No Place for Heroes

30

LORENZA AND MATEO had a couple of bad days following that, dejected and keeping their distance from each other in reverse, the boy holed up in his dark mood and not coming out of his room, and Lorenza sleepless at night and struggling to work while dozing off during the day. On returning to the hotel, all she had to do was see the PLEASE DON’T DISTURB sign hanging on the door to guess that inside the beds would be unmade, towels would be strewn on the floor, the drapes drawn, and in the middle of the shipwreck her son, in his pajamas still, hair uncombed, subsisting on chocolates, potato chips, and Coca-Colas from the minibar, and in a catatonic state in front of his PlayStation, which would be spitting smoke from hour after hour of continual use. She had always been afraid of the PlayStation. It sounded ridiculous, the idea of fearing such an object, a toy. But that’s how it was. The way that Mateo allowed himself to be devoured by the thing made her anxious. It put her on edge — the repetitive little electronic music that invaded him and transported him to a distant world, hyperkinetic and overpopulated with kicking and punching cartoons, who fired machine guns, jumped over barrels, climbed towers, fell over dead, came back to life, crossed through labyrinths, drowned in a moat, and tossed grenades, always at an unsustainable ultrahuman rhythm that was in stark contrast with the statuesque stillness that was Mateo, because aside from his dancing pupils and his thumbs, which punched at buttons in sync with the frenzy on the screen, everything else about him was stillness, absence, hypnosis. And of course, the frightening thing wasn’t the game but what Mateo did not say, what he avoided, what he denied when he sat down in a lotus position, like a boy Buddha, in front of that strange illuminated altar. After Mateo learned about the circumstances surrounding his father’s prison sentence, he decided to close his ears and mouth and wanted to know nothing more about him, about Buenos Aires, but also nothing more about his mother.

He announced that he would return to Bogotá as soon as they could get a plane reservation, and she could find no arguments to dissuade him. There was no way she could get him to allow them more time to find a less disheartening finale to the trip that they had undertaken with such great hopes.

“Do you want to talk, Mateo?” Lorenza asked him, but her son was so absorbed in the game that he did not even respond.

“Son, don’t you think we should talk?” she insisted.

“No, Lolé, anything you say will make me feel like shit. I don’t like the way you talk to me.”

“I’m doing what I can, kiddo, telling you about things as they happened—”

“That’s the problem, you are Wonder Woman and the whole story is like a screenplay for an action film. Your Ramón is a comic-book hero. He does this thing here. Zap! Wap! Does that thing there. Boom! Shoom! He falls, he gets up. Krak! Crock! He’s arrested, released, fights against the villains, against the good guys. It doesn’t make sense, Lorenza, do you understand? That fiction has nothing to do with the Ramón who is my father. My father is a weirdo, a shitty crook, a frustrated one at that, who doesn’t have the balls to show his face, to come offer me some explanations. What does your wide-shouldered warrior have to do with that bastard who erases himself, who disappears? Riiiiiiiiing … Riiiiiiing … Hello? Who is it? No one, nobody, no response, I don’t know, wrong number, who gives a shit.”

“Couldn’t you wait for me a few days, Mateo, until I finish my duties here in Buenos Aires, and then we can return together to Bogotá?” she asked. “Or if you want, you can go tomorrow morning to Bariloche, and do some skiing until I come pick you up.”

But Mateo refused outright. The only thing he wanted was to be left alone and in peace, submerged in his PlayStation, lost to the world.