“I neither love him nor despise him. I keep him in mind.”
“I know, so he can never harm me again. Yet you do me more harm, robot face,” Mateo said, with an affectionate nudge to his mother’s chin that landed a little too rough. He began to shadowbox around the room like Muhammad Ali, dancing like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. “Shit, fuck, shit,” he chanted, throwing jabs and uppercuts in the air. “Are you sure, Lorenza?”
“Of what?”
“That it was his voice.”
“I could pick it out from a million other voices, that muffled and guttural voice was his. Besides, it’s almost exactly like yours, Mateo. You both mumble and speak so low that one can barely understand what you are saying.”
“So you’re saying that his voice hasn’t changed at all.”
“Not at all, not even a little bit. It’s exactly the same voice of the young man I knew. Yours, on the other hand, changes day by day, and there are times now when you sound just like him.”
“I don’t think so,” Mateo said, continuing to shadowbox against some invisible foe. “There’s nothing about me that resembles Ramón. I don’t want to look like him. Shit shit, what a bitch son of a fucking shit,” he went on, and his fist assaulted a pillow until it began to spit out its down. It was not rage but a swarm of uncertainty that needed release.
“All right, take it easy, Cassius Clay,” she implored and passed him the phone receiver. “Stop monkeying around and make the call.”
“No! What if he’s come back home and answers? What if the real him answers?”
“Tell him you’re in Buenos Aires.”
“And then hang up?”
“No, then you talk to him, if you want.”
“That’s not what I want,” he said but dialed the number anyway and listened closely. “You’re right, this guy really mumbles, you can barely understand him. Besides he sounds like such an Argentinean … he is so Argentinean.”
“Relax, Mateo, you’re revved up like a squirrel.”
“It’s true,” he laughed, “I must look like a fucking electrocuted squirrel. Do you remember, Lolé, the time that the squirrel crawled up my pants and shirt and perched on my head. I think Ramón was still with us then.”
“No, that was much later, at the Parque de Chapultepec. In Mexico.”
“Unbelievable, the only thing that I remember about Ramón is not Ramón but a yellow cur that he picked up in the park and named Malvina. I know I played with her, but I can’t remember what city it was.”
“That was in Bogotá. We lived in an apartment in the Salmona towers. Not the one we live in now, a smaller one we rented with your father.”
“I wonder whatever happened to that doggie. You think Ramón took her with him? Or maybe he let her back out on the streets where he found her. Do you know why we didn’t keep Malvina with us? Or, I don’t want to know,” Mateo said, throwing another punch in the air. The memories he had of his father were in truth not his but his mother’s, and having to continually ask her was worse than asking to borrow a toothbrush.
He dialed the number again, listened for a moment, and hung up again.
“I just wanted to know if his voice really sounded like mine. It’s weird listening to Ramón again after all these years,” he murmured, and a cloud of frustration dimmed his gaze.
“And?” Lorenza asked. “What does he say exactly?”
“There’s no one here to take your call, that’s all, there’s no one here.”
Mateo fell on the bed. He leaned back against the pillows, turned on the TV with the remote, let the tension escape his body, and was soon engrossed with Thundercats, a cartoon that he had loved as a child and that on that afternoon in Buenos Aires, so long afterward, hypnotized him once more. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and Mateo did not move, not really there, silent, his eyes fixed on the screen, lazily twirling the same lock of hair with his index finger.
“Aren’t you going to call again, Mateo?”
He said that he would, but not at the moment, later.
“Then get dressed, and if you want we can go out and grab a bite. You must be starving. Hello? Knock, knock. Is anybody home?”
Lorenza tapped him on the head to see if he had heard her.
“Okay, Lolé, but not now, later.”
6
THE SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST once asked Mateo to write a profile of his father. The title was “Portrait of a Stranger,” and this is what he wrote:
My name is Mateo Iribarren and I don’t know much about my father. I know his name is Ramón Iribarren and that he is known as Forcás. Sit, Forcás! Stay, Forcás! It is a good name for a dog. Ironically, the dog that we adopted with Forcás, he christened Malvina. Not Lassie or Scooby-Doo, not even Lucky, but Malvina, like the islands that the Argentineans were fighting for, tooth and nail, against the British. That’s what interested my parents, political conflict and class struggle.
Ramón Iribarren left when I was two and half years old. My grandmother, my aunt, and my mother explained to me that he’s in Argentina.
A year later we received his last letter, and I’ve never heard anything about him since. My grandmother tells me that after he disappeared, I began to hate vegetables and grew fearful of the dark. I’ve gotten over this, at least the darkness phobia. But even now, before going to bed, I jam a chair against the closet door, because who knows what can come out of there when everything is black.
To imagine what my father looks like, I think of characters that I have seen on television, like the powerful buck king with enormous antlers who appears at the end of the movie Bambi. And why not? We all have a right to think that our father is a good guy. Félix Romero, one of the kids in my class, always said that; maybe because everyone accused his old man of being a mafioso. And if Romero thinks well of his father, I have the right to think that mine is a buck. The problem is that Ramón does not belong to the real world, and talking about him is like trying to paint the portrait of a ghost. I carefully collect the reflections of those who knew him, so as to make a collage of who he may have been. When all this gives me a headache I think again of the king of the deer, which is a lot easier. You are allowed this kind of leeway when your father is an enigma. The only clue he left me was his last letter, a piece of paper in which he drew Smurfs and frogs and squirrels climbing a flowering tree. It looks like something sketched by a preschool teacher. Your father had thick wrists and a very broad back, like a bull, my uncle Patrick, my aunt Guadalupe’s husband, often told me, and he threw back his shoulders and puffed his chest to complete the imitation. Every time I asked him about my father, he said the same thing, and always ended it with the same pantomime. My aunt Guadalupe assured me that my father was an intelligent man, always up-to-date with the news. It seemed that he knew what was happening in any part of the world and spent all his time reading history and economics. He was a sweet papi, Nina used to say, closing her eyes and sighing. Nina was an ancient nanny who cared for me and my cousins when we were infants. Those details are important, the image of the buck with huge antlers has evolved to a figure who has become a supermacho he-man. According to what everyone has told me, my father was an intelligent, strong, and good-looking man. What more can you ask for?
When I was eight, I asked my mother for the first time to take me to Argentina to meet Ramón. She said no, not for the moment, we needed to wait until I was older. The last thing I knew about him was that he was in jail, and I think he’s still there. Someone who knew him back then told me that he had been charged with political offenses.