“The real question,” La Venus said, “is why buy a house at the edge of the world?”
“Because it would be ours,” Paz said. “Don’t you see? We’d always have a place to be free.”
That shut everyone up for a while. The fire sparked, sang. The lighthouse beam brushed over them, left, brushed again. The women looked at the flames, at each other.
“Let’s go see it,” Flaca said.
“Let’s go!” said La Venus.
“Why not?” said Malena. “Maybe it’ll have something to tell us.”
The others looked at her in surprise. Malena, the sensible one, the reserved one, the ex-nun, suggesting they listen to a house?
“Now?” Romina said.
“Now, ¡boluda! When else?”
They took a single flashlight. They stumbled through the dark, drunk, full of fish and bread and starlight and each other’s excitement. The dirt shimmered darkly beneath their feet. Malena walked close to Paz. “Can we talk?”
Paz shrugged, but let herself lag back to walk with Malena.
“Listen. About today.”
“Forget it,” said Paz.
“I just want to say—you’re not the problem. I’m the problem. I’m terrified and I don’t know what any of this means for me.”
It surprised Paz, the spilling rawness of the confession, perhaps propelled by the whiskey. “It means whatever we want it to. That’s the point.”
“Oh really? So we have a few days of fresh air and swims at the beach, declaring the sort of women we are, and then what? We have to go back to the city. We have to be good and proper.”
“I thought you were always good and proper.”
Malena snorted. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
A quiet step, another, another.
“And if we can’t act the same anymore in the city,” Malena went on, “what do you think will happen to us?”
“We’ll be safe.”
“How do you know?”
“We have each other.”
Malena made a barking sound that might have been a laugh. “You’re something else, Paz.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. But I’ll never be safe.”
“You don’t know that.”
“The way you talk, I forget sometimes how young you are.”
Paz gritted her teeth. “I’m not a child.”
“I didn’t say you were a child. I know very well you’re not. When I was your age—” Malena broke off, fixed her gaze on the backs of their friends in the darkness ahead.
“What? When you were my age what?” Paz was desperately curious and seemed on the brink of revelation. Malena at sixteen. A novice at the convent? Or?
“Never mind.”
She’d closed up again. It was shocking, how good Malena was at closing up, at shuttering her mind to others. It seemed a useful skill; Paz couldn’t exactly blame her. As they walked on, she spooled Malena’s words out in her mind: I’ll never be safe, never be safe, be safe.
“I admire you, Paz.”
A glow of pleasure, surprise.
“I want to be friends.”
A slap. Rejection. It stung, because what she’d done with Malena had been a first, an attempt at being bold like Flaca, though when she stopped to think about it she wasn’t sure whether she had a crush on Malena because of who she was, or simply because she was there. Not that Malena wasn’t pretty: she had delicate features and eyes you could get lost in. But she was so tightly wound, with her bun and her knees together, that Paz would not have noticed her if she hadn’t been out on this beach, with these women, signaling connection to this tribe. Maybe the primness wasn’t her real self at all. Maybe she was finding her way to her real self, just like Paz was. She felt a deep yearning, though she didn’t know for what. “Of course, Malena. We’ll always be friends.”
The hut loomed, appearing black in the night.
“Is this the one?”
“I think it is.”
It was long and narrow, with a pitched roof that seemed to catch shards of the moon. The door stood at the center of a long wall, a window to one side, bereft of glass. An awning hung over the front door to form a small front patio.
“Quaint,” La Venus said.
“A dream,” Flaca said.
It seemed that way to Paz, too, reminding her of the humble huts in fairy tales where fishermen’s wives had wishes granted by mythical fish who longed for another day of life.
“A wreck,” Romina said.
“It’ll need some work,” La Venus admitted. “That roof looks like it would let the rain right in.”
“Nothing we can’t handle,” Flaca said.
“What’s this we?”
“You, my queen, my Venus, won’t have to lift a finger.”
La Venus smiled, and approached the door.
Romina moved toward her, whether to stop her or to follow, she wasn’t sure. “What are you doing?”
“Well, no one’s home, right?”
The door was not locked.
One by one, they stepped through.
There was no furniture save a narrow table in the area that must have been the kitchen, judging by the stacked metal pails and the cooking pit dug in the old peasant way. A packed dirt floor. Three windows, none of them paned. Gaps in the walls wide enough to let the wind through. A hole-pocked roof stretched over a bare rectangle of space.
They stood together in that empty space. The lighthouse beam slashed in through a window and swept over them, a cloth of light, followed by the deeper cloth of dark.
