The women nodded. Tales of hiding were not unfamiliar.
La Venus thought fleetingly of the hole she’d shit in earlier that day. The dirt she’d used to cover her feces. Suddenly seen in the light of luxury.
“We started talking a little, when I came down. She was easy to talk to.” Paz remembered the way Puma had asked questions, keenly, with a gaze so unblinking that Paz had the bizarre sensation that there was nothing she could not tell her. That no matter what her soul dredged up and no matter how ugly her revelations might seem to her own ears, Puma would simply take them, easily, eagerly, with an unwavering welcome. It made her want to spill everything. When Puma first arrived, she was trembling, and Paz brought her blankets and sweaters because she assumed it must be from the cold. But the trembling kept on until one day Paz instinctively put her hand on Puma’s. That’s when the woman stopped, grew suddenly still, and looked her in the eyes. Her body was warm. The revolution. The warmth of revolution in her hand. The war had been lost, so her mother had said; repression had won, it sat in the Government Palace now and that was the end of that. Love had lost, fear had won. Revolution, dead. And yet. Here was this woman, this Puma, still warm and breathing, like the last survivor of a shipwreck. And there was death in her eyes, pain in her eyes, but something else, too. That night, Paz waited until her mother was asleep and tiptoed back down to the dark basement and curled up beside Puma. She would never know exactly why she did it. The basement was stone cold but Puma’s body was warm. She didn’t dare fall asleep, as she had to be back upstairs before her mother woke. She just lay beside Puma and listened to her breathing, slow with sleep. It wasn’t until the third night that Puma’s hand reached out through the darkness and sought hers, gently, and when they held hands the cold melted away.
She couldn’t put this into words for the women around the fire. They were waiting. She struggled against the silence for another minute, then shrugged. “She was my friend.”
“And more than a friend?”
Paz looked away, into the fire.
“When was this?”
“The summer after the coup.”
They were silent. Doing the math in their heads, repeatedly, as though there had to be an error in the arithmetic.
“You were twelve.”
“I was almost thirteen.” She picked at her nails. “I’ve always looked older.” Always felt older, she thought.
“And she—” Romina began, but could not finish.
La Venus wore a face of disgust. “She had no right! A child!”
Paz shrank back.
“Go easy,” Flaca said. “Look, Anita, when I first—with Romina—we were young, too.”
“First of all, you were both the same age—weren’t you? That’s completely different. And secondly, you told me you were eighteen!”
“Seventeen,” Flaca said, “yes.”
“That,” La Venus said fiercely, “is a world away from twelve.”
Almost thirteen, Paz thought, but did not say.
“You must have been so scared,” Romina said.
“You don’t know that,” said Malena.
Romina stared at her, surprised. There was more inside that woman than she’d understood.
Malena leaned forward, and her face caught the firelight. “Paz is the one who knows. Whether she was scared. What it was like. She’s the one we should listen to and believe.”
Romina opened her mouth, made a sound. The fire crackled. She looked at La Venus, who looked startled, then at Flaca, whose brow furrowed. Neither spoke.
Malena turned to Paz. Her eyes were gentle, and she seemed, in that moment, older than any of them, as old, Romina thought, as the very earth. “Do you want to tell us?”
Paz swallowed, hard. “I wasn’t scared. It wasn’t like that! She was—” Again the wordlessness rose up around her and she couldn’t speak. There was no way to speak it. How to ever say. The way that Puma stroked her hair, as if it dazzled her, as if it contained the mysteries of the night sky and so she said it, your hair is more beautiful than the night sky. You’re a miracle, Paz, you are everything. Puma, as gentle as water in a pool, shaping and reshaping around you. Broken, whole. Awakening. Silence, haunting, full of the unsaid. Only if you want was her refrain and then her breathing was a song. Only if. Deep in the silence. Revolution. You want. “She was kind. She showed me what I am.”
