Laura Restrepo - No Place for Heroes

“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.”

“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 .