announced that he was going to take a long bath.
“Can I use all the hot water?” he asked before locking himself in.
“The only thing that is infinite in this world is the hot water in hotels,” she replied.
“If you want, you can read it,” her son’s voice said from the other side of the door, drowned out by the running water. She opened the envelope.
Ramón: This trip to Buenos Aires has confirmed what I already knew. That you have never been anything to me, and that you are not now, the letter said. You have grown in me like a ghost, like a fear of darkness and hatred of vegetables. I recognize your absence in the insecurity of my adolescence and in this arrogant shyness that isolates me from others. But fortunately it is not only that. You have also grown in me like a passion for mountains, and rivers and snow and mist. Every time that I climb a mountain, I seem to remember that I once had a father. I’ll stay with the memory and stop searching for you. I no longer expect anything from you.
That’s what Mateo had written, but he was still expecting. In the back of the envelope, making an effort to write clearly, he had jotted down his phone number and address in Bogotá, specifying the name of the neighborhood, the apartment number, and the postal code. And if that weren’t enough, below he had drawn a little rudimentary map, indicatin
g with arrows how to get there.
Lorenza had another busy workday ahead of her, and was very worried about leaving her son alone, given over to Wei-Wulong and the Dynasty Warriors. Fortunately, the phone rang just then, she picked it up to hear the sweet voice of a girl, asking for Mateo.
“Mateo, it’s Andrea Robles, the daughter of el negro Robles. She says that they told her you were looking for her and wants to know if you want to go out for a bit,” she screamed past the bathroom door, covering the speaker so that she wouldn’t hear the categorical no her son would come back with. But to her surprise, Mateo agreed to see her.
“SHE’S VERY PRETTY, Andrea Robles,” Mateo told his mother that night. “An elongated face, thin body, curly hair, and eyes like this. She took me to the Botanical Gardens, which was full of cats, but there we talked. Who knows what all those cats in the gardens eat, Lolé. You think people bring them food? Or maybe the government feeds them. Or they eat plants, botanical stuff, like cows do. It’s not just a few, there’s an army of cats. I’ve never seen so many in my life. That is not a botanical garden, it’s a feline garden.
“She’s older than me, Andrea Robles. Like four years, or ten. At least six, yes six, or seven, that’s what I figured, although she sometimes seems like she could be my age, depending on how you look at her, and she talks about revolution, about commitments, about the injustices of this world. Andrea believes in those things, Lolé; she says she inherited it from her father. She told me that for many years she thought he had died in a car accident, that’s what they’d told her, her mother I guess, since it sounds like the loving lie of a mother. A lie from a mother afraid that in school her daughter would repeat the true story and get the whole family in trouble.
“In their house, there had always been mystery surrounding the work of her father,” Mateo went on. “I mean, even when el negro Robles was still alive, they had this problem. Can you imagine? When they asked Andrea what her father did, she didn’t know how to reply, so she started making up jobs for him, inspired by things she saw around the house. She always saw papers, piles of papers, typewriters, mimeograph machines, and that’s why she started to tell everyone that her father was an office worker. Or if not that, a pilot, because they always traveled for free. Of course, in truth it wasn’t free, the tickets were bought by the party, but she didn’t know that. What she knew was that airlines gave pilots and their families free tickets, so she decided that her father was a pilot. She also said that he was in the military, or so she told me, that she told people her father was in the military, or was a militant. Funny, right, Lolé? The two things sounded the same to Andrea Robles, the military and militant. She had heard both words in her house and she thought they were the same thing.
“Andrea Robles told me that one morning around seven they were having breakfast as always, and some friends of her mother arrived, who were not really friends but party comrades, but Andrea did not know that until much later. Her mother attended to them in the kitchen. Andrea did not know what they were doing there so early, and they wouldn’t leave to let them have their breakfast, and when they finally did leave, her mother sat her and her brother at the table, but instead of giving them breakfast, she told them that their father had died in an accident.
“It had already been some time since Andrea Robles’s father had separated from her mother and gone to live in another city, so that Andrea did not see him that much anyway, not every day, not even every month, only once in a while. So that when he was killed, Andrea didn’t feel the change much, and pretty soon forgot about the fact that he was dead and returned to the idea that he lived far away and that he would soon come to visit. When he had been alive, el negro Robles visited them and took them on trips to the mountains in his Citroën, where they would make snowmen. I asked Andrea if that mountain was in Bariloche, and I told her that Forcás had taken me to see the snow in Bariloche, but what I didn’t tell her was that he only took me once and then disappeared. She told me that it wasn’t in Bariloche, but some mountain. What mountain? I don’t know, Lorenza, I don’t know what mountain, we didn’t get into details. Andrea told me that it was the only time in her life that she’d seen snow, never again after that, even after she became an adult. Now that I think about it, el negro César took his kids to see the snow only once, like Ramón did with me. It’s an important part of the story. And they were lucky because it snowed. Well, maybe he took his kids to the mountains several times, but it only snowed that one time.
