No Place for Heroes

18

AURELIA HAD BEEN in Buenos Aires twelve days, sharing an apartment on Deán Funes with Sandrita, the bundle of dollars still in her suitcase, the microfilm in the toothpaste tube, and the passports under the mattress. Sandrita was growing restless; she said that all it took was one raid and they were dead.

“Forcás was nowhere to be seen. I was starting to doubt his existence, like in that play by Ionesco where the characters yearn for the arrival of the Maestro and the Maestro doesn’t show.” When the Maestro finally arrives, the others realize that he has no head. Maybe Forcás had no head.

“That would explain a lot,” Mateo said. “Forcás has no head.”

Through an agent, he told Sandrita to tell Aurelia that soon, very soon. But another week passed and nothing. And then one Saturday, Sandrita came home with two boxes of ravioli, and when Aurelia asked her why two when one was enough for both of them, she said that they weren’t for eating, but to hide what she was turning over to Forcás the following day. That is, at noon on Sunday, Aurelia finally had an appointment with him. And they had to set things up. They emptied the boxes and repacked them, first a layer of ravioli and on top a pair of passports, another layer of ravioli, another two passports, a double layer of ravioli, and the top. And a string to make it look good. Sandrita told her to relax, no one would notice a thing.

“But I also have to give him the dollars,” Aurelia confessed.

“Why didn’t you tell me, we’ll have to put them in the box.”

“There are too many bills.”

“How many?”

“A lot.”

The meeting was at the confectioner Las Violetas, on the corner of Rivadavia and Medrano. So that Lorenza had to go to a spot on the map called Rivadavia and Medrano, and Lorenza who had no idea how to get anywhere. Sandrita took her that afternoon, on Saturday, as if they were scouting out the territory, so that Aurelia could find it the next day without problems.

“And what about Forcás? How do I recognize him?” she asked.

“Right before noon, you go into Las Violetas and sit at a table. But not with your back to the door. Never sit with your back to the door, always with your eyes on the door, in case the cana show up. You don’t want them to grab you unexpectedly. You sit at a table in a spot where he can see you. You put the boxes of ravioli on the table, and you wait for him to come to you.”

“And how will he know who I am?”

“Don’t worry about him. He’ll know what you look like, and if he is not sure, the boxes will tip him off; he knows that you’re bringing him ravioli.”

Second rule for those types of meetings, the margin of error is ten minutes. If at twelve ten one of you is not there, the other one will suppose that you have been taken and will go, to prevent from being grabbed as well. Third rule, after a meeting, never go straight home or to another meeting before taking a subway or walking a few blocks heading in an opposite direction, to make sure that you’re not being followed. Fourth rule, always carry identification. Always. Never go anywhere without an ID, not even to buy some bread next door.

“All right, I got it. Now tell me, what’s he like?” Aurelia asked.

“What’s who like?”

“Forcás. What’s he like?”

“He’s good-looking, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“All Argentinean men are good-looking.”

“But this one is twentysomething, eyes and hair the color of honey, wide shoulders. Good-looking guy, I’m telling you.”

“Any specific details? Defects?”

“No one’s perfect. He’s not very tall and he’s bowlegged, as if he just jumped off a horse.”

Las Violetas, a confectionery from the turn of the century, seemed to Aurelia a little too romantic a spot for a political rendezvous. It was truly an art-nouveau jewel, as delicate and ornate as a box of fine chocolates. She felt nervous, and attributed it to what she had to do the following day, or to the lit stained-glass windows of Las Violetas, or to the realization that night was falling at that moment over Buenos Aires. Or maybe because of Forcás, whom she was finally going to meet after so much waiting.

After they had tea in Las Violetas, Aurelia and Sandrita walked a few blocks and went into a café where they had some more tea, during a short informatory meeting with a comrade from the regional directive. He told them about the rumors spreading of the fiasco that had befallen the head of the military junta, General Jorge Rafael Videla, during a trip to Italy. The gossip around Buenos Aires was that the pope had thrown the forced disappearances of hundreds of persons in Videla’s face, and that the Italian press had greeted him by divulging the existence of chupaderos.

On their way back home, meandering to fulfill the rigorous regulations for vigilance, Sandrita and Aurelia took deep breaths of the night air. It was an unforgettable evening when the silence that had always sheltered the dictatorship began to melt, drop by drop, like the snows on top of Monte Tronador.

