Read Online No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo - Free Book Online

personally, they considered him a legend: after all, he was the secretary of the organization, the one who controlled the strings for the whole clandestine operation. Secret printing presses, movement of money, safe houses, placement of directors, lists of sympathizers, the forging of passports and other documents so that fugitives could sneak out of the country—all this depended on him. In Madrid they knew him well because they often collaborated with him on things that could only be done from the outside.
    “Should we get an ice cream?”
    “Maybe some caramel flan instead.”
    Many Argentineans had sought exile in Madrid and collaboratedfrom there, and comrades from other countries had joined them. She was one of them. They made denouncements, raised funds, and coordinated campaigns all over Europe, hoping to find those who had disappeared still alive somewhere. But the dream that some of them most truly longed for was to return some day to Argentina to join the proper resistance against the dictatorship from the inside.
    “We thought we had to lay it all on the line.”
    “What line?”
    “It’s just another expression, I guess that’s how we put it.”
    “We thought? We put it? Why are you speaking in the plural as if you were a crowd? Like the devil in The Exorcist , who gives me the chills when he says, ‘I am not one, but legions.’ So tell me, why did they call Ramón Forcás?”
    “That’s just what I had asked in Madrid, and since they told me that they had no idea, I recited what I remembered from the Darío poem.”
    “They called Ramón Forcás because his parents were from the country. Pierre and Noëlle. My grandfather Pierre, my grandmother Noëlle. Pierre Iribarren, Noëlle Darretain. Lolé, do you think Grandma Noëlle loved me?”
    “She loved you very much, you were her only grandson. When you were a baby, we dressed you in clothes she knitted for you, wool for the winter and cotton for the summer.”
    “I wonder what became of them, Lorenza. Do you think they’re still alive?”
    “We’ll know when you work up the nerve to call your father, won’t we?”
    Lorenza remembered the mordant incident when Mateo was ten and she found by accident a photograph of Alice Hughes Leeward in his wallet. She was an Englishwoman who had lived for a while in Bogotá, a casual friend of her own mother, but aside from that not very closely connected to the family. But nevertheless, the boy had carefully tucked the photo into his billfold—Alice Hughes Leeward. Lorenza had to laugh.
    “What is this woman doing in your wallet?” she had asked. “Where did you get this picture?”
    “I found it in one of Mamaíta’s albums. Don’t touch it, Lorenza, it’s a picture of Noëlle,” he had responded in a very serious tone, grabbing the wallet from her.
    “Noëlle? Noëlle who?”
    “My grandma Noëlle, Ramón’s mother, my grandma.”
    “Oh, my love!” Lorenza had hugged him. “That’s not Grandma Noëlle, no, no, but if you want a picture of her, we’ll find one somewhere. And you’ll see, Mateo, Grandma Noëlle has beautiful eyes, like yours, you inherited those gray eyes from her.”
    After this incident, Lorenza made it a point to take Mateo to the French Basque country, so he could discover the birthplace of his paternal grandparents and the origins of the blood in his veins. The opportunity arose when she was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on literature at the film festival in neighboring Biarritz. So she dragged Mateo along.
    From the tiny and beautiful village of Ascain, in theheart of Euskal Herria, Mateo sent a letter to his aunt Guadalupe.
    It seems that this is where my grandparents were born, he wrote. We are on one side of a magnificent black stone, sharp as a blade, that’s called La Rhune, the sacred mountain of the Basques. Lorenza says that if my grandparents weren’t born in this village, they were born in one just like it. That’s exactly the kind of