No Place for Heroes

45

“I GET OUT of the car in the middle of the snowy mountains that I knew only through Ramón’s dreams, a place that for me was not part of any map, but from the stories and songs he improvised as nursery rhymes for Mateo,” Lorenza tells Gabriela. “And suddenly out of nowhere there comes a horse, and on that horse is Ramón, and Ramón has my child. And he gives me the child. I swear, not even when he was born did I feel such a commotion, as if I was giving birth again, but after a much more difficult labor. There he was with me, my baby Mateo. I kissed him and hugged him; poor little one, he must have been suffocating from so much squeezing, but I couldn’t stop, I had to be convinced that this was real.”

It was the only real thing in that landscape of an imaginary postcard holiday, where snow bleached everything and settled everywhere, hiding the face of things. But there was her son. Everything else faded around her, like during a dizzy spell or a hallucination. But Mateo was laughing, he had learned to say new words, and was wearing a red cap: he was amazingly real. Fortunately real.

“I kissed his nose, his eyes, his hair, his hands, his laughing strawberry mouth, his soft skin. I planted kisses even on the yellow boots he wore.”

“Mateo has been waiting for you,” came the voice of Ramón.

“I couldn’t look at him, Gabriela. At Ramón. I couldn’t do it.”

“How you must have hated him.”

“That wasn’t the problem, hatred in the end can be handled. But it wasn’t pure, it was mixed with gratitude, even reverence, that ruinous gratitude, the odious veneration that you bear your abuser when you pardon him. That’s why I didn’t want to look at him.”

“I explained to Mateo that we were on vacation, him and me,” Ramón’s voice said, “and that you would take some days to catch up with us because you had a lot of work, but that you were coming.”

“I realized then that Mateo didn’t know,” Lorenza told Gabriela, “and I felt a huge relief. If the boy was happy it was because he didn’t know about the drama and behaved as if he were on vacation, fascinated with the snow and the horse, with the fire in the hearth and the water of the lake. Ramón told me things. He told me that Mateo was in love with the horse, that the first night he had wanted to bring the horse into the cabin so that he would not be cold, and that he had no choice but to go out and show him the stable where the horse was asleep. The stable at the neighbor’s place, from whom they rented the horse. I noted the fact, neighbors nearby, I might ask them for help. And there were horses. They might not be Bucephaluses, but they had four working legs. If I couldn’t get hold of a car, I would flee with the boy on the horse.”

“Great,” said Gabriela, “with your eyelashes frozen like in Doctor Zhivago.”

“It was cold as shit, and very dark,” Ramón’s voice kept saying, “you couldn’t see a thing, and Mateo and I at midnight, with the flashlight, looking for the stable.”

There was a flashlight, Lorenza registered; she had to figure out where he kept it. She looked around and saw no electrical wires. Doing all this while making efforts to look at Ramón, to say something nice.

“Something nice? With how you were feeling?” said Gabriela.

“Anything, that I had missed him, or that the scenery was beautiful, whatever, but nothing came out. I had come to play in the cold and I wasn’t succeeding. I had to overcome it, to make him think that I was glad to see him.”

“But what could he expect of you? He couldn’t really believe that everything would be as before.”

“I knew exactly what I expected of him: nothing. I had gone there to get my son, period. Now what he expected from me, I don’t know, I’d have to guess at it.”

“Did he believe that this was really a reconciliation?”

“Difficult to say, Ramón is anything but naïve. Oh yes, maybe he was acting in good faith. Like I said, I was a little out of it. I needed time to devise a way to take Mateo with me, and meanwhile I had to remain on good terms with Ramón. On good terms, by his lights, of course, that is, in tune with this love story that I was supposedly starting over.

“It was all very strange, Gabriela. My head was a mess. How could I make sense of the fact that the boor, who a month before had taken my child and put me in grave danger by stealing money from the Mafia, was this loving father, this Prince Charming who came out to meet me like in a fairy tale. What logic was there in that? And while he looked at me, I felt that he couldn’t take his eyes off me, and that he was in the same situation, with horrible doubts about me. We both tried to appear spontaneous but we were walking on eggshells. He didn’t have a full advantage, either. I relaxed a little when I realized that.”

“You can rest easy,” the voice said. “Mateo didn’t have a single bad moment, all that was missing was his mother, and here she is.”

