It was Saturday again when Isabel called, inviting me over for a family lunch that included Tito and Cecilia. Afterward, the two of us went for a walk in the neighborhood. It felt almost like an urban version of that first summer in Pinamar: hot concrete instead of sand and scurrying waves under our feet, rambling conversations that touched on everything except our feelings for each other. Passing Plaza Güemes and the children playing on the church steps shadowed by palm trees, I said, “It’s lovely here.”
“It’s wealthy, you mean,” Isabel replied.
“Not everything has to be political, does it, Isa?”
“No? What else can it be?”
“There’s the personal side of things too, isn’t there?”
She shrugged. “They’re the same to me—the personal and political. They always have been, Tomás.”
Truthfully, I couldn’t disagree. Even as a teenager, she’d called her mother hypocrite more liberally than most. “You complain, you want change,” she’d rail, “but you don’t do anything for it,” and it was hard to know if she was referring to the country’s state or her mother’s, after her father had left them.
Had Isabel become a Peronist because she was a rebel, or a rebel because she was a Peronist? The chicken-and-egg of it was hard to determine, but I tended toward the former explanation. Peronism was the ideal vehicle for those like her who wanted change but didn’t necessarily possess a full-fledged ideology or agenda. After the man himself was booted from the country in ’55 and his party proscribed, their right-wing aspects were widely forgotten and the label evolved into a catchall for populism of every stripe, a handy banner for anyone who wanted to step on the battlefield. (Indeed, the Montonero guerrillas originally took up arms to bring Perón back from exile, before growing into a broader insurrection against state oppression.) The word almost had spiritual connotations now; for some, it was a moral lifestyle as much as a fight against injustice. As Isabel had said on that same walk, “Peronism is like poetry—it can’t be explained, only recognized.”
For me, it was about a different kind of poetry. The headlines, Isabel’s activism and volunteer work—in a sense, that was all background, the stage on which everything else was meant to happen. I believed in the leftist cause, the fight for liberty and justice, et cetera. But I tacked on that “et cetera” willingly, indifferent to the details. I was more interested in the forest than the trees, and more interested still in getting lost in it, catching the contagious energy that would lead Isabel to bounce off me in exactly the right way.
“Well, I’m glad to know you take your personal life seriously, then,” I said.
“Deadly seriously,” Isabel said, linking her arm in mine.
That night, her friends came back to Pichuca’s basement. We drank and smoked and talked until midnight, and then someone put on a Sly and the Family Stone album.
“You don’t still just listen to the Beatles, do you, Tomás?” Isabel said, rising from the couch, her hips swaying. I shook my head and followed her. Jiggling and jumping with the others, tittering at the more preposterous moves, we danced for hours, as if it was pure fun the revolution depended on.
“I didn’t think you’d like it,” Isabel said to me during a break, drinking water for a change because we’d been at it long enough to start sweating.
“Dancing? I don’t.”
“You smile a lot while dancing for someone who doesn’t like it.”
“I’m not smiling because of the dancing.”
She smiled too. Then she refilled her glass with booze and led me by the hand back into the fray.
Nothing happened between us that night, or the two other nights like it when we danced in her basement. But the horizon continued to shimmer with possibility, political and otherwise. In Isabel’s presence, existence had a quicker-seeming pulse, and the signs piled up in such profusion that I couldn’t help but seek a pattern in them, a confirmation. Soon, I told myself, soon we’d get caught up in that slice of the future as well.
EIGHT
As March rolled around, the tremors of fear became harder to ignore. You’d see more television screens with showily waving Argentine flags and catch more speeches from admirals and generals about the war for liberty and democracy, the exact terms their opponents used. You’d see more soldiers in the street, more police barriers. (The ID checks came later, along with unexplained street closings and the need to have your documents on you in public at all hours.) You’d notice the first trickles of inflation, the stress of shoppers in grocery stores deploring the rise in prices. You’d read headlines about shoot-outs in which only the “terrorists” were killed, and none of the soldiers or officers were so much as wounded. You’d hear the voice of a famous activist priest like Mugica on the radio advocating for volunteer work in the villas and arguing on behalf of Peronism or socialism or some other ism that ran counter to the government’s increasingly reactionary stance, and a few days later you’d hear another famous voice on the radio say he’d been killed. In these cases, it was the terrorists who were said to have done the killing, and in these cases alone, they somehow always escaped.
You heard rumors. Someone hadn’t been heard from in a couple days, hadn’t shown up at home either. Someone else, a professor, had suddenly taken a post abroad—in Mexico, the tale usually went, but occasionally there were more outlandish destinations, like Switzerland or Norway. You remembered the stories parents told kids about how an aged dog had been taken to some arcadia in the country where it could run free, and you wondered if these tales were like that.
The one thing you never heard were the shots. For all the talk, death and violence and war remained off-screen. But the forces behind them seemed no less powerful for that. To the contrary, they had more the aura of magic as a result, a sorcerer’s unstoppable reach. Again, if I startled when the Colonel gave me his revolver, it was probably less because of the gun itself than because, against such invisible might, it seemed a puny, pointless sort of shield.
