Laura Restrepo - No Place for Heroes

Every time that Aurelia ended up with Lucia, because of shared party activities, she listened to her talk about her husband with a love and devotion that was gripping. It seemed as if their married life had been a joyful one. She described him as a shy and reserved man, but affectionate, with a sophisticated sense of humor and vibrant inner life. Lucia was very pretty, tall and willowy with an exceptional angular face. And Aurelia knew, because plenty of others confided in her, that more than one comrade would have liked to approach her, invite her to the movies, become friends with her, keep her company in her calamity. But no one had dared. Given her unconditional loyalty to the memory of Piper, any such attempt would have been a transgression. It was all but certain that Piper was dead by that point, there were even some clues that this was the case, like the testimony of another prisoner who had seen him horribly tortured in solitary confinement and who did not think he could have survived. Of course, that likelihood could not be mentioned to Lucia, who was absolutely convinced that Piper was still alive, and that if she persevered in her efforts to find him, sooner or later, she would be successful. Lorenza confessed to Mateo that despite the enormous respect she had for Lucia and the sympathy she felt for her situation, she had not failed to pick up on the hint of madness in her obsession, which, plainly, affected her mother-in-law as well. They kept his things intact, his favorite armchair, his history book, open to the page that he had been reading when they seized him, his clothes laundered and folded in the armoire. Aurelia knew all this because Lucia herself had told her. She told Aurelia that it had to be that way, because any day now Piper would return. Faithful to such convictions, neither of them ever left the city, not on weekends, not on holidays, not on vacations, because what if just at that time they handed him over, what if he reappeared, or if someone showed up who could offer them a clue, someone who might know something, who, careless, might let some hint escape, even the slightest.

“All very understandable,” Lorenza commented. “The death of a loved one is a terrible thing, but in the end there is some closure, it’s done for, no going backward or forward. But a disappearance is an open door to eternal hope, toward questions without answers, uncertainty, the hallucinatory, and there’s no human head or heart that could suffer through it without, at least to some degree, facing madness.”

“I know,” said Mateo. “You invent things, start coming up with explanations that grow crazier and crazier. It happens to me with Ramón. Ramón is my ghost. If the dictators had disappeared him like Piper, I would have had someone to blame at least.”

The whole thing was atrocious, starting with the very phrase “the disappeared;” instead of “kidnapped,” or “tortured,” or “murdered,” they christened them “the disappeared,” as if they had vanished on their own, no one’s doing, or maybe their own doing because of their volatile nature.

The dictatorship disappeared people and then denied that there were disappeared ones, and so disappeared even the disappeared. Like some cruel magic trick.

“Now you see it, now you don’t. Now it’s here, now it’s disappeared,” Mateo said.

That was Piper’s state when Aurelia stopped seeing Lucia. Since the compartmentalization of the party was so strict, once you lost contact with someone, that person was gone, like a ring in the sea. And that’s what had happened with Lucia. Time passed. Lorenza left Argentina and went on with her life, the military junta fell, and a few years afterward, at a dinner in New York, someone introduced her to an Argentinean oncologist who had been a Montoneros sympathizer. Chatting with him, quizzing him about his experience during the dictatorship, she found out that Piper’s mother had been one of his patients and an old family friend. Lorenza immediately wanted to know about Lucia. Was she still waiting for Piper?

“Yes, she’s still looking for him,” the oncologist told her. “With less conviction than before, but she still lives in her mother-in-law’s house — the señora passed away. And as far as I know, she’s never had another romantic relationship. Deep down in her soul, she goes on waiting for him.”

Then Lorenza said something about how happy their marriage had been, and the doctor gave her a surprised look. “You mean you don’t know?” he asked.

“What?”

“Lucia and Piper were separated when he was kidnapped,” he explained. “They had been separated for at least a year and a half. He was already with someone else and so was she. By the time he was kidnapped, their relationship was a thing of the past.”

A WEEK AFTER their first meeting in Las Violetas, Aurelia met with Forcás again, picking up things just as they had left them. The same café, the same minute, but the situation was a little more tense the second time, perhaps charged with premeditated expectations on each of their parts. It was also nighttime and the nocturnal mise-en-scène made for an awkward setup. Let’s just say that Aurelia was too dressed up, let’s say she had chosen her outfit very purposefully, and that she had blow-dried her hair, and that he for his part was recently bathed and emitted an odor of cologne, one of those virile dark ones that go for the kill, Drakkar Noir or something just as withering, in all truth, to Aurelia’s disappointment, who all week had yearned for the stable smell of his wool sweater. Now on the same note, Aurelia was no better off; in those days when she went out at night, she put on a double dose of Anaïs Anaïs, a frenziedly floral perfume. She must have strolled into Las Violetas like Botticelli’s spring, trailing a wake of lilac and jasmine. So the reason for the tension was simply that unlike the first time, this time there was a motive. The whole thing had been reduced to its common denominator, a bold flirting where conversation could not flourish. If they had met in Bogotá or Madrid, they would have broken the ice talking about Trotskyite matters, like the antagonism in Angola among the MPLA, UNITA, and FNLA, or the denunciation of the Spanish Socialist Party by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra, or the foreseeable split of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. But in Buenos Aires, they could not talk of such things. In public places they had to avoid those topics — their topics, their passions — and the nervousness was leading them into a series of phony questions and cutting replies. But the seduction was already having an effect on Aurelia, the pretty hair and the broad shoulders, so much so that she didn’t seem to mind the smoke from the Particulares 30. And just when his Drakkar Noir and her Anaïs Anaïs stopped repelling each other and began to mingle, a group of men in dark outfits and buzzed skulls burst through the door, five or six in all.

“It’s like I’m reliving that entrance into Las Violetas, which was like elephants stomping into a fine glass shop,” Lorenza told Mateo. “Another Argentinean saying: Elephant in a glass shop.”

Everybody froze right where they were, even the waiters, as if it were the palace of Sleeping Beauty and the only thing awake was Aurelia’s own heart, which began to beat like mad.

“Just keep to our story and nothing will happen,” Forcás said, trying to soothe her nerves.

They could see in the mirror in the back that the men forced two señores who shared a table to get up from their seats. They shoved the taller one to a corner of the room and the other one to an opposite corner. A few minutes later, three of the cana approached Aurelia and Forcás, who had attracted them like iron shavings to magnets. They asked for their identification papers. Around them, everybody else camouflaged themselves in a stillness that they hoped made them invisible, guiltless. If I’ve seen you, I don’t remember, and if I remember, I’ll forget. No one dared to turn and look, but they did look, if not with their eyes. Two of the men took Forcás to the door leading out to Medrano and the other one took Aurelia by the arm and pushed her toward the back, to the staircase leading to the bathrooms. That’s how they did it, they would interrogate one in one corner, who are you with, where did you meet him, what were you talking about; and the other person in the opposite corner, who introduced you, what were you talking about, when did you see each other last. Oh, there was a contradiction? Well, you’re fucked, you sons of bitches, that means you are subversives and are conspiring, we’re going to bust you open.