“My god,” Flaca said, “still hungry?”
“Always. For you always.”
“Say that and we’ll be here forever.”
“Good.”
“You want to be here forever?”
“Yes.”
“Or you want—me, forever?”
“Oh God, that’s so good.”
“Answer the question.”
“Shut up, don’t stop—”
“I’m not stopping.” The world tipped, blew open. Flaca inside, Flaca everywhere. “See?”
“More.”
“More fingers?”
“Yes.”
“First answer the question.”
“Oh fuck you I can’t remember the fucking question—”
“What were you thinking about?”
She couldn’t remember the original question but she knew it hadn’t been that. She wanted to ram her hips against Flaca’s hand, to demolish herself against this woman’s solidity. She was wide open, her body a burst seam. These delays of Flaca’s could lead to orgasms so ferocious that she almost felt afraid. “That your hands on me are like food. And I didn’t know I was starving.”
“Ah.” The movement returned. “No need, my Venus, to go hungry now.”
* * *
*
On the fourth day, Paz returned to El Lobo’s store and he finally started telling stories. It happened as he was drinking mate and she was taking an unreasonably long time to pore over the produce, ignoring its itinerant flies. She thought he’d forgotten his promise to tell her about the Tacuarí. She’d held on to that word, rolling the syllables though her mind as she looked out at the ocean or drifted off under the stars, so as not to forget them, Ta-cua-rí, Ta-cua-rí. She’d started to wonder whether she should ask directly, but wasn’t sure how to go about it without intruding on the nebulous feeling she had of the shop as a place of quiet, of immersion in the rhythms of the sea. And then, just as she was reaching for a skinny bell pepper, El Lobo said, “We’re known, you know, as a land of shipwrecks.”
“Who?”
“Us, here. Cabo Polonio. This little thumb of land poking into the ocean.”
He extended the gourd toward her.
She sipped the mate. It tasted as though he’d added a few yuyos, as she’d heard that country people did. Some said the extra herbs were there for flavor, some for medicine or witchcraft. She wondered which of these it might be for El Lobo.
“We earned that name long ago, in colonial times, because the waters here are shallow. Treacherous. Sinking many ships. Sit, sit.” He pointed at a stool.
Paz sat. She waited. He didn’t go on immediately. Time was slower here. Time, slow and wide, unrushed, time a calm in which it was possible to float.
“Treasure, merchandise, sailors’ bones: it’s all there, in the belly of the ocean you can see from this door. It gathered there over many generations. In fact, some people think that the very name Polonio came from the wrecked ship of Capitán Polloni of Spain, in 1753—oh, don’t look so surprised that I know the dates. We keep true to our histories around here. And yes, there are other versions of how the cape got its name, but those aren’t the true ones, because you know how it is, the truest story is always the one that endures over time and speaks the most deeply to the people.”
His daughter Alicia poked her head in from the back room, which Paz now understood was their living room and kitchen. She was round-faced, with a long braid down her back and a small child on her hip. “Papá’s subjecting you to his stories?”
“She wanted to hear them, you know.”
Alicia smiled broadly at Paz. “The truth is, he wants to tell them. And actually, he knows all the stories of this place—he’s holding them for everyone.” She kissed El Lobo’s forehead with a casual tenderness that made Paz go hollow inside. “Chica, I’m making buñuelos, do you want some?”
Paz nodded, mouth watering. “Thank you. They’re delicious. I have money.”
“Oh, how interesting for you! Absolutely not. You’re our guest.”
It shamed her, the thought of taking from the little this family had—they all lived in those cramped back quarters, El Lobo; Alicia; her husband, Óscar; and three or four children—but she feared that if she pressed on about paying, she’d offend.
“So, then,” El Lobo said, filling the gourd again as Alicia disappeared behind the curtain, “Capitán Polloni of Spain. He arrived here with a ship full of over three hundred passengers. Some of them were priests coming to America to convert the heathens, to tame a land they thought needed taming.” He paused to sip through the bombilla. “They had merchandise on board. Unlabeled. It wasn’t part of what they’d been commissioned to bring over. Booze, tobacco, playing cards, all of which, you understand, were strictly forbidden. Well. The crew broke into the secret cargo and got so drunk that their songs could be heard by the very stars and there were many stars, it was a clear black night, there could be no excuse for their wrecking that ship against the rocks. There were only two possible reasons for the crash. Either it was the curse of the heathens, who hadn’t wanted anybody coming to convert them; or, the crew was drunk.”
“Or both?”
He stared at her, slowly, carefully. “Well, sure. Or both.”