It must have been true, she saw no signs of anxiety or discomfort in Mateo. He looked as radiant as ever. He seemed very proud of his wool pullover, red with green-and-blue dolls and a matching cap, clothes that she had never seen, which the father must have bought. It was clear that of all the marvels in Mateo’s unexpected paradise, the father was by far his favorite. And now also her, the mother, who came without his ever suspecting that she might not have made it there.

She had to remain lucid, have a clear picture of the place, and make decisions quickly. But it was hard to think. Her head sent her contradictory messages, as if Mateo’s unexpected joy cast a light on the dark episode. Because if things had not been, after all, as atrocious as she had imagined, she could well have made up the whole nightmare.

“You’re skinny,” Ramón said, shattering the illusion. He had dropped the phrase as if it were not his fault, as if every kilo lost was not a result of the agony of waiting.

“He asked if I wanted to eat,” she tells Gabriela. “He said he was going to pop open some burgundy to celebrate my arrival. Impudence, I finally saw it in his face as he spoke. I told him I’d rather unpack first.”

“Great.”

“It was really something. And he said: Come, I’ll show you the cabin, you’ll see, it’s like the house of Hansel and Gretel.

“And he takes my suitcase out of the Impala along with the briefcase with the double bottom, false passports, and the Revlon cosmetics bag with those lethal drops. My blood half froze, but my bag did not give me away, I told you it was a vaina for professionals. Now, the cabin was beautiful, tiny and cozy with the fireplace going, something out of Robinson Crusoe. Ramón’s comparison maybe had not been well thought out; in the story of Hansel and Gretel, the sweet little house turns out to be a place of terror.”

Lorenza felt that everything there was fictitious, someone putting on a show. She had just spent twenty days and nights preparing for war, had come resolved to confront her enemy, and her enemy was playing the fool.

He received her with open arms as if the matter were forgiven — even worse, as if there wasn’t anything to forgive.

“And here I was, coming prepared to poison him.”

“Did you really think about the possibility of poison, with the drops?” Gabriela asked.

“Well, no. Not poison him, but leave him dazed. Or in as deep a slumber as Sleeping Beauty, at least. Wouldn’t you kill for your Mary?”

“Ah, yes, I would, but I’m crazier than you.”

Lorenza sat by the fire, still clutching the child to her chest, thinking of how to break free and carry him away from there. She soon realized that Miche and the white Impala were gone.

“Bad start,” said Gabriela.

“Very bad. I wanted to show Mateo what I had learned from my gringa girlfriends in the Washington winter, that if you throw yourself back on the snow and move your arms up and down, you leave behind the stamped figure of an angel with big wings. The first time I saw that I was dazzled, not that I really thought it was an angel. Mateo did not grasp the subtlety of it, however, and thought it was about wallowing in the snow and that seemed fine to him.”

“Where’s Miche?” Lorenza asked as they walked in, and Ramón replied to forget about Miche, that he’d told him they wanted to be alone, this wasn’t Coronda with him coming and going as he pleased. Finally, they had the whole house to themselves.

“Idyllic,” says Gabriela.

If there was no Miche, then no Impala, Lorenza thought. It was going to be crazy, the Escape from Alcatraz on the frail, old horse. Another thing: she did not see a phone, but dared not ask, since the purpose would have been all too obvious.

“Then he immediately told me, no phone, and his voice no longer sounded so friendly, as if he had read my thoughts and was offended. Or maybe not, maybe he wasn’t offended, because he came and went, placing the food on the table. It was exhausting to be trying to even minimally gauge all his signals.”

There was bread, ham, lamb, goat cheese, and something which he said was traditional winter pears with raspberry sauce. Ramón went to fetch wood from the huge pile outside, then crouched to stoke the fire, and next went looking for wineglasses. She was helping him, but meanwhile she measured his steps and movements, and scrutinized every corner of the house.

“That place was a prison, so coldly polite and calculating,” she says to Gabriela. “A prison with doors that led nowhere. But we ate well, all three of us, and I did what I never do, I had two glasses of wine.”

“You don’t drink wine?”

“Not red, it gives me a headache. But that day I did, and we even toasted.”

“Hard to imagine, that toast. I hope it was for happiness.”

“Fortunately, no. We toasted Mateo, and we both left it at that.”

The cottage had a kerosene stove on the lower level, the table where they ate and a couple of chairs facing the fireplace, and an attic-like loft that was reached by a ladder, where there was a double bed and another small one, toward the back. Ramón had placed the small one there, against the wall, and the double perpendicular to it, blocking it. So that Mateo did not go headfirst over the railing if he got up in the middle of the night and wanted to go looking for the horse, he said, adding that he would have to pass over them.

