“But I couldn’t have understood those stories,” Mateo said.
“No, how could you have? You were a baby. But he would tell them to you still. And I heard them and later retold them to you when you were old enough to understand. I think that aside from his nostalgia for the mountains of Bariloche, your father was a man without memory.”
He had said next to nothing to her about the town where he was born, the friends of his childhood, his teenage girlfriends. He either did not remember or had chosen not to tell her. Or he did tell her, and it was she who had forgotten. And maybe that was why it now proved so difficult to tell her son what his father was like. By that point, she didn’t even know, or perhaps she had never known. At the end of the day, it was not so unusual that Forcás had no memories. It was a thing that a lot of them had in common. It wasn’t a time for remembrances; too much anxiety to be tending to those interior gardens.
“I have come up with a story, or I should say made up a memory about Ramón. A memory I like,” Mateo said. “Maybe it’s real, I don’t know. There is a very prominent figure with big hands who must be him and he puts me down in a crib made of snow. But I am not cold, but rather toasty. The large figure gives me a pacifier and I notice the many bright lights.”
“That happened just as you remember it. Your memory is real. When the three of us were in Bariloche, you were already two and a half. He always carried you on his shoulders on our long walks through the mountainside. There was snow, not a lot, but also sun, and when we climbed a tall peak, he liked to dig a hole in the snow and make a crib, using his wool coat and mine to line it, to lay you there so you could drink your milk and sleep awhile. And I have another image engraved in my mind of you and your father in Bariloche, both wearing wool caps and leather boots, and in the background the splendor of the aurora borealis.”
“There you go again with your exaggerations. I have one nice memory, just one, and off you go dressing up the story with blazing lights. Even a loser like my father lights up, as if he had a saint’s halo. You just make shit up, Lorenza. You can’t even see the aurora borealis in Bariloche. The lights that you see near the south pole are the aurora australis.”
Mateo then grew quiet, looking anywhere but at her. He had grown disgusted with his mother, as usually happened when they talked about Ramón. It always started out fine, continued fine for a while, but things soon heated up and continued to heat up until he exploded, which was followed by long periods of silence.
“All right, no more auroras or blazing lights,” she said, after letting a prudent amount of time pass.
“You just don’t want to admit to yourself that my stories about my father are not happy ones. There’s a lot of pain there, and you are not allowing me any pain — and that in itself is very painful.” Mateo’s angst got him all tangled up in tongue twisters.
“And there’s another thing that doesn’t exist at the south pole,” he said after some time had passed. “Polar bears.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, I would swear on it. No polar bears and no aurora borealis. Although I don’t think Ramón would be out this late, considering how cold it gets there. He is probably already inside his house with a fire going in the fireplace. The little house that he rented that time in Bariloche had a fireplace, right?”
“It did, and we had to keep the fire going all night because there was no other heat source. Sometimes it went out while we slept, and the freezing air would wake us. If the living have to suffer through this sort of cold, what must it be for the dead, your father said. Who knows where such thoughts came from, but he said it every time it was cold.”
“If the living have to suffer through this sort of cold, what must it be like for the dead,” Mateo repeated, now cheery. “Is that really what my father said, Lolé? And in Bariloche we split wood for a new fire when the old one had gone out. Maybe at this exact moment, Ramón has run out of firewood and has gone out into the woods to look for a supply that will last him the night.”
“But what about if he is in La Plata, you crazy kiddo? Or if he’s here in Buenos Aires like the phone book says?”
16
LORENZA TOOK MATEO out to Puerto Madero on the shores of the river, a popular place, resplendently lit, full of people, cafés, and restaurants. She told him that it had once been the main port of Buenos Aires, and that she’d had secret meetings there with stevedores.
“Who were the stevedores?”
“They were the ones in charge of loading and unloading cargo from ships, well, the ships that still came in, every once in a while. Right here where we are standing now, right around here. Back then the port had been mostly abandoned, a haunted place, all the docks half empty.”
She explained that the redbrick structures that were everywhere were called docks, or warehouses, now all transformed into huge restaurants. The dock where she had met up with others was nothing more than a graveyard for cranes, useless hulks and empty wooden boxes scattered everywhere, the remnants of the rich Argentina that with its exports called itself the world’s granary. She would meet up there with the stevedores, amid the rusted iron and the whitecaps. Generally there were six or seven of them, unemployed and rusty themselves. They waited for her bundled in their thick, black coats, their hands buried in their pockets. And they had their meetings right there.
“And if anyone saw you meeting and denounced you, wouldn’t you end up disappeared or something?”
“Something like that. But so that we wouldn’t be noticed we had our cover story, the grill. Whoever passed by there and saw us, all we were doing was roasting, we were just grilling some meat.”
“You pretended to eat?”
“We did eat. We set up some coals, put a grill over it, and threw some chorizos on, which we would eat with bread and cheap wine. Meanwhile we would talk in low voices about what was happening, what the press wasn’t saying. They would tell us their troubles and we would tell them ours. We would be conspiring, in other words.”
“So that’s what conspiring is like? What possible harm could you bring to the military junta, hidden there, eating chorizos and speaking ill of the regime?”
“A lot of harm, though you may not believe it. The dictatorship needed silence like you need air. The very act of getting together and talking about things was a way to resist.”
“What did you talk about?”
“We told them about the chupaderos, for instance, makeshift morgues where the military tortured and killed detainees out of the public eye. Or we brought them up-to-date on the insurrection against Somoza in Nicaragua. The press would say nothing about that, and it was the news that the stevedores liked best. They’d ask us, Comrade, are the Sandinistas on the move? They found it unbelievable that it was possible to get rid of the tyrants, that in another part of the world people had risen against tyranny and defeated it. Some of them would even give me money. They would say, Make sure this gets to them, the ones fighting in Nicaragua.”
“Yes, yes, Lolé, but it still doesn’t sound like it was accomplishing anything.”
“It’s hard to say how much we did accomplish. But aside from being a foreigner, I was just a low-ranking militant, you have to remember that. Fucking low-rank, like we said. I moved in the trenches, while those in charge moved in wider circles. Besides, we had labor leaders who were in the thick of it, in the very mouth of the wolf, trying to saw off the legs of the dictatorship from within the syndicates. The matter was infinitely complex and infinitely infinitesimal.