No Place for Heroes

12

MATEO AND LORENZA left La Biela and headed toward Corrientes, to stroll among booksellers and music vendors and coffeehouses. Lorenza wondered where all the books had been during the time of the dictatorship, she didn’t remember seeing them, or buying any, or even stopping to peruse, maybe because she never had any money or because it wasn’t safe to do such things, or maybe she had done it, but that was one of the many things that had not been made part of the official register. Her memories of that time were confined to the events of the main plotline. They were simple and directly related to what had happened, no props or scenery, and strangely enough, almost without words.

“Do you smell that, Mateo?” she asked. “It’s mold. That’s the smell of Buenos Aires.”

It was a rancid smell that had an aristocratic whiff. She had experienced it when she had come with her father, and years later when she had lived with Ramón, and now again, here with Mateo. It wasn’t ubiquitous or all-pervasive, but engendered in the dark humid corners of the city, the shady parks, the salon hairstyles of the old señoras, the subway trains, the stacks of used books, and diffused through the streets in small whiffs.

There it was … coming out from under a railing like steam. There again, clinging to the jacket of a passerby. That old smell. Dictators had come and gone, but Buenos Aires always smelled the same, like a broadtail fur coat stored in a basement. When you are here, it is not very noticeable because the nose gets used to it. But when you leave, it goes with you, and wherever you go and open your suitcase, it jumps out at you so that you can’t mistake it. That’s when nostalgia hits.

“Put your nose to that book you just bought,” she told Mateo. “Do you smell it? It’s Buenos Aires. You have in your hands the very essence of the city.”

“You sound like a tourist guide, Lolé. Why don’t you tell me about the content of those microfilms you were supposed to hand to Forcás, instead?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I already told you that it wasn’t worth knowing. In any case, we concealed them inside an emptied tube of toothpaste. And I wondered what ‘minute’ I would have to invent if they discovered such a thing at the airport in Ezeiza. The comrades told me that if it happened, to say an Our Father and hope for the best, because no minute would explain away such a thing.”

“Have you ever read Foundation?” Mateo asked, and without waiting for a response went on to recount the entire, endless plot, like he always did when he had read something, or had a nightmare or saw a movie. Once he started, he couldn’t stop until he reached the grand finale, and this time was no different. He only stopped chattering when his mother told him they were as lost as a Turk in a fog.

“Is that what they say in Argentina, a Turk in a fog?” he asked.

“It’s a saying.”

Lorenza cursed her poor sense of direction, that hopeless flaw that Trotsky called topographical cretinism, which makes any city into a labyrinth. Unfortunately, Mateo had inherited this trait, a tendency to roam endlessly for lack of an internal compass. The good thing about being so out of it was that you never even realized you were lost. Ayacucho, Riobamba, Hipólito Yrigoyen, they had followed the whim of their feet for hours, and the streets of the city center danced around them. Tucumán? Virrey Cevallos? Sarandí?

They didn’t hold hands anymore. It had been a few years since they had last done so. Before that, the boy’s hand fit in hers as if they had been made for each other, a big hand and a small hand, and they liked to pretend to fit them together like pieces of Lego. But by the time it was her hand that fit into his, Mateo did not want anything to do with this old game. He peeled away from her indignantly when she tried to hug him and he looked all around to make sure that no one had caught them in such a compromising position. Then Lorenza would restrain herself not to anger him, but she recognized a bit of herself in that distance that her son put between them. As a child, he had always clung to her, the two huddled together like ferrets in their burrow — if it was after midnight, the nightmares chased him to her bed; if they were at the beach, he wanted to fight like sharks; if they were on the street, he zigzagged in front of her, stepping on her with his oversize, thick-soled sneakers. They were like some creature with two heads and eight limbs. And how often had they found themselves in the narrow changing room of a store, as she struggled to try on the clothes and he played with his Transformers on the floor? Or even at home, as she tried to write while he practiced a jujitsu hold on her arm, or he watched his favorite TV program and she force-fed him spoonfuls of soup, or he tied knots in her hair, or she combed his and he pushed her away? At some point, Mateo became ruthless when it came to delineating his personal space and setting distances. He drew a Maginot Line between them and would not allow her to cross it by even a centimeter. And that’s how it should be. Lorenza understood that, as well as the fact that Mateo was no longer her child, no longer a kid, hers or anyone’s, and she realized how much it upset him when she ignored this truth. Mateo was justified in his territorial claims, it was only natural. But that hardness made tears well in her eyes, tears which she was allergic to.

“Do you think Ramón has arrived at his house in Buenos Aires,” he asked, “or at that cabin in the snowy mountains—”

“Or at his bar in La Plata. If you want, you can call him from the public phone. I have the number in my pocket.” He shook his head. Before they realized it, it was past eleven and they found themselves in front of the obelisk, which split in two the red splendor of a giant Coca-Cola billboard and speared upward toward the darkness. How had it become so late? It was something that often happened to them. Although they no longer walked holding hands, their conversation was still as entangling as any embrace and time passed them by unwittingly and the rest of the world remained in the wings. And so they kept on walking, by God’s grace, at times entertaining each other and at others simply gazing at the ground, and when she thought she recognized Santa Fe, they had returned to the Avenida de Mayo.

“It’s no use, Mateo, we’re going around in circles.”

“But you lived here, Lorenza, for years. How can you get lost?”

“So what? I still get lost in Bogotá. Wait! Do you smell that? That corner smells like Buenos Aires again.”

They ended up in a dirty and crowded street full of theaters and nightclubs, which they found out was Lavalle. Apprehensively, they made their way past the pale neon lights which failed to make the air warm, sidestepping hands that offered passes for the strip shows.

“Let’s get out of here, Lorenza. This place is like a frontier. Or look, let’s go into this theater, it looks like a horror film.”

The movie was terrible, but Mateo didn’t care. When his mother suggested that they leave, he said he wanted to see the ending. She thought her son would do anything, even sit through some vile movie, as long as it stalled the return to their hotel room where at some point he had to make that call which he had no idea how to make.