No Place for Heroes

36

THERE’S AN ALLEYWAY at the back of the well-known Mercado del Progreso on Primera Junta, in the Caballito section. Called Pasaje Coronda, it is the drop-off point for trucks bringing food to the market, and could well be one of the least memorable spots in Buenos Aires.

Number 121 in that alleyway is a type of small old convent where several families lived. A big and precarious one-story building, it is train-like, with a narrow façade and nine separate rooms lined up in the back, all facing a common hallway. At one time, Forcás rented the first of those rooms, the only one with a window facing the street, and his brother, Miche, the adjacent one.

Forcás’s room had a door out to a small patio, a half bath, and a sort of corner kitchen. And since Miche’s was only a room, Forcás had given him a key to his side, so he would use it whenever he needed to. And, of course, Miche needed to, coming in and out at all hours of the day and night.

“Do you want to come with me to Coronda, Mateo, to see the place?” Lorenza asked, and Mateo, who was in a better mood since talking to the daughter of el negro Robles, allowed himself to be convinced after a period of haggling.

“What an ugly spot,” he said after they arrived, and his mother took it as an offense.

“Ugly? I wouldn’t say that. Really, you think it’s ugly? Well, I was happy here.”

“It’s still pretty ugly.” Mateo patted her on the back, to make up for his comment.

“I always found it charming, from the day I arrived here with my suitcase to come live with Forcás. Before that, I had never come. I had no idea where in the city his hideout cave was.”

“But didn’t we just leave it that the two of you were breaking up, never to see each other again?”

“About a month and a half after that, we made up. He had looked me up to tell me that he had broken it off with his old love. I broke it off with mine with a long phone call from a public telephone, and a few days later we had already decided to live together. I said goodbye to Sandrita and the apartment on Deán Funes, packed my suitcase, and showed up knocking at his door, 121. It was the same exact door you see now, metal, with this same oxidized mustard color. I rang the bell. Very emotional as you can imagine, startled, really, not really knowing where I was and what I was doing.”

Her worries vanished as soon as Forcás opened the door. He was in an undershirt and sandals and was drinking a maté, and she liked that. He looked like a neighborhood kid. He didn’t smell like sheep’s wool, nor like Drakkar Noir, but like that instead, an everyday kid, wearing sandals and drinking a maté in his neighborhood. It was the first time that she had seen him like that. Before, she had always seen him in some role, as a resistance fighter, or as director, or the handsome one, or an Argentinean, or a boyfriend. But now it was just the face of an ordinary young man, who smiled as he opened the door of an ordinary house in an ordinary barrio, who took her suitcase and asked her to come in. She sensed that the moment was important. It was something like landing in a normal life, or as much of a normal life as could have existed amid the general horror. It was also like stepping into the real Buenos Aires. For Aurelia, Coronda was the doorway into the city.

“It’s not the same being in a city as stepping into it, Mateo. For example, you and I, in our hotel, we’re in Buenos Aires, but we are not. At the apartment on Deán Funes I was in Buenos Aires, but not fully. But in Coronda it was different; Coronda was the real Buenos Aires, the city within the city, the heart. And it’s not really a metaphor. Caballito is in the middle of Buenos Aires and Coronda is in the heart of Caballito. Or who knows, that’s what they say. What is definite is that Coronda was my citizenship papers; as soon as I stepped into that house, I stopped being a foreigner.”

Forcás introduced her to his two cats, Abra and Cadabra, a pair of ashen little things, barely alive, blade thin from hunger. A few days prior, he had found them in the vacant lot across from the convent, among the garbage from the market, where someone had abandoned them in a sack. They were half dead when he took them in.

“But they were already fine when you arrived?” Mateo noted with a touch of anxiety. He couldn’t stand the thought of an animal suffering.

“They were starting to come back, thanks to some mineral water that Forcás fed them with a syringe. After he introduced me to his cats, he showed me the house.”

“From now on it’s our house,” Forcas had told her. But he didn’t tell her that it was also his brother Miche’s, and his girlfriend Azucena’s. That part Aurelia would find out that night.

The entrance to the room was through the small patio, which had a few potted plants, and Forcás showed her the washbasin and a rope ladder that led to the roof and that, he explained with hand signals, he had put there as a means of escape should it become necessary to do so. They ducked to go under the clothesline and Aurelia was shown the bathroom, a stream of water that came out of a piece of pipe and splashed on the floor, in a space so narrow that, she would find out the next day, on showering you had to watch that your back didn’t graze the cold wall.