* * *
Not that I felt terribly in danger myself. On subsequent visits, the Colonel had been nothing but reassuring, telling me it was just a lot of noise, soon enough Argentina would return to its normal level of insanity. “Don’t worry, Tomasito,” he’d say, gesturing at the plush armchairs and glossy green plants around his living room while talking heads fearmongered on the TV about the Montoneros. “The truth is, life here is more under control than we pretend.” Mercedes plied me with wine and food and questions whenever I came over, the Colonel with his whiskeys and soliloquies. They’d insist I stay the night in the spare bedroom if it got late, and took it on themselves to be the unbroken, loving parent set I hadn’t had for nine years.
There was also the resumption of classes to distract me, the immersion in a new routine. Biology labs with fetal pigs suddenly consumed my time, organic chemistry assignments and reading for an English literature seminar at the Cambridge Institute the Colonel had suggested I sign up for. I had a physics class too, and I was surprised to find my housemate Beatriz there in the front row of the lecture hall, taking diligent notes as if nothing could be more important.
Of course, it was Isabel who most kept the sense of peril at bay. History came and went, especially in this country. But love? Once in a lifetime, boludo, if you were lucky. And I believed I was.
Her buoyancy in spite of everything was infectious. Once she asked me over to help her and Nerea cook a casserole for people in the villa after one of them had been arrested, and, laughing, she blamed the tears in her eyes on the onions she’d been chopping. Another time, she took me on a long walk past Colegiales and the cemetery in Chacarita to a run-down neighborhood I didn’t know the name of, and when I joked that a lot of our strolls lately had been down streets where I worried we’d be killed, Isabel told me, “You’re not worried, Tomás.” Then she opened the backpack she’d been carrying and pulled out two cans of spray paint. “Ar
e you?”
Taking one, I watched her go to the door of the boarded-up house we’d stopped at and spray a long blue line that curved at the bottom. A J.
“What do I write?” I asked, joining at her side.
“I was going to do ‘Justice for All.’ How about you do something a bit more serious, like . . . ‘Fatherland or Death.’”
“‘Fatherland or Death,’ really?”
She shrugged and laughed, focusing on the loop of her U. Hesitating a moment, I gave the can a shake and sprayed. But I held it level too long and then overcorrected, making a thick white dot with a jagged tail that looked like an elongated comma. “Shit.”
“Boludo,” Isabel said. She took my wrist with her free hand and, moving it in a swift but measured arc, completed the P for Patria. “You got it?”
My heart was beating fast and pleasurably, and Isabel was looking at me with that sly smile that made my limbs tingle, and I shook my head. “I think you’re going to have to help me the whole way,” I said.
She laughed and grasped my arm again, and I wasn’t worried about a thing.
* * *
The following Sunday afternoon, Isabel called and proposed the two of us go for another walk—“The Bosques this time, don’t panic.” I pointed out the sky was ominously gray, and she replied, “Who cares?” She didn’t want to be “cooped up,” rain clouds and the demise of the nation be damned.
Neither of us wore jackets or boots or even brought umbrellas. “Thank God you’re as ridiculous as me,” Isabel said. “Caring about bigger things and all that.”
“Rain is tiny,” I agreed. “Speaking of which . . . what ever happened to your ex?” I segued gracefully, earning a chuckle.
“Nothing happened with him. Literally,” she said, to my immense gratification. “It was like dating a fish.”
“Not one of those Japanese fighting ones, I take it?” Cecilia’s husband wanted one for his tank, a trend among upper-class porteños lately.
“I wish,” Isabel said. “More like a trout. But let me guess—your girlfriend, what was she? A goldfish?”
“That’s cruel even for you, Isa,” I said.
A thunderclap serendipitously thumped its approval. We smiled at each other just as the first fat drops landed on our upturned palms, then took off running back to Pichuca’s. Too late by a long shot—we arrived soaked, Isabel’s shrieks and snorts of laughter disappearing prettily into the rocky symphony of the storm.
Neither Pichuca nor Nerea was home, so we felt no need to go to the basement. Or to turn on the lights, though it was nearly dark enough outside to be night. Isabel didn’t bother changing on getting home, and her nipples, erect with cold, were visible through her wet top. It was black, with little white and yellow flowers that looked like happy honeybees. At least to my fogged mind, they looked happy. Isabel had rolled a joint—Rodolfo apparently had connections in Punta del Este with rich international types—and, deciding marijuana posed no risk to my asthma, I’d taken several deep hits. Isabel had also prepared a mate, and the smoky smells mixed, giving the usually stuffy living room a cabinlike ambience. It reminded me of Pinamar: our sitting across from each other on the shag rug like when we were teenagers, Isabel moving her wet hair from one side of her neck to the other the way she used to after a swim.
“Why’d you stop going? Pinamar, I mean,” I clarified.
“I knew what you meant,” Isabel said. “It didn’t feel very grown-up, I guess. Not real, you know?”
“I don’t,” I confessed.