For a long time, no one spoke. The fire sparked and hummed; Flaca added another log—the cart driver had been right that firewood was scarce here, and she was glad now that she’d bought as much as she could from him. She hoped that tomorrow the grocer would have more to sell. She was spending down a year’s worth of savings on this trip. And who cared. To be here with these stars and these women, surrounded by an oceanic song, a wsssshhhh that undergirded every word and thought. Beauty draped in blackness. Night and fire. The whiskey bottle started going around again. When it reached Paz, she took another sip and nobody teased her about it this time.
The silence shifted, thickened, a lush thing between them.
Romina stole glances at Paz, trying to take her story in. Angry at Puma for using a child—even though Paz said she’d wanted to. The revolutionary in the basement, a hero. An opener of worlds. But twelve. Twelve. Her mind stopped over and over at that, at the thought of a Paz even more vulnerable than the girl she saw before her, all thorns and spikes and hunger, a restless, wandering kid. She had to sit on her hands to keep herself from going to Paz and wrapping her arms around her because Paz clearly didn’t want that and would take it as condescension when in fact it was something else, a need to protect so ferocious it almost knocked the breath from Romina. She’d never felt this kind of urge before. The tenderness of a lion for her cubs. Strong enough to kill. Maternal love—was it like this? Could it be the secret thing inside her giving her this feeling? No. Not that, turn away from that—free me of that nightmare, black sky and stars and fire and rocks, and I will give my never-be-a-mother love to this girl Paz.
The fire danced and sank in gleaming tongues.
La Venus nestled into Flaca, her comforting body. Flaca was lean and strong, as strong as her husband, perhaps even more so as Arnaldo sat at an office desk all day, while Flaca heaved and cut and carried. La Venus felt as though she’d never stop wanting this woman, and the depth of her hunger frightened her. The rest of her life stretched before her, uncharted, full now of this secret self that would always breathe beneath the surface of her days, no matter what she did or didn’t do. It wasn’t so simple, to return to your life the way it was, after you’ve torn it open. She would always have sat on this beach with a ring of women who saw her secret become an ordinary thing, a woman leaning on a body she was not supposed to love, yet loved. She ached. But for what? For Flaca? For the future she would not have? And which future was that? Perhaps she was aching for Paz, this girl, and that Tupamara, who had done something terribly wrong and no amount of Paz explaining could convince her otherwise. Two women was one thing, a woman and a child was another. And yet. Paz. Here on this beach, at sixteen years old. To know so much at such a young age about what’s possible. About women. How would her own life have been different if she’d known? Who would she be today? Would that other version of her be more free or less free than she was now?
* * *
*
A new day, drenched in sunshine. The women woke slowly and dispersed after their mate, to the sea, to the dunes. They went for swims, walks, explorations of the rocks around the lighthouse. Malena sat on the beach, sifting sand through her fingers, looking out at the water. Romina dove out past the waves to where she could float with her eyes closed. Flaca and La Venus found a hollow between sand dunes—“cleavage,” La Venus called it, laughing—where they made love on the burning sand, then ran to the ocean for relief and did it again in the water.
Paz struck out alone, roaming, unsure of what
she was looking for. She needed time to think. After last night’s confessions, she felt embarrassed, exposed, as if these women were her sisters and her aunties all at once. The first thrill of arriving here was settling into a strange unease, just under the surface of her skin. She wanted to escape—but escape what? And why? Escape her own skin? Escape into a basement and hide in the dark, as she’d done over the years since Puma left—the dark hollow under the trapdoor had become her secret refuge—but that wasn’t possible here, there was no basement anywhere on this damn cape, there was barely a tree to hide behind, everything had a raw quality to it, bared to the open wind. She walked. The motion soothed her. Again she was alone. Just like at home, where she was alone with a mother who did not want her around and for whom she was a not-right girl, an annoyance, in the way. She shouldn’t have told her new friends about Puma. Now she was torn open with no way to close the seam. Sola, she thought, alone, so - la, a syllable for each step, left foot so, right foot la, step so, step la, so, la, on and forward. Surprised to find herself at El Lobo’s grocery store. A box of a hut with the curtain tied back in the open doorway. They’d been meaning to come here for supplies, but hadn’t yet; the plan had been to go together later in the day.