At a certain point they separated, and Aurelia took a cab to Belgrano R, one of the wealthier neighborhoods in the city. She rang the bell of a Colombian couple who were friends of her mother, to whom her mother had mailed from Bogotá some papers that Lorenza had to sign and return as soon as possible by certified mail. They were inheritance documents relating to the finca that her father had left her in the countryside outside Bogotá.

“A finca called San Jacinto that you never got to see,” Lorenza told her son. “It was a lovely place, a little valley covered in mist in between two blue mountain ranges.”

Along with the documents, Mamaíta had sent money and a letter in her clear and beautiful handwriting, words made uncertain by grief. She had also sent a pair of high-heeled Bally shoes, made of grape-colored suede, which so many years later Lorenza still remembered as if she were holding them in her hands. Ever loving Mamaíta, to think about presents at such a time. And Bally shoes at that, how crazy, who would think of such an extravagance? Of course, in the Argentinean party the women had to dress up, not like in Bogotá or in Madrid, where they all went with the complete identikit: faded jeans, military vest, native backpack, and lace-up boots with thick rubber soles, like those of a construction worker, what her father had called her little communist boots. In Argentina, one had to adopt almost the opposite type of disguise: comb your hair neatly, wear perfume, put on stockings and other feminine accessories. They even wore nail polish, which Lorenza applied with great care. But no Ballys. The Ballys didn’t fit the profile, they were too much.

“That’s funny, so now you were a landlord with this property in San Jacinto,” Mateo teased her.

“I would have done anything for the comrades not to look at me as some well-off girl playing at revolution. But that’s probably how they did see me.”

“And the Colombians?”

“What Colombians?”

“The husband and wife who gave you the shoes you didn’t like.”

“I did like them, they were divine, but I wasn’t going to risk wearing them.”

The Colombian couple wanted Lorenza to have dinner with them, a simple meal, they warned her, just family, and they served a cheese and mushroom omelet. Of course, they knew nothing of her activities in Buenos Aires. They thought she was in school because that’s what Mamaíta had told them. During dinner, as they chatted about nothing in particular, dogs and horses, the wife mentioned in passing that Videla was a great horseman, an outstanding example, and that she admired him because of his role in restoring Argentinean values. A piece of omelet got stuck in Lorenza’s throat, but she remained quiet, and bit by bit the conversation returned to the safe territory of animals and Colombian soap operas, and the icy rain that fell over the Bogotá savannah. The husband seemed to be somewhere else, dozing off, but suddenly he would jolt up and interrupt his wife.

“We Argentineans are right and human.” He kept repeating this because the saying was so catchy, he said. It was the first time that Lorenza had heard that slogan, coined by the reactionaries as a response to the denunciations against human rights violations in Argentina that had begun to spread all over the world. “What ingenious nonsense — right and human!” the husband went on. “You have to admit that whoever came up with it had a stroke of genius. With a little phrase they shut up all the government detractors. Damn, what valuable nonsense!”

“Those Argentinean generals are top-notch,” the wife assured, “very white and well-heeled. Not like ours, those chubby little darkies. But they are selfless, our poor military men, how well I know about their selflessness and capacity for sacrifice. And these Argentinean generals, what model men, with such refined educations, fluent in French and English, with perfect accents, just between us, they’re divine, from the best families. I never imagined that a military man could speak perfect French. How could I have? In Colombia they can’t even speak Spanish well.” Lorenza listened to all this feeling as if the blood was going to burst from her veins. Please, Papaíto, she prayed, don’t let a word escape my lips, don’t let me utter some insult now that I’ll pay for dearly later, and she swallowed those toads, responding only with, “You don’t say.”

So Videla speaks perfect French? You don’t say. And he is a good horseman, so right and so human? You don’t say. You don’t say, that phrase so common in Bogotá, used by the speaker when it is he who doesn’t want to say something. But before long, Aurelia couldn’t take it anymore. She made up something about having to attend a conference at the university, and grabbed her letter, shoes, money, and inheritance documents, expressed her gratitude, and got up from the table. But the hosts, ever courteous and warm, asked her to stay for dessert, homemade île flottante, following the recipe in L’Art Culinaire step by step, she shouldn’t miss out on that. They relented when she insisted that she had to go right away, and told her that there would be a car waiting for her.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, but no. I’ll take a taxi. You’re very sweet, but you don’t have to do that, I’ll take a taxi.”

