No Place for Heroes (29 page)

The problem had been how to tell it, and now she thought she had figured it out: simple, intimate as a conversation between two women reminiscing behind closed doors. No heroes, no adjectives, no slogans. In a minor key. Without delving minutely into major events, keeping just the echo, to wrap it in tissue paper, like the sheets, to see if it finally stopped beating and, little by little, began to yellow. Yes, wrapped in the silky tissue paper, maybe that’s exactly what was needed: for the chatter, the laughter, the interweaving of moments and pains, the small confessions—these would smoothly envelop the old fear, reducing it to the realm of everyday gossip.

“I
GET OUT
of the car in the middle of the snowy mountains that I knew only through Ramón’s dreams, a place that for me was not part of any map, but from the stories and songs he improvised as nursery rhymes for Mateo,” Lorenza tells
Gabriela. “And suddenly out of nowhere there comes a horse, and on that horse is Ramón, and Ramón has my child. And he gives me the child. I swear, not even when he was born did I feel such a commotion, as if I was giving birth again, but after a much more difficult labor. There he was with me, my baby Mateo. I kissed him and hugged him; poor little one, he must have been suffocating from so much squeezing, but I couldn’t stop, I had to be convinced that this was real.”

It was the only real thing in that landscape of an imaginary postcard holiday, where snow bleached everything and settled everywhere, hiding the face of things. But there was her son. Everything else faded around her, like during a dizzy spell or a hallucination. But Mateo was laughing, he had learned to say new words, and was wearing a red cap: he was amazingly real. Fortunately real.

“I kissed his nose, his eyes, his hair, his hands, his laughing strawberry mouth, his soft skin. I planted kisses even on the yellow boots he wore.”

“Mateo has been waiting for you,” came the voice of Ramón.

“I couldn’t look at him, Gabriela. At Ramón. I couldn’t do it.”

“How you must have hated him.”

“That wasn’t the problem, hatred in the end can be handled. But it wasn’t pure, it was mixed with gratitude, even reverence, that ruinous gratitude, the odious veneration that you bear your abuser when you pardon him. That’s why I didn’t want to look at him.”

“I explained to Mateo that we were on vacation, him and me,” Ramón’s voice said, “and that you would take some days to catch up with us because you had a lot of work, but that you were coming.”

“I realized then that Mateo didn’t know,” Lorenza told Gabriela, “and I felt a huge relief. If the boy was happy it was because he didn’t know about the drama and behaved as if he were on vacation, fascinated with the snow and the horse, with the fire in the hearth and the water of the lake. Ramón told me things. He told me that Mateo was in love with the horse, that the first night he had wanted to bring the horse into the cabin so that he would not be cold, and that he had no choice but to go out and show him the stable where the horse was asleep. The stable at the neighbor’s place, from whom they rented the horse. I noted the fact, neighbors nearby, I might ask them for help. And there were horses. They might not be Bucephaluses, but they had four working legs. If I couldn’t get hold of a car, I would flee with the boy on the horse.”

“Great,” said Gabriela, “with your eyelashes frozen like in
Doctor Zhivago.”

“It was cold as shit, and very dark,” Ramón’s voice kept saying, “you couldn’t see a thing, and Mateo and I at midnight, with the flashlight, looking for the stable.”

There was a flashlight, Lorenza registered; she had to figure out where he kept it. She looked around and saw no electrical wires. Doing all this while making efforts to look at Ramón, to say something nice.

“Something nice? With how you were feeling?” said Gabriela.

“Anything, that I had missed him, or that the scenery was beautiful, whatever, but nothing came out. I had come to play in the cold and I wasn’t succeeding. I had to overcome it, to make him think that I was glad to see him.”

“But what could he expect of you? He couldn’t really believe that everything would be as before.”

“I knew exactly what I expected of him: nothing. I had gone there to get my son, period. Now what he expected from me, I don’t know, I’d have to guess at it.”

“Did he believe that this was really a reconciliation?”

