Laura Restrepo - No Place for Heroes

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.

“TELL ME ABOUT the dark episode,” Mateo asks Lorenza, and she says that she will, but suddenly she can’t, impossible all of a sudden for her to remember, as if the memory of it were a black box lost in the sea after a midair accident, unwilling to give up its information. “What happened that early morning after you had found out that Ramón had kidnapped me?” Mateo presses her.

“Kidnap is a strong word.”

“Then what would you call what he did?”

“It doesn’t have a name.”

“Why do you strip the names from the things that Ramón has done?”

“You mean the Ramónisms?”

“Not funny.”

“Yeah, I can tell you don’t think so.”

That morning Lorenza had plunged into an anguish so all encompassing that it robbed her of the faculty of thought, hence the difficulty in trying to put the moment into words now. Instead of words, echoes were all that remained, resonating within — one in particular, the odious echo of premeditation, the scene in the park, the previous afternoon, when she had had no idea what was about to happen. Naturally Ramón had known the course of events down to its last detail. It was so well planned that he even asked her to pack a suitcase for the boy. Lorenza, oblivious to the misfortune that she was helping to engineer with that macabre ritual, packed everything the boy would need for the journey: his clothes, his food, his clowns, and the serpets.

“During the first hours after the news sank in, the image of each of those objects of yours enlarged and shrunk in my head,” she wanted to explain to Mateo. “Enlarging and shrinking like hallucinations, as if I were in the throes of a high fever.”

How could she possibly transform that maniacal anxiety into a peaceful memory to put into words? Not only had Lorenza voluntarily given away her son but she had helped set up, step by step, the unimaginable sacrifice of losing him forever. She had relinquished her son as one relinquishes an expiatory victim. It had been a deadly ritual, and she herself had officiated. She had approved it, given her permission, her blessing, right there in the park the day before. When Ramón had asked her if she was sure she wanted to separate, she had said yes, sealing her own misfortune; then, when Ramón had asked her if there was any way around it, she’d replied that there wasn’t, that there was no going back. Another ritualistic gesture on Ramón’s part, to let her call that sinister coin toss, which she had lost without even knowing it. He forced her to bet, without warning her what she was risking. She had naïvely, stupidly, sentenced herself. She could have stopped everything with a single word, but had failed to do so.

“You didn’t know,” her mom tried to reason with her on that miasmic morning. “How could you have known? It’s not your fault. You could never have guessed.”

“Yes, I could have,” she barked back. “I could have known. I should have known.”

Everything had been evident from that afternoon in the park. The signs were there, exposed, a warning siren should have gone off in my head. Everything pointed to what Ramón was about to do, even Ramón. All one had to do was look and listen to realize it.

“I wandered from room to room like a madwoman,” Lorenza tells Mateo, “convinced there was nothing we could do. My head was a battered mess that repeated one thing over and over: There is nothing to do.”

Like a robot, and only because her mother insisted, she made the few phone calls that she could make, knowing beforehand that they would prove futile. She dialed the three or four numbers of the people who knew Forcás, though it was all too clear that he wouldn’t be hiding anywhere she could so easily find him. And of course those friends knew nothing. Ramón? The boy? No, they hadn’t seen them. They had no idea where they could be. It’s no use, Lorenza told her mother, who still pushed her to keep on trying. It was no use.

Ramón’s parents didn’t have a phone in Polvaredas, but she was able to reach one of the neighbors, who called them over. She heard the voice of Grandpa Pierre on the other end of the line, and could sense the old man’s excitement on hearing from his grandson, his son, and his daughter-in-law.

“How are you?” the old man asked. “When are you coming to visit us? Grandma is down in the dumps. It’s been a long time since she has seen her grandson. Send some pictures, will you? Let me get Noëlle, the old coot has been complaining that you people don’t write, don’t keep us up-to-date. Let me get her, she’s going to be thrilled.”

Obviously, Grandpa Pierre and Grandma Noëlle did not have a clue about Forcás’s whereabouts. They could not even begin to suspect the calamity that had just occurred. Of course not. Forcás would have never chosen his parents’ house to hide Mateo. Now Lorenza had no one else to call. And because in Argentina they had never known anyone’s real name or their phone numbers, she had no way of getting in touch with their friends there.

“Wait, Lorenza, you’re skipping over some very important things. Tell me about the conversation with my grandparents. It must have been the last time you heard their voices.”