“No, but really, I mean it,” Paz went on. “Why should those stuffy old people in Madrid decide whether we can or can’t say caballera?”
“Or cantora?” Romina said.
“Cantora?” Anita looked confused. “You mean, a singer?”
“Oh, my sweet innocent dove,” Flaca said, and her chest ached warmly as she said it.
“Don’t you ‘sweet innocent’ me,” Anita said. “I have a lot to learn, but I’m learning fast.”
“Oh, nobody doubts that,” Romina said.
Laughter rose and wrapped around them.
“So yes, a cantora is a singer,” Romina said, “for the Real Academia Española. But it has another meaning for us.”
“A cantora,” Flaca said, flopping another fish into the clean pile, “is a woman who sings.”
“A woman like us,” Malena said, with such a clear steady voice that they all turned to her in surprise. She’d been so quiet throughout this conversation that they’d forgotten she was there. Her job had been to gather bricks from the abandoned house to hold up the flat grill top Flaca had brought from home; they sat in orderly piles beside her.
Romina stared at Malena. “So you are, then? A cantora?”
Malena looked at her, eyes wide. “I suppose that’s what I just said.”
“You did,” Anita said.
They all waited for Malena to say more, but she just stared into the fire, and the silence filled with the low roar of waves.
Anita rolled the word across her mind. Cantora. Its connotations were beautiful, but also obscene, depending on how you approached it.
They became aware of the lighthouse beam, swirling slowly across them in a slow bright pulse.
Romina put a pot of water on the fire, to boil the carrots, and the women gathered round.
“All right, Romina,” Anita said, “how about you tell us how you met Flaca?”
To Anita’s surprise, Romina did as she requested, detailing the story of the Communist Party meeting, how good Flaca smelled in her men’s cologne—“the daring, can you imagine?” “Yes I can,” answered Anita—and the month of friendship that culminated in a dance club bathroom. This brought shouts of delight from the other three women; even Malena seemed to brighten with curiosity. Romina went on to summarize their months together and her months of hiding in Tacuarembó when waves of kidnappings took hold of the city. To Flaca’s relief, Romina left out the part about the other lovers Flaca had taken up with when Romina was away, ending instead with her arrival back into the city, intact but shaken, her brother gone, Flaca still there.
“That’s quite a story,” Anita said.
“It’s not a story,” Romina said tightly. “It’s what happened to me.” She took the carrots off the fire and stepped away from the flames.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“She didn’t mean it like that,” Flaca said, gently.
Romina shrugged and poured the carrot water out, right onto dark earth. Water, hot, streaming into the dirt. Do not fall back into the cell where the Three the Only Three, not that, not now, get away get out there is no out—
“Romina,” Flaca said.
“What.”
“Don’t be angry.”
“Fine,” Romina said. “It’s fine. They’re all stories. We all have a story. And I want to hear the story of La Venus over here,” she added, jerking her head toward Anita.
Anita straightened and tried to dissemble her pleasure at the name. “Is that me?”
“Who else?” Romina glanced around the circle at the others. “No offense to those present—you’re all beautiful muchachas, of course.”
“None taken,” Malena said amiably. “I have eyes in my head.”
“None taken,” said Paz, recalling that afternoon, the bikini, foam, the stab of sunshine on bare flesh.
Anita flushed. “What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you’ll tell us. How you got here, for example.”
She took a deep breath. “The same way as you.”
“You’re cheating.”
“All right, all right.” Anita pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. She watched as Flaca put the grill over the fire, for the fish. “All right, fine. Look, I’m married. You probably all know that.”
Silence. Ocean song.
“I didn’t know that,” Paz said.
Anita scanned Paz’s face for judgment, but found none. She’s just a child, she thought, what will she understand? And should she even hear this? But the air around her was so open. She pressed on. “Well. We’re not happy. At least, I don’t think he is, but—what I should say is, I’m not happy. I mean, I loved him. I thought I loved him. But now—” She spread her hands open before her, empty.
“There’s a reason you married him,” Romina said.
“I suppose so.”
“It wasn’t his cock.”
“No! No. Of course it wasn’t. I mean, I’d never seen his cock when we got married, what do you take me for?”
Romina raised her eyebrows. “Can I assume that’s a rhetorical question?”
“Maybe.” Anita smiled.
“And when you did see it?” Flaca asked before she could stop herself. She’d always avoided the topic of her lover’s husband, a strategy she’d learned a long time ago. Stay in the moment, keep the peace, don’t remind women of the cluttered duties waiting for them outside the dim room where you can be together. That’s what husbands were, clutter and duties, or so it seemed to Flaca. But this was different; they were not in a dim room, but in a vast expanding night, getting drunk on starlight and each other’s company. And this lover, she was now beginning to see, this particular woman, had a different effect on Flaca than anyone else had since Romina. She wanted to know Anita’s story, to see inside her life, to know everything about her, including what she thought of her own husband. The realization was unnerving.
Anita shrugged and rolled her eyes.