“Difficult to say, Ramón is anything but naïve. Oh yes, maybe he was acting in good faith. Like I said, I was a little out of it. I needed time to devise a way to take Mateo with me, and meanwhile I had to remain on good terms with Ramón. On good terms, by his lights, of course, that is, in tune with this love story that I was supposedly starting over.

“It was all very strange, Gabriela. My head was a mess. How could I make sense of the fact that the boor, who a month before had taken my child and put me in grave danger by stealing money from the Mafia, was this loving father, this Prince Charming who came out to meet me like in a fairy tale. What logic was there in that? And while he looked at me, I felt that he couldn’t take his eyes off me, and that he was in the same situation, with horrible doubts about me. We
both tried to appear spontaneous but we were walking on eggshells. He didn’t have a full advantage, either. I relaxed a little when I realized that.”

“You can rest easy,” the voice said. “Mateo didn’t have a single bad moment, all that was missing was his mother, and here she is.”

It must have been true, she saw no signs of anxiety or discomfort in Mateo. He looked as radiant as ever. He seemed very proud of his wool pullover, red with green-and-blue dolls and a matching cap, clothes that she had never seen, which the father must have bought. It was clear that of all the marvels in Mateo’s unexpected paradise, the father was by far his favorite. And now also her, the mother, who came without his ever suspecting that she might not have made it there.

She had to remain lucid, have a clear picture of the place, and make decisions quickly. But it was hard to think. Her head sent her contradictory messages, as if Mateo’s unexpected joy cast a light on the dark episode. Because if things had not been, after all, as atrocious as she had imagined, she could well have made up the whole nightmare.

“You’re skinny,” Ramón said, shattering the illusion. He had dropped the phrase as if it were not his fault, as if every kilo lost was not a result of the agony of waiting.

“He asked if I wanted to eat,” she tells Gabriela. “He said he was going to pop open some burgundy to celebrate my arrival. Impudence, I finally saw it in his face as he spoke. I told him I’d rather unpack first.”

“Great.”

“It was really something. And he said: Come, I’ll show you the cabin, you’ll see, it’s like the house of Hansel and Gretel.

“And he takes my suitcase out of the Impala along with the briefcase with the double bottom, false passports, and the Revlon cosmetics bag with those lethal drops. My blood half froze, but my bag did not give me away, I told you it was a
vaina
for professionals. Now, the cabin was beautiful, tiny and cozy with the fireplace going, something out of
Robinson Crusoe
. Ramón’s comparison maybe had not been well thought out; in the story of Hansel and Gretel, the sweet little house turns out to be a place of terror.”

Lorenza felt that everything there was fictitious, someone putting on a show. She had just spent twenty days and nights preparing for war, had come resolved to confront her enemy, and her enemy was playing the fool.

He received her with open arms as if the matter were forgiven—even worse, as if there wasn’t anything to forgive.

“And here I was, coming prepared to poison him.”

“Did you really think about the possibility of poison, with the drops?” Gabriela asked.

“Well, no. Not poison him, but leave him dazed. Or in as deep a slumber as Sleeping Beauty, at least. Wouldn’t you kill for your Mary?”

“Ah, yes, I would, but I’m crazier than you.”

Lorenza sat by the fire, still clutching the child to her chest, thinking of how to break free and carry him away from there. She soon realized that Miche and the white Impala were gone.

“Bad start,” said Gabriela.

“Very bad. I wanted to show Mateo what I had learned from my gringa girlfriends in the Washington winter, that if you throw yourself back on the snow and move your arms up and down, you leave behind the stamped figure of an angel with big wings. The first time I saw that I was dazzled, not that I really thought it was an angel. Mateo did not grasp the subtlety of it, however, and thought it was about wallowing in the snow and that seemed fine to him.”

“Where’s Miche?” Lorenza asked as they walked in, and Ramón replied to forget about Miche, that he’d told him they wanted to be alone, this wasn’t Coronda with him coming and going as he pleased. Finally, they had the whole house to themselves.

“Idyllic,” says Gabriela.

If there was no Miche, then no Impala, Lorenza thought. It was going to be crazy, the
Escape from Alcatraz
on the frail, old horse. Another thing: she did not see a phone, but dared not ask, since the purpose would have been all too obvious.

