But what if liquor made it harder to shut herself back down?
What if so much living made you dangerous?
* * *
*
They arrived on the beach before the fishing boat reached the shore, and stood to greet it like long-lost relatives. The fishermen were not surprised to see them, or at least showed no outward signs of curiosity or wonder. There were three of them, with weathered faces and muscled arms, and they welcomed the women with the gentle silence developed over years of hard labor, or so Flaca thought of it, having come from a long line of such men herself. She’d been bracing herself for too-long stares, for prurient interest in them as women visitors unaccompanied by men, sidelong comments like those made by the cart driver the night before, about where their husbands were, why they were alone, what they were looking for in such an isolated place. But none of that came.
“We’re visitors,” she said to them. “Would you sell us some fish?”
The man at the stern nodded. He seemed to be the youngest, perhaps in his twenties. He tipped the nearest basket forward so they could see the fish inside. Heaps of silvery cool flesh.
Flaca waded to the boat and leaned over the edge to look at the wares, choosing fish for their lunch, standing ankle-deep in the waves. Foam engulfed her calves, licked at her legs. She struck up a conversation with the young man. His name was Óscar. His father-in-law, El Lobo, owned the little grocery of Cabo Polonio, which could be found over there, he said, pointing. Flaca was used to men tensing up around her, and his calm, unsmiling ease was refreshing. She placed the fish in a bucket she’d brought for that purpose.
Anita, back onshore, marveled at how competent and prepared Flaca was, how she seemed to have thought of everything. I could trust that girl with my life, she thought. So young and yet so capable. Those hands, so sure of themselves on the slippery fish. Lifting their bodies to right where she wanted them. Making them bend and flash in the sun.
“How much?” Flaca asked, pointing at the full bucket.
The fisherman shrugged. “Whatever you think.”
Flaca counted out pesos and handed them to the man, a generous amount, and they started back toward their makeshift camp. She was elated. They could procure food, and the fishermen would leave them to their haven. Now they were here—more than ever.
“Let’s leave these at our camp, and go for a swim,” Flaca said.
“Good idea, it’s getting hot,” said Romina.
Hands, Anita thought. Flaca’s hands. Underwater, in the ocean, nobody else would see. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”
* * *
*
Paz was finally awake—groggy and smiling—so the five of them changed into their bathing suits and took the path down to the shore. The water called to them, blanketing the sand with its low roar. Come, come. Down the slope, to the shore, to the waves. To the long blue. Feet bare, leaping, sinking into wet sand, dark sand, into the wet darkness. Feet into foam.
Flaca strode in first, Romina close behind her.
“Cold!” Romina cried out.
“Don’t worry, you get used to it. Here—” Flaca cupped up water, threw it toward her.
“¡Ay!”
“It’ll help!”
“Oh, some help!” Romina splashed her back, in mock outrage.
Malena was just behind her, submerged to the neck, giving herself immediately to the ocean.
Paz took courage from the sight of Malena, gliding through the water, eyes closed as if in an indestructible state of prayer. She wanted that, too. The cold pricked at her calves; she hadn’t been in the ocean since she was eleven, since before the dictatorship, when her mother still took her down the coast to a cousin’s beach house for a couple of summer weeks. Now she sometimes bathed in the Río de la Plata, down at Playa Pocitos, a city beach always sure to draw a crowd in the summer, just a short bus ride or long walk from home, and the river there was like the sea, so wide you couldn’t see the other shore, wide enough that she’d come to think of it as the same thing, as almost the same thing. But it was not the same. This water had a different force, a majesty. The Atlantic. Roaring. Reaching all the way to Africa. These waves just the beginning, connected to the wider world. Paz stepped out further and plunged her chest, her neck, her head in until the whole of her was captured by a presence even hungrier than her own.
“Look at that!” Flaca said. “Paz and Malena did it. You see, Romina? Nothing to be afraid of.”
Anita had sidled up beside Flaca. “Nothing?”
Before Flaca could respond, Anita doused her with water.
“Ha!” Romina said. “See now, Pilota, you have to be careful—I’ve got allies!”
Flaca, dripping, turned to Anita in surprise. Anita in her blue polka-dot bikini. Reducing the world to curves and lust. She had never seen her lover’s body—or any of her lovers’ bodies—in the sun. Lovers were for secret places only. Dark places. Now this, so much sky, so much light, and a body catching all that light into its skin.
Anita took her hand and pulled her down into the cold water.
“Swim out with me,” she whispered into Flaca’s ear.
