No Place for Heroes

29

WHY HADN’T RAMÓN ever looked for Mateo? The question kept Lorenza awake that night. In her insomnia, near dawn, she wanted to put these thoughts to rest and started reading the novel by Bernhard Schlink that she had bought a few days earlier on Avenida Corrientes. And by chance she came upon a passage that perhaps held the only answer to that impossible question. Why hadn’t Ramon looked for Mateo all those years? “There are some things you do just because,” Schlink wrote, “because the conscience dozes, becomes anesthetized, not because we make this or that decision, but because what we decide is precisely not to decide, as if our will is overwhelmed by the impossibility of finding a way out and decides to stop pedaling and idles while it can.” Perhaps the reason Ramón did not look for Mateo was simply because he did not look for him. Perhaps there was no other answer but that, leaving a void where the boy so much wanted answers.

Lorenza read Schlink’s passage several times, thinking that she would have to read it to Mateo. Or maybe not, it would be too difficult for him. She had always tried to protect her son from the pain of the past, as if she could suppress it by simply not naming it. Silencing words had been her main tool, and perhaps it was for that, more than the acts themselves, that Mateo could not forgive her. He couldn’t forgive her for minimizing the past, making it seem unimportant, trying to neutralize it, avoiding the topic, not reacting to it. It was possible that Mateo felt that when she came between him and the raging bull of his abandonment, she prevented him from seeing it fully, and left him defenseless against its charge. It was possible that Mateo believed that by denying the loneliness of abandonment, instead of exorcising it, she helped to multiply it, leaving him even more alone. Or was it her own fault, her role in everything which she tried to camouflage with euphemisms?

At breakfast the following morning, all these questions had been reduced to the phantoms of her sleeplessness, truths intuited but not fully integrated. The insomniac night once again constrained her to futile gestures and truncated language, because how could she name such things without deepening the wound, where could she find rhyme or reason? There are never good enough reasons for a father’s abandonment, and that made it unnamable. Idling, the Schlink passage said, how well it applied to Lorenza.