Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  “But I’m different. Not like the rest of you.”

  “You think I don’t feel different?”

  Malena turned and finally looked at Paz. “Yes. I suppose you must.”

  “I’m like a kid to them, that’s what they all call me, even you. La Venus is married, Flaca is, well, Flaca—we’re all different. That’s why we came.”

  “Is it?”

  “Isn’t that why you came?”

  Malena turned away and faced the horizon again, jaw clenched. When she faced Paz again, her eyes were wet, and she seemed on the brink of breaking open.

  Paz leaned in and kissed her on the lips.

  First kiss since Puma.

  Time distilled.

  Plush lips, surprisingly warm.

  There was pull in Malena, a deepsea whirlpool, drawing her in for one beat, two, and then Malena drew back. “No.” She wiped her mouth.

  Paz couldn’t move. Shame poured through her. “Oh God,” she said, and then, “I’m sorry,” even though she wasn’t, or if she was, she didn’t know what for.

  “This isn’t right.”

  What isn’t right? her mind shouted back. Kissing you, or my age, or two women’s mouths together at all—but her mouth wouldn’t open to say a thing. She sprang to her feet and ran up the rocks toward El Lobo’s.

  * * *

  *

  “Tell me about the sea lions,” Paz said.

  She was sweeping the floor with a broom made by hand from bundled sticks. El Lobo no longer protested when she reached for the broom or a rag to dust the shelves with, a victory that pleased her.

  He watched her from the counter. “You’re not really leaving tomorrow.”

  “I am.”

  “What a shame.”

  “That’s why you should tell me about the sea lions.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “You used to hunt them, right?”

  “Every day.”

  “And seals?”

  “Yes.”

  She nosed the broom into a corner. She didn’t know how to pull stories out of this man. The best way, it seemed, was to wait, to sit inside the silence until he broke it, only now she had no time left, and this man was so comfortable saying nothing that it sometimes seemed he’d never break it at all, as though silence were a precious thing to be kept whole. It was new to her, this sort of silence, not corrosive at all, but warm and solid, like a quilt shared on a winter night.

  “It was hard work,” he finally said. “They are powerful creatures. I hunted until I didn’t have the strength to be out there anymore. They thrash, you know, fight for their lives, and slaughtering them takes strength. It’s not for the old—or for the faint of heart. You know, city people don’t come out here much, but when they do, they don’t want to hear about this sort of thing. They want to look at the beautiful waves but they don’t want to know what it really means to live out here, what it takes to survive. They don’t want to see the blood in the foam.”

  Her mind filled with foam, red foam, bristling on the surface of the sea.

  “But you’re not like that.”

  “I hope not.”

  “And so I talk to you. And it’s strange, hija.” He looked at her tenderly. “I’ve never talked to a city person so much before.”

  Paz gathered the broom around a tidy pile of dust. She didn’t know what to say. She thought fleetingly of her own father. “Do you have a dustpan?”

  “We just sweep it all out the door. Look, like this.”

  He came out from behind the counter and took the broom from her hands. She watched him sweep her little pile out and into the surrounding grass. Malena was out there, somewhere, likely laughing at her, maybe telling the others about the kiss so they could all laugh. She waited inside for El Lobo to return. El Lobo, she thought. Of course. Not lobo, wolf. Lobo marino, sea lion, seal. Named for the creatures he’d hunted.

  “I’d want to see the blood in the foam,” she said when he returned.

  He made a grunting sound.

  “I mean it,” she said, trying to keep the hurt out of her voice. “I want to stay here.”

  “Hmm. For how long?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe forever.”

  “Forever! What would you do here?”

  “What do you do here?”

  “You know the answer. I used to kill sea lions, and now I run a store.”

  “I’ll do that too.”

  He put the broom in its corner, and returned to his counter. “Polonio doesn’t need another store. There’s barely anyone to sell to.”

  “I’ll open a restaurant.”

  “Hah!”

  “What?”

  “This isn’t big old Montevideo.”

  “There’s nothing for me in Montevideo.”

  He stopped and looked at her intently. “Why do you say that? Don’t you have a family?”

  She shrugged. “There’s my mother.”

  “School?”

  “To hell with school!”

  He laughed. Again she was startled by the gaps where teeth had been. She laughed along with him this time, surprised that he hadn’t lectured her on the importance of school, as adults almost always did. “You haven’t seen Polonio’s winter storms,” he said.

  “I love storms.”

  “Listen, hija, I’m glad you like it here. But you’d go crazy if you stayed.”

  “I don’t think I would.”

  They looked at each other for a long time. His expression shifted, grew thoughtful. He searched her face as if probing for the answer to an unformed question.

  “Well,” he said, “I might have something for you.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “A place you could call home.”

  * * *

  *

  The women prepared a feast for that final night, with the luxury of extra wood that Flaca and La Venus had spent all afternoon gathering, so they could have fire for a long time, really celebrate, which seemed questionable to La Venus and she said as much: what was there to celebrate about having to leave?

  “The fact,” Flaca said, “of having made it here at all.”