“Then he immediately told me, no phone, and his voice no longer sounded so friendly, as if he had read my thoughts and was offended. Or maybe not, maybe he wasn’t offended, because he came and went, placing the food on the table. It was exhausting to be trying to even minimally gauge all his signals.”

There was bread, ham, lamb, goat cheese, and something which he said was traditional winter pears with raspberry sauce. Ramón went to fetch wood from the huge pile outside,
then crouched to stoke the fire, and next went looking for wineglasses. She was helping him, but meanwhile she measured his steps and movements, and scrutinized every corner of the house.

“That place was a prison, so coldly polite and calculating,” she says to Gabriela. “A prison with doors that led nowhere. But we ate well, all three of us, and I did what I never do, I had two glasses of wine.”

“You don’t drink wine?”

“Not red, it gives me a headache. But that day I did, and we even toasted.”

“Hard to imagine, that toast. I hope it was for happiness.”

“Fortunately, no. We toasted Mateo, and we both left it at that.”

The cottage had a kerosene stove on the lower level, the table where they ate and a couple of chairs facing the fireplace, and an attic-like loft that was reached by a ladder, where there was a double bed and another small one, toward the back. Ramón had placed the small one there, against the wall, and the double perpendicular to it, blocking it. So that Mateo did not go headfirst over the railing if he got up in the middle of the night and wanted to go looking for the horse, he said, adding that he would have to pass over them.

“There’s sawdust, there must be termites in the beams,” said Lorenza, shaking the blankets, but she was thinking that she too would have to pass over Ramón if she tried to take the child at night. Even with that, he was calculating. Zero chance of not waking him during the operation, unless she
used the Revlon needle. The best thing would be to keep the briefcase with the cosmetic bag beside the bed. All of her instruments within reach. But he was quite sturdy, Ramón, she had forgotten just how sturdy. If she decided on the Revlon, she would have to do it viciously, she thought, or else it wouldn’t even tickle him. “So I would sleep in the double bed, as well. Apparently it had already been decided.”

Did Ramón not remember, would not remember, that they were separated, that they no longer lived together, no longer slept together? Lorenza chose not to protest. She too would play dumb, as long as it was necessary.

“At that instant, Mateo appeared with a package bigger than himself. I unwrapped it and it was a pullover for me. Handwoven by village women, said Ramón. Lovely, really. Open in front, a deep black, with blue-and-white trinkets.”

“If it was open it wasn’t a pullover.”

“A sweater?”

“Nope.”

“Then I don’t know what the hell it was.”

“A cardigan. It must have been a Scandinavian cardigan, back stitch. In Bariloche they make divine ones. I have some from there. Look at this scarf. It’s made with Scandinavian backstitch. For the front to come out right, you have to hold the thread through the back. It’s really not that complicated.”

“But they also gave me a black cap, which I used for many years, who knows where I lost it, and snow boots, fur-lined. Well chosen, wouldn’t you know, just my size. My
heart melted to see Mateo’s enthusiasm, the jumps and hops when he saw the three of us with our outfits on, looking like forest gnomes. I hugged them. Both of them. They had caught me by surprise with this generosity, Gabriela, how was I not going to celebrate it.”

“I see where this is leading. He was always a charmer, that Forcás.”

Hikes were still possible because winter had not yet descended on the region, and that same afternoon they went out to make a brief trek around the property. A short one, Ramón had decided, not going too far, just to warm up, with the kid riding on the horse, held by his leg from below to prevent him from falling. Although Lorenza was determined not to be impressed by anything that would muddle her resolve, the beauty of those snowy heights left her agape and it took her breath away when they contemplated from a peak the entire universe spread at their feet. But she also noticed how deserted the surroundings were. They were alone at the end of the world, and it was neither metaphor nor reassurance. They started to come down the mountainside in the afternoon. Mateo dozed, as if enraptured with the rocking of the horse, and the last rays of the sun spread golden streaks on the locks that escaped from under Ramón’s cap. You can’t deny it, she thought, the son of a bitch has very pretty hair.