No Place for Heroes Read Online Free PDF Page B

continuing to shadowboxagainst 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.”

T HE 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