No Place for Heroes Read Free Page A

stay forever.
    But there was always another one, a new one. And theroutine of everlasting love would begin again, the rented house in some neighborhood in another city, and the illusion of domesticity crafted by taking the bus to school and regular visits to the dentist, the assurance of ordering a favorite dish at the neighborhood restaurant every Sunday, the peace of mind that came from knowing friends’ phone numbers by heart, friends who would always be friends. Mateo and Lorenza put up pictures of horses on the walls of his room, planted flowers in pots, adopted a cat, and got hold of a secondhand bicycle, which they painted to look like new, because this was it, here they would settle forever.
    “Forever, Lolé?”
    “Yes, my love, forever.”
    And then one day signs would begin to crop up, the long-distance phone calls for Lorenza, the whispered responses, Lorenza in some other world when he tried to show her his drawings or tell her a story. Soon Mateo would realize that it was time to give the cat to the neighbors, abandon the bicycle on the patio, pack the suitcases, and wake up in the house of strangers.
    Mateo would take out his colored pencils and concentrate on his drawings during the long airplane flights, desperate to know: Why, Mother? Why did we have to leave if we were fine where we were?
    “Switching bicycles was the easy part, Lolé,” he would confess to her later. “It was switching cats and fathers that was difficult.”
    She would have liked to explain why things had to be theway they were, why they led such a life, which perhaps was later to blame for his infantile, jumbled handwriting. Why such a parade of absences and shocks, of moves from schools and houses and countries, so many fearful nights, partings from friends, having no father or too many fathers, so many whys, which in time cast a pall of confusion over his childhood and prolonged it unnaturally. She wished she could have given him detailed reasons that could be condensed into a paragraph.
    “Maybe it’s better if you don’t tell me,” he confessed to her sometimes, because his mother’s political tales sounded alien and her love stories just plain bad.
    “You have always dragged me through your issues, Lorenza, and I have never known what those issues are.”
    And then one day he was taller than she was, and he stood before her, committed and defiant, having grown so big and his mother so tiny beside him, and he gave her an ultimatum.
    “This is it, Lorenza, I want to meet my father. If you don’t take me, I’ll go by myself.” He rummaged through the things he had stuffed on an upper shelf of his closet and pulled out a Basque beret, which he had been saving for a long time to give to Ramón on the day that he saw him again.
    “My father and I are Basque,” he always said proudly to whoever might listen. “Well, we’re Argentinean, but with Basque roots.”
    Realizing how Mateo had struggled through his adolescence and with the ongoing tug-of-war he had with his identity, Lorenza had begun to understand the implications ofraising a child whose father was no more than a phantom, someone who vanishes after inflicting his harm. She would help him look for Ramón, but first Mateo needed to understand the language of the old story, be brought up-to-date on each episode, to help him create a whole out of the fragments he already knew. They would have to give it some serious thought, talk to each other a lot, and work together as a team so as not to be led astray. They would also have to rely on their own strength alone, for no one else could help them in this search.
    So the decision had been made and they were now in Buenos Aires. But how was Lorenza to begin to look for Ramón Iribarren, if when they lived together, they had mastered the art of hiding so as never to be found? How could she search for someone whose daily life with her had been taken up with changing their names, counterfeiting personal identifications,