Romina laughed, and Flaca beamed in triumph, having won a tiny shred of space over her rival—and alarmed, at the same time, that she was starting to see the husband as a rival at all.
“So you didn’t marry him for that,” Malena said, amused. “Why, then?”
The embers glowed. Three fish lay on the grill, rubbed down with salt and parsley, their bodies inert, their scent wild, lush, rising. Paz’s belly rumbled, but she didn’t want dinner to be ready, didn’t want this atmosphere of bold talk around the fire to ever stop.
“I don’t know,” Anita said. “I had to marry someone, and he seemed better than the rest. My parents wanted me to get married, they wouldn’t have stood for anything else.” She stopped abruptly, as though she’d just remembered where she was.
A low flame licked the air, crackled. Receded back to its nest of wood.
“My parents wanted me to marry too,” Romina said. “They still do. They’re always asking me whether I’ve met any new men.”
“What do you tell them?” Anita asked.
“Different things each time. Generalities. No, or maybe, or a shrug that they can interpret however they want to. Whatever gets them to drop the subject.”
“How long do you think that’ll work?” Paz said. Her mother never asked these things, and of course she was still too young to marry, but then again her mother never asked much about her life at all.
“As long as I can make it work.”
“My parents used to ask.” Flaca stirred the embers with a stick. “They’ve given up now.”
“Do you think they know?” Romina asked.
“No. Yes. I really don’t know.” Flaca looked across the fire at Malena. “What about you? How is it with your family?”
Silence fell. Malena stared at them like a startled animal.
They waited.
“We weren
’t talking about me,” Malena said steadily. “We were talking about La Venus.”
“La Venus,” Flaca said slowly. A naming. Once is a witticism, twice a baptism, as she well knew, having been Flaca for so long that no one ever called her by her birth name. She elbowed her lover lightly in the ribs.
“It’s who she is,” Romina said.
La Venus smiled slightly in the firelight, and didn’t protest, though, of course, it would have made no difference if she had; nicknames, as everyone knew, could never be chosen or turned away once they had settled on your skin.
“But anyway,” Flaca said, turning back to Malena, “we can talk about you. This circle we’re sitting in, the fire we’re gathered around, it’s not for any one of us. It’s for everyone here.”
“And the stars, O poet?” Romina sang. “Are they shining for the five of us too?”
“Why not?” Flaca kept her eyes on Malena.
Malena wrapped her arms around her chest as if to shield it and she looked so vulnerable that La Venus longed to gather her up in her arms. She’d been right about this woman’s armor. So much roiled underneath. She was moved to see it, moved by what could open among women around a fire. She touched Malena’s arm. “It’s all right—”
“No,” Malena said.
The lighthouse beam swept over them and disappeared.
Paz wondered what Malena’s story could be, what kept her so tightly shut around it. There had to be something there, a radioactive core—perhaps involving brothels or murder or torrid sex or more ordinary realities like secret prisons—to make her act this way. She had to be hiding something. Paz thought of her own story, the basement story, and wondered whether she’d be asked to tell it, and, if she was, whether she’d dare—and if she did, if she told, giving voice to it for the first time, would these women understand? Was this circle of women, this fire sparking into the night, the only place in all of Uruguay where such a telling could be heard and understood?
“Your fish are going to burn, Flaca,” Romina said.
“They’re fine,” Flaca said, but she stood to check them, and soon they were on plates and a new set of fish were on the grill. They began to eat the first round, three fish between the five of them.
“All right,” Romina said, “back to La Venus. You married the man. And then?”
“And then things changed,” La Venus went on between bites. “We were fighting all the time. He wanted me to have dinner ready when he got home from work, the house spotless, and be all made up and perfect-looking, just pining to hear about his day. That sort of thing. And you know how it is, how these years have been. There’s never any good news from his day. He was going to be a famous musician, before the coup. I believed him. He was good enough, and bold enough, that it seemed possible. Now we can barely even listen to music; we destroyed most of our records, back during the searches, just like everyone else. He’s trapped in a job he hates. He can’t talk to his colleagues. He doesn’t know whom he can trust.”
“No one does,” Romina said.
“Well, sure,” said Anita who was also La Venus. “Fine. Everyone’s in that boat. But then, as a wife, I’m supposed to carry that load? I have to pretend to be interested in everything he says? Feel sorry for him, spread my legs for the poor baby? He never asks about me, about how my day went, about how I seasoned the damn meat, nothing.” She struggled for more words, for ways to articulate the blunt knife buried in her days. “He’s a perfect husband, everybody says so.”
“Who’s everybody?” said Malena.
“My mother, my sister, my sister-in-law. Friends. And I suppose they’re right. I suppose I’m just allergic to perfect husbands.”
Paz opened her mouth to laugh, but caught herself just in time, when she saw that no one else was laughing. The women had become suddenly serious. They were quiet, then, the five of them, the fire rustling, stabbing at the air.
The ocean moaned.
“Where does he think you are?” Romina asked.
“With my cousin, in Piriápolis.”
“Hm,” Romina said. “Piriápolis. There are certainly better toilets in Piriápolis.”
Laughter.
