No Place for Heroes (8 page)

G
ET USED TO
not going around asking about what doesn’t concern you, her comrades had warned her in Madrid on the eve of her departure for Buenos Aires, where she went after the death of her father. This was their response when she had asked why Forcás was called Forcás, a nickname that made her recall that strange poem by Rubén Darío, “Forcás from the Country.” This Argentinean Forcás was one of the leaders of the party inside Argentina itself, a being of mythical proportions—that is, for those who supported the resistance from the outside. Since they didn’t know him personally, they considered him a legend: after all, he was the secretary of the organization, the one who controlled the strings for the whole clandestine operation. Secret printing presses, movement of money, safe houses, placement of directors, lists of sympathizers, the forging of passports and other documents so that fugitives could sneak out of the country—all this depended on him. In Madrid they knew him well because they often collaborated with him on things that could only be done from the outside.

“Should we get an ice cream?”

“Maybe some caramel flan instead.”

Many Argentineans had sought exile in Madrid and collaborated
from there, and comrades from other countries had joined them. She was one of them. They made denouncements, raised funds, and coordinated campaigns all over Europe, hoping to find those who had disappeared still alive somewhere. But the dream that some of them most truly longed for was to return some day to Argentina to join the proper resistance against the dictatorship from the inside.

“We thought we had to lay it all on the line.”

“What line?”

“It’s just another expression, I guess that’s how we put it.”

“We
thought?
We
put it? Why are you speaking in the plural as if you were a crowd? Like the devil in
The Exorcist
, who gives me the chills when he says, ‘I am not one, but legions.’ So tell me, why did they call Ramón Forcás?”

“That’s just what I had asked in Madrid, and since they told me that they had no idea, I recited what I remembered from the Darío poem.”

“They called Ramón Forcás because his parents were from the country. Pierre and Noëlle. My grandfather Pierre, my grandmother Noëlle. Pierre Iribarren, Noëlle Darretain. Lolé, do you think Grandma Noëlle loved me?”

“She loved you very much, you were her only grandson. When you were a baby, we dressed you in clothes she knitted for you, wool for the winter and cotton for the summer.”

“I wonder what became of them, Lorenza. Do you think they’re still alive?”

“We’ll know when you work up the nerve to call your father, won’t we?”

Lorenza remembered the mordant incident when Mateo was ten and she found by accident a photograph of Alice Hughes Leeward in his wallet. She was an Englishwoman who had lived for a while in Bogotá, a casual friend of her own mother, but aside from that not very closely connected to the family. But nevertheless, the boy had carefully tucked the photo into his billfold—Alice Hughes Leeward. Lorenza had to laugh.

“What is this woman doing in your wallet?” she had asked. “Where did you get this picture?”

“I found it in one of Mamaíta’s albums. Don’t touch it, Lorenza, it’s a picture of Noëlle,” he had responded in a very serious tone, grabbing the wallet from her.

“Noëlle? Noëlle who?”

“My grandma Noëlle, Ramón’s mother, my grandma.”

“Oh, my love!” Lorenza had hugged him. “That’s not Grandma Noëlle, no, no, but if you want a picture of her, we’ll find one somewhere. And you’ll see, Mateo, Grandma Noëlle has beautiful eyes, like yours, you inherited those gray eyes from her.”

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.

W
HEN
L
ORENZA 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.”

M
ATEO AND
L
ORENZA
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.