Laura Restrepo - No Place for Heroes

The days succeeded each other, pleasant against all expectation. Not since Coronda had a house welcomed them as this cottage made of tree trunks, where they could shut themselves in while the world turned on the outside. At times Lorenza thought that she was with the handsome and confident Forcás of earlier times, so different from that other grim, jealous, moody one she’d had to deal with in Bogotá. A honeymoon, she thought, somewhat amazed, it’s as if we are honeymooning. Who would have thought?

“A somewhat macabre honeymoon. Moreover, there’s no honeymoon without sex,” says Gabriela.

“There was sex, of course. Not at first, but a bit later, there was. Yes. Good sex.”

“I couldn’t have done it. In that kind of situation, forget it.”

“We never talked about the sex, and even in bed the silences were killing us. But the rest worked, perhaps because I was always outside the physical battlefield. I remember one occasion in particular. We had eaten dinner and we were listening to the radio transmitting these madly triumphant communiqués, which only confirmed that we were losing the war.”

The people, who had originally celebrated the recovery of the islands with enthusiasm, now cried out against the slaughter of hundreds of teenage conscripts, poorly trained, badly fed, and dying from the cold, whom the inept bureaucratic superiors abandoned to their fate when the British moved in with all their firepower. The Argentinean patriotic fever became a wave of disappointment and anger in the streets. Rage against deception, against the inefficiency and bravado of those who behaved as butchers domestically but like lambs when facing a foreign army. The media, which just the week before had been bound by censorship, began to ridicule General Menéndez, the military governor of the Falklands, who had just signed the surrender to Moore, commander of the British troops.

“We were there, listening in,” Lorenza told Gabriela, when the voice of a Uruguayan journalist from Buenos Aires reaches us, claiming to be on the corner of Diagonal Norte and Florida, where a group of people had taken a policeman’s hat and began playing with it, putting it on their heads, passing it from hand to hand. No more fear, we said. And we hugged. Now the dictatorship will go down because the people are not afraid. Buenos Aires had become the burning Troy. People screaming toward Plaza de Mayo. The police responded timidly, not dispersing the crowd or locking anyone up. General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri, head of the junta at the time, who besides being the ideologue of the defeat was an alcoholic, came out drunk on the balcony of Government House, responding to the claims of the crowd with a delirious speech. ‘Those who fell are alive and will be sculpted in bronze,’ he shouted, and assured them ‘that we will be complete masters of our entire destiny total and will light torches as the highest values.’”

“Just that week I had been hospitalized for a stomach ulcer,” Gabriela says. “But my sister Alina was out on the streets, even though she didn’t understand anything about politics, nothing, and she came to visit very agitated to tell me that something was happening. She was startled, feeling that things were out of control. Suddenly we heard a ruckus outside and I asked Alina to open the window. Madre mía , we heard, it’s over, it’s over, the dictatorship is over.”

“In Plaza de Mayo, the drunkard Galtieri was haranguing his nonsense while the people in the street were screaming in his face that it was over. It was almost over, Gabriela, and we were so far away, with those shitty little radios, full of interference and static, so that we couldn’t quite hear. Or maybe yes, maybe what we heard was the roar of the collapse.”

The war was lost, the dictatorship was being overthrown, and Lorenza and Ramón were gripped by bittersweet feelings — gripped, on one hand, by the euphoria at the ridiculous manner in which the tyrants had perished, on the other, by regret over the conscripts who had been sent to die. On the one hand, victory: the Falklands had overthrown Argentina’s military junta. On the other, defeat: it had assured Thatcher’s reelection.

“This was turning into a porn movie,” Gabriela reminded her, “and now you’re telling me a war story.”

“Sorry, now for the porn, but it’s going to be much shorter. No, nothing; just that we made love that night, how would you say, intensely but with great melancholy, as if that encounter would be our farewell. Ramón knew, that night I realized that he also knew. End of movie.”

In keeping with the performance they were each giving, Ramón played his role as lover and father flawlessly. But it was clear that he could not trust her. He never closed his eyes. Miche began to visit often, bringing bottles of water and other provisions, helping with whatever was needed, and during his visits, the Impala was parked out in front of the cabin. But the keys always disappeared. Lorenza had noted that when Miche left them on the table, not five minutes would pass before Ramón put them in his pocket.

When they went down to the town, Lorenza managed to get a few minutes and would memorize street signs and gather information, sometimes she was even able to ask questions, checking bus stops and timetables, car rentals, nearby hotels, maps and roads. Chile had become her secret obsession. If they could only cross the border, they’d be outside his scope. But during these brief breaks, she was never alone with Mateo. Ramón never left them alone, not in the cabin, or walking, or on the street.

At the cabin, Lorenza played for hours with Mateo, told him stories, doing housework, sitting and reading by the fire. Without feeling any urgency, given this contrived but, after all, placid stagnation of time. Time. Let time run by. After much reflection on the possibilities of escape, she had come to understand that the only thing playing in his favor was the weather. With Mateo already by her side, she would be happy to wait. The magazine had given her an indefinite leave from work. She could wait. Another week, two more weeks, a month. Sooner or later, Ramón would become neglectful. I have been isolated, she thought, but not defeated. If space is your tool, the weather will be mine. And let the hours run, always waiting for the right moment.

Now and then she was surprised to wake up and the father had already dressed the child and fed him breakfast, or taken him out for a ride. One of those mornings, she heard male voices down below the loft. A neighbor had come to ask for help, some repair in his cabin. Lorenza opened her eyes and saw the thick sky through the window. Strange thing, it always dawned clear, but a little later the sky always seemed lower, woolly, heavy. Heaven’s donkey belly, she thought, that’s what they call this kind of sky in Lima. Ramón came up. “Here’s Mateo. Keep an eye on the baby, I’m leaving him here with you,” he said.

“Are you going to see about the neighbor?”

“No, Miche is going to help him. I put cookies on the table, apples and tea, go down to breakfast anytime.”

“Donkey belly, donkey belly,” she tickled Mateo on the tummy.

Getting out from under the cold blankets, she felt how cold the house was. The fire must have died out. Strange, Ramón always kept it going.

“Ramón?” she called to him several times, and getting no answer, threw a blanket over her shoulders and went down with the child to stir up the fire.

“It went out,” Mateo said, and it was true.

Ramón was not in the house, but he had to be around. She left the child on the carpet, entertaining himself with his old serpets, and looked out the window, feeling strange about the silence. The snow that had fallen during the night had erased the line between sky and land, leaving everything in a single confused vagueness. Large footprints, of three pairs of feet, moved away from the house and were lost to the left. Lorenza went out to examine them closely. These were Ramón’s, she was sure, recognizing the zigzag marks they left with their imprint and the little circle with the make in the center. There was no mistaking it. Unless Miche was wearing them … and then where was Ramón? Lorenza looked around the cabin and did not see him.