“Nice,” Mateo smiled. “Everything in the open air, like farmers. In the middle of the city, Forcás lived like a farmer. I like that. Now I see how his name became him.”
“In the summer things got ugly. Because the heat and humidity were so suffocating, you barely stepped outside the range of the fan before you began sweating buckets. But in the winter it was pleasant, that’s the truth. I returned to the house each evening about eight or nine and I loved finding your father leaning back on a chair, sipping his maté, with the cats on his lap and his feet resting on the open oven door.”
“His feet must have charred,” Mateo said.
“He had his shoes on. It was a gas oven and since there wasn’t any heating, we kept it on and open so that the place stayed warm. But in general, we wouldn’t see each other during the day. We both left early to fulfill our tasks for the party, not having any idea where the other one was, and it was nice to come back at night and realize that the other one had returned unharmed. I swear, Mateo, the reunion each night was a gift. When you go fearing the worst, it’s a relief to find out that nothing has happened. And so we passed the time, day by day, very much in love, not knowing about what was going to happen the next day, not guessing too much either.”
“Were you scared?”
“When I remained alone in the house.”
Sometimes Aurelia had to stay alone for the night in Coronda, because Miche, who ran a collective, had the night shift, Azucena wasn’t home yet, and Forcás was traveling. She locked the door securely and bundled herself up in the Aymara blanket, Abra and Cadabra curled up by her feet, and began to feel as if the panic that spread throughout the neighborhood outside seeped in through the cracks in the wall and flooded the room. She couldn’t fall asleep for thinking of the basements where people bled to death in the dark, their fingernails ripped off; of the pregnant woman from the neighborhood who had disappeared the week before; or of a comrade who had turned up cut to pieces in the gutter. When she heard the sound of a lone motor outside, she stood on the bed to look out the window and her blood went cold if it was a green Ford Falcon without plates, the fed cars, the true vehicles of death, which now and then parked in the empty lot across the street. Fortunately, around four, the trucks began to arrive to unload and that was the saving grace, life returning with all its noise to frighten off the ghosts, and then finally Aurelia could sleep, lulled by the voices of the truck drivers, which in the coldness of dawn offered each other some maté, or a Faso. It was a sign that the night had been left behind and that she was safe, and she slept soundly until six, when Miche, who returned from his shift, came into the room without knocking, with the day’s newspaper in one hand and bags of the night’s business in the other, to talk about the news and ask if she wanted breakfast. It was an issue trying to convince him that he had to knock before coming in; she never finally succeeded. He argued, convincingly, that no one should have to ask permission to go into his own bathroom. Besides, the kitchen was his domain; he was the one who generally cooked for everyone, and it was pretty tasty, especially his milanesas with puree and salad. Before working in the collective he had been a butcher, and in his room he still kept a hair-raising collection of cleavers and Swiss knives that he had once used for his profession.
“So they treated you pretty well,” Mateo said.
“Yes, always. Forcás did whatever he could so that I felt at home. But not always. I do remember a specific case …”
Aurelia had bought a Japanese lantern, one of those round ones with rice paper that you see everywhere. She hung it from a string over the table, connected the electric wire, and was happy with it. She thought that it added a nice ambiance to the room. It was the first thing, aside from her clothes, that she had brought into Coronda. That night, Miche began to ridicule her immediately for putting up such a thing, and began to jab it as if it were a punching bag, quickly destroying it.
“Forcás watched him and did nothing to stop him. He let Miche destroy the lantern,” Lorenza said.
“That’s not unusual,” Mateo said. “The house had belonged to the two brothers before you arrived.”
“But that was really the only time they made me feel like an intruder.”
“Maybe it was some sort of initiation ritual, a baptism of blood.”
“Well, of paper in this case. But after that night, Coronda was as much mine as theirs, and Azucena’s, of course.”
“And what about Ramón when he eventually came to live in your place in Bogotá, did he feel the same?”
“It wasn’t my house. I didn’t have a house. We rented an apartment together, and with you, who had already been born. On the wall of your room, I put up a huge poster of wild horses, and you liked it when—”
“Wait, wait,” Mateo interrupted her, “what I want to know is if Ramón was as content in that place in Bogotá as you were in Coronda.”
“No. He was miserable. We had left Argentina at my request, distancing ourselves from the party. You were going to be two, we had gone through three tyrants, one after the other and each with his blood spilling — the generals Videla, Viola, and Galtieri. I couldn’t take it anymore. The anguish over the fact that something might happen to us before four in the afternoon, and that no one could pick you up from the sitter, was killing me. That was the worst part of the fear, that it would be four o’clock and no one would be there to pick you up at the sitter.
“For your safety and for my peace of mind, Ramón agreed to move to Bogotá and distance himself from everything that was his, the party, his comrades, what he liked to eat, and the only job he knew how to do. And in Bogotá, I forgot about him and left him very alone and isolated. For some reason, I remember with an almost photographic memory each of the objects that we had in Coronda and not even one of the objects we put up in the apartment in Bogotá; except for the poster in your room, I don’t remember any of them.”
One of the lines in that letter from Ramón that she did not read, the one that he left for her during the dark episode, said “exiled from everything, even your love.” And, “I’m taking the boy, the only thing that is mine.”
“Then you did read the letter.”
“No, only those lines.”
“I need a screwcork to pull information out of you.”
“Corkscrew.”
“Yeah, that. You know, there are times I would like to forgive him.”
“Wanting to forgive is already a form of forgiving, I suppose.”
“But no, no, he was a bullshitter, I wasn’t the only thing that he took with him. He also took that money that wasn’t his.”
37
AURELIA HAD BEEN in Coronda for only a brief while when Forcás announced that the leadership of the party wanted to meet with her. Aside from Forcás himself, Águeda and Ana would be there, two of the party’s historic directors. They were known to be powerful and mysterious, and spent most of the time outside of the country, from where they pulled strings, and their methods were known to be relentless.
“It was very rare that they would attend a meeting,” Lorenza told her son. “To meet Águeda and Ana was quite an opportunity. Ninety percent of the party membership had likely never seen them in person, only in photographs.”