  Romina had bought a full bucket of fish from Óscar, the fisherman who lived behind El Lobo’s grocery with his wife, Alicia; her father, El Lobo; and the children, Lili, Ester, and Javier. As darkness gathered, they lit candles and held flashlights for each other while the fish opened their bellies to knife and hand and salt. Everyone seemed happy, sated after their day outdoors, salt in their hair, dirt under their fingernails, even though Flaca thought she detected a streak of sadness below it all, at everything ending, at this being their last night. Leaving was painful. But this was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? A deepening of connections, a week of joy? The trip had been more successful than she’d dreamed possible. She’d thought they might get relief from the city, perhaps make friends, but she hadn’t known they could come to feel like something more than friends, something larger, a kind of alternative family stitched together by the very fact that they’d been torn from the fabric of the accepted world. She pushed her fingers deeper into the slick body of a fish. Yes, they had to go back to the city, to the dullness of it and the fear, the smallness of the sky, but she didn’t want to think about the city right now. It would all be there for them tomorrow. Stay here, in the moment, on these rocks, under this indigo sky, in this holy unholy communion that had no name and yet meant more to her than anything else in her life.

  They roasted the fish over embers, along with whole bell peppers and a couple of eggplants, all of which they served with olive oil and Alicia’s freshly baked bread. It was almost midnight when they finally gathered to eat, the moon high above them in a drove of stars.

  A quiet fell over them.

  “
I don’t want to go back,” Romina finally said.

  No one dared respond. The ocean spun its rhythmic song out in the distance.

  “I can’t stand it anymore,” Romina went on. “And yet I have to stand it. We all have to.”

  “The city?” Flaca asked.

  “The dictatorship,” Romina said, louder than she’d meant to.

  The word dictatorship hovered between them, over the fire, slinking around it, dark and weightless. No one ever used that word in the city. Many people didn’t even think it anymore, or so it appeared from the outside. Even here, out in Polonio, far from civilization and its spies, no one had uttered the word or heard it.

  “You mean El Proceso,” La Venus ventured. The Process. The regime’s term for the curfews, kidnappings, censorship, searches, surveillance, interrogations, rules, decrees, all the changes they’d imposed on the nation, as if a word could sanitize the horrors away.

  “I mean the dictatorship,” Romina said. The bleeding between her legs emboldened her. They took so much, the blood crooned, but not your womb and not your voice. “Why can’t we call a thing by its name? You think it’s some kind of ‘Process,’ like the steps involved in fixing cars or curing leather? The disappearing of my brother, the—what happened to me? The fact that I can’t ever get a job as a teacher if I’m categorized as a B or C citizen, a threat to the nation—which I probably am—or if I’m ever overheard criticizing the State or even accused of it? My brother and I have both been arrested, that’s enough to threaten my career. And if the government got wind of everything I’ve just said—forget it, I can’t say any of this in the city, it’s impossible, you all know that, that’s why you’re all staring at me right now like I’m crazy but you know what? I’m saying it because tomorrow night I won’t be able to, we’ll all be back in our cages.”

  She fell silent. Flaca moved to stoke the embers into flames. She added kindling, a log. Now that the food was all roasted, the fire could spark up again for their warmth and pleasure.

  “I often wonder how long it’ll last,” La Venus said. “I’m always looking for clues that the regime is crumbling, that next month or next year things will be back to normal.”

  “There is no normal to go back to,” Romina said.

  “Now now, Romina,” Flaca said, “no need to be unkind. La Venus is just holding out hope, is that so wrong? We all need hope, don’t we?”

  “We need to survive, Flaca. If hope is what gets you there, fine. But I can’t rely on holding my breath until it’s over.”

  “Why not?” Malena asked.

  Romina stared at her, and softened. She was a kind soul, Malena, for all her layers of hiding and her deflections; she bristled when you got too close, and yet, when she sensed need in someone, she gave without a thought. “Look, I’m sorry if I’ve upset you—any of you. I don’t mean to be negative. This is our goodbye party, our celebration. It’s easy to see why we avoided the topic until now.”

  “It’s fine,” La Venus said, reaching out a hand to Romina’s knee. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m rather dumb about these things, it’s true.”

  “You’re not dumb, Venus!” Flaca said.

  “My husband calls me stupid all the time.”

  “Your husband’s an idiot!”

  “Enough, you two,” Romina said, though in truth she loved the tender look they exchanged, as if a gaze between women could wrestle a man’s insults to the ground.

  “But look, Romina—I really do want to know your answer to Malena’s question,” La Venus said. “And I bet everyone else does, too.”

  “Really?” Romina scanned the circle.

  “Oh, sure,” Flaca said. “Of course I want to know. But I’m going to need a hell of a lot more whiskey.”

