No Place for Heroes

4

“SPIT, LOLÉ,” Mateo ordered his mother the following morning, as she brushed her teeth. “Spit out whatever you have in your mouth, it drives me nuts when you talk with all that foam in your mouth. Besides, Ramón is in Bariloche. I’m sure he is in Bariloche, where I last saw him. He likes the mountains, like me. Do you think I got that from him, the fact that I love the mountains?”

“Don’t go loopy on me, kiddo, he is not in Bariloche. Were you listening when I told you that he was in La Plata?”

“Are you going to spit or not?”

“Turn the TV down so we can talk.”

“I’ll turn the TV down if you spit the foam out.”

“All right! There! I spit it out. But from now on everybody brushes their teeth whenever and however they damn well feel like it.”

“Good. So no more nagging about yellow teeth and cavities or counting the days since I brushed them last. And so, did you always trust your comrades?”

“Pick up your clothes, kiddo. Room service is bringing breakfast and I don’t want the room to be a mess,” Lorenza ordered, but it was like speaking to the air. “Come on, Mateo, pick up a little bit. And yes, I did.”

“You did what?”

“Trust the comrades in the party. Isn’t that what you just asked?”

“Even if they were tortured to get them to name names?”

“Well, I was never denounced. In general, those in the party did not betray each other. There was a high moral standard among the comrades. A high moral stan-dard, that seems like such a dated phrase, but it was true, a very high standard.”

“Were you ever tortured?”

“No.”

“And if you had been tortured? Would you have denounced others?”

“Torture is a pretty fucked-up business. Who knows how much you can take?”

“And what did they ask? The torturers, what did they want to know?”

“Names, addresses … sometimes they were after something specific, and sometimes they just asked general questions. Other times they had no idea who they were torturing or why they were torturing him, and then they didn’t even know what to ask.”

Years later, after she had returned to Colombia and had been writing for La Crónica for some time, she interviewed an ex-sergeant who had been a torturer in Argentina during the dictatorship. He told her that they would jot down any information that they ripped from the prisoner on scraps of paper, which they would more often than not misplace.

“Maybe we should just go to La Plata to look for your father,” Lorenza said. “I can’t tomorrow or the next day, but Thursday I can. I’m free Thursday through Monday, so we can take a bus to La Plata, and if nothing turns up there we’ll look for him in Polvaredas, where his grandparents lived.”

“Why don’t we just look him up in the Buenos Aires phone book?” Mateo grabbed the tome and began to leaf through the pages. “Let’s see I … I … Irigoyen … shit I went down too far, here, Iribarren Armanado, Pablo; Iribarren Cirlot, Dolores: Iribarren Darretain, Ramón! Here it is, Lorenza, Iribarren Darretain, Ramón—”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, look, Iribarren Darretain, Ramón.”

“It can’t be, Mateo, let me see. There it is, a Ramón Iribarren. It has to be some other person. It can’t be him.”

“What other person, Lorenza, with those two surnames? It’s him.”

“Maybe it’s a joke, so prosaic, the enigmatic Forcás easily reachable and in alphabetical order. I don’t buy it, going from the underground resistance to the phone book. Shit, so these are the fruits of democracy?”

“Behold, my father, after so many years of mystery,” the young man said, and both broke into laughter because there was nothing else to do.

“Let me see again,” Lorenza said, grabbing the phone book.

“Iribarren Darretain, Ramón,” Mateo recited. “It’s there. Who else can it be?”

“Does it say where he lives?”

“What? Here, in Buenos Aires. It’s the Buenos Aires phone book, right? Shit, that’s so fucked up, Lolé. Maybe he lives right next door. What a disaster, what a shock. Let go of the phone book, leave it wherever it was. And shut it, I beg you, I don’t know what got into me to go looking in it.”

“Let me at least write down the number—”

“Come on. Lorenza, let’s get out of this room.”

“But I just ordered breakfast.”

“Cancel it. Let’s get out of here. Cancel the order, Lorenza. We can have breakfast downstairs.”

“You’re still in your pajamas.”

“Then hide that phone book. Put it under the bed, wherever, I just don’t want to see it. Come, come,” he said, going to her, and putting her hand over his tightly shut eyes, like when he was a child and afraid of something, “cover my eyes, Mommy, please, please, cover my eyes.”