No Place for Heroes

22

AROUND THE TIME that Aurelia met Forcás, she also met Lucia, a comrade in the party who still bore the scars of a recent tragedy. A few years before, four days after the military coup, they had disappeared her husband, who was also in the resistance, but only obliquely, since politics wasn’t really his thing. His name was Horacio Rasmilovich, and he was known as Pipermín, or Piper, and although Aurelia never got to meet him, little by little, from what she learned from Lucia, she felt she got to know him. Piper was a translator from Portuguese to Spanish, so he was never very busy with work, which was fine by him, because he could devote himself to his true passion, reading history books, especially those about World War I. Lucia was never entirely sure if her husband had been kidnapped because they confused him with someone else, or because they had their eyes on him, or because they had really been after her, and on not finding her grabbed him.

This last scenario tormented her. She couldn’t help obsessing over the possibility of such a fatal swap, taking him in place of her.

“That’s part of the torment.” Lorenza wanted to explain to Mateo that because tyrants and torturers don’t show their faces, the victims end up blaming themselves. It was useless to warn Lucia not to get trapped in the cruelty of that cycle, that the pain of the loss itself was enough without adding the burden of guilt.

The only thing that Lucia knew for sure, because a neighbor who had witnessed the scene from her window told her, was that they had taken Piper out of the house blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, and his head bathed in blood. And that he was screaming something, something he wanted heard, even as they struck him to silence him. The neighbor had seen him scream, but she couldn’t tell Lucia what words, she apologized, explaining that her window had been shut, that fear seals the ears, and that at that moment some road workers were drilling on the asphalt. From then on, Lucia never stopped wondering what Piper’s last words had been, which the noise from the street had swallowed. What message had he wanted to deliver, maybe some clue that would make the effort to find him possible.

“What do you think Piper was screaming, Lolé?” Mateo said. “I want to know as well.”

“Generally those who were sequestered screamed their names at the last moment, so that at least there would be witnesses, somebody in the street to hear what was going on and could report the disappearance.”

“So you mean Piper came out screaming, I am Piper! I am Piper, they are kidnapping me!”

“Probably more like, I am Horacio Rasmilovich, his real name.”

After that Lucia learned nothing more about him, as if the earth had swallowed him, and both she and her mother-in-law devoted all their days and hours to looking for him, to reporting his kidnapping to whatever international organizations they could reach, to asking about him in the military tribunals, the general staff of the army, and the Government House. They went together to the archbishopric and to the newsrooms of the dailies, not parting from each other day or night, so that Lucia eventually moved in with her mother-in-law. They consoled each other and conducted a one-topic relationship, talking about Piper at all hours, remembering him, crying for him, plotting strategies to find him, and so on year after year, not letting the passage of time weaken their resolve, on the contrary, each day growing more stubborn, more defiant, marching every Thursday with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

“This exact plaza, Mateo. I wanted you to see it for yourself,” Lorenza said, the two of them standing next to the obelisk that had been erected in the plaza’s center. “Here is where dictatorship began to fall, because of the shove the Mothers gave it. Every Thursday, right here where we are standing, women wearing white handkerchiefs on their heads would gather and march around this obelisk, demanding the return of their sons alive.

“Can you imagine what courage it must have taken, Mateo? In those terrible times, they were the ones who dared. And they did it here, right in front of the Government House, across the square. They marched with the eyes of the murderers on them and in the face of the fear and indifference of most of the rest of the populace.”

Among the Mothers were Lucia and her mother-in-law, carrying, come rain or shine, a picture of Piper on a placard, his friendly face and thick glasses, so fitting his occupation as a translator, but so incongruent with the bold red letters on the placard that announced how he had disappeared. There they headed, lining up one by one, getting up at dawn to march in front of the government offices, Lucia and her mother-in-law, enveloped in their grief, separated from the world, the only inhabitants of a lost planet called Piper.

Every time that Aurelia ended up with Lucia, because of shared party activities, she listened to her talk about her husband with a love and devotion that was gripping. It seemed as if their married life had been a joyful one. She described him as a shy and reserved man, but affectionate, with a sophisticated sense of humor and vibrant inner life. Lucia was very pretty, tall and willowy with an exceptional angular face. And Aurelia knew, because plenty of others confided in her, that more than one comrade would have liked to approach her, invite her to the movies, become friends with her, keep her company in her calamity. But no one had dared. Given her unconditional loyalty to the memory of Piper, any such attempt would have been a transgression. It was all but certain that Piper was dead by that point, there were even some clues that this was the case, like the testimony of another prisoner who had seen him horribly tortured in solitary confinement and who did not think he could have survived. Of course, that likelihood could not be mentioned to Lucia, who was absolutely convinced that Piper was still alive, and that if she persevered in her efforts to find him, sooner or later, she would be successful. Lorenza confessed to Mateo that despite the enormous respect she had for Lucia and the sympathy she felt for her situation, she had not failed to pick up on the hint of madness in her obsession, which, plainly, affected her mother-in-law as well. They kept his things intact, his favorite armchair, his history book, open to the page that he had been reading when they seized him, his clothes laundered and folded in the armoire. Aurelia knew all this because Lucia herself had told her. She told Aurelia that it had to be that way, because any day now Piper would return. Faithful to such convictions, neither of them ever left the city, not on weekends, not on holidays, not on vacations, because what if just at that time they handed him over, what if he reappeared, or if someone showed up who could offer them a clue, someone who might know something, who, careless, might let some hint escape, even the slightest.

“All very understandable,” Lorenza commented. “The death of a loved one is a terrible thing, but in the end there is some closure, it’s done for, no going backward or forward. But a disappearance is an open door to eternal hope, toward questions without answers, uncertainty, the hallucinatory, and there’s no human head or heart that could suffer through it without, at least to some degree, facing madness.”

“I know,” said Mateo. “You invent things, start coming up with explanations that grow crazier and crazier. It happens to me with Ramón. Ramón is my ghost. If the dictators had disappeared him like Piper, I would have had someone to blame at least.”

The whole thing was atrocious, starting with the very phrase “the disappeared;” instead of “kidnapped,” or “tortured,” or “murdered,” they christened them “the disappeared,” as if they had vanished on their own, no one’s doing, or maybe their own doing because of their volatile nature.

The dictatorship disappeared people and then denied that there were disappeared ones, and so disappeared even the disappeared. Like some cruel magic trick.

“Now you see it, now you don’t. Now it’s here, now it’s disappeared,” Mateo said.

That was Piper’s state when Aurelia stopped seeing Lucia. Since the compartmentalization of the party was so strict, once you lost contact with someone, that person was gone, like a ring in the sea. And that’s what had happened with Lucia. Time passed. Lorenza left Argentina and went on with her life, the military junta fell, and a few years afterward, at a dinner in New York, someone introduced her to an Argentinean oncologist who had been a Montoneros sympathizer. Chatting with him, quizzing him about his experience during the dictatorship, she found out that Piper’s mother had been one of his patients and an old family friend. Lorenza immediately wanted to know about Lucia. Was she still waiting for Piper?

“Yes, she’s still looking for him,” the oncologist told her. “With less conviction than before, but she still lives in her mother-in-law’s house — the señora passed away. And as far as I know, she’s never had another romantic relationship. Deep down in her soul, she goes on waiting for him.”

Then Lorenza said something about how happy their marriage had been, and the doctor gave her a surprised look. “You mean you don’t know?” he asked.

“What?”

“Lucia and Piper were separated when he was kidnapped,” he explained. “They had been separated for at least a year and a half. He was already with someone else and so was she. By the time he was kidnapped, their relationship was a thing of the past.”