No Place for Heroes (5 page)

“Of what?”

“That it was his voice.”

“I could pick it out from a million other voices, that muffled and guttural voice was his. Besides, it’s almost exactly like yours, Mateo. You both mumble and speak so low that one can barely understand what you are saying.”

“So you’re saying that his voice hasn’t changed at all.”

“Not at all, not even a little bit. It’s exactly the same voice of the young man I knew. Yours, on the other hand, changes day by day, and there are times now when you sound just like him.”

“I don’t think so,” Mateo said, continuing to shadowbox
against some invisible foe. “There’s nothing about me that resembles Ramón. I don’t want to look like him. Shit shit, what a bitch son of a fucking shit,” he went on, and his fist assaulted a pillow until it began to spit out its down. It was not rage but a swarm of uncertainty that needed release.

“All right, take it easy, Cassius Clay,” she implored and passed him the phone receiver. “Stop monkeying around and make the call.”

“No! What if he’s come back home and answers? What if the real him answers?”

“Tell him you’re in Buenos Aires.”

“And then hang up?”

“No, then you talk to him, if you want.”

“That’s not what I want,” he said but dialed the number anyway and listened closely. “You’re right, this guy really mumbles, you can barely understand him. Besides he sounds like such an Argentinean … he is so Argentinean.”

“Relax, Mateo, you’re revved up like a squirrel.”

“It’s true,” he laughed, “I must look like a fucking electrocuted squirrel. Do you remember, Lolé, the time that the squirrel crawled up my pants and shirt and perched on my head. I think Ramón was still with us then.”

“No, that was much later, at the Parque de Chapultepec. In Mexico.”

“Unbelievable, the only thing that I remember about Ramón is not Ramón but a yellow cur that he picked up in the park and named Malvina. I know I played with her, but I can’t remember what city it was.”

“That was in Bogotá. We lived in an apartment in the Salmona towers. Not the one we live in now, a smaller one we rented with your father.”

“I wonder whatever happened to that doggie. You think Ramón took her with him? Or maybe he let her back out on the streets where he found her. Do you know why we didn’t keep Malvina with us? Or, I don’t want to know,” Mateo said, throwing another punch in the air. The memories he had of his father were in truth not his but his mother’s, and having to continually ask her was worse than asking to borrow a toothbrush.

He dialed the number again, listened for a moment, and hung up again.

“I just wanted to know if his voice really sounded like mine. It’s weird listening to Ramón again after all these years,” he murmured, and a cloud of frustration dimmed his gaze.

“And?” Lorenza asked. “What does he say exactly?”

“There’s no one here to take your call, that’s all, there’s no one here.”

Mateo fell on the bed. He leaned back against the pillows, turned on the TV with the remote, let the tension escape his body, and was soon engrossed with
Thundercats
, a cartoon that he had loved as a child and that on that afternoon in Buenos Aires, so long afterward, hypnotized him once more. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and Mateo did not move, not really there, silent, his eyes fixed on the screen, lazily twirling the same lock of hair with his index finger.

“Aren’t you going to call again, Mateo?”

He said that he would, but not at the moment, later.

“Then get dressed, and if you want we can go out and grab a bite. You must be starving. Hello? Knock, knock. Is anybody home?”

Lorenza tapped him on the head to see if he had heard her.

“Okay, Lolé, but not now, later.”

T
HE SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST
once asked Mateo to write a profile of his father. The title was “Portrait of a Stranger,” and this is what he wrote:

My name is Mateo Iribarren and I don’t know much about my father. I know his name is Ramón Iribarren and that he is known as Forcás. Sit, Forcás! Stay, Forcás! It is a good name for a dog. Ironically, the dog that we adopted with Forcás, he christened Malvina. Not Lassie or Scooby-Doo, not even Lucky, but Malvina, like the islands that the Argentineans were fighting for, tooth and nail, against the British. That’s what interested my parents, political conflict and class struggle.

Ramón Iribarren left when I was two and half years old. My grandmother, my aunt, and my mother explained to me that he’s in Argentina.

A year later we received his last letter, and I’ve never heard anything about him since. My grandmother tells me that after he disappeared, I began to hate vegetables and grew fearful of the dark. I’ve gotten over this, at least the darkness
phobia. But even now, before going to bed, I jam a chair against the closet door, because who knows what can come out of there when everything is black.

To imagine what my father looks like, I think of characters that I have seen on television, like the powerful buck king with enormous antlers who appears at the end of the movie
Bambi
. And why not? We all have a right to think that our father is a good guy. Félix Romero, one of the kids in my class, always said that; maybe because everyone accused his old man of being a mafioso. And if Romero thinks well of his father, I have the right to think that mine is a buck. The problem is that Ramón does not belong to the real world, and talking about him is like trying to paint the portrait of a ghost. I carefully collect the reflections of those who knew him, so as to make a collage of who he may have been. When all this gives me a headache I think again of the king of the deer, which is a lot easier. You are allowed this kind of leeway when your father is an enigma. The only clue he left me was his last letter, a piece of paper in which he drew Smurfs and frogs and squirrels climbing a flowering tree. It looks like something sketched by a preschool teacher. Your father had thick wrists and a very broad back, like a bull, my uncle Patrick, my aunt Guadalupe’s husband, often told me, and he threw back his shoulders and puffed his chest to complete the imitation. Every time I asked him about my father, he said the same thing, and always ended it with the same pantomime. My aunt Guadalupe assured me that my father was an intelligent man, always up-to-date with the news. It seemed that he
knew what was happening in any part of the world and spent all his time reading history and economics. He was a sweet
papi
, Nina used to say, closing her eyes and sighing. Nina was an ancient nanny who cared for me and my cousins when we were infants. Those details are important, the image of the buck with huge antlers has evolved to a figure who has become a supermacho he-man. According to what everyone has told me, my father was an intelligent, strong, and good-looking man. What more can you ask for?

