No Place for Heroes

6

THE SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST once asked Mateo to write a profile of his father. The title was “Portrait of a Stranger,” and this is what he wrote:

My name is Mateo Iribarren and I don’t know much about my father. I know his name is Ramón Iribarren and that he is known as Forcás. Sit, Forcás! Stay, Forcás! It is a good name for a dog. Ironically, the dog that we adopted with Forcás, he christened Malvina. Not Lassie or Scooby-Doo, not even Lucky, but Malvina, like the islands that the Argentineans were fighting for, tooth and nail, against the British. That’s what interested my parents, political conflict and class struggle.

Ramón Iribarren left when I was two and half years old. My grandmother, my aunt, and my mother explained to me that he’s in Argentina.

A year later we received his last letter, and I’ve never heard anything about him since. My grandmother tells me that after he disappeared, I began to hate vegetables and grew fearful of the dark. I’ve gotten over this, at least the darkness phobia. But even now, before going to bed, I jam a chair against the closet door, because who knows what can come out of there when everything is black.

To imagine what my father looks like, I think of characters that I have seen on television, like the powerful buck king with enormous antlers who appears at the end of the movie Bambi. And why not? We all have a right to think that our father is a good guy. Félix Romero, one of the kids in my class, always said that; maybe because everyone accused his old man of being a mafioso. And if Romero thinks well of his father, I have the right to think that mine is a buck. The problem is that Ramón does not belong to the real world, and talking about him is like trying to paint the portrait of a ghost. I carefully collect the reflections of those who knew him, so as to make a collage of who he may have been. When all this gives me a headache I think again of the king of the deer, which is a lot easier. You are allowed this kind of leeway when your father is an enigma. The only clue he left me was his last letter, a piece of paper in which he drew Smurfs and frogs and squirrels climbing a flowering tree. It looks like something sketched by a preschool teacher. Your father had thick wrists and a very broad back, like a bull, my uncle Patrick, my aunt Guadalupe’s husband, often told me, and he threw back his shoulders and puffed his chest to complete the imitation. Every time I asked him about my father, he said the same thing, and always ended it with the same pantomime. My aunt Guadalupe assured me that my father was an intelligent man, always up-to-date with the news. It seemed that he knew what was happening in any part of the world and spent all his time reading history and economics. He was a sweet papi, Nina used to say, closing her eyes and sighing. Nina was an ancient nanny who cared for me and my cousins when we were infants. Those details are important, the image of the buck with huge antlers has evolved to a figure who has become a supermacho he-man. According to what everyone has told me, my father was an intelligent, strong, and good-looking man. What more can you ask for?

When I was eight, I asked my mother for the first time to take me to Argentina to meet Ramón. She said no, not for the moment, we needed to wait until I was older. The last thing I knew about him was that he was in jail, and I think he’s still there. Someone who knew him back then told me that he had been charged with political offenses.

Lorenza (that’s my mother’s name) thinks maybe that’s why he disappeared from our lives. But there’s something about that story that doesn’t quite add up. If this was the case, why hasn’t Lolé come to his aid? If he’s a prisoner, he must need our help. But she insists that we can’t go looking for him until I am older — not before that, no matter what. Anyway, the image I have of my father is rather positive. In addition to those qualities allotted to Ramón by my aunts and my grandma is the suggestion that he was some sort of superhero in the war against the dictatorship. And since I am obsessed with the Greek myths, I imagine him chained to a rock like Prometheus, wailing and desperately trying to free himself so that he can come see me. I also see myself much later, already eighteen and equally heroic, in the shape of a bull like him, going to Argentina to rescue him.

Lorenza (I don’t know if I already mentioned that she is my mother) and Ramón (that’s my father’s real name) were in the underground resistance against the gory dictatorship. That word is very much Lorenza’s, gory, or I should say very much of her generation, a generation obsessed with repression, another one of their favorite words, and with talking about gore. They say the gory dictatorship, the sanguine dictator, rivers of blood, bloodstained country. When I criticize her for it, she says that I have a point. Today it’s not appropriate to talk about blood and gore, unless you’re a surgeon or a butcher.

I’ve never known the date or place of Ramón’s birth. In one of Lorenza’s old albums I found a picture of him when he was nine years old, dressed like a Prussian soldier for a play at school. In another one, he is already a teenager, playing fútbol in a team uniform. It seems as if he might have been the captain, from the vigorous gesturing toward his teammates with his arms. But who knows, it could easily be that Ramón was as big a flop at fútbol as I was. When they told me how he had joined the party at twelve, I thought it had something to do with some party thrown by his fútbol teammates. Later, I learned that it was a political party and that he was nicknamed Redboy. Who knows when it changed to Forcás. By fifteen, he had left school to dedicate himself to the struggle, Lorenza says, and I wonder if she would be using the same admiring tone if it was me she was talking about leaving school.