No Place for Heroes

37

AURELIA HAD BEEN in Coronda for only a brief while when Forcás announced that the leadership of the party wanted to meet with her. Aside from Forcás himself, Águeda and Ana would be there, two of the party’s historic directors. They were known to be powerful and mysterious, and spent most of the time outside of the country, from where they pulled strings, and their methods were known to be relentless.

“It was very rare that they would attend a meeting,” Lorenza told her son. “To meet Águeda and Ana was quite an opportunity. Ninety percent of the party membership had likely never seen them in person, only in photographs.”

“So it was like meeting Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp at the same time, huh?” Mateo asked.

“I couldn’t even begin to imagine what task I would be assigned or where they would want to send me. On the day of the meeting, Forcás accompanied me to the place, but didn’t divulge anything. Apparently he already knew how I was needed, but he didn’t want to tell me anything. I kept my eyes lowered, looking at the ground so as not to figure out the exact whereabouts of the meeting, although this precaution was superfluous, since there was no way I could figure it out.”

When she could look up again, she was inside a darkened house where someone had smoked a lot, the smell of cigarettes was the first thing she noticed. But it also smelled like garlic, so they must have been cooking. Forcás led her into the kitchen, which was unlike the other rooms, bathed in daylight coming in from a window that faced an inner courtyard, and the comrade who was cooking there said, “It’s gnocchi with ham broth, che, I hope you like it.”

Seated at a table, in front of an ashtray filled with butts, were the two women. The one who introduced herself as Águeda was older and wore her hair so short that her ears were completely visible, two gypsy-like monstrosities hanging from them. Ana, the quieter one, her lips painted red, had a face like an otter, but was good-looking nevertheless. Both rose to welcome her with a hug and immediately began to ask her questions about the political situation in Colombia and about the functioning of the solidarity with the Argentinean office in Madrid.

“And then I thought, That’s what they want,” Lorenza recounted to her son. “They want information on the international work, and it even occurred to me that they had wanted to meet with me to ask me to relocate, to return to Madrid. But no, it wasn’t that.”

“Listen, piba,” Águeda had told her, and Aurelia had listened, and on hearing what they wanted had gone cold. Her mouth grew dry and she couldn’t respond.

“I know what they wanted, you told me once,” Mateo said. “They wanted you to turn over San Jacinto to the party.”

“It’s called cotizar, to give up for the general welfare.”

“Yeah, cotizar, for you to give up San Jacinto for the general welfare.”

“They had found out that I inherited a finca in Colombia and they had come into the country to talk to me about how in the party we all lived with what we needed and gave up the rest for the general welfare, the good of the party. They said that this was the Bolshevik and proletarian thing to do, ‘the bolche and the prole,’ and that Homero had offered his mother’s apartment when she had passed away, and that La Gata had turned in the whole of her inheritance, and that Rafael, who was the owner of a factory, had given it to the party and now lived on a laborer’s salary.”

The bolche and prole, prole and bolche, and Aurelia before them mute. She hadn’t said yes, or no, not even maybe; she couldn’t say a thing. San Jacinto was the only thing she had left of her father. More than a finca, for her it was a collection of Sunday mornings, afternoons of hot chocolate and fritters, trips to the countryside, and whole nights by the fireplace. San Jacinto was a handful of animals with proper names and soft hair. How do you give up animals and memories for the national welfare?

“But most important, it was a finca, damn it,” Lorenza told the boy, “good land that was worth a few million pesos, in the end my only inheritance. And I couldn’t say a word. My ears were buzzing and their voices grew distant. I turned around to look at Forcás, as if begging him for help. Up to that moment, Forcás had remained silent, and when he opened his mouth it was to agree with them, the Bolshevik and the proletariat on one side and on the other the fucking petite bourgeoisie.”

She knew she didn’t want to, but she couldn’t avoid it, she had to say yes, of course she would give up the finca for the general welfare, but the words got caught in her throat. The worst thing in the world was to be a petit bourgeois, and she wanted with all her heart to be bolche and prole, but she heard those voices as if they were an echo, that So-and-so turned in his car, Such-and-such her marriage ring, and she was unable to hear anything but her own inner turmoil, as if she were chomping on raw carrots. Where could she find the words to explain to them that Papaíto baked bread in the oven, that San Jacinto was where his pampered cows grazed, that she had never received the dress he sent to Madrid? How could she tell them that her mother had sent her Bally shoes, that she had used the box to hide some dollars, and that Forcás had never given them back, although she reminded him of it every day? These were the only arguments that came to her head in defense of San Jacinto, and something told her that they weren’t going to sound very convincing to the ears of the two monuments carved from living rock who were sitting there, inheritors of the purest and hardest worker’s code, Águeda and Ana.

“So what did you say?” Mateo asked.

“That first I would have to go to Colombia to take over the inheritance, because it had not yet been transferred to me and I couldn’t do it from Argentina.”

“And what did they say?”

“To think about it, that it didn’t have to be right away. Then the comrade who had been cooking served the gnocchi with bread and red wine and sat down to eat with us, and they talked to me a long while about the difference between a dilettante and a professional militant. When they said goodbye, they told me that I had to decide whether I wanted to cross over, or that I had to burn some bridges, or something about bridges and crossings, one of those irrefutable metaphors.”

Up to then, Lorenza had always thought that she would hold on in Argentina as long as she could, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, well, back to where she came from. She would stop being Aurelia and return to Colombia and that would be that, her mission completed and duties fulfilled in the resistance. But after the meeting with Águeda and Ana, her whole stay in Buenos Aires didn’t feel so much like theater or some adventure anymore. She left that kitchen feeling that she was now bound by a deep commitment and there would be no going back.

“It all makes sense, Lorenza,” Mateo told her. “The turning over of one’s inheritance is a test that any hero has to pass. Like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, how can you not see these things? The hero has to renounce his former life and his blood ties in order to begin clean and pure on his quest, without prior ties to his new family, which is the secret society. And he has to give up his former name. It’s so much like in the movies, that going from Lorenza to Aurelia, from Ramón to Forcás … Like Darth Vader, which is the name that the Sith give Anakin Skywalker when he joins them. You were fulfilling all the prerequisites, Mother, and you still don’t even realize it; change of name, truncated identity, coded language, secret society, danger of death, superior ideals, the renunciation of the previous life.… Do you see any of this? You were fulfilling all the prerequisites of the initiation ritual.”

“Ini-ti-a-tion.”

“Right, that.”

“But look at it from a more practical point of view,” his mother proposed. “To go around doing what we did using your real name would have been pretty stupid. And as far as San Jacinto … how else do you think an unarmed resistance can survive, but by the voluntary donations of those who ran it and supported it? Right? So let’s just leave it at that and say that the gnocchi was one damn expensive meal.”