No Place for Heroes

11

WHEN LORENZA 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.”