No Place for Heroes

3

TWO NIGHTS BEFORE, Lorenza had returned late to the Claridge Hotel and dashed into the room to tell Mateo that she had seen them, that they had returned to the country. She had found them, their old comrades! But she had to hold her tongue when she found him asleep. He always complained about her insomnia. She not only did not sleep, he claimed, but she didn’t let anybody else sleep. So she said nothing and satisfied herself with watching him sleep.

Mateo’s sleep was not peaceful. It had never been. He talked in his sleep, was restless, often so entangling himself in the sheets that in the morning the bed would be stripped bare. Lorenza wondered to what distant lands her son journeyed and how lonely he must be in his travels. Of all the languages in the world, it was the language of her son’s dreams that she most yearned to understand, but she realized that its jargon derived from the grammar of other worlds, a dialogue in the dark with a stranger, someone she did not even know.

“Who are the Maccabees?” Mateo had asked her once, still completely asleep. “The Maccabees, who are the Maccabees?”

She didn’t really know. A people from the Bible, right? That was as far as her expertise went. Fortunately she did not have to elaborate because her son just as suddenly fell back into a deep slumber and the sleep-talking episode ended. But Lorenza remained uneasy. What is he doing in the middle of the night, she remembered thinking, with these Maccabees?

When he was asleep, he looked exactly like Ramón. She remembered being shocked to discover the unmistakable features of a grown man on her son. He was no longer a child, no longer a boy, almost a stranger. This illusion persisted until he awoke, when the mark of his father vanished from his face and those gestures that she recognized as genuinely his livened his face again. He then seemed such a different creature that she could see herself in her son, as if looking at a clone, he as her only son, she as his only mother. Only then was she able to reclaim that son who had always been so exclusively hers and so little Ramón’s.

Mateo sensed her presence and half opened his eyes for an instant.

“What’s wrong?” he murmured.

“Nothing, kiddo. There’s nothing wrong. Go back to sleep.”

“You have news for me.”

“Later, you’re half asleep.”

“Not anymore I’m not. Come on, tell me.”

Lorenza sat on the edge of the bed and told him about them, their old comrades in the party, how just a few hours ago nine of them had shown up at a reading of her new novel and had searched her out afterward.

“Was Ramón there?” Mateo asked, bolting upright, but when she said no, he threw himself back on the bed and covered his face with the blanket.

“Can you hear me from inside that cave?”

“Barely.”

Although he pretended not to listen, she told him about hugging her old comrades in the middle of the street, now at last with nothing to fear, the whole gang raising a ruckus, not having to look over their shoulders to see who was following them, or lower their voices lest someone overhear. She told him that they all went to a pizzeria called the Immortals, its walls covered with photographs of legendary tango artists.

“Quite a name, the Immortals, and all of us there moved by the occasion and teary-eyed, reminiscing about the disappeared; el negro César Robles, Pedro Apaza, Eduardo Villabrille, Charles Grossi,” Lorenza recited the names. “Imagine that, Mateo, our dead, and there we were remembering them in a place called the Immortals. We shouted over one another trying to catch up on everything that had happened since the fall of the dictatorship. It was very strange to talk of these things out loud and in a public place, given that before we could meet in groups no larger than three, whispering in some bar for no longer than fifteen minutes at a time.”

But on that night, so many years later, they had reunited with no need for aliases and nothing to fear, to celebrate the end of the nightmare with pizza and beer — or rather, to celebrate with her, Aurelia, now Lorenza, because they had already celebrated among themselves. They had been a long time in coming out of the hole in their struggle to rejoin the living, adjusting to the light of day, to what had begun to be called a democracy.

“But Mateo, the thing is, I had left Argentina before the end of the dictatorship and have been gone all this time. Do you see? For me those days have long been frozen in time. And then on the very night you decide you don’t want to accompany me, look what happens.”

“Did you talk to them about Ramón? Did they tell you where he is?” Mateo’s voice rose out of his cave.

“Yes, we talked about him, and no, they don’t know where he is, but they gave me some idea. Nothing too exact, but let me tell you the whole story, moment by moment.”

She had found it amusing when they had revealed their true names and professions, like Dalton, who had been imprisoned, a skinny towhead, a good guy who had been director of the magistrate and who, he told her at the Immortals, was really called Javier something — a Javier, who would have guessed, that name didn’t suit him at all — and taught classes at the university and had three kids; or Tuli, a driven black woman, who during the days of military rule offered support to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, and who in reality was Renata Rocamora, a double bassist for a tango quartet, which that very week was performing at the Café Tortoni.

“If you want, we can go,” Lorenza proposed, to which Mateo growled like a bear. “What a joy to learn that Tuli is devoted to the tango. I asked her if she had played during the time of the military rule, and she said she did. Strange, because in our group at that time nobody really seemed to care about the tango. The music of the resistance was Argentinean rock, what we called rock nacional.”

