No Place for Heroes

2

Ramón Iribarren, I am your son, Mateo Iribarren. I have come to Buenos Aires to meet you. If you get this message, you can call the Claridge Hotel, room 506. I am going to be here until the end of the month. Thank you very much. Sincerely, Mateo Iribarren.

On a sheet of notebook paper, in his uneven handwriting, this is what Mateo wrote and signed, years after the dark episode, after his mother had just gone over parts of the tale with him again.

Lorenza read the paragraph and asked herself how it was possible for her son, now an adolescent and taller than her, to have such awful handwriting, long-legged scribbles crowded together, climbing and falling from the line at will. The contrast between the childlike penmanship and the sober and dignified tone of the content made a knot in her heart. “Ramón Iribarren, I am your son, Mateo Iribarren,” Mateo read in a loud voice, and asked his mother, “Is it okay, Lorenza?”

She had to go out for a few hours and leave him alone in his trance. She had no choice but to fulfill the obligations that had purportedly brought her to Buenos Aires, although she had truly come for something else. She had come to keep a promise she had made to her son years ago, to be with him when the time came to look for his father. She knew that once she left the hotel room, Mateo would remain seated by the telephone, fiercely focused on what he had written in the notebook, going over it again and again, to memorize it, so that when the time came, the words would not fail him. Ramón Iribarren, I am your son, Mateo Iribarren. I have come to Buenos Aires to meet you.

“‘I have come to Buenos Aires to meet you’—you think I should say that, Lolé, ‘to meet you’?” he asked, when his mother was already at the door.

“Yes, I suppose you can say that.”

“But I already know him. He’s going to say that we already know each other. Maybe I should say ‘to get to know you again.’ No, I don’t like that, either, it sounds weird. And the ‘sincerely,’ you think I should say ‘sincerely’?”

“You can take that out if you want, or change it to ‘a big hug’ or something like that?”

“‘A big hug’? Are you crazy, Mother? How can you suggest that? Don’t you realize how awful it sounds? If you want, I’ll take out ‘sincerely,’ but don’t ask me to send a big hug to a man who has had nothing to do with me. The only thing he has caused us is harm, and now you want me to send him a hug?”

“Forget it, Mateo, don’t send him a hug. I only suggested it because you asked.”

“Bad suggestion, Lorenza, possibly the worst suggestion ever. I think I’m going to leave it just how it is, ‘Sincerely, Mateo Iribarren,’ and stop fucking around with it, it stays the way it is.”

The boy chose only the words that seemed most precise and discarded the rest, not wanting to overdo it and yet not wanting to leave anything out. His message had to create a certain effect, produce results, and he weighed the possibility that there would be no answer to the telephone call he was about to make, like someone tossing a message in a bottle into the sea.

“What if Ramón doesn’t answer, Lolé?” he asked for the tenth time, his voice betraying his fear. “What if his answering machine malfunctions and he can’t understand the message? What if something like that happens and then when Ramón wants to call me, he can’t, because the message is garbled, or maybe he doesn’t even remember me. Lolé, do you think he even remembers me?” He imagined a thousand different scenarios of the doomed encounter, as if on this particular Buenos Aires morning he could undo so many years of absence with the sound of his voice alone, with a mere paragraph that he rehearsed again and again. Yet he was unable to pick up the phone and dial his father, whom he had seen for the last time when he was two and a half years old and his father had taken him away.

They had not heard from Ramón since, not a single phone call, or a letter, or only a few letters at first and then nothing, only the vague and contradictory reports that reached them by luck and through third parties. That Ramón had been imprisoned, that he was bald and had lost a tooth, that he lived with a Bolivian girlfriend and was busy helping Bolivian miners organize, that he was now a labor director in one of the poor sections of Buenos Aires. But they never knew his whereabouts, because he did not try to find them and they did not try to find him. Or to put it exactly, Lorenza did not look for Ramón and he did not look for her and their child. They could not include Mateo in this tangle because he had never been given the opportunity to voice his opinion on the matter, not until the moment of this enraged demand, the sorrowful insistence that had forced Lorenza to fly to Buenos Aires to be with him.

After the dark episode, years had followed filled with suitcases, roads, and airplanes, but the two of them had never run into Ramón. Never even came close. On the contrary, she had imposed upon herself, as a matter of destiny, the urgent task of pushing the son far away from his father’s influence. She warned him that if his father had taken him once, he could easily try it again. But she never spoke ill of him as a person to her son or suggested that he was a bad person. That she would never do.

“Tell me about this man, Lolé,” Mateo asked over and over. “Come on, Lorenza, tell me about him.”

She told him that he was a moody man, but convinced of his ideals, a vibrant and intelligent man. She assured him that he was courageous and good-looking, and that they had been happy in the years that they lived together. But every time that Mateo asked how he could find him, she made up excuses and found ways to stall him.

“You have to be a little older, Mateo,” she said to him. “It’s not so easy.”

“What’s not so easy?”

“Your father, your father is not easy. You have to be a little older and grow strong. And then we’ll go looking for him.”

Mateo relented willingly, so careful not to hurt her, and determined to accept whatever man was living with them at the moment as his father, and that man’s children as his siblings. This is the one, Lolé, he’d say, with this one we can create a family and be happy, and yes, she’d agree, this one will stay forever.

