“The man who wrote this letter is in love, and he does not want to take your child from you, he wants to win you back. So be ready, Lorenza, because he will call. Do everything you have to, so that when that call comes, you are ready. You know best what you have to do. But he will call you, you can count on that. When? I don’t know. In a week, two weeks, a month. When he feels that he is in a safe place, at that moment, he will call you.”
Lorenza, who knew that Dr. Haddad had years of experience dealing with kidnapping cases, had meticulously studied his appearance and now looked all around, scrutinizing his office.
“I studied it with such intensity,” she told Mateo, “that although I never returned there, to this day I remember every detail.”
Boxy furniture upholstered in gray, wood floors, white walls, and on the walls three posters from art exhibitions. On one of them was a bronze sculpture by Archipenko, Woman Combing Her Hair, according to the description beneath. On another one, an abstract figure in blue, gray, and black by Malevich. On the third, a series of lines in plum and brown by Rothko.
“Don’t tell me that at that critical moment you started looking at posters,” Mateo objected.
“I wanted some sign. I was looking for clues, something that would allow me to take that decisive step: to trust him. To be able to act I needed to believe in that man, it was a matter of life and death, to trust him, and I was searching for some confirmation. For instance, a copy of a Renoir would have been an unfavorable clue.”
There was something syrupy about reproductions of Renoir. The art displayed in the office, however, was in keeping with the message that the doctor wanted to get across, intentionally or not: clarity, conceptual rigor, simple forms, and mechanical precision. Everything was good then, but it was also impersonal. Something else was necessary for Lorenza to lower her guard resolutely, something that would allow her to make contact, that would engage her emotions, and she saw it on the doctor’s desk: a framed photograph. It was not of his wife or their kids, that would have been equivalent to a Renoir, or of Freud or Jung, that would have just been clearly offensive. It wasn’t a postcard, either, or a piece of art. It was a plain black-and-white photograph of an olive tree in the middle of a rocky field. Presumably the doctor himself had taken it, in his land of origin. It was just what Lorenza needed.
“Why? What did that have to do with anything?” Mateo asked.
“It had nothing to do with anything. Don’t ask me why, but I interpreted it as a green light. I could trust that man, I was going to trust that man. I was going to prepare for that call he had talked about. When Ramón’s call came, because it would come, I would be ready to take it.”
“Wait a second, Lolé, wouldn’t it have been better to read the letter yourself?” Mateo asked.
“No. Listen to what you’re saying. Reading Ramón’s letter would have just caused anger, or contempt, or guilt, and in the best imaginable scenario, compassion or sorrow, and it was essential that I feel nothing. Nothing at all. This doctor was a third party, an outsider to the case, who had read it coldly and had given, let’s say, a diagnosis. Or maybe he had smacked me in the head. Or a sort of prophecy? He had told me, he will call you, and all of a sudden, everything made sense, the pieces of the puzzle interlocked in an unexpected but logical procession, and I found it important to believe his every word.
“From that moment on, that phrase, he will call you, would become my certainty and my compass. I was too emotional to make judgments on my own without becoming delirious, too involved in the drama to be even moderately objective. So I would let the cricket set the guidelines, and from those directions I would devise a plan of action for the only thing I cared about, to get you back.”
“Like a robot,” Mateo said.
“Yes, like a robot,” Lorenza replied. “But you don’t even know what kind of robot. Thanks to Dr. Haddad I emerged from my paralysis and became Tranzor Z.”
22
AROUND THE TIME that Aurelia met Forcás, she also met Lucia, a comrade in the party who still bore the scars of a recent tragedy. A few years before, four days after the military coup, they had disappeared her husband, who was also in the resistance, but only obliquely, since politics wasn’t really his thing. His name was Horacio Rasmilovich, and he was known as Pipermín, or Piper, and although Aurelia never got to meet him, little by little, from what she learned from Lucia, she felt she got to know him. Piper was a translator from Portuguese to Spanish, so he was never very busy with work, which was fine by him, because he could devote himself to his true passion, reading history books, especially those about World War I. Lucia was never entirely sure if her husband had been kidnapped because they confused him with someone else, or because they had their eyes on him, or because they had really been after her, and on not finding her grabbed him.
This last scenario tormented her. She couldn’t help obsessing over the possibility of such a fatal swap, taking him in place of her.
“That’s part of the torment.” Lorenza wanted to explain to Mateo that because tyrants and torturers don’t show their faces, the victims end up blaming themselves. It was useless to warn Lucia not to get trapped in the cruelty of that cycle, that the pain of the loss itself was enough without adding the burden of guilt.
The only thing that Lucia knew for sure, because a neighbor who had witnessed the scene from her window told her, was that they had taken Piper out of the house blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, and his head bathed in blood. And that he was screaming something, something he wanted heard, even as they struck him to silence him. The neighbor had seen him scream, but she couldn’t tell Lucia what words, she apologized, explaining that her window had been shut, that fear seals the ears, and that at that moment some road workers were drilling on the asphalt. From then on, Lucia never stopped wondering what Piper’s last words had been, which the noise from the street had swallowed. What message had he wanted to deliver, maybe some clue that would make the effort to find him possible.
“What do you think Piper was screaming, Lolé?” Mateo said. “I want to know as well.”
“Generally those who were sequestered screamed their names at the last moment, so that at least there would be witnesses, somebody in the street to hear what was going on and could report the disappearance.”
“So you mean Piper came out screaming, I am Piper! I am Piper, they are kidnapping me!”
“Probably more like, I am Horacio Rasmilovich, his real name.”
After that Lucia learned nothing more about him, as if the earth had swallowed him, and both she and her mother-in-law devoted all their days and hours to looking for him, to reporting his kidnapping to whatever international organizations they could reach, to asking about him in the military tribunals, the general staff of the army, and the Government House. They went together to the archbishopric and to the newsrooms of the dailies, not parting from each other day or night, so that Lucia eventually moved in with her mother-in-law. They consoled each other and conducted a one-topic relationship, talking about Piper at all hours, remembering him, crying for him, plotting strategies to find him, and so on year after year, not letting the passage of time weaken their resolve, on the contrary, each day growing more stubborn, more defiant, marching every Thursday with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
“This exact plaza, Mateo. I wanted you to see it for yourself,” Lorenza said, the two of them standing next to the obelisk that had been erected in the plaza’s center. “Here is where dictatorship began to fall, because of the shove the Mothers gave it. Every Thursday, right here where we are standing, women wearing white handkerchiefs on their heads would gather and march around this obelisk, demanding the return of their sons alive.