No Place for Heroes

15

“SO WHAT WAS Ramón doing in Bariloche, I mean, before you met him?” Mateo asked.

“He had worked there as a mountain guide, seasonal work, I imagine. I think that it was the only job he had done his whole life, aside from the resistance.”

Ramón had rocked the newborn Mateo to sleep with stories of the mountains of Bariloche. His lullabies were about his time there. He told tales of giant boulders of ice that came loose from Tronador peak with a thunderous noise, and of a tavern at the peak of the Cerro Otto from which you could contemplate the whole world, everything covered in snow, while enjoying hot chocolate beside the fireplace. He told the child about a natural cave where a group of Slavic nuns had sought refuge from an avalanche, emerging with their lives four days later.

“But I couldn’t have understood those stories,” Mateo said.

“No, how could you have? You were a baby. But he would tell them to you still. And I heard them and later retold them to you when you were old enough to understand. I think that aside from his nostalgia for the mountains of Bariloche, your father was a man without memory.”

He had said next to nothing to her about the town where he was born, the friends of his childhood, his teenage girlfriends. He either did not remember or had chosen not to tell her. Or he did tell her, and it was she who had forgotten. And maybe that was why it now proved so difficult to tell her son what his father was like. By that point, she didn’t even know, or perhaps she had never known. At the end of the day, it was not so unusual that Forcás had no memories. It was a thing that a lot of them had in common. It wasn’t a time for remembrances; too much anxiety to be tending to those interior gardens.

“I have come up with a story, or I should say made up a memory about Ramón. A memory I like,” Mateo said. “Maybe it’s real, I don’t know. There is a very prominent figure with big hands who must be him and he puts me down in a crib made of snow. But I am not cold, but rather toasty. The large figure gives me a pacifier and I notice the many bright lights.”

“That happened just as you remember it. Your memory is real. When the three of us were in Bariloche, you were already two and a half. He always carried you on his shoulders on our long walks through the mountainside. There was snow, not a lot, but also sun, and when we climbed a tall peak, he liked to dig a hole in the snow and make a crib, using his wool coat and mine to line it, to lay you there so you could drink your milk and sleep awhile. And I have another image engraved in my mind of you and your father in Bariloche, both wearing wool caps and leather boots, and in the background the splendor of the aurora borealis.”

“There you go again with your exaggerations. I have one nice memory, just one, and off you go dressing up the story with blazing lights. Even a loser like my father lights up, as if he had a saint’s halo. You just make shit up, Lorenza. You can’t even see the aurora borealis in Bariloche. The lights that you see near the south pole are the aurora australis.”

Mateo then grew quiet, looking anywhere but at her. He had grown disgusted with his mother, as usually happened when they talked about Ramón. It always started out fine, continued fine for a while, but things soon heated up and continued to heat up until he exploded, which was followed by long periods of silence.

“All right, no more auroras or blazing lights,” she said, after letting a prudent amount of time pass.

“You just don’t want to admit to yourself that my stories about my father are not happy ones. There’s a lot of pain there, and you are not allowing me any pain — and that in itself is very painful.” Mateo’s angst got him all tangled up in tongue twisters.

“And there’s another thing that doesn’t exist at the south pole,” he said after some time had passed. “Polar bears.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, I would swear on it. No polar bears and no aurora borealis. Although I don’t think Ramón would be out this late, considering how cold it gets there. He is probably already inside his house with a fire going in the fireplace. The little house that he rented that time in Bariloche had a fireplace, right?”

“It did, and we had to keep the fire going all night because there was no other heat source. Sometimes it went out while we slept, and the freezing air would wake us. If the living have to suffer through this sort of cold, what must it be for the dead, your father said. Who knows where such thoughts came from, but he said it every time it was cold.”

“If the living have to suffer through this sort of cold, what must it be like for the dead,” Mateo repeated, now cheery. “Is that really what my father said, Lolé? And in Bariloche we split wood for a new fire when the old one had gone out. Maybe at this exact moment, Ramón has run out of firewood and has gone out into the woods to look for a supply that will last him the night.”

“But what about if he is in La Plata, you crazy kiddo? Or if he’s here in Buenos Aires like the phone book says?”