“That’s true,” La Venus said, “but I’d rather be here, with you, shitting in a hole.”
“I still can’t shit here,” Romina said. “Have you done it yet?”
“Well, yes,” La Venus said, “since you asked. And it wasn’t so bad.”
“La Venus! Our first shitter!”
“Long live La Venus!”
The last fish came off the grill. They ate. Bread and carrots and the catch of the day. The stars sang voicelessly above them. When they were done, they put the dirty dishes aside in a stack and brought out the whiskey and the mate gourd. Romina put water on the fire, to boil for the mate thermos.
Flaca handed Paz the whiskey bottle and watched her take what looked like an expert swig, with more self-assurance than the night before. It was normal, of course, for whiskey to emerge after dinner, a Uruguayan tradition, and Flaca herself had tried her first sips as a teen at Sunday parrillas with her family. Those first whiskeys. A copper blooming in your chest. “¡Opa!” she said. “Like a pro!”
Paz smiled and wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“It must be strange for you,” La Venus said, “to hear all these older women speaking so frankly about their lives.”
“Wait a second!” said Romina. “Some of us aren’t that much older.”
“What are you? Twenty?”
“Twenty-two.”
“You see?” La Venus said. “That’s worlds away from sixteen.”
“Does that mean your age is worlds away from mine?” Flaca asked, impishly.
“Tsk—the scandal!” Romina crowed. “Flaca the innocent!”
“No it does not, and we weren’t talking about that,” La Venus said. The whiskey had flung something open inside her. “We were talking about Paz.”
“Talking to Paz,” Romina said.
“Right. To Paz.”
“About whether she’s shocked,” La Venus said. “I’m really curious.”
“Shocked by what?” said Romina.
“By—us!” La Venus spread her palms open. “By the things we talk about. By what we are.” She looked directly at Paz. “I mean, it has to be the first time you’ve heard women talk like this. When I was your age, I didn’t even know it was possible. I mean—that two women could—” She broke off, and felt her face grow hot, though thanks to the darkness no one seemed to notice.
“That two women could chucu-chucu,” Flaca finished off.
“I just didn’t know,” La Venus said, a bit defensively. “No one speaks of it. And if they do, it’s to say that two women together would be like—” She gestured, patting her flat palms together, turning them back and forth.
“Like a tortillera,” said Romina.
La Venus nodded.
“I hope you’ve been disabused of that notion now,” Romina said, glancing meaningfully at Flaca.
Flaca stifled a smile and glanced at La Venus.
“About a thousand times!” La Venus said.
The women hollered in delight.
“But anyway,” La Venus said, “calm down, ladies—anyway, Paz, for you this must all be very new.”
“Actually,” Paz said, “I’ve known for a while.”
“What do you mean?” Romina asked. “Known what?”
“That two women can be—together.”
A stunned quiet fell over the group.
“Someone told you about it?” Venus said.
Paz gazed into the fire. It flicked and coiled, licking the night air, inviting her to hurtle forward. “More than that.”
She watched their faces as they wrestled with what seemed to be a thick tangle of reactions: confusio
n, astonishment, disturbance, fear, a slash of envy.
“Who was she?” Flaca asked.
The question hung over the fire. Everyone waited.
“A Tupa,” Paz finally said.
“A Tupamara,” Flaca said more than asked.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Flaca,” Romina said, “what other kind of Tupa is there?”
“All right, fine,” Flaca said. “Will you let the girl talk?”
They waited. The fire sang. The lighthouse beam swished over them three times, like breaths of light in the darkness. Once. Again. Again.
Paz stared at the heart of the fire. “My mother—” she said, and stopped.
“It’s all right,” Romina said gently. “This may be the one place in the entire country where you can talk about Tupamaros without endangering your mother.”
Paz wrestled with herself, and with the mantle of inner silence, which draped over everything, which kept you alive.
The women waited.
“My mother hid a few of them over the years,” Paz finally said. “The first time was right after the coup, two young women. We have a basement you can’t see from the street, that you get to through a trapdoor my mother covers with a rug.”
She paused. All these things she was to never say. Romina nodded encouragingly, La Venus had an indecipherable expression on her face, and Flaca was stirring the fire, which she’d rekindled now that the embers didn’t need to be low for cooking, with a stick that kept her attention rapt. Malena was looking at her calmly. She was the only one who didn’t seem shocked; her eyes were kind.
“So anyway, the fourth time, it was just one woman.” Paz felt her chest fill with heat at the memory of those days, the dawning realization that a new person was hiding downstairs, her mother’s whispered conversations with friends close to the blaring radio so the neighbors couldn’t hear, in case they were spies, anyone could be a spy or become one by reporting you on a whim, and she could only catch the whispers in scraps and shards, she got here last and did you know the baker’s wife they say was also and nowhere left to go, they want them all dead, no, all gone, not even bothering with a grave. “I never learned her real name. We called her Puma. She stayed in the basement. My mother would send me down there with plates of food. I cleared her plates too, and her—you know, her bucket. She couldn’t come upstairs to use the bathroom.”
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