No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo

if his innards only tolerated those first foods from the age before fear set in, the childish pap and puddings that he seemed to yearn for still.
    “So what’s the story with that, the fact that you couldn’t cry for your own father?” he asked, his tone suddenly calm and seeking a quick cease-fire.
    “It’s not a story, I’m allergic to tears. They burn my skin. They’re salty water, after all.”
    “Maybe your personality is shaped a little too much by that allergy.”
    “Perhaps. Those who can cry don’t flee in the face of some sorrow, they stay put and weep until they learn to tame the tears.”
    “And you, on the other hand, fled instead of going to your own father’s funeral. But I’m not sure I buy this whole tears thing. Tell me why you weren’t there, if you loved him so much. Because instead of taking a return flight to Bogotá to bury him, you took another flight, one that brought you to Buenos Aires.”
    “One morning in Madrid, the phone woke me with the news of Papaíto’s death, a massive coronary, his heart had burst into a thousand pieces. I hung up, got up, bathed, dressed, took the train, went into the party’s office in Virgen de los Peligros, near the Puerta del Sol, and told them I was ready to fly to Argentina.”
    “You mean you didn’t even tell them your father had just died?”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    “Think of the party as a mosque, and your feelings and all the other personal stuff as your shoes. Before you enter the mosque you take your shoes off. When Papaíto died, I didn’t tell anyone, and a few days later, I was on a plane to Buenos Aires.”
    “This is bizarre, Lorenza, very very bizarre. You need to explain it to me.”
    “I will, but let me finish my tea in peace first. You know how I love to drink my tea … in peace.”
    There was a brief silence.
    “Ready now?”
    “Here goes. Every single day since I had left my parents’ home, I dreamed about returning. I was doing my duty in Madrid, basically performing supporting tasks for the Argentinean resistance from the outside. I lived my life, followed my passion, worked like crazy. It was fine. Let’s just say that I thought I was fulfilling my destiny, or that thing that we each call our destiny, and who knows what it truly is, or why we insist it’s got to be one thing and not another. We say ‘my true destiny’ with such conviction that who knows where it comes from, but it is the crazy cow that we jump on.”
    She had felt she was fulfilling her destiny, yet deep down what she wanted was to go back home. But she never did it; so perhaps she both wanted to and didn’t want to. Although she would have liked it to be different, the truth was that she missed her father too much and every day she told herself the same thing, today I won’t go back, but tomorrow I will, this week I can’t, but next week I’m out, I can’t take it anymore, I’ll stay for the summer, but by fall I’ll be there, back with my people. And so time passed, and she continued to postpone her return, month after month, year after year. When her father died, a return was no longer possible for her. She had always been able to return to her mother and sister, and in factoften did, but the reunion with her father remained pending. To return for his burial would have been dreadful, that wasn’t the kind of return that she had wanted, she would not have been able to get through it.
    “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told you,” she said. “It’s about my father, a little story about Papaíto. It’s about a present that he sent to me in Madrid a few days before he died. It was a dress that he must have sewn himself at his tailor shop, death looking over his shoulder, although he must not have suspected that, because he was relatively young and the heart attack hit him without warning.
    “I never got that parting gift of his. The news of his death arrived first and I took off for Argentina. Months later, I found