No Place for Heroes

16

LORENZA TOOK MATEO out to Puerto Madero on the shores of the river, a popular place, resplendently lit, full of people, cafés, and restaurants. She told him that it had once been the main port of Buenos Aires, and that she’d had secret meetings there with stevedores.

“Who were the stevedores?”

“They were the ones in charge of loading and unloading cargo from ships, well, the ships that still came in, every once in a while. Right here where we are standing now, right around here. Back then the port had been mostly abandoned, a haunted place, all the docks half empty.”

She explained that the redbrick structures that were everywhere were called docks, or warehouses, now all transformed into huge restaurants. The dock where she had met up with others was nothing more than a graveyard for cranes, useless hulks and empty wooden boxes scattered everywhere, the remnants of the rich Argentina that with its exports called itself the world’s granary. She would meet up there with the stevedores, amid the rusted iron and the whitecaps. Generally there were six or seven of them, unemployed and rusty themselves. They waited for her bundled in their thick, black coats, their hands buried in their pockets. And they had their meetings right there.

“And if anyone saw you meeting and denounced you, wouldn’t you end up disappeared or something?”

“Something like that. But so that we wouldn’t be noticed we had our cover story, the grill. Whoever passed by there and saw us, all we were doing was roasting, we were just grilling some meat.”

“You pretended to eat?”

“We did eat. We set up some coals, put a grill over it, and threw some chorizos on, which we would eat with bread and cheap wine. Meanwhile we would talk in low voices about what was happening, what the press wasn’t saying. They would tell us their troubles and we would tell them ours. We would be conspiring, in other words.”

“So that’s what conspiring is like? What possible harm could you bring to the military junta, hidden there, eating chorizos and speaking ill of the regime?”

“A lot of harm, though you may not believe it. The dictatorship needed silence like you need air. The very act of getting together and talking about things was a way to resist.”

“What did you talk about?”

“We told them about the chupaderos, for instance, makeshift morgues where the military tortured and killed detainees out of the public eye. Or we brought them up-to-date on the insurrection against Somoza in Nicaragua. The press would say nothing about that, and it was the news that the stevedores liked best. They’d ask us, Comrade, are the Sandinistas on the move? They found it unbelievable that it was possible to get rid of the tyrants, that in another part of the world people had risen against tyranny and defeated it. Some of them would even give me money. They would say, Make sure this gets to them, the ones fighting in Nicaragua.”

“Yes, yes, Lolé, but it still doesn’t sound like it was accomplishing anything.”

“It’s hard to say how much we did accomplish. But aside from being a foreigner, I was just a low-ranking militant, you have to remember that. Fucking low-rank, like we said. I moved in the trenches, while those in charge moved in wider circles. Besides, we had labor leaders who were in the thick of it, in the very mouth of the wolf, trying to saw off the legs of the dictatorship from within the syndicates. The matter was infinitely complex and infinitely infinitesimal.

“Every month, the party put out an underground newspaper, taking great risks and facing a whole range of difficulties. They distributed it one by one, a task that took a few hours. They’d remove the wrapping from a box of cigars, empty it from the bottom, then roll up each of the eight pages of the newspaper until it was the size of a cigarillo. Then they’d fill half of the box with fake cigarillos and half with real ones, and wrap it back up. It was an old trick that marijuana dealers used and they adopted it to mock the regime. One newspaper at a time, to one contact, often having to go all the way across town to deliver it.

“There were a lot of words in those eight pages, Mateo, do you understand, words which were in such short supply. Imagine that we were pizza delivery boys. Ring, ring, yes, with mozzarella and anchovies, and off we would go with the newspaper, rain, thunder, or lightning. And sometimes it didn’t say anything new and it arrived wet and cold, but we would be there to deliver it.”

“The newspaper story sounds like it was true, but that thing about the whitecaps, the stevedores waiting for you in the fog, you made that up.”

“No, there was fog. There still is. You’ll see it for yourself in a bit.”