“What do you mean, you’re taking a taxi this late? Let the driver take you, that’s what he’s here for. His name is Humberto and he is quite a character. And tell us, what is this conference about? Very intriguing. Where do you say it is, at what school?”

“The one in Buenos Aires.”

“A conference this late on a Saturday night? It’s ten o’clock, what kind of conference starts this late?”

“Well, it’s technically a debate,” she stammered, her shortened breath making her flush. “But you’re right. What a disaster. It’s already too late. I’ve missed it.”

“Then what’s the hurry? Eat your île flottante in peace and then have some coffee, which is Colombian, of course, one hundred percent Colombian. Because these people may have their beef, but coffee, coffee is our specialty. And if you want, you’ll join us for a little cognac afterward. I promise, Humberto will drive you to your house afterward; and wait until you go inside, so we can all sleep soundly, so your mother can’t say that we have not taken care of her little girl.”

Lorenza finally made it out of that house in the Mercedes owned by the husband and wife, Humberto driving. She had to mislead him so that he wouldn’t find out where she lived on Deán Funes. Let’s head toward Recoleta, Humberto. It was the first thing that came into her head, but she regretted it immediately. Shit, why had she said that? Recoleta is like the cemetery. Or I should say, Recoleta was the name of the most traditional cemetery in Buenos Aires, but also of the neighborhood that surrounded it. Humberto put her at ease when he said, So the señorita lives in Recoleta. Congratulations, it’s a very beautiful place. Very beautiful, yes, thank you, Humberto.

They had been on the way for a while, who knew where, when Lorenza asked, playing the foreigner, Are we in Recoleta yet, Humberto? And since the chauffeur said yes, she replied straightaway, Here, here, Humberto, drop me off on this block, I live nearby, so don’t worry about me, Humberto. I can walk from here. It’s a beautiful night, maybe a brisk walk will refresh me. Right? The best thing after the meal to settle you down.

But Humberto wasn’t buying it. She did not have to worry. He had received an order from his patrones, and he was the type who would fulfill his duty. There was nothing to do but summon Papaíto’s help, because even if it meant paying for it with his life, Humberto was going to drop her off at her door and wait until she went inside. How was she going to get into any of the houses, since none of them were hers?

It wasn’t even her neighborhood. She had never set foot in it. How would she open the door, what key would she use. She was in a bind, when, oh miracle, a couple coming out of a building. This is it, she told herself, help Papaíto, heroes and buffoons. It’s over there, Humberto, that building in the corner. Thanks, Humberto, here, that’s fine, stop. Thanks, Humberto. Stop! Kisses to everyone, ciao, Humberto, ciao. She jumped out of the car trying to reach the door of the building before it closed behind the couple, and she made it. She was inside. She tried to catch her breath. Thanks, Papaíto, I owe you, half a second more and I wouldn’t have made it.

When the driver saw that she was inside, he was content and drove off. Great, we’re free of Saint Humberto. We’re safe, Papaíto, you were stupendous. But maybe not so stupendous, the couple who had just left was locking the door from the outside. What a nightmare. They had locked her in.

Coño, it was really dark, she couldn’t see a thing. Where was the light? Here, here, the light switch. And now where is the button, the one you pressed from inside to open the door. Pawing the walls, she found the damn button and pressed it, but she realized that there were two locks and it had opened only one of them. The second one remained locked at night for security purposes. There was nothing to do, she was locked in.

In other words, a prisoner of this run-of-the-mill building at about one in the morning, hoping that the couple who had left would return, reasoning that if they had keys it was because they lived there, and if they lived there, they would have to return at some point. The light would shut off after a minute and a half and she would turn it back on, not because there was anything to look at but because of how depressing it was to wait in the dark, like Audrey Hepburn, she thought, blind and with her short hairstyle, hiding in the dark from the murderer.