  A freshly opened bottle started making the rounds, and when it reached Romina she swigged and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “All right. Two reasons. First of all, because some nightmares last a lifetime and that’s it. Look at what Trujillo did to the Dominican Republic. Look at Paraguay. Some dictators hold the reins forever. I know we Uruguayans think that couldn’t happen to us, that we’re a different kind of country, but guess what? That’s exactly why we didn’t see the coup coming! Secondly: even if this does end before we’re, say, fifty years old, we can’t just push a button and miraculously rewind to ’seventy-three. Even if all the political prisoners are freed, even if all the exiles come back, what do we do with them? What do they do with themselves? We’d have to start taking stock of the ruins, of what’s broken in our country, and it won’t all be sun and rainbows—it’s when our work will begin.”

  She fell silent.

  Flaca whistled. “So speaks the prophet.”

  “Shut up,” Romina said.

  “No, I mean it—you’re like John the whoever it was.”

  “Or like Cassandra,” Malena said. “She really saw all of it.”

  “And the Trojans didn’t believe her,” Romina said.

  Malena gave her a look so intense it was almost hungry. “Well, there you go.”

  “One thing is clear,” La Venus said. “When all of that happens, however old and gray we are, we’ll make you president.”

  Laughter erupted.

  “You’re already drunk,” Romina said.

  “I am! But it’s true! You’re what we’ll need! Come on, you have to at least become a senator, won’t you?”

  “Oh, all right,” Romina said. “And I’ll also fly unicorns to the moon.”

  “I could use a unicorn to ride,” La Venus said.

  “I’ll find you one, my angel,” Flaca declared.

  La Venus flashed a radiant smile. “I knew you would.”

  “I tell you what,” Flaca said, “let’s get so drunk that tomorrow doesn’t even exist anymore, that all of reality is right here on this beach.”

  “So we never go back?”

  “So we never go back.”

  “I don’t want to die,” said Romina. Pleasure spread across her chest as she realized that, in that moment, it was true. She was here, on this rock near the beach, reddening the cloth between her legs, the cigarette burns almost faded from her limbs, her ears full of ocean and women, and she wanted to live.

  “Neither do I,” said Malena, with a note in her voice that resembled surprise.

  “I’m not talking about dying.” Flaca lit a cigarette. “I’m talking about living forever inside this moment.”

  “And how do we do that?” Romina reached into Flaca’s pack for a smoke of her own. “Witchcraft?”

  Flaca smiled. “I’m game.”

  “Me too,” Paz said.

  “The witches of Cabo Polonio!” said Romina.

  “I already feel like a part of me will be here forever,” La Venus mused. “I’ve never felt so alive in my life.”

  “We all know why that’s true!” Romina raised the whiskey flask.

  “No, really—”

  “I feel that way too,” Malena said, reaching her palms toward the embers. “As if part of me won’t ever leave.”

  “Actually,” Paz said, “I have some news. About some witchcraft that could keep a part of us here.”

  Flaca exhaled smoke and stared at Paz. “Chica, what? Out with it.”

  Once she started, it all spilled out, each word cascading over the ones before it. “I went to see El Lobo today, and you won’t believe it, his nephew has an empty house—a hut, really, you know, for fishermen—right here in Cabo Polonio, just a short walk from the store and he used to live there, the nephew, with his wife and daughter, but the daughter has asthma and it’s not good for her to live out in the elements, she was suffering, her health was I mean, so they moved to Castillos, that nearby town we saw on the map, remember?—where there’s an apothecary and roads to get to the hospital if they have to go and they want to sell the
place but they haven’t advertised or anything, they want to sell it by word of mouth.”

  She fell silent and the women savored the thoughts that poured through their minds.

  “How are we supposed to buy a house?” Romina said. “My family can barely afford meat these days.”

  “Calm down, Romina, we’re just talking,” Flaca said. “Here, have another swig of whiskey, relax.”

  “Go to hell.” Romina took the flask cheerfully, and drank.

  “How big is the hut?” La Venus asked.

  “Tiny,” Paz said. “But who cares?” She took the flask as it came around and relished the liquid burning down her throat. “It’s one room for everything, beds, kitchen, you know how it goes. And god knows about the toilet. But El Lobo said he’d recommend us.”

  “It sounds perfect,” said Flaca.

  “Except we can’t have it,” Romina said.

  “Why do you have to ruin the fun?”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I’ve always wanted to see inside one of those fishermen’s huts,” La Venus said. “Haven’t you?”

  “Sure,” Romina said. “But I can’t buy one.”

  “Why not?” said La Venus.

  “You’re drunk!” Romina pointed a finger to the sky, as if to emphasize her case.

  “Not drunk enough—pass the whiskey.”

  “Fine, fine. But the house—”

  “What about it?” La Venus leaned in seductively. “Don’t you want it?”

  “Hey, hey,” Flaca said, pulling her back, “easy there.”

  “My love, I’m just asking our friend whether she wants a house.”

  “Put it like that and she’d want any house.”

  “I haven’t even seen the house!” Romina said.

  “Yes, you have,” Paz said. “It’s the one with dark brown walls before that lone tree on the way to El Lobo’s—”

  “How am I supposed to know which one that is?”

  “I think I know the one,” Malena said thoughtfully.