When I was eight, I asked my mother for the first time to take me to Argentina to meet Ramón. She said no, not for the moment, we needed to wait until I was older. The last thing I knew about him was that he was in jail, and I think he’s still there. Someone who knew him back then told me that he had been charged with political offenses.

Lorenza (that’s my mother’s name) thinks maybe that’s why he disappeared from our lives. But there’s something about that story that doesn’t quite add up. If this was the case, why hasn’t Lolé come to his aid? If he’s a prisoner, he must need our help. But she insists that we can’t go looking for him until I am older—not before that, no matter what. Anyway, the image I have of my father is rather positive. In addition to those qualities allotted to Ramón by my aunts and my grandma is the suggestion that he was some sort of superhero in the war against the dictatorship. And since I am obsessed with the Greek myths, I imagine him chained to a rock like Prometheus, wailing and desperately trying to free himself so
that he can come see me. I also see myself much later, already eighteen and equally heroic, in the shape of a bull like him, going to Argentina to rescue him.

Lorenza (I don’t know if I already mentioned that she is my mother) and Ramón (that’s my father’s real name) were in the underground resistance against the gory dictatorship. That word is very much Lorenza’s, gory, or I should say very much of her generation, a generation obsessed with repression, another one of their favorite words, and with talking about gore. They say the gory dictatorship, the sanguine dictator, rivers of blood, bloodstained country. When I criticize her for it, she says that I have a point. Today it’s not appropriate to talk about blood and gore, unless you’re a surgeon or a butcher.

I’ve never known the date or place of Ramón’s birth. In one of Lorenza’s old albums I found a picture of him when he was nine years old, dressed like a Prussian soldier for a play at school. In another one, he is already a teenager, playing
fútbol
in a team uniform. It seems as if he might have been the captain, from the vigorous gesturing toward his teammates with his arms. But who knows, it could easily be that Ramón was as big a flop at
fútbol
as I was. When they told me how he had joined the party at twelve, I thought it had something to do with some party thrown by his
fútbol
teammates. Later, I learned that it was a political party and that he was nicknamed Redboy. Who knows when it changed to Forcás. By fifteen, he had left school to dedicate himself to the struggle,
Lorenza says, and I wonder if she would be using the same admiring tone if it was me she was talking about leaving school.

“T
ELL ME ABOUT
the dark episode,” Mateo asks Lorenza, and she says that she will, but suddenly she can’t, impossible all of a sudden for her to remember, as if the memory of it were a black box lost in the sea after a midair accident, unwilling to give up its information. “What happened that early morning after you had found out that Ramón had kidnapped me?” Mateo presses her.

“Kidnap is a strong word.”

“Then what would you call what he did?”

“It doesn’t have a name.”

“Why do you strip the names from the things that Ramón has done?”

“You mean the Ramónisms?”

“Not funny.”

“Yeah, I can tell you don’t think so.”

That morning Lorenza had plunged into an anguish so all encompassing that it robbed her of the faculty of thought, hence the difficulty in trying to put the moment into words now. Instead of words, echoes were all that remained, resonating within—one in particular, the odious echo of premeditation, the scene in the park, the previous afternoon, when she had had no idea what was about to happen. Naturally Ramón had known the course of events down to its last
detail. It was so well planned that he even asked her to pack a suitcase for the boy. Lorenza, oblivious to the misfortune that she was helping to engineer with that macabre ritual, packed everything the boy would need for the journey: his clothes, his food, his clowns, and the serpets.

“During the first hours after the news sank in, the image of each of those objects of yours enlarged and shrunk in my head,” she wanted to explain to Mateo. “Enlarging and shrinking like hallucinations, as if I were in the throes of a high fever.”

How could she possibly transform that maniacal anxiety into a peaceful memory to put into words? Not only had Lorenza voluntarily given away her son but she had helped set up, step by step, the unimaginable sacrifice of losing him forever. She had relinquished her son as one relinquishes an expiatory victim. It had been a deadly ritual, and she herself had officiated. She had approved it, given her permission, her blessing, right there in the park the day before. When Ramón had asked her if she was sure she wanted to separate, she had said yes, sealing her own misfortune; then, when Ramón had asked her if there was any way around it, she’d replied that there wasn’t, that there was no going back. Another ritualistic gesture on Ramón’s part, to let her call that sinister coin toss, which she had lost without even knowing it. He forced her to bet, without warning her what she was risking. She had naïvely, stupidly, sentenced herself. She could have stopped everything with a single word, but had failed to do so.

“You didn’t know,” her mom tried to reason with her on
that miasmic morning. “How could you have known? It’s not your fault. You could never have guessed.”