“Do you want to talk, Mateo?” Lorenza asked him, but her son was so absorbed in the game that he did not even respond.
“Son, don’t you think we should talk?” she insisted.
“No, Lolé, anything you say will make me feel like shit. I don’t like the way you talk to me.”
“I’m doing what I can, kiddo, telling you about things as they happened—”
“That’s the problem, you are Wonder Woman and the whole story is like a screenplay for an action film. Your Ramón is a comic-book hero. He does this thing here. Zap! Wap! Does that thing there. Boom! Shoom! He falls, he gets up. Krak! Crock! He’s arrested, released, fights against the villains, against the good guys. It doesn’t make sense, Lorenza, do you understand? That fiction has nothing to do with the Ramón who is my father. My father is a weirdo, a shitty crook, a frustrated one at that, who doesn’t have the balls to show his face, to come offer me some explanations. What does your wide-shouldered warrior have to do with that bastard who erases himself, who disappears? Riiiiiiiiing … Riiiiiiing … Hello? Who is it? No one, nobody, no response, I don’t know, wrong number, who gives a shit.”
“Couldn’t you wait for me a few days, Mateo, until I finish my duties here in Buenos Aires, and then we can return together to Bogotá?” she asked. “Or if you want, you can go tomorrow morning to Bariloche, and do some skiing until I come pick you up.”
But Mateo refused outright. The only thing he wanted was to be left alone and in peace, submerged in his PlayStation, lost to the world.
31
ON THE THIRD day of Mateo’s isolation, Lorenza decided to cancel all her appointments and stay in the hotel with him, playing with him on the PlayStation, to see if she could reestablish some sort of contact in this manner. If Muhammad can’t go to the mountain, the mountain is going to have to sit down at the PlayStation.
“Can I play with you?” she asked.
“No, you don’t know how.”
“You can teach me.”
“You’re too old, you don’t have the reflexes.”
“So try me.”
“All right, but let’s play Dynasty Warriors.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Lock the door and hang up the sign, so no one interrupts.”
“Who’s going to interrupt?”
“Just hang the sign, will you? Dynasty Warriors is my favorite of all the PlayStation games. You play in steps, and the more you advance, the more skilled Wei-Wulong becomes and the more powers he acquires,” he explained, suddenly very talkative. Speaking of Wei-Wulong filled him with pride, as if he himself were the one who possessed those powers. Lorenza hung the sign on the doorknob and they entered, Wu, Shu, and Wei, the three kingdoms of Dynasty Warriors, where everything was brutal and luminous. Here there was no resting, but also no fatigue; the battles were ferocious but devoid of blood and bodies, because when an enemy was eliminated, all it did was flash and disappear right away. Mateo barely blinked, everything about him was concentration, tension, and alert reflexes, his vision good only for the vertiginous slashes of the swords. Lorenza noticed how amid those brilliant, sparkling colors, the room vanished and the other world slowly shut off, a slow and boring thing. At this moment, Mateo does not exist, she thought. Wei-Wulong has taken possession of my son.
“Didn’t you say you were going to show me?” she asked, and her voice startled Mateo, who had completely forgotten she was there.
He replied that he would, and began to explain the game to her, not handing over the controls yet, telling her when she should bring out the catapults, when she should use the drawbridges, how to score points. Finally, she got him to turn over the controls, but because she played horribly he quickly grew impatient, upset with her and with her incompetence, and made her turns shorter and shorter as he made his longer. His explanations, at first very enthusiastic, became more sporadic and succinct, until he again immersed himself fully in what seemed like a religious silence.
Lorenza soon opened the door and left the room, and Mateo did not even notice.
32
“EXACTLY FIFTEEN DAYS afterward Ramón left with you,” Lorenza begins to tell him.
“He didn’t leave with me, Mother. He kidnapped me.”
“Fifteen days after that—”
“It’s not called ‘that,’ it’s called disappearing a kid. You, who tell the story of the disappeared in Argentina so often, are afraid of the word when it deals with your own son.”
“It’s not the same, Mateo, you know that.”
“It’s not the same, but it’s very similar.”
“Similar, perhaps, but not really. Let me go on. Fifteen days later I found out that just as I had expected, he had fled with you to Argentina. It was confirmed by a very unexpected source.”
“Slow down, Lorenza. Slow down, you’ve never told me this part.”
“So be patient and you’ll hear it.”
That whole week passed without a call from Ramón. They called her, however, from La Crónica. The director of the magazine, who had given her as much time off as she needed, and who did anything he could to help her, told her that a very serious-looking man had shown up in the newsroom asking for her and saying he had news about her husband. A funny word, husband, which Lorenza never used to refer to Ramón, and that those who knew them well would not have used either.
She was there in less than an hour to meet a man who gave her a business card that said he was Joaquín Alberio Pinilla, Attorney. But clearly not just any attorney, his smile shone revealing gold fillings and extremely white porcelain implants, his extremely black curls were just beginning to go gray, and in front of the building he had parked an exceedingly silver Toyota, of the kind that narco traffickers owned. When she had investigated and written about organized crime, Lorenza interviewed some of these lawyers, who acted as spokespersons and representatives for the Mafia.
“If I am not mistaken, you signed this,” the man said, pulling out of his pocket a check for one hundred and fifty thousand pesos, a very large sum for her then, considering that her salary was twenty-eight thousand a month. The check was signed in her handwriting and had come from her checkbook. It was dated the day before. “Your husband, the Argentinean señor, gave it to my boss a month ago, postdated, shall we say. Yesterday the date came up and my boss sent me to cash it, and I’m sorry, it was returned for lack of funds. I understand that your husband is no longer in Colombia, so with all due respect, you are going to have to answer for this.” The man fanned himself with the check while he proffered smiles and variant courtesies.
He told her that he respected her and simultaneously disrespected her by addressing her using the familiar Lorencita, a little verbal manhandling that she decided to allow faced as she was with that compromising check and no funds.
“My boss reads La Crónica and admires you very much. He recognizes that you are a top-class journalist, and precisely because of that does not want to proceed with a court case, shall we say. The amount of the check is not the problem, but we’re talking about principles here. My boss doesn’t like to be … toyed with. Do you understand?”
“I do understand, Mr. Pinilla, but tell me, what was my husband’s check for?” asked Lorenza, already guessing.