“Not at all, but he was fucking scared.”
Fear: another thing that no one dared mention. No militant ever said he or she was afraid, ever. As if simply by not naming it, you could escape it.
Lorenza told Gabriela about the days with her mother, who had come to Buenos Aires to be with her for childbirth, and her life with Mateo as a newborn and beyond, Mateo taking his first steps, and then confessed that, at that stage in her life, she had felt afraid. To be able to continue their work in the resistance, she and Ramón had decided to enroll Mateo in day care from the time he was three months old, the Jardín Pelusa on Avenida Santa Fe, and every afternoon, took turns picking him up at four o’clock.
“That was the face of fear for me,” she confessed. “I became obsessed with the idea that if something happened to us one day, to Ramón or me, that four in the afternoon would come around and there’d be no one to pick up Mateo.”
She had taken to thinking about it all the time and, as much as she tried, could not get the idea out of her head. She began to panic and picked up Mateo from the crib, to hug him, and then he’d wake up and she had to put him to sleep again. “Until then I hadn’t known what anxiety was.” Not the time that she had to escape from her house through the roof, nor when she’d granted San Jacinto to the party, signing the notarized papers and saying goodbye to her only inheritance.
She didn’t remember having been afraid during the twenty-four hours she had been detained at a police station in Icho Cruz, convinced that she would not walk out alive. Shock, yes, and adrenaline by the bucketful, also heart palpitations and vertigo at the adventure, all that. But not fear. Fear, what is really called fear, that shadow of the enemy that invades you and defeats you little by little from within. That she had never experienced. Until Mateo was born.
Thereafter, the image of the abandoned child at the Jardín Pelusa, of the hundreds of children who were taken from prisoners and given up for adoption to military families, the possibility that something similar could happen to Mateo, gradually became a terror that sapped her strength. She bore it as well as she could, without a word, until Mateo was two years old and on the day when the boy blew out his pair of candles, she announced to Ramón her decision to take him away for a while. Much to her surprise, Ramón agreed. Not only did he not argue, nor reprimand her, or call her weak, or insult her, but he told her that he would go with them. For Mateo. For Mateo to grow up far away from the circle of death and breathe air that was free of threats. A month later, the three set off for Colombia, having made the decision to leave the party and to stay away at least a few months.
Amid clouds of steam and fuzz, the sputtering steam iron, and the hum of the sewing machine, they continued their chat laden with secrets that had never been revealed and indeed would never be mentioned again. The sheets, embroidered and ironed, piled up, and they had to be sorted into sets — fitted sheets, flat sheets, and pillowcases — then wrapped in tissue paper and placed carefully in a box. And it was there in Gabriela’s apartment where Lorenza thought she finally had found the tone that would allow her to write, now, yes, that chapter in their history. She needed to put into words this story that had been so far marked by silence. She had always known that sooner or later the task would have to be taken up, there was no way around it, because the past that has not been tamed with words is not memory, only a sort of spying.
The problem had been how to tell it, and now she thought she had figured it out: simple, intimate as a conversation between two women reminiscing behind closed doors. No heroes, no adjectives, no slogans. In a minor key. Without delving minutely into major events, keeping just the echo, to wrap it in tissue paper, like the sheets, to see if it finally stopped beating and, little by little, began to yellow. Yes, wrapped in the silky tissue paper, maybe that’s exactly what was needed: for the chatter, the laughter, the interweaving of moments and pains, the small confessions — these would smoothly envelop the old fear, reducing it to the realm of everyday gossip.
45
“I GET OUT of the car in the middle of the snowy mountains that I knew only through Ramón’s dreams, a place that for me was not part of any map, but from the stories and songs he improvised as nursery rhymes for Mateo,” Lorenza tells Gabriela. “And suddenly out of nowhere there comes a horse, and on that horse is Ramón, and Ramón has my child. And he gives me the child. I swear, not even when he was born did I feel such a commotion, as if I was giving birth again, but after a much more difficult labor. There he was with me, my baby Mateo. I kissed him and hugged him; poor little one, he must have been suffocating from so much squeezing, but I couldn’t stop, I had to be convinced that this was real.”
It was the only real thing in that landscape of an imaginary postcard holiday, where snow bleached everything and settled everywhere, hiding the face of things. But there was her son. Everything else faded around her, like during a dizzy spell or a hallucination. But Mateo was laughing, he had learned to say new words, and was wearing a red cap: he was amazingly real. Fortunately real.
“I kissed his nose, his eyes, his hair, his hands, his laughing strawberry mouth, his soft skin. I planted kisses even on the yellow boots he wore.”
“Mateo has been waiting for you,” came the voice of Ramón.
“I couldn’t look at him, Gabriela. At Ramón. I couldn’t do it.”
“How you must have hated him.”
“That wasn’t the problem, hatred in the end can be handled. But it wasn’t pure, it was mixed with gratitude, even reverence, that ruinous gratitude, the odious veneration that you bear your abuser when you pardon him. That’s why I didn’t want to look at him.”
“I explained to Mateo that we were on vacation, him and me,” Ramón’s voice said, “and that you would take some days to catch up with us because you had a lot of work, but that you were coming.”
“I realized then that Mateo didn’t know,” Lorenza told Gabriela, “and I felt a huge relief. If the boy was happy it was because he didn’t know about the drama and behaved as if he were on vacation, fascinated with the snow and the horse, with the fire in the hearth and the water of the lake. Ramón told me things. He told me that Mateo was in love with the horse, that the first night he had wanted to bring the horse into the cabin so that he would not be cold, and that he had no choice but to go out and show him the stable where the horse was asleep. The stable at the neighbor’s place, from whom they rented the horse. I noted the fact, neighbors nearby, I might ask them for help. And there were horses. They might not be Bucephaluses, but they had four working legs. If I couldn’t get hold of a car, I would flee with the boy on the horse.”
“Great,” said Gabriela, “with your eyelashes frozen like in Doctor Zhivago.”
“It was cold as shit, and very dark,” Ramón’s voice kept saying, “you couldn’t see a thing, and Mateo and I at midnight, with the flashlight, looking for the stable.”
There was a flashlight, Lorenza registered; she had to figure out where he kept it. She looked around and saw no electrical wires. Doing all this while making efforts to look at Ramón, to say something nice.
“Something nice? With how you were feeling?” said Gabriela.
“Anything, that I had missed him, or that the scenery was beautiful, whatever, but nothing came out. I had come to play in the cold and I wasn’t succeeding. I had to overcome it, to make him think that I was glad to see him.”
“But what could he expect of you? He couldn’t really believe that everything would be as before.”