Romina watched them go with a pang of envy, not because she wanted either one of them the way they wanted each other—she hadn’t been with anyone since Flaca, having decided to focus on her studies and keep her head down after the coup, which was easy given that women didn’t make advances under a dictatorship (except Flaca, of course, who’d made it her specialty) and she found boys’ and men’s advances easy to tune out. No. What she envied was their ease and freedom, the flow of their own lust. To come to a place where you could do that, in broad daylight. Look at Flaca: loving a woman so openly, under a broad blue sky. The high of it. She’d watched it play across Flaca’s face. She wondered whether she, Romina, would ever know what that felt like. To love so openly even for a minute of her life. And if the chance did come, would she be able to take it? Even if the other two miracles fell into place—a woman who would love her, and a place where she could love—would she have it in her to love back? What if it never left her, this clench against the Three the Only Three, their stink in her nostrils, their memory scarred into her skin? She could not think too far ahead. She still didn’t know how much they’d done. What was dead inside her or was living. If they’d done it, if they’d started a life—but no. Ocean, no. Are you listening. You can’t I can’t so please. She sank deeper, down to her neck, are you listening. Deeper. Face underwater and the tears mix into waves. Salt to salt. Pain to ocean. Take me. Save me. Hold me, water. And the water did.
* * *
*
Flaca and Anita swam out toward a rock that protruded from the waves, and, when they arrived there, Anita grasped it and kissed Flaca on the mouth. Flaca kissed back, thinking, kissing in the middle of the ocean, well now, there’s a first time for everything. Anita pushed her barely covered breasts against her, her tongue insistent, skin demanding, and soon Flaca stopped thinking, her hands were greedy on Anita’s body, amazed by it, ever amazed, Anita filling her hands like joy and it was all so close, right there, under that skimpy little bikini bottom, which was nothing really, just the flimsiest little ribbon of cloth that you can swoop under like this. She had no foothold, the waves pressed at them, calm waves today and thank God for that because Anita was writhing furiously enough to drown her—“don’t stop,” she murmured, but Flaca thought, What? How to go on? Ridiculous, we can’t go on, one slip and we both drown or crack our skulls against the rocks. But then Anita said it again, “don’t stop.” What will this woman do to me, she thought, wildly, drunk on the question, knowing that she should stop, but she did not, she turned Anita around so that she was facing the rock and could hold on for them both, and she did so roughly, with that way of taking charge that she knew Anita liked. The position itself was awkward, and unstable, but no matter. Flaca could not
deny a woman like Anita. “Hold on tight,” she whispered into Anita’s ear as she slid into her from behind, and then, keeping balance with her free hand on Anita’s waist, she did her lover’s bidding, pretending at power when in fact her life was at the mercy of Anita’s steady grip.
* * *
*
The three other women heard the cries, faintly, gliding in over the water. They could have been the call of a faraway exotic bird, or, perhaps, the song of salt in water, rising from the ocean itself. Romina glanced at Malena, who either hadn’t heard or was pretending so effectively that it amounted to the same thing, that calm collected look she often wore when gathering up her things after lunch to return to the office, everything in order, everything in its place. Then she looked at Paz, who seemed to be trying, and failing, to hide her reaction. Her mouth was open, eyes wide. They should have been more careful, Flaca and Anita, especially with Paz around. And yet, Romina couldn’t wholly fault them. In the city, Flaca lived with her parents, Anita with her husband. They were always fighting for the smallest shreds of privacy. She knew what that was like. Still, Paz was terribly young. It was a situation with no road map.
“You all right?” Romina asked Paz.
“What?” Paz stared at her. “Oh. I—yes.” Her face was solemn. “I mean, I’ve never been better.”
This caught Romina by surprise. She took a good long look at the girl. Who was she? What was going through her mind? She had a recklessness or disregard for normalcy that amazed Romina, a brazenness she could never have imagined at that age. Maybe Flaca was right about her. How had she known?
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said.
Paz blinked furiously. She flashed a quick smile that disappeared as quickly as it had come. Then she pushed off to float on her back in the shallows, leaving Romina to her silent conversation with the ocean.
The couple took a long time to return. When they finally did, Anita arrived first, rising from the waves, dripping, tall, voluptuous, her long hair slick against her shoulders and chest, her knees scraped from the rocks. Glistening Anita, triumphant in the foam. She had the figure, Romina thought, of the women in the superhero comic books her boy-cousins were so obsessed with and surely jerked off with at night, two of which she’d stolen from them and used as a teenager to do the same. Romina could not rip her eyes away, not even when Flaca rose from the water a few paces behind her.
Flaca saw Romina staring. She saw Paz staring, too, closer to the shore. She moved toward Anita, on legs still shaky from sex, moving as if to save her—how? from what?—but then Anita’s posture stopped her. Her lover didn’t need saving. She was beaming. Basking. As if the other women’s stares were rays of sun.
Paz was staring as if the last oxygen in the world were packed into those curves.
She wants her, Flaca thought, she wants my woman. And why wouldn’t she. A stab of surprise and pride and just the tiniest prick of fear.
