No Place for Heroes

38

“DID YOU LIKE Azucena?” Mateo wanted to know.

“She smelled like cookies.”

Azucena, Miche’s girlfriend, worked at Bagley, a cookie and cracker factory south of the city, on Avenida Montes de Oca, near Barracas. Her job consisted of taking cookies out of the oven, tray after tray of cookies, exposed to high temperatures and sweating buckets, until the smell got into her skin and impregnated her hair. At the end of the shift, she showered at the factory with hot water, scrubbing herself with soap and shampoo, but she could not completely get rid of that sweet, penetrating smell.

“She arrived at the house smelling divine, of cinnamon and butter and flour.”

Lorenza remembered her sitting on a stool on the patio, trying to paint her toenails a dark red, with balls of cotton between each toe, and frustrated because she couldn’t hit the target precisely with the nail-polish brush.

“I should have helped her do it, who knows why I didn’t,” Lorenza said. “In fact, it wasn’t that easy to approach her. She was always tense, her movements sudden bursts of electricity, as if there was some kind of short circuit inside her. Maybe her blood pressure was a little high after a whole day of toiling at the factory, or maybe her illness influenced her inability to hit her target with the nail-polish brush.”

Azucena’s personality had been a mystery to Aurelia until Miche secretly confessed that he bought her Epamin tablets to prevent seizures. Epilepsy? Miche said yes, a mild form of epilepsy.

“What were they like?” asked Mateo.

“What was what like?”

“The seizures.”

“I never saw her have one. She was thin, a good body; I’d say pretty, if she didn’t comb her hair to look a bit like Betty Boop, and her eyebrows were plucked so thoroughly that they had almost completely disappeared. But she was pretty, although she had a strange and feverish way of looking at you.”

At first she said she didn’t want to know anything about politics, but Azucena ended up introducing them to a pair of workers from the Bagley factory, and thus, in that way, began raising the political consciousness in the food industry. And even though Azucena eventually stepped aside, these two workers presented them to another, and then someone from Terrabusi and from Canale, the other two traditional cookie factories, and so they started to put a small group together. To avoid using their real names, they decided they’d use the name of the cookies they were responsible for on the production line. So one was Criollita, another Smile, the others Two Smiles, Temptation, Merengue, Rumba, Twin One, Twin Two, even Twin Three during their busiest seasons.

“Good noms de guerre,” Mateo said. “I would have enjoyed being in a subversive cell with Smile, Rumba, and Merengue.”

The girls took at least an hour between the whistle announcing the end of their shift and when they showed up in El Chino, a little hole-in-the-wall bar a few blocks from Bagley, where on Mondays and Thursdays Aurelia waited for them to arrive at the group’s secret meeting.

They would appear there without aprons or gray plastic caps, freshly bathed, their hair brushed and blow-dried, meticulously made up, in tight jeans and high heels. The minute was that they were getting together to see Amor gitano, the soap opera that was the craze then. They took Aurelia to the rooms they shared in the tenements of Barracas.

“Creaking wooden floors, twin beds, flowery quilts, a stove, a good-size TV, and a large picture of Evita in the most prominent spot,” Lorenza told Mateo. “Nothing more, nothing less, those were their treasures. You couldn’t miss the picture of Evita, with plastic flowers and lit candles, or I should say the altar to Eva Perón, dead so long but still on her throne.”

Aurelia began to understand whom these girls resembled, whom they dressed, moved, and talked like. Who else could it be but Evita, prim and shaken by the country, ready to become martyrs if such a thing was necessary. If Evita had been a laborer … for Evita, and under her protection, the girls from Bagley would go up against anything, they would dare to confront anyone who got in their way, starting with the cunt of your mother’s dictatorship, as they said: those military bastards and those bitch mothers who gave birth to them.

“But you weren’t a Peronista,” said Mateo.

“I was a Trotskyite, and they accepted me as the leader in their get-togethers, but if I had made one peep about their Evita they would have slammed the door in my face. And all for what, we were supposed to stand united against the dictatorship, no?”

Already locked in the room, seated three to a bed, they passed around the maté and got the ball rolling by talking about the quality of different brands of panty hose, about the varicose veins they got from standing on their feet for so long, about creams for dry hands, the prices of things, dastardly men, the miracles of saints, and the delays in menstruation. But at the stroke of seven, as if by magic, they all went silent at the same time. In the tenement, in the neighborhood, apparently in all of Buenos Aires such silence was imposed, because that’s when the soap opera started. A new episode of Amor gitano.

Criollita, Smile, Rumba, and Temptation affixed their eyes on the screen, madly in love with Renzo, the Gypsy, as handsome as he was masculine, with eyes so deep. Impulsive and courageous, he had been unjustly convicted of a crime he had not committed and thus deprived of the love of the beautiful Countess de Astolfi, herself a victim of an infamous tyranny in a realm from an indeterminate place and time — but much like present-day Argentina — a place dominated by cruel villains such as Count Farnesio and his vile lackey the hunchback Dino, perhaps even crueler, and scattered with dungeons and secret passages and forest ambushes, where young and green-eyed innocents like Renzo were locked up in inhumane Islands of the Damned.

During commercial breaks, the girls from Bagley forgot about Renzo, the time had come for plotting. They turned up the volume, lowered their voices to a whisper, and the clandestine meeting took place. Rumba, who belonged to the internal committee, reported that in the nineteenth century the “law of the chair” had been approved, which their employer no longer respected, but which they should start fighting for again: for every hour on their feet, they had a right to fifteen minutes of sitting.

Then Renzo and Adriana de Astolfi pledged to love each other forever through a Gypsy blood rite, and during the commercials that followed Aurelia had them read excerpts from the party newspaper and talked about the articles with them. You should have seen how those girls hurled curses and insults in low voices at the military junta, at the executioners of Triple A, at the federals of coordination, against the Marquis Farnesio and his abject hunchback. And you should have heard how they pledged their lives and swore to overthrow them, all of them, to restore freedom to Renzo and to all the missing and kidnapped. Because if Evita were alive, she would not have allowed these criminals to fuck with our lives like this. If Evita were alive, if Renzo the Gypsy, if the Countess de Astolfi really existed …