She was listening with her ears and all her pores open. She was on the deck of the ship, under the stars, surrounded by drunken sailors and their loud, slurred songs. She was beside them, climbing over a shattered prow, into the water, onto the rocks, scrambling for life. Reaching the shore bedraggled and raw or maybe drowning along the way. And meanwhile, the heathens—the Charrúa Indians or out here would it have been the Guaraní? she didn’t know—waiting in the sand dunes, possibly having cursed the priests who cursed them, because wasn’t that also true, that the arrival of the priests was itself a curse depending on the angle at which you looked? She’d never liked church, the stiff dresses, the kneel and up and sit and pray and sorry for my sins. She could never win the sin game, and so she’d stopped trying, only took communion to avoid a fight with Mamá, who luckily only took her to church a few times a year anyway. In this moment, absorbing the story of Polloni, Paz thought of her own home as a kind of ship with a lonely crew, just her and Mamá. Her father had left her and her mother when she was two, gone to São Paulo for a job and never called, and though he sent money, he never answered the letters she’d written back when she was still too young to know better. When she and her mother were home together, their house bucked and leaned with the captain’s changing moods, as if the thing might capsize or collapse at any moment and drown them in the suffocating night. And there was no destination, no map to elsewhere, just a terrible emptiness that threatened to drift on forever. Maybe it was better to crash, to break against the rocks, so that you could at least arrive somewhere, however broken. She wanted space for herself, a larger life. The kind of life people in Uruguay didn’t have anymore—and not only didn’t have but no longer dared imagine. She would set sail and sweep across the sea until she landed in Brazil, Venezuela, Canada, France. China. Australia. With nothing but tobacco and playing cards in her hold.
“Did they die?” she asked.
El Lobo shook his head. “The whole crew survived. That’s the crazy part. The only casualty was a priest who was said to have died from the shock of having crashed right in the middle of a self-flagellation, which was known only because he was found dead on his bunk with lash in hand.”
Paz laughed. “Is that true?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
Why would it be? she thought, but didn’t say. Histories tend to grow richer with time, gathering details as they pour down generations.
“That, of course, was all a long time ago. Since then, there have been many other shipwrecks. Understand: this is a rocky place. Sharp edges everywhere, once you dive down to look. The
most recent shipwreck was the Tacuarí. That just happened, in 1971, so that would be, let’s see”—El Lobo raised his gaze to the ceiling—“six years ago, yes, that’s right, six years. Two sailors died. The rest swam out to the shore or rowed in emergency boats, and by the next morning they were all gone to the nearby town of Valizas, leaving the ship and its treasures behind. The ship is still there, out in the water, off the Playa de las Calaveras. It’s sinking, though. Slowly. A little more each year. Things keep floating out from the shipwreck, washing up on the shore.”
“Like that oxygen mask?” Paz asked.
“Like the mask.”
She waited for him to go on, but he picked up the wooden carving on the counter and whittled in silence. The stories were over. Paz thought of his wife, the dead wife, who’d turned the mask into the core of a work of art. The piece of wood was becoming a doll, with surprisingly delicate features. She felt awkward, standing in the center of the little store, and yet she didn’t want to leave. The smell of frying oil, of buñuelos cooking, wafted from the other room. El Lobo’s presence enveloped her; it made her feel alive. She wanted to swim in his company for as long as she could. So she started cleaning up the wood shavings from the counter, under his hands. He let her do it, not looking up from his work, as if they’d been doing this together for years, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. When she dared steal a glance at the oxygen mask, it looked different somehow, less like an object and more like a face, hovering on its pale nest of bones.
* * *
*
They scattered in the day, did as they pleased, and gathered around the fire at night. There, they cooked, drank, ate, lingered, cleaved to each other as if to long-lost relatives from whom they’d soon be torn away. They confessed secrets, retold the forays of their days, and dreamed up wild, absurd adventures that, in the crackling glow of the flames, they could almost pretend were possible.
On the sixth night, as Flaca and Romina were bickering warmly over who would be the pourer of the mate, La Venus said, “Tonight, I’m going to insist on it, Malena: your turn to tell us more about yourself.”
Malena looked startled. She was sitting at the fire, casting fish bones from her plate to the flames. “Me?”
“You.”
Silence fell over the women. Flaca gave the thermos to Romina with a shrug, you win.
“I don’t have much to tell,” Malena said.
“Bullshit.” La Venus’s voice was gentle. “Look, I don’t mean to upset you. It’s just that, well, we all talk so much—why are you all laughing? we do!—we talk so much that we should remember to make space for quiet people.”
“I’m a quiet person?”
“Aren’t you?”
Malena didn’t answer. The fire licked and sang. Romina poured water into the mate and handed it first to Malena. Inside, Romina was drunk on happiness, because she’d felt the blood arrive that afternoon as she was walking to the beach for a swim. No baby. No new life. No yoke to the Only Three. She’d walked into the water and, once immersed, took off her bikini bottom so she could look at the stain, see it with her own eyes, such a glorious red smear, she could frame it and put it on her wall and admire it for all her days, and then without thinking she opened her legs wide underwater and bled into the ocean, an offering, a thank-you, a sealing of some indecipherable pact. And now, here she was, with these women, browner from five days of sun, so easy with each other that they could almost forget that some of them had recently been strangers and that soon they’d all return to their other, pinched lives. “We don’t have much longer,” she said now.
