No Place for Heroes

33

EVENTUALLY, MATEO shut off the PlayStation and sat down to write a letter to Ramón.

“You can give it to him after I leave for Bogotá,” he told his mother when he was finished. “If you see him, that is, or see someone who can give it to him.” On the desk he left a folded piece of paper inside a hotel envelope, and announced that he was going to take a long bath.

“Can I use all the hot water?” he asked before locking himself in.

“The only thing that is infinite in this world is the hot water in hotels,” she replied.

“If you want, you can read it,” her son’s voice said from the other side of the door, drowned out by the running water. She opened the envelope.

Ramón: This trip to Buenos Aires has confirmed what I already knew. That you have never been anything to me, and that you are not now, the letter said. You have grown in me like a ghost, like a fear of darkness and hatred of vegetables. I recognize your absence in the insecurity of my adolescence and in this arrogant shyness that isolates me from others. But fortunately it is not only that. You have also grown in me like a passion for mountains, and rivers and snow and mist. Every time that I climb a mountain, I seem to remember that I once had a father. I’ll stay with the memory and stop searching for you. I no longer expect anything from you.

That’s what Mateo had written, but he was still expecting. In the back of the envelope, making an effort to write clearly, he had jotted down his phone number and address in Bogotá, specifying the name of the neighborhood, the apartment number, and the postal code. And if that weren’t enough, below he had drawn a little rudimentary map, indicating with arrows how to get there.

Lorenza had another busy workday ahead of her, and was very worried about leaving her son alone, given over to Wei-Wulong and the Dynasty Warriors. Fortunately, the phone rang just then, she picked it up to hear the sweet voice of a girl, asking for Mateo.

“Mateo, it’s Andrea Robles, the daughter of el negro Robles. She says that they told her you were looking for her and wants to know if you want to go out for a bit,” she screamed past the bathroom door, covering the speaker so that she wouldn’t hear the categorical no her son would come back with. But to her surprise, Mateo agreed to see her.