“Every month, the party put out an underground newspaper, taking great risks and facing a whole range of difficulties. They distributed it one by one, a task that took a few hours. They’d remove the wrapping from a box of cigars, empty it from the bottom, then roll up each of the eight pages of the newspaper until it was the size of a cigarillo. Then they’d fill half of the box with fake cigarillos and half with real ones, and wrap it back up. It was an old trick that marijuana dealers used and they adopted it to mock the regime. One newspaper at a time, to one contact, often having to go all the way across town to deliver it.
“There were a lot of words in those eight pages, Mateo, do you understand, words which were in such short supply. Imagine that we were pizza delivery boys. Ring, ring, yes, with mozzarella and anchovies, and off we would go with the newspaper, rain, thunder, or lightning. And sometimes it didn’t say anything new and it arrived wet and cold, but we would be there to deliver it.”
“The newspaper story sounds like it was true, but that thing about the whitecaps, the stevedores waiting for you in the fog, you made that up.”
“No, there was fog. There still is. You’ll see it for yourself in a bit.”
17
ON SUNDAY, forty-eight hours after the dark episode, Lorenza was still wrapped in the straitjacket of her own anxiety.
“You’re going to go crazy if you don’t look for help,” Mamaíta told her. Lorenza didn’t hear her or respond, but paced the house back and forth like a caged lion, her heart beating a thousand times a minute, her blood pressure rising, and her hands like ice. She hadn’t been able to sleep, not even to lie down for a moment. She could not eat because it felt as if she were choking. In a picture taken a week afterward for her travel documents, she has the fiendish eyes of a caged animal and sharpened features due to the half a kilo she was losing daily. Although she refused to see a psychiatrist, Mamaíta and Guadalupe persisted and somehow they got her into the office of the well-respected Dr. Haddad, who specialized in treating family members of those who had been kidnapped. Although it was a Sunday, he had agreed to see her right away.
Lorenza walked into the office at eleven in the morning, her eyes darting everywhere but resting nowhere. She wouldn’t even sit down, and let her mother relate to the doctor what had happened.
“I don’t want to tell you my story or listen to your theories. I just want to find my son,” was the only thing Lorenza said.
“Why were you being so obnoxious, Lolé?” Mateo asked. “What had that man done to you?”
“Nothing, I didn’t even know him. But it was like I was possessed. It was either that afternoon, or the next day, that I slugged your uncle Patrick.”
“Shit, really? Why?”
“Because he said something or didn’t say something; because he did something, or didn’t do something. Who knows?”
“Did he slug you back?”
“No, of course not. He was there trying to help, and everybody coped as well as they could. I was hypersensitive, a vulnerable and unhinged thing. But I didn’t even want to go see that psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, or whatever the hell he was. Not that one or any of them, not then or ever; to this day, I won’t sit still on a divan. Not that I sat on one then, I remained standing, trying to keep myself together so I wouldn’t explode with impatience, so I wouldn’t scream at that doctor that I thought talking to him was a waste of precious minutes.”
Dr. Haddad made them return to the waiting room for a moment. When they went back in, ten or fifteen minutes later, he had his glasses on and in his hands were the pages of Forcás’s farewell letter, which apparently he had been reading in the interlude.
“You had given it to him?” Mateo asked.
“No, no, I told you I was not all there. I imagine my mother had given it to him, or Guadalupe.”
“So what did he say?”
“He said the weirdest thing. I don’t know what stopped me from jumping him and slugging him as well, because what he said was like a kick to the kidneys.”
This is a love letter, he said.
18
AURELIA HAD BEEN in Buenos Aires twelve days, sharing an apartment on Deán Funes with Sandrita, the bundle of dollars still in her suitcase, the microfilm in the toothpaste tube, and the passports under the mattress. Sandrita was growing restless; she said that all it took was one raid and they were dead.
“Forcás was nowhere to be seen. I was starting to doubt his existence, like in that play by Ionesco where the characters yearn for the arrival of the Maestro and the Maestro doesn’t show.” When the Maestro finally arrives, the others realize that he has no head. Maybe Forcás had no head.
“That would explain a lot,” Mateo said. “Forcás has no head.”
Through an agent, he told Sandrita to tell Aurelia that soon, very soon. But another week passed and nothing. And then one Saturday, Sandrita came home with two boxes of ravioli, and when Aurelia asked her why two when one was enough for both of them, she said that they weren’t for eating, but to hide what she was turning over to Forcás the following day. That is, at noon on Sunday, Aurelia finally had an appointment with him. And they had to set things up. They emptied the boxes and repacked them, first a layer of ravioli and on top a pair of passports, another layer of ravioli, another two passports, a double layer of ravioli, and the top. And a string to make it look good. Sandrita told her to relax, no one would notice a thing.
“But I also have to give him the dollars,” Aurelia confessed.
“Why didn’t you tell me, we’ll have to put them in the box.”
“There are too many bills.”
“How many?”
“A lot.”
The meeting was at the confectioner Las Violetas, on the corner of Rivadavia and Medrano. So that Lorenza had to go to a spot on the map called Rivadavia and Medrano, and Lorenza who had no idea how to get anywhere. Sandrita took her that afternoon, on Saturday, as if they were scouting out the territory, so that Aurelia could find it the next day without problems.
“And what about Forcás? How do I recognize him?” she asked.
“Right before noon, you go into Las Violetas and sit at a table. But not with your back to the door. Never sit with your back to the door, always with your eyes on the door, in case the cana show up. You don’t want them to grab you unexpectedly. You sit at a table in a spot where he can see you. You put the boxes of ravioli on the table, and you wait for him to come to you.”
“And how will he know who I am?”
“Don’t worry about him. He’ll know what you look like, and if he is not sure, the boxes will tip him off; he knows that you’re bringing him ravioli.”
Second rule for those types of meetings, the margin of error is ten minutes. If at twelve ten one of you is not there, the other one will suppose that you have been taken and will go, to prevent from being grabbed as well. Third rule, after a meeting, never go straight home or to another meeting before taking a subway or walking a few blocks heading in an opposite direction, to make sure that you’re not being followed. Fourth rule, always carry identification. Always. Never go anywhere without an ID, not even to buy some bread next door.