“There’s sawdust, there must be termites in the beams,” said Lorenza, shaking the blankets, but she was thinking that she too would have to pass over Ramón if she tried to take the child at night. Even with that, he was calculating. Zero chance of not waking him during the operation, unless she used the Revlon needle. The best thing would be to keep the briefcase with the cosmetic bag beside the bed. All of her instruments within reach. But he was quite sturdy, Ramón, she had forgotten just how sturdy. If she decided on the Revlon, she would have to do it viciously, she thought, or else it wouldn’t even tickle him. “So I would sleep in the double bed, as well. Apparently it had already been decided.”

Did Ramón not remember, would not remember, that they were separated, that they no longer lived together, no longer slept together? Lorenza chose not to protest. She too would play dumb, as long as it was necessary.

“At that instant, Mateo appeared with a package bigger than himself. I unwrapped it and it was a pullover for me. Handwoven by village women, said Ramón. Lovely, really. Open in front, a deep black, with blue-and-white trinkets.”

“If it was open it wasn’t a pullover.”

“A sweater?”

“Nope.”

“Then I don’t know what the hell it was.”

“A cardigan. It must have been a Scandinavian cardigan, back stitch. In Bariloche they make divine ones. I have some from there. Look at this scarf. It’s made with Scandinavian backstitch. For the front to come out right, you have to hold the thread through the back. It’s really not that complicated.”

“But they also gave me a black cap, which I used for many years, who knows where I lost it, and snow boots, fur-lined. Well chosen, wouldn’t you know, just my size. My heart melted to see Mateo’s enthusiasm, the jumps and hops when he saw the three of us with our outfits on, looking like forest gnomes. I hugged them. Both of them. They had caught me by surprise with this generosity, Gabriela, how was I not going to celebrate it.”

“I see where this is leading. He was always a charmer, that Forcás.”

Hikes were still possible because winter had not yet descended on the region, and that same afternoon they went out to make a brief trek around the property. A short one, Ramón had decided, not going too far, just to warm up, with the kid riding on the horse, held by his leg from below to prevent him from falling. Although Lorenza was determined not to be impressed by anything that would muddle her resolve, the beauty of those snowy heights left her agape and it took her breath away when they contemplated from a peak the entire universe spread at their feet. But she also noticed how deserted the surroundings were. They were alone at the end of the world, and it was neither metaphor nor reassurance. They started to come down the mountainside in the afternoon. Mateo dozed, as if enraptured with the rocking of the horse, and the last rays of the sun spread golden streaks on the locks that escaped from under Ramón’s cap. You can’t deny it, she thought, the son of a bitch has very pretty hair.

With no electricity, the fireplace was the only source of heat they had. The chimney rose on the wall against the headboards, warming the loft space. It was night, the first one the three of them would spend together in the cabin. Lorenza put pajamas on the boy, who failed to drink his milk before he fell asleep, and she set him down in the small bed. She lay down, wrapped in blankets and without taking off all of her clothes, on the side of the bed nearest Mateo, keeping near the edge, as close as possible to the child, to feel in the darkness his sweet breath. Ramón remained downstairs.

“I didn’t want to fall asleep,” Lorenza tells Gabriela. “Mateo was with me and I wanted that long-yearned-for moment to last forever. I didn’t want to fall asleep, but eventually I did.”

The mixture of absolute fatigue and a restored sense of calm made her let her guard down. At least for this night, they would not escape, not even in her dreams could she take Mateo from that heated refuge into the frozen night and across the snowy field to fly through the curtains of sleep on an old horse or in a white car. At some point, she was awakened by the cold.

The fire must have died out. She felt Ramón’s body stretched out beside her, facing away. Mateo had crawled to the big bed, leaving the three huddled tight like in a den, with her in the middle.

“And I felt good, Gabriela. What a difference from those tormented sleepless nights that I had spent alone. In times like that I forgot the monstrous things that Ramón had done. Well, and also the monstrous things I’d done to him as well in Bogotá.”

But soon enough she remembered the disaster she was in and began plotting an escape. In the end, that cabin was just a trap, a baseless illusion, an untenable, extravagant situation that Ramón had pulled out of his hat to mend things. She would have to raise an invisible barbed-wire fence between them. But she felt his body against hers, and appreciated its warmth.

“Wait a minute,” Gabriela said. “I still don’t understand what had happened in Bogotá. What do you mean when you say that you were guilty of monstrous things as well? Which ones?”