* * *
*
The next day, hungover, dizzy with the exhilaration of their seven days, they packed up their things and left Polonio on foot. First they stopped at El Lobo’s shop to say goodbye. Alicia and the children came out, too, and the women accepted a mate and lingered, talking and playing with the children—Javier, the youngest at four years old, brought out the seal bones he used as toy soldiers and sparked a little war in the dirt with Flaca, which her army promptly lost—until Alicia finally pointed out that they should go if they wanted to catch the last bus to the city from the bus stop on the highway. They left with promises to return—and we’ll be ready for you, El Lobo said, with a tender look at Paz, which she pocketed away in the deep recesses of her mind—and then they struck out along the long, sprawling northern beach, the Playa de las Calaveras, named for skulls because, once upon a time, that beach had been riddled with them. The women were silent as they walked, each harboring her own roiling thoughts, the sand a damp thud under their feet. To their left, the ocean waves sang out rich music, beckoning for them to stay, but they walked on. At the end of the long beach, before the sand dunes began, they turned to look back one last time. There, behind them, the low slope of Polonio, and the majestic curve of the ocean. There, the lighthouse, its tall body like a finger held, ssshhhhh, to the closed lips of the horizon.
3
Into Madness
AT FIRST SHE couldn’t bear to shower. For four days, La Venus wiped her armpits with a washcloth but kept the rest of her body soiled with Cabo Polonio, its film still on her, gilding her, humming against her skin. She couldn’t stand the thought of losing the last grains of sand from between her toes, between her legs. Her mother called, why won’t you come for tea, and her sisters and sisters-in-law, come on, where are you?, but she couldn’t see them until she bathed, so she held them at bay. Pretending that she could slow down time. As if the smell of her own sweat could keep the dream intact.
None of it worked. Her body clamored to be clean. It was no use trying to hold on to the traces of beach, of freedom; the scent of the ocean was soon overpowered by her own odor; sweat gilded her skin and gradually made it smooth again, slip
ping sand grains away to oblivion. Arnaldo hadn’t noticed—or, if he had, he hadn’t said a word. He said so little these days. How small their lives had become, how confined by fears no one spoke aloud.
The question was how to live here in the city without letting it crush you.
The question was how to live in the city at all.
She was ungrateful, and she knew it. They were alive. Neither of them had been arrested even once since the coup. Arnaldo had work. He hated it, but he had it. He processed paperwork at the Ministry of Education and Culture, a job he’d had since they got married five years before. Back then, he’d been excited about the possibilities: he, a musician with big dreams—the John Lennon of Uruguay, that’s what they’ll call me, just you wait—was going to get paid to work in the government offices of culture, helping decide the destinies of artists. Those were heady days, long-haired, bell-bottomed. Arnaldo her bohemian man. She’d had her pick of men, all sorts of them lined up to gladly lick the floor she walked on: middle-aged businessmen with deep pockets, young doctors launching their careers, sons of former senators with glitzy beach apartments in Punta del Este, fervent poets, brilliant philosophers, law students with tongues of gold. She chose Arnaldo because he had seemed to embody a bohemian life. He looked a bit like Mick Jagger and spoke as if all his dreams were already true. He made you want to repeat his words because they tasted so damn good, because he rolled them like honey in his mouth. When she was with him the world was wide. She became a rock star’s girlfriend and then, very soon, a rock star’s wife. But after the coup, it didn’t take long for the rock star to become the Incredible Shrinking Bureaucrat, smaller and smaller with each passing week. He swallowed all his rage and disappointment, brought it home in tight packages that splayed out their unhappiness behind closed doors. He stopped playing music. He stopped laughing without malice. Sex was his only consolation, his expected reward for a long day of dullness, fear, and doing the will of the regime. She was his medicine, the shot of whiskey meant to drown his sorrows. He drank her bitterly. Afterward, he’d fall asleep and she’d lie in the sour aftertaste, his bitterness lodged under her skin.
Now she’d been ruined by Cabo Polonio, by those big gulping breaths of ocean air. Her lungs had expanded. Their apartment gave her no room to breathe. There was no room here for La Venus, for the damp woman in possession of every inch of her own body, desired and bursting with desire. Glowing. Seen. What had that thought been, in the sand dunes? That Anita was a lie, a broken shell. How could she fit herself back into that lie, that old self in which she no longer believed? And yet she had to. So she got up and—as if she’d never been to the sand dunes, as if no dunes existed on this earth—she brewed the mate, toasted bread for her husband’s breakfast, smiled at him when he stumbled into the kitchen, brightly, automatically, as if she were a machine programmed to stretch its mouth at the sight of him. When had that begun? Was it new, or had she simply not noticed it before? It disgusted her. She disgusted herself. A broken shell. She had to leave. She couldn’t leave. Ridiculous! She would lose everything: her parents’ respect, her old friends—all married, women who would never in a thousand years be caught pressed up against a Cabo Polonio rock—her home, her ability to buy new clothes and keep a tab with the grocer, the baker, the butcher—perhaps not the butcher. She could go further down the road, to Flaca’s. Flaca would surely give her meat. Flaca would give her a lot of things. She certainly would. But Flaca lived with her parents, she was so young, all that swagger made it easy to forget that she was only twenty-one, too young to burden with this question of how a married woman might survive without her husband.
