“‘I have come to Buenos Aires to meet you’—you think I should say that, Lolé, ‘to meet you’?” he asked, when his mother was already at the door.
“Yes, I suppose you can say that.”
“But I already know him. He’s going to say that we already know each other. Maybe I should say ‘to get to know you again.’ No, I don’t like that, either, it sounds weird. And the ‘sincerely,’ you think I should say ‘sincerely’?”
“You can take that out if you want, or change it to ‘a big hug’ or something like that?”
“‘A big hug’? Are you crazy, Mother? How can you suggest that? Don’t you realize how awful it sounds? If you want, I’ll take out ‘sincerely,’ but don’t ask me to send a big hug to a man who has had nothing to do with me. The only thing he has caused us is harm, and now you want me to send him a hug?”
“Forget it, Mateo, don’t send him a hug. I only suggested it because you asked.”
“Bad suggestion, Lorenza, possibly the worst suggestion ever. I think I’m going to leave it just how it is, ‘Sincerely, Mateo Iribarren,’ and stop fucking around with it, it stays the way it is.”
The boy chose only the words that seemed most precise and discarded the rest, not wanting to overdo it and yet not wanting to leave anything out. His message had to create a certain effect, produce results, and he weighed the possibility that there would be no answer to the telephone call he was about to make, like someone tossing a message in a bottle into the sea.
“What if Ramón doesn’t answer, Lolé?” he asked for the tenth time, his voice betraying his fear. “What if his answering machine malfunctions and he can’t understand the message? What if something like that happens and then when Ramón wants to call me, he can’t, because the message is garbled, or maybe he doesn’t even remember me. Lolé, do you think he even remembers me?” He imagined a thousand different scenarios of the doomed encounter, as if on this particular Buenos Aires morning he could undo so many years of absence with the sound of his voice alone, with a mere paragraph that he rehearsed again and again. Yet he was unable to pick up the phone and dial his father, whom he had seen for the last time when he was two and a half years old and his father had taken him away.
They had not heard from Ramón since, not a single phone call, or a letter, or only a few letters at first and then nothing, only the vague and contradictory reports that reached them by luck and through third parties. That Ramón had been imprisoned, that he was bald and had lost a tooth, that he lived with a Bolivian girlfriend and was busy helping Bolivian miners organize, that he was now a labor director in one of the poor sections of Buenos Aires. But they never knew his whereabouts, because he did not try to find them and they did not try to find him. Or to put it exactly, Lorenza did not look for Ramón and he did not look for her and their child. They could not include Mateo in this tangle because he had never been given the opportunity to voice his opinion on the matter, not until the moment of this enraged demand, the sorrowful insistence that had forced Lorenza to fly to Buenos Aires to be with him.
After the dark episode, years had followed filled with suitcases, roads, and airplanes, but the two of them had never run into Ramón. Never even came close. On the contrary, she had imposed upon herself, as a matter of destiny, the urgent task of pushing the son far away from his father’s influence. She warned him that if his father had taken him once, he could easily try it again. But she never spoke ill of him as a person to her son or suggested that he was a bad person. That she would never do.
“Tell me about this man, Lolé,” Mateo asked over and over. “Come on, Lorenza, tell me about him.”
She told him that he was a moody man, but convinced of his ideals, a vibrant and intelligent man. She assured him that he was courageous and good-looking, and that they had been happy in the years that they lived together. But every time that Mateo asked how he could find him, she made up excuses and found ways to stall him.
“You have to be a little older, Mateo,” she said to him. “It’s not so easy.”
“What’s not so easy?”
“Your father, your father is not easy. You have to be a little older and grow strong. And then we’ll go looking for him.”
Mateo relented willingly, so careful not to hurt her, and determined to accept whatever man was living with them at the moment as his father, and that man’s children as his siblings. This is the one, Lolé, he’d say, with this one we can create a family and be happy, and yes, she’d agree, this one will stay forever.
But there was always another one, a new one. And the routine 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 the way 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 of raising 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.