No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo

finca that her father had left her in the countryside outside Bogotá.
    “A finca called San Jacinto that you never got to see,” Lorenza told her son. “It was a lovely place, a little valley covered in mist in between two blue mountain ranges.”
    Along with the documents, Mamaíta had sent money and a letter in her clear and beautiful handwriting, words made uncertain by grief. She had also sent a pair of high-heeled Bally shoes, made of grape-colored suede, which somany years later Lorenza still remembered as if she were holding them in her hands. Ever loving Mamaíta, to think about presents at such a time. And Bally shoes at that, how crazy, who would think of such an extravagance? Of course, in the Argentinean party the women had to dress up, not like in Bogotá or in Madrid, where they all went with the complete identikit: faded jeans, military vest, native backpack, and lace-up boots with thick rubber soles, like those of a construction worker, what her father had called her little communist boots. In Argentina, one had to adopt almost the opposite type of disguise: comb your hair neatly, wear perfume, put on stockings and other feminine accessories. They even wore nail polish, which Lorenza applied with great care. But no Ballys. The Ballys didn’t fit the profile, they were too much.
    “That’s funny, so now you were a landlord with this property in San Jacinto,” Mateo teased her.
    “I would have done anything for the comrades not to look at me as some well-off girl playing at revolution. But that’s probably how they did see me.”
    “And the Colombians?”
    “What Colombians?”
    “The husband and wife who gave you the shoes you didn’t like.”
    “I did like them, they were divine, but I wasn’t going to risk wearing them.”
    The Colombian couple wanted Lorenza to have dinner with them, a simple meal, they warned her, just family, andthey served a cheese and mushroom omelet. Of course, they knew nothing of her activities in Buenos Aires. They thought she was in school because that’s what Mamaíta had told them. During dinner, as they chatted about nothing in particular, dogs and horses, the wife mentioned in passing that Videla was a great horseman, an outstanding example, and that she admired him because of his role in restoring Argentinean values. A piece of omelet got stuck in Lorenza’s throat, but she remained quiet, and bit by bit the conversation returned to the safe territory of animals and Colombian soap operas, and the icy rain that fell over the Bogotá savannah. The husband seemed to be somewhere else, dozing off, but suddenly he would jolt up and interrupt his wife.
    “We Argentineans are right and human.” He kept repeating this because the saying was so catchy, he said. It was the first time that Lorenza had heard that slogan, coined by the reactionaries as a response to the denunciations against human rights violations in Argentina that had begun to spread all over the world. “What ingenious nonsense—right and human!” the husband went on. “You have to admit that whoever came up with it had a stroke of genius. With a little phrase they shut up all the government detractors. Damn, what valuable nonsense!”
    “Those Argentinean generals are top-notch,” the wife assured, “very white and well-heeled. Not like ours, those chubby little darkies. But they are selfless, our poor military men, how well I know about their selflessness and capacity for sacrifice. And these Argentinean generals, what modelmen, with such refined educations, fluent in French and English, with perfect accents, just between us, they’re divine, from the best families. I never imagined that a military man could speak perfect French. How could I have? In Colombia they can’t even speak Spanish well.” Lorenza listened to all this feeling as if the blood was going to burst from her veins. Please, Papaíto, she prayed, don’t let a word escape my lips, don’t let me utter some insult now that