“So wait … my father sent himself a big wooden box,” Mateo said. “This is getting interesting.”
“Yes, he was both the sender and the recipient.”
“I bet it wasn’t an empty box.”
“Right. But see if you can guess what was in it. Believe it or not, your uncle Miche.”
“Uncle Miche? Inside the box?” Mateo laughed. “You’re telling me that my uncle Miche was the merchandise? And what shit was he up to inside that wooden box?”
“Your uncle Miche was to arrive sealed in the box to the deposit safe. He’d come out of his hiding pace in the middle of the night, switch the bags of money for fake ones, keep the real ones with him inside the wooden box, which he would reseal and wait … for your father to claim him the following day.”
“Brilliant! But where did it go wrong?”
“Goye says that according to his wife’s cousin they had done a practice run of the whole thing, in a different shipment, not the one with the money, and everything had gone without a hitch. Uncle Miche had spent the night in the deposit safe without being noticed and on the following day Ramón had successfully claimed him. So far, so good.”
“What a bitch of a life!”
“I know, it’s unbelievable. They repeated the operation, this time for real, on the day the money was sent. But because Uncle Miche is no taller than five feet three inches or so, the box he was in was very heavy, and this time the movers dropped it. Your uncle Miche suffered a tremendous blow to the head and lost consciousness. It seems that he was out when he arrived at the deposit company, and that he only started to come to the following morning, and he groaned.”
“Of course, they heard him. The weird case of the groaning wooden box.”
“They heard him and figured out what was going on, but they didn’t say anything at first. They waited for the recipient to come and claim him and they snatched your father as well.”
“It’s like an episode of the Three Stooges.”
“The two stooges.”
“Typical Ramónism!”
“The moral of the story: don’t hit your head while you’re heading a heist,” she said, and the two broke into fits of uncontrollable laughter.
Ramón and Uncle Miche spent a few months behind bars. Nothing serious, since Miche had never gotten his hands on the money, they couldn’t prove much. Don’t hit your head while you’re heading a heist, Mateo repeated on the way back to the hotel, amused. But when they arrived he suddenly grew morose.
“Don’t laugh anymore, Lorenza. It’s not funny. I would have preferred if Ramón had been a real criminal,” he said. “And that the sentence had been many years. At least that way I could have believed that he never looked for me because he couldn’t, because he was in prison and they wouldn’t let him. A great thug, or a famous underground political leader, someone sentenced to high-security solitary confinement for many years, thinking about me every day, like I think about him. Someone who was sure that as soon as he was let go, the first thing he would do is look for that son he had lost. I swear, Lolé. I had held out such hopes until today. I think I’d rather he was dead. So that I could forgive him. Do you understand? But no, now it seems that he is alive, jailed for some buffoonery.”
29
WHY HADN’T RAMÓN ever looked for Mateo? The question kept Lorenza awake that night. In her insomnia, near dawn, she wanted to put these thoughts to rest and started reading the novel by Bernhard Schlink that she had bought a few days earlier on Avenida Corrientes. And by chance she came upon a passage that perhaps held the only answer to that impossible question. Why hadn’t Ramon looked for Mateo all those years? “There are some things you do just because,” Schlink wrote, “because the conscience dozes, becomes anesthetized, not because we make this or that decision, but because what we decide is precisely not to decide, as if our will is overwhelmed by the impossibility of finding a way out and decides to stop pedaling and idles while it can.” Perhaps the reason Ramón did not look for Mateo was simply because he did not look for him. Perhaps there was no other answer but that, leaving a void where the boy so much wanted answers.
Lorenza read Schlink’s passage several times, thinking that she would have to read it to Mateo. Or maybe not, it would be too difficult for him. She had always tried to protect her son from the pain of the past, as if she could suppress it by simply not naming it. Silencing words had been her main tool, and perhaps it was for that, more than the acts themselves, that Mateo could not forgive her. He couldn’t forgive her for minimizing the past, making it seem unimportant, trying to neutralize it, avoiding the topic, not reacting to it. It was possible that Mateo felt that when she came between him and the raging bull of his abandonment, she prevented him from seeing it fully, and left him defenseless against its charge. It was possible that Mateo believed that by denying the loneliness of abandonment, instead of exorcising it, she helped to multiply it, leaving him even more alone. Or was it her own fault, her role in everything which she tried to camouflage with euphemisms?
At breakfast the following morning, all these questions had been reduced to the phantoms of her sleeplessness, truths intuited but not fully integrated. The insomniac night once again constrained her to futile gestures and truncated language, because how could she name such things without deepening the wound, where could she find rhyme or reason? There are never good enough reasons for a father’s abandonment, and that made it unnamable. Idling, the Schlink passage said, how well it applied to Lorenza.
30
LORENZA AND MATEO had a couple of bad days following that, dejected and keeping their distance from each other in reverse, the boy holed up in his dark mood and not coming out of his room, and Lorenza sleepless at night and struggling to work while dozing off during the day. On returning to the hotel, all she had to do was see the PLEASE DON’T DISTURB sign hanging on the door to guess that inside the beds would be unmade, towels would be strewn on the floor, the drapes drawn, and in the middle of the shipwreck her son, in his pajamas still, hair uncombed, subsisting on chocolates, potato chips, and Coca-Colas from the minibar, and in a catatonic state in front of his PlayStation, which would be spitting smoke from hour after hour of continual use. She had always been afraid of the PlayStation. It sounded ridiculous, the idea of fearing such an object, a toy. But that’s how it was. The way that Mateo allowed himself to be devoured by the thing made her anxious. It put her on edge — the repetitive little electronic music that invaded him and transported him to a distant world, hyperkinetic and overpopulated with kicking and punching cartoons, who fired machine guns, jumped over barrels, climbed towers, fell over dead, came back to life, crossed through labyrinths, drowned in a moat, and tossed grenades, always at an unsustainable ultrahuman rhythm that was in stark contrast with the statuesque stillness that was Mateo, because aside from his dancing pupils and his thumbs, which punched at buttons in sync with the frenzy on the screen, everything else about him was stillness, absence, hypnosis. And of course, the frightening thing wasn’t the game but what Mateo did not say, what he avoided, what he denied when he sat down in a lotus position, like a boy Buddha, in front of that strange illuminated altar. After Mateo learned about the circumstances surrounding his father’s prison sentence, he decided to close his ears and mouth and wanted to know nothing more about him, about Buenos Aires, but also nothing more about his mother.
He announced that he would return to Bogotá as soon as they could get a plane reservation, and she could find no arguments to dissuade him. There was no way she could get him to allow them more time to find a less disheartening finale to the trip that they had undertaken with such great hopes.