No Place for Heroes

17

ON SUNDAY, forty-eight hours after the dark episode, Lorenza was still wrapped in the straitjacket of her own anxiety.

“You’re going to go crazy if you don’t look for help,” Mamaíta told her. Lorenza didn’t hear her or respond, but paced the house back and forth like a caged lion, her heart beating a thousand times a minute, her blood pressure rising, and her hands like ice. She hadn’t been able to sleep, not even to lie down for a moment. She could not eat because it felt as if she were choking. In a picture taken a week afterward for her travel documents, she has the fiendish eyes of a caged animal and sharpened features due to the half a kilo she was losing daily. Although she refused to see a psychiatrist, Mamaíta and Guadalupe persisted and somehow they got her into the office of the well-respected Dr. Haddad, who specialized in treating family members of those who had been kidnapped. Although it was a Sunday, he had agreed to see her right away.

Lorenza walked into the office at eleven in the morning, her eyes darting everywhere but resting nowhere. She wouldn’t even sit down, and let her mother relate to the doctor what had happened.

“I don’t want to tell you my story or listen to your theories. I just want to find my son,” was the only thing Lorenza said.

“Why were you being so obnoxious, Lolé?” Mateo asked. “What had that man done to you?”

“Nothing, I didn’t even know him. But it was like I was possessed. It was either that afternoon, or the next day, that I slugged your uncle Patrick.”

“Shit, really? Why?”

“Because he said something or didn’t say something; because he did something, or didn’t do something. Who knows?”

“Did he slug you back?”

“No, of course not. He was there trying to help, and everybody coped as well as they could. I was hypersensitive, a vulnerable and unhinged thing. But I didn’t even want to go see that psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, or whatever the hell he was. Not that one or any of them, not then or ever; to this day, I won’t sit still on a divan. Not that I sat on one then, I remained standing, trying to keep myself together so I wouldn’t explode with impatience, so I wouldn’t scream at that doctor that I thought talking to him was a waste of precious minutes.”

Dr. Haddad made them return to the waiting room for a moment. When they went back in, ten or fifteen minutes later, he had his glasses on and in his hands were the pages of Forcás’s farewell letter, which apparently he had been reading in the interlude.

“You had given it to him?” Mateo asked.

“No, no, I told you I was not all there. I imagine my mother had given it to him, or Guadalupe.”

“So what did he say?”

“He said the weirdest thing. I don’t know what stopped me from jumping him and slugging him as well, because what he said was like a kick to the kidneys.”

This is a love letter, he said.