She stepped inside.
The air was dim, thick. A long table served as a counter, behind which an old man presided over shelves painted a chipped and hopeful light blue, lined with scattered provisions.
“Good morning,” he said. He was white-haired, surprisingly hardy, as if years of outdoor labor had at once shriveled and toned him, made him belong entirely to the sun. He stood with the majestic ease of a ship captain, the old kind of ship, Paz thought, all sails and masts and salted rope. In his hands, the man held a piece of wood and a carving knife; curls of wood lay in a small pile on the counter. She wondered what he was shaping.
“Good morning,” she replied.
“You’re new.”
“Yes.”
“You came in with that group of ladies?”
Ladies. She fought the urge to contradict him. “Yes.” She hovered uncertainly, realizing only then that she’d brought neither money nor a shopping list. “Are you El Lobo?”
He nodded slowly, staring at her as if she could be deciphered, like the wind. Then he turned back to his carving.
Paz scanned the shelves, with their careful wares. Paint, glue, rice in a burlap sack, spices in unlabeled jars, packets of yerba mate, toilet paper, tanks that looked like they might contain water, two sleeves of vanilla cookies cloaked in dust, a huddle of scrawny apples, a single head of lettuce already browning at the edges. She wondered what it would be like to live here, so far from civilization. In the presence of this man, she felt transported to another era, a time before telephones and televisions and airplanes that took exiles from the country, a time of timelessness, where life was bound to the rhythms of the ocean.
He looked at her, amused.
“What?” she asked, immediately feeling rude.
“You seem lost.”
“I know where I am.”
He shrugged. “Are they your sisters? Aunts?”
Paz hesitated. She opened her mouth to explain that they were friends, but it occurred to her that she might then have to explain why friends like these were traveling together without men. “We’re cousins.”
He carved without responding.
She hovered, lingered, trying not to seem lost. Flies congregated around the apples and anemic bell peppers. A beam of light from the door caught motes of dust. On the far wall, behind the counter, hung a strange mask with a long metal snout, suspended on a matrix of pale yellow bones.
El Lobo followed her gaze. “That’s an oxygen mask. For sailors. My wife mounted it on those bones years ago. She’s dead now,” he added, and raised his eyebrows as if this news surprised him.
“What kind of bones are they?”
“Human.”
She shrank back.
He laughed, revealing the holes where some of his teeth had been. “Oh, child. No. They’re from a sea lion. I used to hunt them, and seals, but I don’t have the strength anymore.”
“And the mask?”
“It’s from the Tacuarí.”
She stared at him blankly. It sounded like an indigenous word, a Guaraní or Charrúa word—there were places that bore indigenous names, like the town of Tacuarembó, or that street down in Montevideo’s Old City, Ituzaingó—but what did any of that have to do with oxygen masks that looked hoisted from photos of the Second World War?
“You don’t know about the Tacuarí?”
“No.”
“Ah. You just got here.”
“Yes.”
“How much longer do you have?”
“Four more days.”
“Well, come back and I’ll tell you the story, all right?”
She nodded.
“Do you want to buy anything?”
“I’m sorry. I forgot to bring money,” she said, though she hadn’t so much forgotten as not planned to be here at all.
“That’s no problem. Take what you want and you can pay me when you come back.”
“Thank you.”
“Here, wait.”
He ducked through the door behind the counter, into the back room, which she now realized must be his home. He returned with two fried dumplings on a piece of white butcher paper. “Buñuelos. My daughter Alicia made them this morning. A welcome gift for you.”
She took the packet. When she was a child, buñuelos were her favorite food; she’d sometimes helped her mother mix the dough, and blend in the spinach or corn before watching her dollop the mixture into hot oil on the stove.
“They’re made from seaweed.”
“Seaweed?” She’d never heard of such a thing, had never imagined seaweed could be food. “You mean, you harvested it? From the ocean right here?”
El Lobo gave her a look, as if to say, crazy city girl, what other ocean would it be?
