No Place for Heroes Read Free

nothing to do with me. The only thing he has caused us is harm, and now you want me to send him a hug?”
    “Forget it, Mateo, don’t send him a hug. I only suggested it because you asked.”
    “Bad suggestion, Lorenza, possibly the worst suggestion ever. I think I’m going to leave it just how it is, ‘Sincerely, Mateo Iribarren,’ and stop fucking around with it, it stays the way it is.”
    The boy chose only the words that seemed most precise and discarded the rest, not wanting to overdo it and yet not wanting to leave anything out. His message had to create a certain effect, produce results, and he weighed the possibility that there would be no answer to the telephone call he was about to make, like someone tossing a message in a bottle into the sea.
    “What if Ramón doesn’t answer, Lolé?” he asked for the tenth time, his voice betraying his fear. “What if his answering machine malfunctions and he can’t understand the message?What if something like that happens and then when Ramón wants to call me, he can’t, because the message is garbled, or maybe he doesn’t even remember me. Lolé, do you think he even remembers me?” He imagined a thousand different scenarios of the doomed encounter, as if on this particular Buenos Aires morning he could undo so many years of absence with the sound of his voice alone, with a mere paragraph that he rehearsed again and again. Yet he was unable to pick up the phone and dial his father, whom he had seen for the last time when he was two and a half years old and his father had taken him away.
    They had not heard from Ramón since, not a single phone call, or a letter, or only a few letters at first and then nothing, only the vague and contradictory reports that reached them by luck and through third parties. That Ramón had been imprisoned, that he was bald and had lost a tooth, that he lived with a Bolivian girlfriend and was busy helping Bolivian miners organize, that he was now a labor director in one of the poor sections of Buenos Aires. But they never knew his whereabouts, because he did not try to find them and they did not try to find him. Or to put it exactly, Lorenza did not look for Ramón and he did not look for her and their child. They could not include Mateo in this tangle because he had never been given the opportunity to voice his opinion on the matter, not until the moment of this enraged demand, the sorrowful insistence that had forced Lorenza to fly to Buenos Aires to be with him.
    After the dark episode, years had followed filled withsuitcases, roads, and airplanes, but the two of them had never run into Ramón. Never even came close. On the contrary, she had imposed upon herself, as a matter of destiny, the urgent task of pushing the son far away from his father’s influence. She warned him that if his father had taken him once, he could easily try it again. But she never spoke ill of him as a person to her son or suggested that he was a bad person. That she would never do.
    “Tell me about this man, Lolé,” Mateo asked over and over. “Come on, Lorenza, tell me about him.”
    She told him that he was a moody man, but convinced of his ideals, a vibrant and intelligent man. She assured him that he was courageous and good-looking, and that they had been happy in the years that they lived together. But every time that Mateo asked how he could find him, she made up excuses and found ways to stall him.
    “You have to be a little older, Mateo,” she said to him. “It’s not so easy.”
    “What’s not so easy?”
    “Your father, your father is not easy. You have to be a little older and grow strong. And then we’ll go looking for him.”
    Mateo relented willingly, so careful not to hurt her, and determined to accept whatever man was living with them at the moment as his father, and that man’s children as his siblings. This is the one, Lolé, he’d say, with this one we can create a family and be happy, and yes, she’d agree, this one will