No Place for Heroes

35

ONE DAY AT noontime, Lorenza had agreed to meet Forcás at a place called Banchero, on the way to Primera Junta. They had set aside barely an hour to be together and he had invited her to that pizzeria, where she had never been, because they made a top-notch fugazza that she had to try. But she was late, she had gotten the streets wrong and in haste had walked past the place and had to turn back, convinced that she would not arrive on time. Forcás would get up and go as it had to be. The ten-minute waiting period had just about come and gone when she saw him, at an instant when and in a place where she had not expected to see him. But it was him, it was Forcás; there he was seated at a table, in a white shirt, at a restaurant that had not been the one they agreed upon. Aurelia looked up and saw the name of the spot; it said Banchero. Then it must be the place, Banchero, she thought, look no further. Just a little while before she had passed right in front of it and kept on going.

He looked very handsome in his white shirt, but he was in a bad mood, maybe due to her lateness, or because he had asked for two very cold Quime beers and by the time she got there they weren’t that cold anymore; and besides, Aurelia told him that she would rather have a Pepsi because she didn’t drink beer and to make things worse, she didn’t want the fugazza that he had wanted her to taste and instead ordered a small pizza à la calabresa, who knows why. So the truth was that their encounter had not been going as well as their previous ones. There was in fact a noted unpleasantness as their allotted hour slowly wound down, and so she did her best to try and fix things. But Forcás wasn’t saying much and he couldn’t take his eyes from a television screen in the corner, which the owners had put there so that the clientele could watch the World Cup, which that year was played in Argentina.

The local team consisted of players of the caliber of Kempes, Passarella, Fillol, and Ardiles, and the whole country was celebrating their goals with wild street parties. But the dictators were also celebrating ostentatiously, congratulating themselves, that was the fucking thing, coming out on their balconies to greet the crowds after each game, proud as peacocks, paternal and populist, as if the victories on the soccer field were something owed to their government. With the World Cup, the military junta was scoring its greatest goal: thanks to fútbol, it washed its face in an Olympic gesture and showed itself to the world recently shaved, spotless, free of dirt and straw, and cleansed of blood. If there were international doubts or causes for concern about what was happening in Argentina, now everyone could relax before the spectacle of a euphoric populace out in the streets celebrating the victories of the phenomenal team, side by side with the military. The generals had managed to get in their pockets a specific type of local, who boiled over with patriotic fervor, and some foreign correspondents, who praised the friendly climate and the feeling of good sportsmanship that reigned in the country. The collective enthusiasm even gave the impression that on that very day, at that very hour and moment, the dictatorship was reaching its zenith, its summit, its consecration, and its historic justification.

“These sons of bitches want to cover up the dead with goals,” Forcás cursed in a low voice, and sucked furiously on his Particulares. “They’ve made even fútbol into a bitter topic.” As part of its face-cleaning, the regime had decided to attack the deep-seated Argentinean tradition of throwing confetti on the field during games. With the argument that it was low class and damaged the image of the country, the regime had mounted a systematic campaign to intimidate the crowds and stop them from throwing the confetti. But every day Clemente, an irreverent and demented bird who was the central character in a comic strip, incited disobedience from the pages of Clarín, poking out from the frame of his little story to throw confetti on the reader. And it so happened that Forcás had not finished his fugazza nor Aurelia her calabresa when they saw on the television what looked like a torrential downpour of tens of millions of little pieces of white paper that began to fall over the field, slow and uncontrollable, inundating the stadium and bursting forth on the screen. Big win by Clemente, they had wanted to scream if they could have. The people had dared to throw confetti, to openly defy the regime, however innocently and spontaneously — more festive than anything, in truth, not a big deal. But during those days of panic and subjugation, maybe that had been a sign, a minute and somewhat imperceptible initial indication that upon reaching its highest point, the pendulum had begun to swing back. Or at least that’s what both of them must have intuited, because in that fantastic confetti cloud they enthusiastically embraced, as if wanting to celebrate something.

Soon after that, they stopped seeing each other. Just like that, at the entrance of a theater. In a sudden crossfire of words, they went from the clouds to the mud, from eternal love to nothing, rien de rien, c’est fini, see you later, game’s over. He admitted that he had another love, a relationship that was more than five years old, and she told him that she had left behind a boyfriend in Madrid. There was nothing they could do, no breaking the impasse, neither of them willing to break it off with the former party, so there were months, when they didn’t see each other, of absence and anxious agony. Of stabbing aches in the gut, in the heart, in the head, the immeasurable punishment of breaking up, that small death.