“It was like something out of a movie. God, your mother’s bathing suits—she looked like she’d walked out of a catalog from the twenties. The whole thing was a bubble, and I had this urge to pop it. You remember that piece of glass I stepped on?”
It had been a pivotal moment for me that first summer. Isabel had returned from a solitary stroll on the beach with a bad cut in her foot from a broken beer bottle, and during the hectic rush to get her medical help, she kept insisting not to make a fuss, she was fine, better than fine. After she got her stitches, I asked her how she could have been okay with a gash the size of something out of an American slasher flick, and she laughed and said it was hilarious.
“Hilarious?”
“Please, did you see the look on their faces? It was like they’d never seen pain. You, though—you were no more scared than I was, were you, Tomás? No,” she continued with such authority I believed her. “You and I—we’re not scared of pain.”
I’d never understood why that experience was so seared onto my memory. Something about being hoisted up to her level at the very moment when I was certain I couldn’t be further from it, possibly—nothing had felt more like real love to me.
“What’s the piece of glass got to do with anything?” I asked, after a minute listening to the rain patter against the window.
“Don’t you know why I stepped on it?”
“I assume you didn’t see it.”
“I saw it. It was sticking straight out of the sand.”
“You’re saying you cut your foot on purpose, Isa?”
“Crazy, no? I was such a mess. And here we are talking about it like it was the greatest time of our lives. Don’t get me wrong, there was happiness. Fun and joy and the rest. But even that, even us”—it was the closest she’d come to overtly acknowledging our history—“it came out of a kind of flatness, you know? A kind of emptiness. I wanted to feel—what, I didn’t much care.”
“So, sleeping with me was like stepping on a broken bottle?” I said, hoping for a laugh.
But Isabel shook her head. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she said softly. She was fidgeting with the straw of the mate, digging it up and down in the yerba grounds. “Anyway, we never actually slept together.”
“Happy to correct that oversight,” I said, surprising myself. Thankfully, I could make out the faint, shadowed smile on her face.
“We’re very different, Tomás. Why we’re such good friends, isn’t it? I just worry sometimes you wouldn’t understand. The instinct that made me step on that bottle, that’s made me do much worse. There are ugly, violent parts in me that I don’t know that I want you to see. You, for instance—what’s the worst thing you could ever do to someone?”
“The worst . . . ?” The question caught me completely off guard.
“Do you think you could ever kill someone?”
“Kill someone? Shit, I don’t know, Isa. Do you?”
“You know a lot, Tomás. More than you pretend.”
I tried to reconcile this with what she’d said moments ago. She didn’t want me to see who she really was, but I did—was that the issue?
“You don’t need to hide from me, Isa,” I promised her. “Never. Don’t you know? I’ll always—”
“Shh, Tomás,” Isabel said. It was the same whisper with which she used to enter my room in Pinamar, and I was powerless before her again, a toy in her grasp. She rose and offered me her hands. I took them, and she pulled me to my feet and started leading me toward her bedroom.
“Another dangerous walk, after all,” I said, and now she did laugh. Then she shushed me again and closed the door behind us.
I’d never more than glanced inside her room, and the youthfulness of certain furnishings struck me: the small red rocking chair in the corner and the stuffed monkey sitting in it, the hummingbird-decorated coverlet on the bed. So not the Isabel I knew.
“Who’s the monkey?”
“You’re the monkey,” she said, and I turned to find her smirking. I stepped closer. She put her hand on my neck and brought me closer still. When we kissed, I could taste the earthy, bitter traces of the mate on her tongue.
She gave me a shove toward the bed, and I allowed myself to fall back. She straddled me, and I clutched her waist. I was about to remove her top when she slid to my side, and her fingers wandere
d over my jeans. She unzipped them and took hold of me with such a firm grip I gasped. As had happened more than once in Pinamar, I barely lasted a few seconds.
She continued holding me some time afterward, until my breathing eased and my muscles stopped their tiny spasms. Then she let go and rolled over, her palm tilted toward the ceiling so as not to make a mess.
“I’m sorry,” I said at length, finding her smile across the pillow.
“Don’t be. I’m glad,” she said, and I tried to be glad too. To revel in the release, the lush, sinking feeling of my body next to hers.
“You sure it’s okay?” I asked her, suddenly aware of the dampness of the sheets under us.
“Of course, Tomás. I just need to wash my hands.”
She got up and went to the bathroom. It felt like an eternity that I listened to the faucet running. I zipped my pants back up and sat forward to wait for her.
When she returned, she stopped at the threshold. “The other Aroztegui ladies will probably be home soon. See you later this week?”
“Whenever you want,” I said. She lent me an umbrella and gave me another long kiss before seeing me out, her teeth ever so gently biting my lip.
* * *
My clothes hadn’t fully dried yet, and on the bus ride home I felt chilled and out of sorts. The experience had been so contradictory: too fast but also incredibly drawn out, abrupt yet clearly the result of a long simmering in us both. When I got back to my pensión, I found out I’d gotten a phone call, and my heart fluttered for an instant. But it was only my mother, calling for her Sunday-night check-in.
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