Laura Restrepo - No Place for Heroes

“And do you think that your characters know how to defend themselves? I mean, will their protections work?”

“Don’t worry, Lolé, they are im-pen-e-tra-ble,” Mateo said, careful not to skip any of the syllables of that difficult word, and he took off toward the bus that he rode to school every morning.

The director of the Rome institute told Lorenza that he had hit a classmate named Joe Ferla. She knew who he was, more than once Mateo had returned from school discombobulated because Ferla had put a cigarette inside his desk and almost burned all his notebooks, or had stabbed him with a pencil.

“What about my son?” she asked the rector. “What happened to him in the fight?”

“Not much, signora . He took a few blows and has some bruised ribs.”

“My Mateo is a good boy, signor direttore , and I understand that this Joe Ferla is a malandrino.” The word malandrino was perhaps excessive for the occasion, but it was the closest to bully that Lorenza could come up with from her limited Italian vocabulary.

“Malandrino , no,” the rector corrected her affably. “To be precise, let’s just say that Ferla is a boy with certain behavioral issues. And as such, he is on probation for repeated acts of aggression against other students. For Mateo, on the other hand, this is the first time he has ever been involved in this type of mischief.”

“There you are. So it doesn’t surprise me that a good boy like Mateo could end up losing his patience with Ferla’s … behavioral problems.”

“The fact that he hit Ferla is not what gives us serious concern here, but the brutality with which he did so. Please, if you may, read the medical report.”

Fractured clavicle, hematomas on the face, a cut two centimeters long over the left eyebrow. In other words, Mateo had given Ferla a first-class beating.

Lorenza tried to justify. “He has spurted up physically in the last few months. He went in a flash from being a child to being a grown-up. I don’t think he understands yet how strong he is.”

“That could be the case, signora , but that wasn’t even the worst part, perhaps our most serious concern is over the callous way he reacted when I tried to apprehend him.”

“I’m very sorry, signor direttore , but can you tell me what Mateo said?”

“When I told him that I would have to call his father to tell him what had happened, he replied in an insolent tone, ‘ Se vuol lamentarsi con mio padre, dovrá andare a cercarlo in carcere.’ ”

“Mateo wasn’t trying to offend you, signor direttore , he was simply stating the truth. We don’t know where his father is, but we suspect he is in prison. Still, I apologize for anything my son might have said or done that was disrespectful.”

“Before you leave, signora,” the rector said, when she was almost out the door, “I want you to know that there was something good in all this. Mateo has just barely started to learn Italian, but he spoke that phrase with a proper accent and perfect syntax.”

“I LIKE THAT part of the story, Lolé, at the airport in Ezeiza, when your comrades tell you that you might as well recite an Our Father because there isn’t a story that will save you now. I like that, the formality of ‘recite’ is very Argentinean. It’s a line from a movie. And now tell me about the newspapers again.”

“What newspapers?”

“How they warned you not to read newspapers on the airplane, and later in the café and on the metro, because any woman who read a newspaper was immediately suspicious. And so what happened, in the end, at the airport, with the microfilms and all that?”

For the length of the flight, Lorenza had put off thoughts of her father’s death by wrapping herself in a kind of stupor, as if her mind had shut off during those hours suspended in the clouds. She was cradled in her lethargy, like before the onset of a migraine, when she remained quiet and still, almost invisible, waiting for the enemy to forget her and pass her by. But when they landed, the lurch of the plane on touching the ground jolted her awake. They were in Argentina. It was only then that she grew concerned and asked herself what the hell she was doing there, realizing how stupid she had been to get involved in such a mess. Suddenly her role in the entire drama seemed unreal, as if someone were playing a joke on her, and fear paralyzed her. One of the last missions that she had helped organize in Madrid was demanding to know the whereabouts of a couple and their two daughters, removed from a plane by force just before it was about to take off for Sweden.

Morituri te salutant , she was saying in her head as the plane taxied into the wolf’s mouth. Nevermore , here’s where the current has dragged you, this is the end, my beautiful friend .

“Fear paralyzes, Mateo. Have you ever seen it?” she asked him. “It’s not a metaphor, it can really happen.”

She felt as if she could not move her legs. Her head, which was more decisive, ordered her to go on, to do what had to be done. But her legs had a different idea. They wanted to stay just where they were, in that airplane seat, and they began to search for accomplices in their mutinous mission. They coaxed the hands not to undo the seat belt, and tried to win over the rest of the body, sending out specious messages. This plane is your final protective capsule, they warned, much better to stay here, don’t move from this seat. She must have lingered in this state for a few minutes, like someone at the edge of a diving board searching for the courage to jump.

She soon got herself together and when she went through customs she was calm again, surrendering to the lethargy. She didn’t grow agitated, even when they searched her, which they did only perfunctorily, nor when they questioned her, which also was nothing beyond the routine.

“It was all thanks to Papaíto’s death. It had blindsided me. And I arrived in Argentina convinced that nothing worse could happen to me after what I had gone through.”

Her first days there had been like that, she did things as if she were gliding from one to the other and it wasn’t exactly she who was involved in such things. She felt as if she were an actress onstage, and that strange feeling of playacting stayed with her for the first few months.

“Aurelia, me? Aurelia in the underground resistance in Buenos Aires? The whole thing seemed too theatrical.” The first time she felt the presence and hold of the dictatorship, it was a physical thing, like a slap. The first time she confirmed that behind all the pomp and ceremony the monster’s breath poisoned the air was not because she saw the military police flattening a house, or taking someone in, or firing their weapons. It was rather an ordinary afternoon in a run-of-the-mill café about a week after she had arrived, when she noticed the disapproval and rage with which some older folk glared at a young couple kissing at a nearby table. Not long afterward, she was strolling down a street during a late-fall afternoon, and since it was hot, she wore a light cotton skirt that must have been somewhat see-through, outlining her legs, though just barely. The moment she stepped onto a bus she heard the insult from a man across the street. Sharp-tongued, brimming with indignation, he yelled: “Get dressed, you whore. Why don’t you go to some strip club to show off those hams?” She then knew that the dictatorship was not only enforced by the military but also by citizen upon citizen, and that it was not only political oppression but also moral, like putrid water that slowly seeped into everything, even the most private folds of life.