She sat on one of the marble steps and her kidneys must have grown cold because she suddenly needed to pee, adding to her torment, since she had told Sandrita that she would be back by eleven at the latest, and it was almost two. Sandrita probably thought that they were torturing her this very minute. She imagined Sandrita getting the word out — the foreigner has been nabbed, everyone for themselves — or leaping from the balcony in fear of what was to come. Aurelia had to return to the apartment on Deán Funes immediately, but she didn’t dare knock at any of the apartments of her prison building so that they would open the front door. It was unthinkable to do such a thing at that hour. So there she was, with her box of grape-colored Ballys, her inheritance documents, and the letter from Mamaíta, with its beautiful and distraught words.

“Did you get out?” Mateo asked.

“If I hadn’t, you never would’ve been born. Don’t you see that I was going to meet your father the following day? I finally got out around two in the morning when a young man went out and I snuck through right behind him.” That night, at the apartment on Deán Funes, Aurelia couldn’t sleep, mulling over everything in her head. The dinner with that pair of toadies of the military junta had left a sharp thorn lodged within, so white and cultured, the sons of bitches generals, such wonderful horsemen, such steeds. Argentinean values? Right and human? Motherfuckers, they were a bunch of butchers is what they were. And it doesn’t matter how she looked at it, tossing around on the bed, she couldn’t sleep, out of shame for not having said anything. She should have pulled off that tablecloth, embroidered in neat cross-stitching, splattering the omelet and île flottante against the wall. Instead she didn’t say a peep, eating her food bite by bite, at that table, listening to all their perversions and playing the chickenshit, and now how it came back at her, nausea and upset stomach, as if she had swallowed poison.

On top of that there was Sandrita, who as expected had been waiting for her with her hackles up and had torn her to pieces with quite the lecture for arriving at such an hour, that she had frightened the shit out of her and she had been about to flee the house and sound the alarm, that she was a flake, a lightweight, a shitty petit bourgeois. She went on and on, with good reason, and with that obscene fervor that is characteristic of Argentineans when they begin cussing and losing their shit.

“Did Ramón curse?”

“Yes, a lot. He was a real machine gun with four-letter words.”

Aurelia had calmed down somewhat when Sandrita knocked on her bedroom door. She had forgotten to tell her that the meeting with Forcás had been postponed until the following Monday, at six in the afternoon. The leader, Aurelia thought. She muttered that Forcás was definitely headless, and Sandrita took it to mean something else, saying, you have to understand he has a thousand other things to worry about, he’s not here just to attend to you, it’s not that he doesn’t have a head on his shoulders.

“Let’s go to sleep,” Aurelia implored. “It’s almost three in the morning.”

“You’re going to tell me what time it is?”

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

All this and Sandrita didn’t even know yet that Aurelia had left the shawl she had borrowed at the Colombians’ place … Aurelia realized she didn’t have it way too late, not until she went to bed just before the damn reprimand. Shit, she thought suddenly, the shawl, I left the shawl at that house. Her pulse quickened and the blood beat against her temples. Did I leave it there with Mamaíta’s friends, or had it fallen off while I was imprisoned in the building? If it was in the building, it was gone, but if it was with Mr. and Mrs. Right and Human, they might send Humberto to return it to my supposed apartment in Recoleta, and then they would discover the pile of bullshit that I’d been feeding them, and they would call Bogotá to pass on the rumors, you’ll never guess who has become a subversive.

They were such toadies that they would probably whisper her name to the Argentinean authorities. Such things were not unheard of, such was the state of panic, even with those in the right, meaning they would do anything to kiss the military’s ass. Lorenza would never go there again. She had to tell Mamaíta not to send anything else there. And what if she had left the shawl in the Mercedes, and Humberto found it?

“She was a little anal, that Sandrita, look at the state she had you in,” Mateo suggested.

“Not anal, disciplined. And she was right, if I remained so flighty, I was going to get us both killed. You had to learn how to move, Mateo, and it wasn’t easy. You spent your time trying not to get caught in the web of deceit that you had to weave around you.”