Aurelia wasn’t exactly sure why, but she had the sensation of coming upon a cozy place. Or she did know why, the reason was clear as day: this was a real house, with potted plants and cats and clothes hanging on the line, something unexpected for someone like Forcás, who lived on the razor’s edge. Before further exploring her new refuge, Aurelia locked herself in the bathroom, to be alone for a minute and think about what was happening to her.

“You didn’t lock yourself in there to think, Lolé, but to pee, to mark your territory. That’s what animals do when they take over a place.”

Forcás later showed her the bedroom and she found it stupendous. There were a few books, those that could pass as innocent, Dickens, Kipling, and Stevenson, and a Ken Brown sound system, and a bunch of rock nacional records. The lone bed was simple, with a blanket of black-and-coffee-colored stripes. Forcás told her that it had been hand-knitted by the Aymaras and had been a present from some Bolivian comrades. This is my bed, he said to her, your bed now as well. She sat beside him and laughed, because it was really a narrow bed. A double bed would have been too big, for the room was no larger than thirty square meters. Aside from the bed, there was a table and four chairs, a stove in the corner, and a fridge whose door was held in place by a rope. Stacked against the wall were countless boxes with the name Yiwu YaChina on them. It would be much better without the boxes, she thought, but said nothing.

“Yiyu China?” Mateo asked.

“Yiwu YaChina. A wholesale Chinese jewelry. It was Forcás’s minute. To the neighbors, he was the wholesaler for Yiwu YaChina.”

“Boxes full of jewels! That must have cost a fortune …”

“They were Chinese jewels, kiddo, cheap fake stuff. The boxes were covered in dust, anybody would be able to tell that the merchandise wasn’t moving. But it was his minute. As soon as your father took out a box, he replaced it with another one, and so he kept the neighbors from suspecting.”

From outside on the street, Mateo wanted to look inside the window, hopping up, but he came up short.

So he brought over some bricks from the abandoned lot, stacked them, and stood on top of them, putting his hands on the sides of his face to block the reflection on the glass.

“What do you see?” Lorenza asked from below.

“It’s empty. No one lives here.” Mateo jumped down to the sidewalk.

“If you want, I can ring the bell, kiddo, see if we can talk with some of the neighbors, someone who knew your father. I can say that we lived here a long time ago. Maybe they have keys and we can go in the room, so what if it’s empty. Or better yet, maybe it’s for rent and they’ll show it.”

“You go ahead. I’m going to see what they have in the market.”

“Let’s go together. But tell me what you saw through the window, if the floor has greenish tiles like I remember—”

“I don’t know, I couldn’t tell.”

“Wait for me here. I want to look.” Lorenza went back to the window, added a few bricks to the stack, climbed up on top, and a few moments later was looking for Mateo in the market.

“The floor is green, kiddo!” she screamed at him when she saw him down an aisle. “A milky green, veined with white.”

“Great news,” he laughed. “Veined with white.”

The day Lorenza had arrived for the first time, the floor tiles had recently been mopped with lavender water. The whole place smelled like lavender, because Forcás had just cleaned to welcome her. And he had cleared a couple of shelves above the records and told her she could put her clothes there as he helped her unpack. It was a whole big moving-in ceremony, and although they didn’t mention it, it was clear that it was a solemn occasion for both of them.

“I saw the patio,” Mateo said, checking out the slabs of meat on the counter. “You could see all the way out back. Small, smaller than I had imagined.”

“We did everything on that tiny patio,” Lorenza said. “Even roasted meat on Sundays during the summer. Miche had hung a mirror on the back wall, right between the potted plants that we used to comb our hair. And since there wasn’t a sink inside, we washed pots, dishes, and clothes in the basin, as well as cleaned our hands and brushed our teeth. In the winter you had to be quick about it; funny to have to wear a coat to brush your teeth.”

“Nice,” Mateo smiled. “Everything in the open air, like farmers. In the middle of the city, Forcás lived like a farmer. I like that. Now I see how his name became him.”

“In the summer things got ugly. Because the heat and humidity were so suffocating, you barely stepped outside the range of the fan before you began sweating buckets. But in the winter it was pleasant, that’s the truth. I returned to the house each evening about eight or nine and I loved finding your father leaning back on a chair, sipping his maté, with the cats on his lap and his feet resting on the open oven door.”

“His feet must have charred,” Mateo said.

“He had his shoes on. It was a gas oven and since there wasn’t any heating, we kept it on and open so that the place stayed warm. But in general, we wouldn’t see each other during the day. We both left early to fulfill our tasks for the party, not having any idea where the other one was, and it was nice to come back at night and realize that the other one had returned unharmed. I swear, Mateo, the reunion each night was a gift. When you go fearing the worst, it’s a relief to find out that nothing has happened. And so we passed the time, day by day, very much in love, not knowing about what was going to happen the next day, not guessing too much either.”

