“But Mateo, the thing is, I had left Argentina before the end of the dictatorship and have been gone all this time. Do you see? For me those days have long been frozen in time. And then on the very night you decide you don’t want to accompany me, look what happens.”
“Did you talk to them about Ramón? Did they tell you where he is?” Mateo’s voice rose out of his cave.
“Yes, we talked about him, and no, they don’t know where he is, but they gave me some idea. Nothing too exact, but let me tell you the whole story, moment by moment.”
She had found it amusing when they had revealed their true names and professions, like Dalton, who had been imprisoned, a skinny towhead, a good guy who had been director of the magistrate and who, he told her at the Immortals, was really called Javier something — a Javier, who would have guessed, that name didn’t suit him at all — and taught classes at the university and had three kids; or Tuli, a driven black woman, who during the days of military rule offered support to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, and who in reality was Renata Rocamora, a double bassist for a tango quartet, which that very week was performing at the Café Tortoni.
“If you want, we can go,” Lorenza proposed, to which Mateo growled like a bear. “What a joy to learn that Tuli is devoted to the tango. I asked her if she had played during the time of the military rule, and she said she did. Strange, because in our group at that time nobody really seemed to care about the tango. The music of the resistance was Argentinean rock, what we called rock nacional.”
“Argentinean rock was part of the left?” Mateo seemed suddenly interested. “I thought it was more the music of pothead hippies.”
“Potheads? No, what are you saying? That music was ours. Or maybe it belonged to the potheads as well, but it was mostly ours. Case in point, at the Immortals, Dalton told the story of how there came a time when he had hit bottom in prison. He wanted to die. And the only thing that saved him was discovering a phrase that another prisoner had scratched on the cell wall, down low in a corner, almost unnoticeable. It was a line from ‘Song for My Death’ by Sui Generis, the one that goes, ‘There was a time when I was beautiful and truly free,’ although Dalton said that the only thing that was legible was ‘and truly free.’ But with the mere discovery of those three words, he no longer felt alone or wanted to die.”
“Like in Night of the Pencils,” Mateo said. “I’ve already seen the movie.”
“Well yeah, it’s nothing new. In such endgames, whatever happens is like the story of the cat with raggedy paws, it’s been told time and again. But at the moment it happens, it carries great significance. Anyway, Argentinean rock was the music your father liked. The first time I went to his place, he showed me his records as if they were some kind of treasure. And, of course, when Dalton told the story of the lyric scratched on the wall, we burst into the song in its entirety, and this led to others, the songs of Charly García and Fito Páez, León Gieco, Spinetta. You can’t imagine how good it felt to sing like madmen after so many years of silence.”
“Very romantic. But I think Spinetta came later, Spinetta is not old enough.”
“You’re wrong there, kiddo. Bones Spinetta was idolized at that time, with Almendra and Sui Generis! My favorite, the one I adored was Sui Generis’s ‘Scratch the Stones.’”
“If you put on a record by Sui Generis at a party these days, they’ll toss you out on your ass. So don’t get any ideas.”
“It’s so weird, isn’t it? So many years later finding out the real names and real lives of people you had been so close to.”
“Yeah, as if Batman and Spider-Man got together in a pizzeria and took off their masks and revealed their secret identities to each other,” Mateo said. “And to top everything off, they start bellowing ancient songs. Did you talk to your comrades about me?”
“Of course, isn’t that why I was with them in the first place?”
“What I don’t get is how you found them if you didn’t even know their names.”
Lorenza explained that the reading for a novel is a public event that is announced in newspapers, so that anyone who wants to attend can come, and that’s how they had found out she was in Buenos Aires.
“Yes, I know that. But how did they know that Lorenza So-and-so, who writes books now, was the Aurelia who had been in the resistance with them?”
“One of them figured it out and passed the word along.”
In the middle of the reading, the bookstore manager had handed her a piece of paper folded in half. “It’s from the audience,” he whispered, and she flushed when she read the first word: Aurelia. No one had called her Aurelia in years, nobody even knew that once, in Argentina, that’s who she had been. The note said, “Aurelia, do you have time for a coffee with your old comrades?” She couldn’t see them from the stage because the houselights were dimmed, but before she finished her presentation she said into the mike, “I know that some of my old friends are here, and I want them to know that yes, I have all the time in the world to have coffee with them.”
“But that’s not the part I want to talk about, Mateo. I have news.”
“Don’t tell me: Ramón was there,” he asked, almost begging, and she noticed how pale he suddenly grew.
“No, he wasn’t there, I told you.” But she had asked a lot of questions and gotten some clues. A metallurgist for an auto syndicate, who was called Quico — or who had been known as Quico in the resistance when he lived in Córdoba, and now was called something else, did not live there anymore, and had retired — had confirmed that Forcás had been in prison, not because of politics, for by the time he had been arrested the military junta had already been overthrown some years before, but because of money problems. Quico thought that after a few months in jail, Ramón had been released and had gone to Bolivia. Gabriela had also been at the pizzeria, and Gabriela, the Gabrielita who had been by her side during the commerce protests, her best friend in those days, told her that she had heard that Forcás had returned from Bolivia and had settled down in La Plata, where he had opened a bar.
“A bar?” Mateo asked his mother.
“That’s what Gabriela said. Do you know what it felt like to reconnect with Gabriela? We both found out we were pregnant about the same time, and we would go together to El Once barrio, both with bellies like globes, to the meetings of—”
“And where is this bar?” Mateo interrupted.
“According to Gabriela, in La Plata.”
“I don’t buy it, Lolé, that detail seems off. I am almost sure that Ramón is in Bariloche. He must be wandering those mountains like a Steppenwolf, or at least that’s what I think.”
“Stop. Let me tell you about La Plata. Gabriela thinks that the bar thing hasn’t gone well for Ramón, but that he keeps at it, trying to forge ahead. She doesn’t know that much more, but she gave me some leads to a comrade in La Plata who might know.”
“Ramón is not in La Plata, Lorenza. Why do you insist on this? It doesn’t sound right … La Plata. And the bar thing, even less so. Ramón must be in a cabin buried in snow, in Bariloche.”
4
“SPIT, LOLÉ,” Mateo ordered his mother the following morning, as she brushed her teeth. “Spit out whatever you have in your mouth, it drives me nuts when you talk with all that foam in your mouth. Besides, Ramón is in Bariloche. I’m sure he is in Bariloche, where I last saw him. He likes the mountains, like me. Do you think I got that from him, the fact that I love the mountains?”