“Ignoring him, leaving him alone, tossing him to the side when I should have supported him, as he had done with me in Buenos Aires, like he was trying to do again in Bariloche.”

“But the measure of the two wrongs is so different. Come on! Taking a child from his mother! Even though it is his own father doing it, it’s a brutal tactic that bears some resemblance—some, right? — to what the enemy did. I don’t understand how you didn’t throw it in his face. If it was me, the first thing I would have done was beat him senseless. I’d smash his teeth, shit. You didn’t even reproach him for the money?”

“I’ve told you, it would have screwed everything up. Words were dangerous, Gabriela. I had to avoid them. He did too, he knew the settling of accounts would have ended the game. We talked about other things. About Mateo, mainly; about the cuteness that made Mateo Mateo. The two of us were crazy about the child and there we had no disagreement. And politics, of course. That was during the Falklands War. And we were up there, stuck with our drama and listening to the little battery-powered radio about the godforsaken mess developing below. Our ears glued to that little radio, keeping up with the news, we talked all day long, the two of us alone but like at a party meeting, arguing about whether we should support the Argentinean army in its just claim of a piece of national land. But how could we support such patriotic bluster from the junta, which was only looking to tame the domestic crisis; we shit on the junta but also the imperial vigor with which Thatcher mobilizes the Royal Navy, its Gurkhas, and task forces to continue their dominion over a few coin-size islands that were not theirs and were an ocean away.”

Fearful of having to deal with personal issues, they busied themselves with hiking, mountain climbing, chopping firewood, clearing the snow from the road with a shovel, walking beside Mateo on the horse, rowing on the lake: anything that used their muscles, until they collapsed from fatigue. It was the only way they could be together, their busy bodies then less likely to turn aggressive or vengeful, more likely to go with the flow. Ramón, who knew all the ins and outs of those mountains, took them to visit places that had become legendary, since she’d previously heard of them from him, the cave where Slovenian nuns hid, the glacier called Black Snowdrift, the slopes of Cerro Catedral, which led into the waters of Lago Gutiérrez, the peak of Cerro Otto, where they witnessed cosmic sunsets with a cup of hot chocolate in hand. When their excursions brought them to steep cliffs, they’d leave the horse behind and Ramón would carry Mateo on his shoulders.

They paused to dig a crib in the snow, which they lined with fur, so that the child could drink his milk and take a nap. This crowned their eight- or ten-hour crossing, from sunrise until reaching the refuge of the high mountains, which remained open to every traveler seeking shelter, firewood, and blankets at night. From peak to peak and cliff to cliff, they skirted the depths, like a devil’s nose, standing on huge black rocks looking over the void. With one little push, Lorenza thought when she saw Ramón nearing the edge, just a little push and that would be the end of their problem. But he thwarted the initiative as his eyes countered hers, seeming frightened and strange, as if he were plotting exactly the same.

The days succeeded each other, pleasant against all expectation. Not since Coronda had a house welcomed them as this cottage made of tree trunks, where they could shut themselves in while the world turned on the outside. At times Lorenza thought that she was with the handsome and confident Forcás of earlier times, so different from that other grim, jealous, moody one she’d had to deal with in Bogotá. A honeymoon, she thought, somewhat amazed, it’s as if we are honeymooning. Who would have thought?

“A somewhat macabre honeymoon. Moreover, there’s no honeymoon without sex,” says Gabriela.

“There was sex, of course. Not at first, but a bit later, there was. Yes. Good sex.”

“I couldn’t have done it. In that kind of situation, forget it.”

“We never talked about the sex, and even in bed the silences were killing us. But the rest worked, perhaps because I was always outside the physical battlefield. I remember one occasion in particular. We had eaten dinner and we were listening to the radio transmitting these madly triumphant communiqués, which only confirmed that we were losing the war.”

The people, who had originally celebrated the recovery of the islands with enthusiasm, now cried out against the slaughter of hundreds of teenage conscripts, poorly trained, badly fed, and dying from the cold, whom the inept bureaucratic superiors abandoned to their fate when the British moved in with all their firepower. The Argentinean patriotic fever became a wave of disappointment and anger in the streets. Rage against deception, against the inefficiency and bravado of those who behaved as butchers domestically but like lambs when facing a foreign army. The media, which just the week before had been bound by censorship, began to ridicule General Menéndez, the military governor of the Falklands, who had just signed the surrender to Moore, commander of the British troops.