But there was always another one, a new one. And the routine of everlasting love would begin again, the rented house in some neighborhood in another city, and the illusion of domesticity crafted by taking the bus to school and regular visits to the dentist, the assurance of ordering a favorite dish at the neighborhood restaurant every Sunday, the peace of mind that came from knowing friends’ phone numbers by heart, friends who would always be friends. Mateo and Lorenza put up pictures of horses on the walls of his room, planted flowers in pots, adopted a cat, and got hold of a secondhand bicycle, which they painted to look like new, because this was it, here they would settle forever.

“Forever, Lolé?”

“Yes, my love, forever.”

And then one day signs would begin to crop up, the long-distance phone calls for Lorenza, the whispered responses, Lorenza in some other world when he tried to show her his drawings or tell her a story. Soon Mateo would realize that it was time to give the cat to the neighbors, abandon the bicycle on the patio, pack the suitcases, and wake up in the house of strangers.

Mateo would take out his colored pencils and concentrate on his drawings during the long airplane flights, desperate to know: Why, Mother? Why did we have to leave if we were fine where we were?

“Switching bicycles was the easy part, Lolé,” he would confess to her later. “It was switching cats and fathers that was difficult.”

She would have liked to explain why things had to be the way they were, why they led such a life, which perhaps was later to blame for his infantile, jumbled handwriting. Why such a parade of absences and shocks, of moves from schools and houses and countries, so many fearful nights, partings from friends, having no father or too many fathers, so many whys, which in time cast a pall of confusion over his childhood and prolonged it unnaturally. She wished she could have given him detailed reasons that could be condensed into a paragraph.

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t tell me,” he confessed to her sometimes, because his mother’s political tales sounded alien and her love stories just plain bad.

“You have always dragged me through your issues, Lorenza, and I have never known what those issues are.”

And then one day he was taller than she was, and he stood before her, committed and defiant, having grown so big and his mother so tiny beside him, and he gave her an ultimatum.

“This is it, Lorenza, I want to meet my father. If you don’t take me, I’ll go by myself.” He rummaged through the things he had stuffed on an upper shelf of his closet and pulled out a Basque beret, which he had been saving for a long time to give to Ramón on the day that he saw him again.

“My father and I are Basque,” he always said proudly to whoever might listen. “Well, we’re Argentinean, but with Basque roots.”

Realizing how Mateo had struggled through his adolescence and with the ongoing tug-of-war he had with his identity, Lorenza had begun to understand the implications of raising a child whose father was no more than a phantom, someone who vanishes after inflicting his harm. She would help him look for Ramón, but first Mateo needed to understand the language of the old story, be brought up-to-date on each episode, to help him create a whole out of the fragments he already knew. They would have to give it some serious thought, talk to each other a lot, and work together as a team so as not to be led astray. They would also have to rely on their own strength alone, for no one else could help them in this search.

So the decision had been made and they were now in Buenos Aires. But how was Lorenza to begin to look for Ramón Iribarren, if when they lived together, they had mastered the art of hiding so as never to be found? How could she search for someone whose daily life with her had been taken up with changing their names, counterfeiting personal identifications, remaining invisible in the places where they lived, and creating jobs that they did not have?

“Tell me, Lorenza, tell me how you found out that my father’s real name was Ramón,” Mateo asked, although he already knew, because that was a part of the story that she had told him many times, just like the old tales about the cat with raggedy paws, except that this cat had raggedy paws and its head was screwed on backward.

“Do you want to hear it again?”

“Go on, tell it to me again, the story about Ramón’s name. Again.”

“It was a whole month after living with him that I discovered that your father was named Ramón, and only because an electric bill arrived with his name on it. When I realized what I had stumbled upon, it felt as if the envelope would burn my fingers. It would have been better if I had never read what it said, but there was nothing I could do. The bill fell into my hands and before I could stop it, that ‘Ramón’ slipped into my vision, which turned out to be his name, and also the last name, which would one day be yours, that ‘Iribarren,’ which revealed his Basque roots.”

“It’s all very strange.”

“For security reasons. I couldn’t know his name for security reasons. That’s the way it was in the underground.”

“The underground, I don’t like that word. That’s one of those terms you use. But answer this in your own words. Before you saw the electric bill, what did you think Ramón’s name was?”

“I had no idea. I called him Forcás, which was what other party members called him.” Lorenza had grown so used to that fake name, that the surprise of coming upon the envelope was almost painful, at first seeming to refer to someone she did not even know, some man with another identity, a Ramón who dwelled in worlds from which she was excluded because they were grounded in his childhood, his family, his past, that is, in everything that was truly him, the history of his private life, a whole swath of it in which she had no part and which she should not pry into. How then should they begin to look for Forcás, so many years later, when she didn’t even know the real names of his comrades in the party? Who could she possibly ask about Ramón Iribarren, a name that his old friends in the party likely had never heard, since they all knew each other by their pseudonyms, what in those days they called noms de guerre.

“It’s a great name, Forcás,” Mateo said. “It sounds like a warrior. I like it better than Ramón. In fact, I don’t like Ramón at all. It’s the name of some stranger. What about you, Lolé, your nom de guerre? I know, of course: Aurelia. They called you Aurelia. It still sounds so bizarre, all of it.”

“A cat with raggedy paws and its head on backward,” his mother tells him. “But let’s see, kiddo, let’s see what we can do to turn it back around.”

Everything seemed to indicate that searching for Ramón would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but in the end it proved quite simple. After years without knowing a thing about him, it took them only a few days to discover his whereabouts.