Though what Paz really longed for, what she couldn’t stop consuming with her eyes, was something else. Something larger than Anita, that spread around her in the sunlight. Happiness. Wholeness. A secret way to be a woman. A way that blasted things apart, that melted the map of reality. Two women in love. That a woman like Flaca should exist, should know what to do with a woman like Anita, have the power to draw out from her those sounds that glided in over the waves. They were the sounds of the world tearing open, into a wider form than it could ever have had before. She felt hot and damp and dwarfed by her own ignorance. She longed to know what Flaca knew. What had happened over by the rocks? How did you get a woman like Anita to look at you that way? She had no idea. She burned to find out. The things that happened in a basement years ago gave her no answers, only questions. The kid, they’d called her on the walk down to the beach, and she’d laughed along with them, but the truth was that she didn’t feel like a kid. At sixteen, she felt old already in a gray trap of a world. All the adults around her were shut down tight, as if they had no inner life, as if no such thing as an inner life existed anymore. You shut down and mind your business and you never make waves, since the slightest ripple could kill you. She had no friends her age because the girls at school were too silly for her, with their chatter about makeup and ways to straighten their hair, nor did they want to be friends with a gangly weird girl like her. As for the boys, they wanted nothing to do with her either as she’d already made it clear that she would never under any circumstances accompany them into the dark janitorial closet at the end of the basement hall, and they had no other use for her. She had no use for them either. She belonged nowhere. Or, more accurately, she had belonged nowhere until this woman, this Flaca, had lifted her out of oblivion with a look, a round of mate, an invitation to the beach. What do you want to be when you grow up? she was asked, all her life, by all the adults around her, though in recent years they asked the question with a new layer of dullness that suggested she should answer with a dream of modest size, a word like secretary or at most teacher, and certainly never social worker or journalist, jobs that made you disappear. She’d never had an answer for the dull adults; the future had seemed too bleak to consider. But now it seemed to her, as she stood knee-deep in waves, that there was no greater life achievement than this, than learning the secrets of how to melt a woman open, and she thought yes, why not, that’s what I want to be when I grow up, a woman like Flaca, and to hell with the danger, to hell with prison cells, to hell with my mother’s disapproval, I don’t even care if they kill me for it. At least I’ll have lived along the way.
Flaca splashed water at Romina, breaking the spell. “¡Epa!”
Romina yelped as the water struck her, and threw water back. “You devil.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Oh! How prim of you!”
Anita cupped her hands, dipped them, and poured foam over herself. She should probably feel guilty for enjoying this moment, this little tussle over her, but instead she felt radiant and alive. “Speaking of prim,” she said, “where’s Malena?”
The others looked at each other. They hadn’t realized Malena was gone. Neither Paz nor Romina knew how long she’d been away from their part of the shore. They scanned the horizon, the sand, the rocks at the edges of the beach, and then, finally, they spied her, a dark speck against the water. She’d swum out farther than any of them. They’d missed her at first, because she’d blended in with the waves.
They called out to her once, then louder, and finally, the third time, she turned and waved.
Years later, after the shattering, they would all think back on that moment: the shock of distance, and the rise of Malena’s arm, its gesture resolute and tiny against the infinite blue.
2
Night Fires
IN CABO POLONIO, night fell like a shroud: softly at first, then decisively and with subsuming power. Nothing escaped the darkness. That second night, Flaca lit a fire in the ring of stones she’d made, and the friends set about preparing dinner. They’d been too hungry after their swim to bother cooking the fish for lunch, and instead had devoured the bread, salami, cheese, and apples they’d brought from the capital. So now, in the dark, at eleven o’clock according to Malena, who was the only one to have brought a watch, they set about preparing the fish for the grill.
“Ugh, don’t make me gut those,” Anita said.
“I shall do it, fair damsel.” Flaca bowed dramatically.
Romina was at her side, chopping carrots. “And what, good caballero, are you going to get in return?”
“A true gentleman, a true caballero, asks nothing in return.”
“Maybe you’re not a caballero at all,” Anita said, “but a caballera.”
“Oho!” Romina raised her knife to the air. “An invented word! What would the Real Academia Española say about that?”
“Forget them,” Anita sai
d. “They don’t own the Spanish language.”
“Actually,” Romina said, “they do. As a high school teacher–in–training, it’s my sad duty to report that if they don’t put it into their dictionary, it’s not part of our great mother tongue.”
“Well, as a high school student,” Paz leapt in, “I’m with Anita.” She was sitting in the dark, legs crossed, watching them in the flickering light of the fire.
Romina glanced up at her wryly. “Of course you’re with Anita.”
Anita beamed over at Paz, who flustered and looked away, then back, smiling.
Flaca, hand inside a cold fish, felt a stab of possessiveness and quickly brushed it aside. She was overreacting. Yes, she’d learned this afternoon that her lover enjoyed the attentions of other women. And so? It didn’t mean anything, did it? She was only teasing Paz, who, after all, was no more than a child. A child Flaca had brought here to take under her wing. She’d been confident that she’d read the girl right; now, there was no question. She was one of them, and how. She couldn’t blame the girl for having eyes in her head, and she herself would have thought the same way in her shoes. What would it be like to be in those shoes, sixteen years old with a group like this, sixteen years old and the nation shut down around you like a cage? Hard to imagine. She hoped they could help Paz, somehow. That they could all help each other. Never in the history of Uruguay had there been a night like this. She sliced another slick belly open. Fish were so much softer than the beef she handled at the shop every day, you had to be careful to keep your knife strokes supple as well as strong. How she loved knives, their smooth power, their simple logic, their opening and opening of flesh. Not to hurt but to feed. Opening flesh could be a gift. Butchers could be kind, loving, spurred by generosity. Her father was like that and her abuelo had been the same.
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