“Were you scared?”

“When I remained alone in the house.”

Sometimes Aurelia had to stay alone for the night in Coronda, because Miche, who ran a collective, had the night shift, Azucena wasn’t home yet, and Forcás was traveling. She locked the door securely and bundled herself up in the Aymara blanket, Abra and Cadabra curled up by her feet, and began to feel as if the panic that spread throughout the neighborhood outside seeped in through the cracks in the wall and flooded the room. She couldn’t fall asleep for thinking of the basements where people bled to death in the dark, their fingernails ripped off; of the pregnant woman from the neighborhood who had disappeared the week before; or of a comrade who had turned up cut to pieces in the gutter. When she heard the sound of a lone motor outside, she stood on the bed to look out the window and her blood went cold if it was a green Ford Falcon without plates, the fed cars, the true vehicles of death, which now and then parked in the empty lot across the street. Fortunately, around four, the trucks began to arrive to unload and that was the saving grace, life returning with all its noise to frighten off the ghosts, and then finally Aurelia could sleep, lulled by the voices of the truck drivers, which in the coldness of dawn offered each other some maté, or a Faso. It was a sign that the night had been left behind and that she was safe, and she slept soundly until six, when Miche, who returned from his shift, came into the room without knocking, with the day’s newspaper in one hand and bags of the night’s business in the other, to talk about the news and ask if she wanted breakfast. It was an issue trying to convince him that he had to knock before coming in; she never finally succeeded. He argued, convincingly, that no one should have to ask permission to go into his own bathroom. Besides, the kitchen was his domain; he was the one who generally cooked for everyone, and it was pretty tasty, especially his milanesas with puree and salad. Before working in the collective he had been a butcher, and in his room he still kept a hair-raising collection of cleavers and Swiss knives that he had once used for his profession.

“So they treated you pretty well,” Mateo said.

“Yes, always. Forcás did whatever he could so that I felt at home. But not always. I do remember a specific case …”

Aurelia had bought a Japanese lantern, one of those round ones with rice paper that you see everywhere. She hung it from a string over the table, connected the electric wire, and was happy with it. She thought that it added a nice ambiance to the room. It was the first thing, aside from her clothes, that she had brought into Coronda. That night, Miche began to ridicule her immediately for putting up such a thing, and began to jab it as if it were a punching bag, quickly destroying it.

“Forcás watched him and did nothing to stop him. He let Miche destroy the lantern,” Lorenza said.

“That’s not unusual,” Mateo said. “The house had belonged to the two brothers before you arrived.”

“But that was really the only time they made me feel like an intruder.”

“Maybe it was some sort of initiation ritual, a baptism of blood.”

“Well, of paper in this case. But after that night, Coronda was as much mine as theirs, and Azucena’s, of course.”

“And what about Ramón when he eventually came to live in your place in Bogotá, did he feel the same?”

“It wasn’t my house. I didn’t have a house. We rented an apartment together, and with you, who had already been born. On the wall of your room, I put up a huge poster of wild horses, and you liked it when—”

“Wait, wait,” Mateo interrupted her, “what I want to know is if Ramón was as content in that place in Bogotá as you were in Coronda.”

“No. He was miserable. We had left Argentina at my request, distancing ourselves from the party. You were going to be two, we had gone through three tyrants, one after the other and each with his blood spilling — the generals Videla, Viola, and Galtieri. I couldn’t take it anymore. The anguish over the fact that something might happen to us before four in the afternoon, and that no one could pick you up from the sitter, was killing me. That was the worst part of the fear, that it would be four o’clock and no one would be there to pick you up at the sitter.

“For your safety and for my peace of mind, Ramón agreed to move to Bogotá and distance himself from everything that was his, the party, his comrades, what he liked to eat, and the only job he knew how to do. And in Bogotá, I forgot about him and left him very alone and isolated. For some reason, I remember with an almost photographic memory each of the objects that we had in Coronda and not even one of the objects we put up in the apartment in Bogotá; except for the poster in your room, I don’t remember any of them.”

One of the lines in that letter from Ramón that she did not read, the one that he left for her during the dark episode, said “exiled from everything, even your love.” And, “I’m taking the boy, the only thing that is mine.”

“Then you did read the letter.”

“No, only those lines.”

“I need a screwcork to pull information out of you.”

“Corkscrew.”

“Yeah, that. You know, there are times I would like to forgive him.”

“Wanting to forgive is already a form of forgiving, I suppose.”

“But no, no, he was a bullshitter, I wasn’t the only thing that he took with him. He also took that money that wasn’t his.”