No Place for Heroes

13

“RAMÓN MUST THINK I’m weak,” Mateo said. “A weakling without any character. He must think that because he didn’t raise me, I turned out soft. I need to tell him how I smacked a kid named Joe Ferla in the face in Rome. And when I tell him, you confirm it, tell him he has to believe me because it’s the truth.”

When they lived in Rome, the rector’s secretary from the institute where Mateo studied had called Lorenza one day to tell her that her son had a scontro di una inammissibile aggressività with another student, and the rector needed to see his parents. It sounded unbelievable to Lorenza. Ever since he had been a child, her son had known how to defend himself, but he would never set out to purposefully harm anyone, or to go after anybody with his feet or kicking. The years of unmitigated rage would come later, with adolescence, but as a child he had been peaceful and compliant. The institute was the Esposizione Universale Roma, and during the long metro ride from the city center to see the rector, Lorenza thought about the only other incident in Mateo’s life where he had revealed a violent side. It had happened years before, at the school he had attended in Mexico City.

“Here it is,” the Mexican teacher had told her, indicating a display laid out on a table, all the drawings that Mateo had done during the semester. “There isn’t one without weapons, wars, aggression, and blood …”

The drawings made an impression on Lorenza, but mostly because of their vibrant colors and beauty, and she said so: “He’s a good artist, my Mateo …”

But the teacher wasn’t interested in aesthetic judgments, what alarmed her were the violent impulses that flowered in the pieces, indicating the urgent need for a psychological evaluation. She said that Mateo must have been affected by some very grim events, those were her words, which perhaps he had lived through in Colombia. Lorenza did not respond. She gathered the drawings, one by one, with the devotion of any mother handling the artwork of her child, as if it belonged in a museum.

That same night, she spread the drawings on the floor of the living room to look at them again with Mateo, who at that time must have been around seven.

“Your teacher says that they are violent,” she said. “What do you think?”

“Violent, what do you mean?”

“Well, she says that these figures here are attacking—”

“They’re not attacking, Lolé, they are defending themselves. That’s very different.”

It was a reasonable interpretation. There was definitely a war being played out in those drawings, a bloody one at that, this much at least she had to concede to the teacher. But it was also true that all the figures were indeed in defensive stances, which also worried Lorenza. She couldn’t sleep that night thinking about what it was that her son had to defend himself against with such zeal. The following morning she asked him about it at breakfast.

“Why so many defenses and armaments, Mateo? I mean, in your drawings … all those shields and helmets.”

“You never know what will happen. It’s always good to be prepared.” His reply was rather vague, so she decided to broach the subject from another angle.

“And do you think that your characters know how to defend themselves? I mean, will their protections work?”

“Don’t worry, Lolé, they are im-pen-e-tra-ble,” Mateo said, careful not to skip any of the syllables of that difficult word, and he took off toward the bus that he rode to school every morning.

The director of the Rome institute told Lorenza that he had hit a classmate named Joe Ferla. She knew who he was, more than once Mateo had returned from school discombobulated because Ferla had put a cigarette inside his desk and almost burned all his notebooks, or had stabbed him with a pencil.

“What about my son?” she asked the rector. “What happened to him in the fight?”

“Not much, signora. He took a few blows and has some bruised ribs.”

“My Mateo is a good boy, signor direttore, and I understand that this Joe Ferla is a malandrino.” The word malandrino was perhaps excessive for the occasion, but it was the closest to bully that Lorenza could come up with from her limited Italian vocabulary.

“Malandrino, no,” the rector corrected her affably. “To be precise, let’s just say that Ferla is a boy with certain behavioral issues. And as such, he is on probation for repeated acts of aggression against other students. For Mateo, on the other hand, this is the first time he has ever been involved in this type of mischief.”

“There you are. So it doesn’t surprise me that a good boy like Mateo could end up losing his patience with Ferla’s … behavioral problems.”

“The fact that he hit Ferla is not what gives us serious concern here, but the brutality with which he did so. Please, if you may, read the medical report.”

Fractured clavicle, hematomas on the face, a cut two centimeters long over the left eyebrow. In other words, Mateo had given Ferla a first-class beating.

Lorenza tried to justify. “He has spurted up physically in the last few months. He went in a flash from being a child to being a grown-up. I don’t think he understands yet how strong he is.”

“That could be the case, signora, but that wasn’t even the worst part, perhaps our most serious concern is over the callous way he reacted when I tried to apprehend him.”

“I’m very sorry, signor direttore, but can you tell me what Mateo said?”

“When I told him that I would have to call his father to tell him what had happened, he replied in an insolent tone, ‘Se vuol lamentarsi con mio padre, dovrá andare a cercarlo in carcere.’”

“Mateo wasn’t trying to offend you, signor direttore, he was simply stating the truth. We don’t know where his father is, but we suspect he is in prison. Still, I apologize for anything my son might have said or done that was disrespectful.”

“Before you leave, signora,” the rector said, when she was almost out the door, “I want you to know that there was something good in all this. Mateo has just barely started to learn Italian, but he spoke that phrase with a proper accent and perfect syntax.”