“What I want to tell you about is that Andrea thought that her father’s accident had been in the Citroën, and that a few days afterward had been very surprised when she saw the Citroën in perfect condition, not even a scratch on it. How was it possible that her father had died in the Citroën, and not a thing had happened to the car? But she didn’t ask. Not at all. She said she didn’t ask anything, didn’t think anything, didn’t come to any conclusions. Only later would she find out that he had been gunned down, and that the Citroën had nothing to do with it.
“Now Andrea knows exactly how everything happened and has filed a legal case against the murderers and she has to testify and give statements. But as a girl she knew nothing. She says that the death of her father seemed unreal because she was only eight when they killed him. She didn’t understand what it meant to die, no one near her had ever died, and on top of that, during the funeral the coffin was closed and she never even suspected that he was in there.
“Andrea told me that she had loved him very much, and that her father had loved her in the same way. I asked her how she knew this, that is, how she was so sure that el negro Robles had loved her, and she said that he always brought her little presents, postcards and maps of the world. And some castanets. Andrea still had those castanets that el negro Robles had brought her once, surely from Spain. But she also knew that he loved her because when she was born, her father ran out and bought all the books by Piaget to understand what children were like and how to best educate them. Tell me, Lolé, did Ramón read all the books by Piaget after I was born, because if he did, they didn’t do him much good.
“One day, Andrea had invited her father to a cafeteria to have a coffee. She told me that she was very small and that she had never in her life had a coffee because it probably tasted terrible, but because she saw el negro talking in cafés with his friends and they all drank coffee, she had wanted to do the same, and she tore into a long monologue on why he had to return to live with her mother.
“In any case, after they killed her father, Andrea Robles began to miss him like never before, that’s what she told me. So she started to pretend that he wasn’t dead but was traveling in Europe and that he would bring her back postcards and castanets. She also liked to imagine that he had lost his memory, a blow to the head or something like that, and since he didn’t remember anything, he couldn’t look for her or call her. It was funny when Andrea told me that, Lolé, because once I also relied on that story that Ramón had lost his memory. I asked Andrea Robles if she ever imagined that her father had been imprisoned, and now it was her turn to laugh, probably because she had thought up that excuse as well.
“Andrea Robles continued to make up stories for herself until one day she picked up the newspaper and saw a picture of her father riddled with bullets. It was on the anniversary of his death, or something like that. Andrea said that it had been a horrible blow, although she was already eighteen, a horrible blow to see the picture of your own father’s body riddled with bullets. Imagine that, Lolé, it must have been quite the surprise. Of course it helped her, what I mean is that, in the end, finding that picture was a good thing for Andrea Robles, because it forced her to finally accept the fact that el negro Robles had died. And she also realized that he had been a brave man and that he had died fighting against injustices and for the poor, and she became such a fan of her father that now she wants to emulate him in everything. But what about that photo? He was bullet-ridden, Lolé, how fucking crazy, to all of a sudden come upon
a picture of your own father riddled with bullets. Did I tell her I was named César in honor of her father? No, but I think she already knew.”
ONE DAY AT noontime, Lorenza had agreed to meet Forcás at a place called Banchero, on the way to Primera Junta. They had set aside barely an hour to be together and he had invited her to that pizzeria, where she had never been, because they made a top-notch fugazza that she had to try. But she was late, she had gotten the streets wrong and in haste had walked past the place and had to turn back, convinced that she would not arrive on time. Forcás would get up and go as it had to be. The ten-minute waiting period had just about come and gone when she saw him, at an instant when and in a place where she had not expected to see him. But it was him, it was Forcás; there he was seated at a table, in a white shirt, at a restaurant that had not been the one they agreed upon. Aurelia looked up and saw the name of the spot; it said Banchero. Then it must be the place, Banchero, she thought, look no further. Just a little while before she had passed right in front of it and kept on going.
He looked very handsome in his white shirt, but he was in a bad mood, maybe due to her lateness, or because he had asked for two very cold Quime beers and by the time she got there they weren’t that cold anymore; and besides, Aurelia told him that she would rather have a Pepsi because she didn’t drink beer and to make things worse, she didn’t want the fugazza that he had wanted her to taste and instead ordered a small pizza à la calabresa, who knows why. So the truth was that their encounter had not been going as well as their previous ones. There was in fact a noted unpleasantness as their allotted hour slowly wound down, and so she did her best to try and fix things. But Forcás wasn’t saying much and he couldn’t take his eyes from a television screen in the corner, which the owners had put there so that the clientele could watch the World Cup, which that year was played in Argentina.
No Place for Heroes Page 14