“I don’t know what kind of person I am,” Malena finally said. She curled her hands around the gourd and looked up at the rampant stars. “Well, all right. Are you going to twist my arm on this?”
“Possibly.” La Venus grinned.
“I can tell you this one thing, I suppose. I used to live in a convent.”
Romina thought she must have heard wrong. All the women were staring. “What?”
“I was a novice.”
“You mean,” La Venus said, “preparing to be a nun?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“You’re joking,” Flaca finally said.
“Shut up, Flaca, for God’s sake,” Romina said. “Can’t you see that she’s not joking?”
Flaca had a thousand questions, but she held back and busied herself poking at the fire with a stick.
“And—why did you go?” La Venus said. “You loved God?”
“No. I mean, I wanted to love Him.” Malena drank from the mate, slowly, intently, as if the brew were the antidote for a long-swallowed poison. “It’s a long—it’s a long story.”
Silence rasped between them again, flecked with the murmur of the flames.
“What—” Flaca began, but La Venus held her back with a hand on her knee.
“We have time for a long story,” Romina said quietly. “There’s plenty of time.”
Malena seemed to shrink into herself. The fire flicked and danced. “I had to get away,” she said, and then a blankness fell across her face like a curtain.
“What was it like?” Romina asked. “Being there, I mean.” She’d always been curious about convents, having grown up in a Jewish household and only seen nuns from a distance.
Malena squinted at the flames as if seeking a familiar face in a crowd of strangers. “It was quiet. Rigorous. Everyone thinks life in a convent is about retiring from things, but, in fact, you’re kept busy with all the prayers and work. Then under the surface of all of that, you’re alone, and so, on the inside, it’s quiet. You start to hear yourself inside the quiet. So it was comforting. But also terrible. To hear yourself so much.”
“Is that why you left?” La Venus asked.
“No. I left because I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t.”
“Do what? Believe in God?”
“No, not that.”
“The Church hates people like us,” Flaca said. She’d never spoken those words aloud before, and they scalded her tongue. “Was that the problem?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” Malena said. She’d grasped a fistful of her skirt and started worrying at the hem, as if trying to iron it out with her bare fingers. “I just couldn’t. It was too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?” La Venus leaned forward. “You must have been very young, no?”
“Even young people can break,” Malena said.
Paz felt these words in the pit of her body. No wonder this woman had understood her, been willing to see.
Romina poured another mate, and passed it to Flaca, and she couldn’t stop her hand from trembling. She tried to imagine Malena as a young novice, hurting inside for who knew what reason—but it couldn’t have been too late, could it? The young could break, but couldn’t they also heal?
They waited for Malena to continue, but the gourd made its slow rounds and she didn’t speak again.
* * *
*
The sixth day. Their last full day at Polonio. Paz was on her way to El Lobo’s to pick up bell peppers and bread for that night’s asado—they’d be grilling fish and making a special feast for their last night fire. Romina had lain down for a siesta, while Flaca and La Venus had disappeared into the dunes. Paz hoped that El Lobo would be in the mood for stories. On her way, she saw a lone figure down past the lighthouse, perched on the rocks. It looked like a woman. She walked closer. Malena. How long had she been there? How long had she been gone from the group? She had taken to wandering away without warning in the afternoons. Her figure cut a human hole in the blue sky. Her hair hung in a ponytail down her back, a more relaxed style than the bun she’d arrived with, and yet Paz realized at that moment that she’d never seen Malena’s hair loose in the wind.
“Can I sit with you?”
Malena
started and glanced up. “Fine.” Then she seemed to soften, remember something about herself or the young woman before her. “I mean, of course.”
Paz folded her legs beneath her on the rocks. The ocean was calmer today than yesterday, luxuriously blanketing the rocks below them, then pulling away, returning.
She didn’t know what to say. She strained for something, then blurted, “Do you ever miss the convent?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“I don’t know. It seems a different world, a different universe.”
“I don’t want to talk about the convent.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s not your fault. I’m prickly and I know it. I’m sure you’re all sick of me by now and wish you hadn’t invited me.”
“No! That’s ridiculous,” Paz said, though she was also thinking that it wasn’t she who’d invited anyone to this place.
Malena shook her head, eyes out on the horizon.
“Really.” Paz moved closer, so that their shoulders touched. “The others feel the same, I’m sure of it. You’re needed here.”
“Where did you get that idea?”
“I don’t know. We need everyone.” She wondered where those words had come from. Whether they could apply to her. “There’s room for everyone.” Unlike in the city. Too soon, tomorrow night, they’d all have to face all that again: streets, tightness, thin walls, pretense. People who couldn’t see them. Even at home.
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