“Argentinean rock was part of the left?” Mateo seemed suddenly interested. “I thought it was more the music of pothead hippies.”

“Potheads? No, what are you saying? That music was ours. Or maybe it belonged to the potheads as well, but it was mostly ours. Case in point, at the Immortals, Dalton told the story of how there came a time when he had hit bottom in prison. He wanted to die. And the only thing that saved him was discovering a phrase that another prisoner had scratched on the cell wall, down low in a corner, almost unnoticeable. It was a line from ‘Song for My Death’ by Sui Generis, the one that goes, ‘There was a time when I was beautiful and truly free,’ although Dalton said that the only thing that was legible was ‘and truly free.’ But with the mere discovery of those three words, he no longer felt alone or wanted to die.”

“Like in Night of the Pencils,” Mateo said. “I’ve already seen the movie.”

“Well yeah, it’s nothing new. In such endgames, whatever happens is like the story of the cat with raggedy paws, it’s been told time and again. But at the moment it happens, it carries great significance. Anyway, Argentinean rock was the music your father liked. The first time I went to his place, he showed me his records as if they were some kind of treasure. And, of course, when Dalton told the story of the lyric scratched on the wall, we burst into the song in its entirety, and this led to others, the songs of Charly García and Fito Páez, León Gieco, Spinetta. You can’t imagine how good it felt to sing like madmen after so many years of silence.”

“Very romantic. But I think Spinetta came later, Spinetta is not old enough.”

“You’re wrong there, kiddo. Bones Spinetta was idolized at that time, with Almendra and Sui Generis! My favorite, the one I adored was Sui Generis’s ‘Scratch the Stones.’”

“If you put on a record by Sui Generis at a party these days, they’ll toss you out on your ass. So don’t get any ideas.”

“It’s so weird, isn’t it? So many years later finding out the real names and real lives of people you had been so close to.”

“Yeah, as if Batman and Spider-Man got together in a pizzeria and took off their masks and revealed their secret identities to each other,” Mateo said. “And to top everything off, they start bellowing ancient songs. Did you talk to your comrades about me?”

“Of course, isn’t that why I was with them in the first place?”

“What I don’t get is how you found them if you didn’t even know their names.”

Lorenza explained that the reading for a novel is a public event that is announced in newspapers, so that anyone who wants to attend can come, and that’s how they had found out she was in Buenos Aires.

“Yes, I know that. But how did they know that Lorenza So-and-so, who writes books now, was the Aurelia who had been in the resistance with them?”

“One of them figured it out and passed the word along.”

In the middle of the reading, the bookstore manager had handed her a piece of paper folded in half. “It’s from the audience,” he whispered, and she flushed when she read the first word: Aurelia. No one had called her Aurelia in years, nobody even knew that once, in Argentina, that’s who she had been. The note said, “Aurelia, do you have time for a coffee with your old comrades?” She couldn’t see them from the stage because the houselights were dimmed, but before she finished her presentation she said into the mike, “I know that some of my old friends are here, and I want them to know that yes, I have all the time in the world to have coffee with them.”

“But that’s not the part I want to talk about, Mateo. I have news.”

“Don’t tell me: Ramón was there,” he asked, almost begging, and she noticed how pale he suddenly grew.

“No, he wasn’t there, I told you.” But she had asked a lot of questions and gotten some clues. A metallurgist for an auto syndicate, who was called Quico — or who had been known as Quico in the resistance when he lived in Córdoba, and now was called something else, did not live there anymore, and had retired — had confirmed that Forcás had been in prison, not because of politics, for by the time he had been arrested the military junta had already been overthrown some years before, but because of money problems. Quico thought that after a few months in jail, Ramón had been released and had gone to Bolivia. Gabriela had also been at the pizzeria, and Gabriela, the Gabrielita who had been by her side during the commerce protests, her best friend in those days, told her that she had heard that Forcás had returned from Bolivia and had settled down in La Plata, where he had opened a bar.

“A bar?” Mateo asked his mother.

“That’s what Gabriela said. Do you know what it felt like to reconnect with Gabriela? We both found out we were pregnant about the same time, and we would go together to El Once barrio, both with bellies like globes, to the meetings of—”

“And where is this bar?” Mateo interrupted.

“According to Gabriela, in La Plata.”

“I don’t buy it, Lolé, that detail seems off. I am almost sure that Ramón is in Bariloche. He must be wandering those mountains like a Steppenwolf, or at least that’s what I think.”

“Stop. Let me tell you about La Plata. Gabriela thinks that the bar thing hasn’t gone well for Ramón, but that he keeps at it, trying to forge ahead. She doesn’t know that much more, but she gave me some leads to a comrade in La Plata who might know.”

“Ramón is not in La Plata, Lorenza. Why do you insist on this? It doesn’t sound right … La Plata. And the bar thing, even less so. Ramón must be in a cabin buried in snow, in Bariloche.”