There was also a story about bunny rabbits. They kept rabbits. Maybe they still do, if they are still alive. My grandparents, not the rabbits. Who knows? Maybe Pierre and Noëlle are still in Polvaredas, maybe they miss me and are looking for me. But that’s unlikely. If they had looked for me at all, they would have already found me. When I was a baby, they visited me and brought dead rabbits to make stew. Ramón put them in the freezer and they never came out because my parents didn’t know how to make rabbit stew, and besides they thought it was disgusting to handle the reddish, skinned rabbits. My grandparents would call later from Polvaredas and Ramón would tell them that I had eaten the whole rabbit and that I was growing into a giant.
When it grew dark and La Rhune was no longer visible, we walked back to the store with the Basque berets and I bought another one, for Ramón, to give it to him when I see him again.
11
WHEN LORENZA ANNOUNCED in Madrid that she was willing to be transferred to Buenos Aires to aid the resistance from within, she was quickly assigned her first mission, to smuggle microfilm, passports of various nationalities, and cash, she didn’t remember how much, but a lot, what had seemed to her an enormous sum then. She was to hand it over to him, to Forcás. How do I find him? she had asked, and they told her that he would find her.
“Daaaaamn!!” Mateo said. “My papa, the Indiana Jones of the revolution. What movies have you been watching, Mother?”
She was not to carry lists of contacts or phone numbers. She had to go to a certain hotel and wait until the organization contacted her. They told her that a comrade named Sandrita would pick her up, that she would be her liaison, take her to her lodging, and let her in on what she needed to know to begin work. Forcás would show up later, when she had safely passed through her first days there.
They also told her that she had to come up with a whole minute. When she asked what that was, “a whole minute,” they told her that it was any likely story to justify her trip there, in case she was questioned. They decided that at first she would say that she wanted to study literature at the University of Buenos Aires and that she had come to figure out the procedure for enrolling.
“Do you remember the Gila monster?” Mateo changed the subject, like he always did when he was sick of his mother’s stories about the resistance. She was more than glad to abandon that minefield, which she always had to cross so vigilantly, because even the slightest misstep ended up making him more vulnerable and he set off the mines. In the wings of all this, they had a gallery of shared memories that did not involve the battlefield. One of them was that Gila monster that they had once seen when they lived on the isolated ranch in the Panamanian jungle. It appeared early one morning in the kitchen, up above, hidden in a corner between the wall and the ceiling. It was a fat, rosy lizard, with little hands. The Panamanian comrades had warned them that it was called the Gila monster, and that its bite was deadly, so they wanted to catch it, but it had escaped.
“It looked like an ugly little baby,” she said.
“An ugly little poisonous baby. It bites and doesn’t let go, the son of a bitch. And on top of that it chews,” Mateo said, “or I should say it breaks the skin so the poison penetrates and drops you dead right there. So many nightmares about imaginary monsters and right there in Panama I found the real one. And do you remember the suicide serpent? That was the most incredible thing I ever saw.”
It was at the same ranch in Panama. They were asleep in their hammocks and were awakened by a whistling noise, as if someone were cracking a whip. It was a long, green snake, a meter and half at least, that was flogging itself against the wall; a demented, terrifying creature to be doing such a thing. Mateo and Lorenza watched it with eyes as big as plates, frozen in their hammocks, while a few steps away that mad thing rose above the lower quarter of its body, as if to stand up, and cast itself against the wall with the speed of a whip, as if it wanted to commit suicide. When he was little, Mateo told the story, saying that eventually the comrades had to do hand-to-hand combat with the snake to get it out of there, as if snakes had hands.
“My friends don’t believe me when I tell them that I once saw a suicidal snake in my own house. Because we did see it, Lolé. Maybe it was trying to shed its skin. One day, I would like to ask a biologist just what that beast was doing.”
12
MATEO AND LORENZA left La Biela and headed toward Corrientes, to stroll among booksellers and music vendors and coffeehouses. Lorenza wondered where all the books had been during the time of the dictatorship, she didn’t remember seeing them, or buying any, or even stopping to peruse, maybe because she never had any money or because it wasn’t safe to do such things, or maybe she had done it, but that was one of the many things that had not been made part of the official register. Her memories of that time were confined to the events of the main plotline. They were simple and directly related to what had happened, no props or scenery, and strangely enough, almost without words.
“Do you smell that, Mateo?” she asked. “It’s mold. That’s the smell of Buenos Aires.”
It was a rancid smell that had an aristocratic whiff. She had experienced it when she had come with her father, and years later when she had lived with Ramón, and now again, here with Mateo. It wasn’t ubiquitous or all-pervasive, but engendered in the dark humid corners of the city, the shady parks, the salon hairstyles of the old señoras, the subway trains, the stacks of used books, and diffused through the streets in small whiffs.
There it was … coming out from under a railing like steam. There again, clinging to the jacket of a passerby. That old smell. Dictators had come and gone, but Buenos Aires always smelled the same, like a broadtail fur coat stored in a basement. When you are here, it is not very noticeable because the nose gets used to it. But when you leave, it goes with you, and wherever you go and open your suitcase, it jumps out at you so that you can’t mistake it. That’s when nostalgia hits.
“Put your nose to that book you just bought,” she told Mateo. “Do you smell it? It’s Buenos Aires. You have in your hands the very essence of the city.”
“You sound like a tourist guide, Lolé. Why don’t you tell me about the content of those microfilms you were supposed to hand to Forcás, instead?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I already told you that it wasn’t worth knowing. In any case, we concealed them inside an emptied tube of toothpaste. And I wondered what ‘minute’ I would have to invent if they discovered such a thing at the airport in Ezeiza. The comrades told me that if it happened, to say an Our Father and hope for the best, because no minute would explain away such a thing.”
“Have you ever read Foundation?” Mateo asked, and without waiting for a response went on to recount the entire, endless plot, like he always did when he had read something, or had a nightmare or saw a movie. Once he started, he couldn’t stop until he reached the grand finale, and this time was no different. He only stopped chattering when his mother told him they were as lost as a Turk in a fog.
“Is that what they say in Argentina, a Turk in a fog?” he asked.
“It’s a saying.”
Lorenza cursed her poor sense of direction, that hopeless flaw that Trotsky called topographical cretinism, which makes any city into a labyrinth. Unfortunately, Mateo had inherited this trait, a tendency to roam endlessly for lack of an internal compass. The good thing about being so out of it was that you never even realized you were lost. Ayacucho, Riobamba, Hipólito Yrigoyen, they had followed the whim of their feet for hours, and the streets of the city center danced around them. Tucumán? Virrey Cevallos? Sarandí?