No Place for Heroes

21

IT’S A LOVE LETTER, Dr. Haddad had said after reading the pages that Ramón left her at the beginning of the dark episode. A love letter? Lorenza was enraged. How the fuck is that a love letter? He took away my son, that’s not a love letter. She would not even bother to discuss the matter with this Dr. Heart. They commit the vilest imaginable act against you, the most treacherous, and that’s a love letter? It announces that you will never see your son again, your two-year-old baby, that creature from your entrails, and that’s a love letter? He steals a child using false papers, forging your own signature, even having tricked you into packing his suitcase, and that’s a love letter? All the psychiatrists in the world were famous for dishing mountains of shit and this Dr. Heart was the worst of all. Lorenza turned to scram out of there, leaving Mamaíta to say goodbye and thank the man for his time.

“Did you read it, Lorenza?” She came to a complete standstill. For a moment she couldn’t move from the door, as if she were making up her mind whether to leave or come back in, and apparently she opted for the second option because she turned around, found a chair in front of the doctor, and sat down. She thought he looked like a cricket, and the cricket was challenging her with his gaze.

“No. Not the whole thing,” she replied. “The first paragraph, that’s all. I am not going to read the rest of it.”

“That’s fine,” Haddad said, and there was an imperceptible triumphant shift of tone in his voice, as if the fish had bitten and all he had to do was hook it. “It’s better that way. Don’t read it. But I have read it, in between the lines.”

“In the actual lines it says that I will never see my child again. What does it say in between the lines?”

“This man doesn’t want to take your son from you, Lorenza. This man just wants you back.”

She did not have to ask him to repeat himself to realize that he had just inspired her to have a revelation. Finally something concrete, something to hold on to! A trail, a light, a possibility. The haze of anguish that had dulled her thoughts day and night lifted in one swoop. After speaking with so many people who had offered nothing, someone had said something worth listening to. Lorenza took a deep breath. She was being offered a path that would lead her to her son. She straightened up in the chair, like a marionette whose strings are pulled, and examined the doctor at length. He was a small man with big hands. Bald. Thin. Prominent nose. Definitely Arab, even in his Western clothes. Although it was a Sunday, he was not dressed informally. On the contrary, his suit, his tie, and white shirt were strictly formal, one could say impeccable. But there was something in his demeanor that was plain, dry, and angular, and it was that, plus the big dark eyes and the bald head, that reminded her of a cricket. Lorenza’s voice was very different when she asked Haddad to please repeat and elaborate on what he had said.

“The man who wrote this letter is in love, and he does not want to take your child from you, he wants to win you back. So be ready, Lorenza, because he will call. Do everything you have to, so that when that call comes, you are ready. You know best what you have to do. But he will call you, you can count on that. When? I don’t know. In a week, two weeks, a month. When he feels that he is in a safe place, at that moment, he will call you.”

Lorenza, who knew that Dr. Haddad had years of experience dealing with kidnapping cases, had meticulously studied his appearance and now looked all around, scrutinizing his office.

“I studied it with such intensity,” she told Mateo, “that although I never returned there, to this day I remember every detail.”

Boxy furniture upholstered in gray, wood floors, white walls, and on the walls three posters from art exhibitions. On one of them was a bronze sculpture by Archipenko, Woman Combing Her Hair, according to the description beneath. On another one, an abstract figure in blue, gray, and black by Malevich. On the third, a series of lines in plum and brown by Rothko.

“Don’t tell me that at that critical moment you started looking at posters,” Mateo objected.

“I wanted some sign. I was looking for clues, something that would allow me to take that decisive step: to trust him. To be able to act I needed to believe in that man, it was a matter of life and death, to trust him, and I was searching for some confirmation. For instance, a copy of a Renoir would have been an unfavorable clue.”

There was something syrupy about reproductions of Renoir. The art displayed in the office, however, was in keeping with the message that the doctor wanted to get across, intentionally or not: clarity, conceptual rigor, simple forms, and mechanical precision. Everything was good then, but it was also impersonal. Something else was necessary for Lorenza to lower her guard resolutely, something that would allow her to make contact, that would engage her emotions, and she saw it on the doctor’s desk: a framed photograph. It was not of his wife or their kids, that would have been equivalent to a Renoir, or of Freud or Jung, that would have just been clearly offensive. It wasn’t a postcard, either, or a piece of art. It was a plain black-and-white photograph of an olive tree in the middle of a rocky field. Presumably the doctor himself had taken it, in his land of origin. It was just what Lorenza needed.

“Why? What did that have to do with anything?” Mateo asked.

“It had nothing to do with anything. Don’t ask me why, but I interpreted it as a green light. I could trust that man, I was going to trust that man. I was going to prepare for that call he had talked about. When Ramón’s call came, because it would come, I would be ready to take it.”

“Wait a second, Lolé, wouldn’t it have been better to read the letter yourself?” Mateo asked.

“No. Listen to what you’re saying. Reading Ramón’s letter would have just caused anger, or contempt, or guilt, and in the best imaginable scenario, compassion or sorrow, and it was essential that I feel nothing. Nothing at all. This doctor was a third party, an outsider to the case, who had read it coldly and had given, let’s say, a diagnosis. Or maybe he had smacked me in the head. Or a sort of prophecy? He had told me, he will call you, and all of a sudden, everything made sense, the pieces of the puzzle interlocked in an unexpected but logical procession, and I found it important to believe his every word.

“From that moment on, that phrase, he will call you, would become my certainty and my compass. I was too emotional to make judgments on my own without becoming delirious, too involved in the drama to be even moderately objective. So I would let the cricket set the guidelines, and from those directions I would devise a plan of action for the only thing I cared about, to get you back.”

“Like a robot,” Mateo said.

“Yes, like a robot,” Lorenza replied. “But you don’t even know what kind of robot. Thanks to Dr. Haddad I emerged from my paralysis and became Tranzor Z.”