“We were there, listening in,” Lorenza told Gabriela, when the voice of a Uruguayan journalist from Buenos Aires reaches us, claiming to be on the corner of Diagonal Norte and Florida, where a group of people had taken a policeman’s hat and began playing with it, putting it on their heads, passing it from hand to hand. No more fear, we said. And we hugged. Now the dictatorship will go down because the people are not afraid. Buenos Aires had become the burning Troy. People screaming toward Plaza de Mayo. The police responded timidly, not dispersing the crowd or locking anyone up. General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri, head of the junta at the time, who besides being the ideologue of the defeat was an alcoholic, came out drunk on the balcony of Government House, responding to the claims of the crowd with a delirious speech. ‘Those who fell are alive and will be sculpted in bronze,’ he shouted, and assured them ‘that we will be complete masters of our entire destiny total and will light torches as the highest values.’”

“Just that week I had been hospitalized for a stomach ulcer,” Gabriela says. “But my sister Alina was out on the streets, even though she didn’t understand anything about politics, nothing, and she came to visit very agitated to tell me that something was happening. She was startled, feeling that things were out of control. Suddenly we heard a ruckus outside and I asked Alina to open the window. Madre mía, we heard, it’s over, it’s over, the dictatorship is over.”

“In Plaza de Mayo, the drunkard Galtieri was haranguing his nonsense while the people in the street were screaming in his face that it was over. It was almost over, Gabriela, and we were so far away, with those shitty little radios, full of interference and static, so that we couldn’t quite hear. Or maybe yes, maybe what we heard was the roar of the collapse.”

The war was lost, the dictatorship was being overthrown, and Lorenza and Ramón were gripped by bittersweet feelings — gripped, on one hand, by the euphoria at the ridiculous manner in which the tyrants had perished, on the other, by regret over the conscripts who had been sent to die. On the one hand, victory: the Falklands had overthrown Argentina’s military junta. On the other, defeat: it had assured Thatcher’s reelection.

“This was turning into a porn movie,” Gabriela reminded her, “and now you’re telling me a war story.”

“Sorry, now for the porn, but it’s going to be much shorter. No, nothing; just that we made love that night, how would you say, intensely but with great melancholy, as if that encounter would be our farewell. Ramón knew, that night I realized that he also knew. End of movie.”

In keeping with the performance they were each giving, Ramón played his role as lover and father flawlessly. But it was clear that he could not trust her. He never closed his eyes. Miche began to visit often, bringing bottles of water and other provisions, helping with whatever was needed, and during his visits, the Impala was parked out in front of the cabin. But the keys always disappeared. Lorenza had noted that when Miche left them on the table, not five minutes would pass before Ramón put them in his pocket.

When they went down to the town, Lorenza managed to get a few minutes and would memorize street signs and gather information, sometimes she was even able to ask questions, checking bus stops and timetables, car rentals, nearby hotels, maps and roads. Chile had become her secret obsession. If they could only cross the border, they’d be outside his scope. But during these brief breaks, she was never alone with Mateo. Ramón never left them alone, not in the cabin, or walking, or on the street.

At the cabin, Lorenza played for hours with Mateo, told him stories, doing housework, sitting and reading by the fire. Without feeling any urgency, given this contrived but, after all, placid stagnation of time. Time. Let time run by. After much reflection on the possibilities of escape, she had come to understand that the only thing playing in his favor was the weather. With Mateo already by her side, she would be happy to wait. The magazine had given her an indefinite leave from work. She could wait. Another week, two more weeks, a month. Sooner or later, Ramón would become neglectful. I have been isolated, she thought, but not defeated. If space is your tool, the weather will be mine. And let the hours run, always waiting for the right moment.

Now and then she was surprised to wake up and the father had already dressed the child and fed him breakfast, or taken him out for a ride. One of those mornings, she heard male voices down below the loft. A neighbor had come to ask for help, some repair in his cabin. Lorenza opened her eyes and saw the thick sky through the window. Strange thing, it always dawned clear, but a little later the sky always seemed lower, woolly, heavy. Heaven’s donkey belly, she thought, that’s what they call this kind of sky in Lima. Ramón came up. “Here’s Mateo. Keep an eye on the baby, I’m leaving him here with you,” he said.

“Are you going to see about the neighbor?”

“No, Miche is going to help him. I put cookies on the table, apples and tea, go down to breakfast anytime.”

“Donkey belly, donkey belly,” she tickled Mateo on the tummy.