Finally alone and shuttered in her room, she decided to get Aurelia out of her head for a while, that beast Aurelia, that is, her fiery nom de guerre, that brave warrior who did nothing but screw up and ignore all the warnings. So she decided to think about the land that Papaíto had left her, beautiful San Jacinto, and she closed her eyes to summon giant purple flowers that appeared on the artichokes if they were not harvested on time, of the manna grass that sprouted on the hills and had to be cared for like an open eye so that it doesn’t dry, the adobe bread oven that Papaíto had built behind the kitchen. She thought for a long time about that oven and the breads that came out of it, which generally ended up, according to Papaíto, soused. And who knows what he meant by that word, because he used it when the breads came out not fully cooked, but also when they were overcooked, when they stuck to one another and when the dough collapsed. What do you think, Papaíto? And he always responded: A disaster, soused again — which must have meant any of these categories: uncooked, burned, stuck together, or deflated. The truth was, they had never mastered the secrets of the adobe oven.

“If you’re talking about good bread, we never quite got there, Mateo. But the faint aroma escaping from that oven on cold mornings was always gratifying. Come to think of it, I suspect that it wasn’t really the bread that interested Papaíto but that aroma. And the slow, milky air that flooded the fields of San Jacinto at night. Did it come down from the hills, or was it more likely the hot breath of the cattle mingling with the freezing air?” Alone in her bedroom of the apartment on Deán Funes, Lorenza continued to dwell on these memories: Papaíto lighting the coal stove, removing bits of iron and blowing on them with the bellows; Mamaíta, who stirred the hot chocolate, wearing a poncho over her nightgown; the old copper water tank, which began to rattle as soon as the water got hot; her sister Guadalupe and herself still under the blankets, testing the harshness of the cold that awaited them outside with the tips of their noses; the times when they would lay down a foundation of bricks to add another bedroom to the house, or crawl about on all fours weeding the garden.

“And they were also the years of the literary boom. In San Jacinto, we devoured novels by Carpentier, Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes. Cortázar’s short stories and Gabo’s Autumn of the Patriarch. We had barely finished reading one when they would be already coming out with another, a new prodigy.”

Lorenza also thought about, or should have thought about, the ass they kept, woolly and purplish like the hairy leaves of the espeletia and the flowers of the sietecueros that flourished up above, in the icy air of the páramo. Papaíto had christened the ass the Philanthropist because he was affectionate and spoiled and followed them around everywhere, even sneaking into the house if they left the doors open. He was fascinated with animals, Papaíto was. Lorenza had never met such an animal lover. And it had been that way since he was a child; all you had to do was look at the pictures from that time to prove it. When he wasn’t hugging a goose, he was riding a dog or a horse, not a regular riding horse but a scrawny one, picked at by cattle tyrants, from the breeds used to frighten foxes.

That night on Deán Funes, Lorenza couldn’t stop thinking about those days, especially about the purebred Aberdeen Angus cattle that her father had imported from the United States and put out to graze in the fields of San Jacinto, in hopes of going into the beef business. They were tiny and squarish, looking more like bovine ponies, with dreamy eyelashes and resplendent black hair. Needless to say, in no time at all, they were no different than the Philanthropist, eating sugar cubes from human hands. Papaíto, who knew each of them by name and spent hours brushing their hair, was of course incapable of sending them off to the slaughterhouse when the time came, so the only thing that perished was his beef business, and the Aberdeen all lived to an old age after a long life as unproductive as it was peaceful.

She thought and thought, about these and other things, until she fell asleep when it was almost dawn, perhaps dreaming about Papaíto, because during that early time in Buenos Aires she dreamed about him a lot, maybe because his death was so recent, or because she refused to accept it. In one of those dreams he was working on a jigsaw puzzle, something that in real life they often did together at night in San Jacinto by the fire. But the jigsaw puzzle of the dream, whose subject was a blue lake, was so big that it fell off the table.

“It was difficult to piece together, Mateo, rather impossible since the whole of the picture was blue, only blue, different hues of blue, the water blue and the sky also blue, so that in my dream, Papaíto was very still, perhaps flabbergasted, looking first at the nascent puzzle and then at the pieces piled on the side, without even trying to put a piece in place because they were all the same, all of them blue, any of them could have fit anywhere in that realm that was blue from beginning to end.”

So she was now the inheritor of San Jacinto? That’s what it looked like. The papers that certified this were on her night table. And yet she awoke thinking that if Papaíto wasn’t there with his soused breads, his overindulged ass and cattle, then she wasn’t quite sure what it was that she had inherited. A bit of fog, nothing more, another lost piece of blue in the middle of the jigsaw puzzle.