A few minutes later, she was heading back to camp with the buñuelos, a few apples, and a sleeve of cookies bundled into her arms, wondering what seaweed tasted like, whether her friends would be disgusted by the idea, whether they’d try such a thing, whether the buñuelos would be fishy or soggy or gritted with sand. The camp was empty, no one yet back from wherever they’d gone. She put down her things and went to the beach they’d all swum at the day before, where she took off her shoes and walked in the waves, calf-deep, her toes sinking into wet sand below. Then she stopped. They were out there in the distance, just two of them, Flaca and La Venus—it had to be them—heads bobbing close together, were they yes they were they must be, or they could be, swaying, staying close, don’t look, don’t look, don’t listen for them turn around Paz turn around, and she did, though not immediately, and not without a stab of disappointment that she hadn’t heard a thing.
At the camp, she unwrapped the greasy paper and ate a seaweed buñuelo, then another. They didn’t taste like fish at all, but like ordinary spinach buñuelos, only with a streak of salty ocean about them, the aftertaste of a long swim through the waves, though even that was light, subtle, a hint you had to listen for with your tongue.
* * *
*
“Do you ever feel bad that we’re the only ones having sex?” La Venus said, hands curling into Flaca’s hair.
“Why should I?”
“Well, I mean, the others aren’t having the same—you know, the same kind of time. And we disappear a lot, don’t we?”
“We’re having sex on behalf of the whole. Doing our part.”
“Ha.”
Flaca continued her slow, tongued descent.
La Venus gripped her lover’s hair tighter, clamped her thighs around her waist where they lay in the dunes. It always amazed her, the way Flaca could talk as if sex—the things th
ey did—were good, even virtuous. “Do it, then.”
It was dusk, the light softening all around them. The third day. The third jewel on a necklace of seven. Only four days left, she thought sadly—and here they were, with lust showing no signs of letting up. It was just the opposite: the more time they spent in this unworldly place, the more clearly their desire rang out, as if it were a radio signal sent from the heart of the wild.
Afterward, they lay heaving, sweating on the sand dunes. A thought poured into La Venus, blindingly bright: this must be love. But what did that mean? Not love for Flaca, exactly, though it was a feeling sparked by her—this woman of the bandit hands, lithe Flaca, steady Flaca, muscular Flaca who made your body roar—but that wasn’t all of what had her reeling. It was something else. Being here with Flaca, in the sand, in the waves, blending bodies and crushing against each other, she sought her own annihilation, sought to set herself free. Flaca was freedom—she’d never seen a person so free, or not, at least, in the years since the coup. She’d started thinking that freedom was an idea that belonged to another time, the era of bohemian dreams wherever you turned, when everyone, or at least people as young as she, really thought that revolution was coming for Uruguay. Was rising among Uruguayans. But now even the musician-husbands were hunchbacked bureaucrats, small-minded and bitter and riddled with fear. Good wife. No room for freedom. A smaller and smaller world. And now this. This blasting open, this ragged breathing. This enormous self.
This delicious self, larger than life, a goddess: La Venus. Venus of the foam. Venus of the dunes. Venus of the legs that open for a woman’s tongue.
The sand was cooling with the fading of the day. Flaca was stroking her, murmuring syllables that made no sense, ta—tatatatata—bue—la—lililila, a stupid happiness that mirrored her own.
What if she could be La Venus all the time? What if she could walk down the streets of her own city as the impossible, sparkling woman she was right now? She didn’t want to return to being Anita—not ever. Even though she had to. There was an old life out there waiting for her to be Anita, people expecting her to live inside that name, people who would look into her face and see the old Anita and nothing more—her husband, her mother, her sister, the grocer, acquaintances, and so-called friends. But no matter what they saw, no matter what they thought, that Anita was a shell now, a broken shell like that of a hatched egg. It was too late to go back. She would never again be a woman who didn’t long to open for women. She had to be Anita, but Anita was a lie. So how to survive, then? she thought furiously. She raised her back so that her breasts filled Flaca’s hands, so the stroking wouldn’t stop. How to survive?
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