Getting out from under the cold blankets, she felt how cold the house was. The fire must have died out. Strange, Ramón always kept it going.

“Ramón?” she called to him several times, and getting no answer, threw a blanket over her shoulders and went down with the child to stir up the fire.

“It went out,” Mateo said, and it was true.

Ramón was not in the house, but he had to be around. She left the child on the carpet, entertaining himself with his old serpets, and looked out the window, feeling strange about the silence. The snow that had fallen during the night had erased the line between sky and land, leaving everything in a single confused vagueness. Large footprints, of three pairs of feet, moved away from the house and were lost to the left. Lorenza went out to examine them closely. These were Ramón’s, she was sure, recognizing the zigzag marks they left with their imprint and the little circle with the make in the center. There was no mistaking it. Unless Miche was wearing them … and then where was Ramón? Lorenza looked around the cabin and did not see him.

But the Impala was parked here, dappled with mud, blending into the landscape. She went for a closer look. On the floor of the front seat, in the rear. There was nothing, why would there be? She returned to the cabin and saw the keys.

There, without much ado, on the table. The keys to the car. Like in a dream. So obvious that it seemed strange that she hadn’t noticed them before. Then she picked up Mateo and climbed to the attic, slowly, so as not to trip with her eagerness, step by step, ceremoniously.

“Donkey belly, donkey belly, Mateo,” and she tickled him with one hand, while with the other she struggled to put his coat on him and switch the yellow slippers to boots. She dressed with what was near at hand and grabbed the money and passports, which she had hidden behind one of the shutters, in case Ramón became suspicious of the old suitcase.

“It had been quite a task hiding it, loosening the boards of the shutter and then readjusting them.”

“And the Revlon?” Gabriela asks. “I have to know, the Revlon?”

“I had buried it days before. Away from the cabin. Fearing Mateo would inadvertently find it and begin to play with it.”

She went down the stairs with the child in her arms, pausing again at each step, as if life depended on the slowness of her movements. She did not ask herself if she wanted to or had to do what she was doing; she acted like one obeying a command. She put the apples, the package of crackers, and a pacifier for Mateo into the bag. She looked around, peered out the windows, and saw that the world was motionless. No one approached. Then she did it, she took the keys, which as if by magic were still there on the table, waiting for her. Heroes or buffoons, she said as she was leaving the cabin, and taking Mateo by the hand, she walked toward the Impala. She took the time that was necessary to remove frost from the windshield, buckled Mateo in the backseat, put the briefcase next to him, and when she shut the door was startled at the possibility that the noise would have betrayed them. She looked around again. The footprints of Ramón and the other men were being erased by the snow that was beginning to fall. The entire universe seemed calm.

She sat at the wheel with the parsimony that comes with any inevitable decision, releasing the emergency brake, shifting the gear into neutral, and then the immense Impala of its own volition, as if it knew exactly what was expected of it, gently rolled down the slope, gently complicit, mute as the snow, invisible in the falling snow, lovely as the mantle of snow that gave them camouflage. Twenty minutes later, the Impala pulled up to the road crossing. She had not expected much traffic, but when she saw a Volkswagen headed toward the village, she got out of the Impala and made some hand signals. The woman driving stopped immediately and offered them a ride, asking if the car had broken down, and thus saving Lorenza the need to make up excuses. Without looking back, knowing instinctively that no one had come after them and acting as if the day belonged to her, Lorenza left the keys in the Impala and the window half closed, so that Miche and Ramón wouldn’t have any problems when they found it. She got into the Volkswagen with the child and the bag. On the way, the women spoke about the dangers of winter driving on such a bumpy road, and she thanked her when she left them in the central square of San Carlos de Bariloche, in front of the town hall.

Until then everything had been suspiciously easy, but suddenly Mateo began to cry, a rare thing for him, who until recently had done so little, but just at that moment he unleashed a fit of disconsolate and uncontrollable weeping, as if leaving a path of tears that Ramón could follow until he found him. He didn’t stop crying when they stopped to pet a sweet dog who waited for its owner at the entrance to a shop, or when Lorenza bought a cupcake decorated with yellow-and-pink icing, or when she sat him by the window of the bus that would take them along Lago Nahuel Huapi and through ancient forests to Puyehue, at the Chilean border, where authorities would let them pass after stamping the false documentation that Lorenza would give them. Mateo only calmed down and stopped whimpering when his mother pointed to a herd of deer on the shores of the lake, searching for something to graze on under the snow.