There was one more thing, too, that she would lose: her chance to have a child. She’d miscarried once and it was the most intense sorrow of her life. Leaving her husband to go be La Venus, goddess of an underworld where women made love to women, would mean leaving the chance to be a mother. All her life she’d longed for the sensation of pregnancy, the fullness of it, and every baby she’d ever held had made her ache to hold her own. Could she walk away from that? Only barrenness awaited La Venus: barrenness and sex and a true life.
Scared to leave. Scared to stay.
She hovered in the space between fears.
On the fifth day, she showered and scrubbed her skin until it was red and raw, then put on meticulous makeup and a clean, elegant blouse that revealed no cleavage. No distractions. When her husband came home, she was waiting for him at the kitchen table with a ready mate. She watched him drink and waited for the watery dregs to gurgle in the gourd before she spoke.
“I don’t want to have sex with you anymore.”
He stared at her for a moment as if she’d suddenly started speaking Czech. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing’s the matter.”
“What have I done? If I’ve done something, you have to tell me.”
“It’s nothing like that.”
“Something I haven’t done?” His voice grew sly. “Something you…want?”
“No.”
His jaw clenched. “There’s another man, then.”
“Arnaldo, calm down—”
“Who is he?”
“There is no other man.”
“Liar.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Then why would you—”
“Please,” she said gently. “Don’t make this difficult.”
“Difficult?” he said. “Me?”
She reached for his hand. He drew back, sprang up from the table, and left the room.
That night, he reached for her in the darkness and she pushed his hand away. He turned from her and went to sleep. She thought she’d won her space. But on the following night, he reached for her again, and when she brushed his hand away, he returned, more forcefully this time. She pressed at his chest with the flat of her palm, but he didn’t yield.
“Don’t be stupid, Anita.”
“We’ve been through this.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake. Either you tell me his name or you stop being childish.”
I’m not being childish, she wanted to say, just the opposite, but his hand was back and so was the rest of him, on her now, and suddenly exhaustion overcame her and she wondered whether it was worth the scope of the fight since her attempts to push him off weren’t working anyway, he was stronger than she, it was no use, he had her pinned and was doing what he liked, and maybe he was right and she was stupid, he was her husband after all, she belonged to him, and hadn’t he had another terrible day in a string of grim and terrible days, what was her problem, tell me that, what is your problem, stupid Anita.
* * *
*
The streets were hostile zones, pocked with reminders of torture. Romina flinched at almost nothing, and this shamed her: all the people who’d been tortured for months on end, and she quakes like this after only three days? And yet it rose in her, insistent. Sometimes it seemed that people were seeing into her, could read what had happened in her face or in the way she held her shoulders. At other times she thought she read torture in those around her: was that why the kiosk vendor never met anyone’s eyes anymore, or why the neighbor at the end of the block swept her porch steps brutally, as if they’d crossed a line and had to be punished? It could be anyone who passed her on the street, really. How to know who else bore those same wounds? Certainly those who’d never met la máquina still lived in fear of it, didn’t they? Who hadn’t heard of it? Maybe everyone bore the wounds, no matter what had or hadn’t happened to them; maybe they were all part of the same vast, bruised body in the shape of a nation. A body groping for the slightest illusions of safety.
She never would have thought this way before Polonio. Where had her pragmatism gone? She’d spent seven days in dreamtime, in a landscape of beauty, of refuge, of the impossible, and she’d relaxed too much, she’d bled gleefully into the ocean, and she’
d even been so reckless as to talk about the dictatorship—using that very word, no less—out loud, in the open air! Now she feared herself. She feared she might have lost the restraint she needed for the city.
She kept her head down in her studies. History. The colonial era. The heroic tracts and battles of Artigas. Artigas was a liberator, yet the generals allowed him into their censored history books, still lauded him as a hero, hadn’t toppled a single statue of the man. How could that be? To them he was a military general, like them, their predecessor, who’d made this country they now got to run at the expense of its own people. Liars. Their histories were a lie. But she studied them. She memorized them. Why? Because she was a traitor? That’s what she’d thought at first, in the first years of university, that she was betraying her Communist brother who’d disappeared into those very generals’ prisons, that she was betraying her neighbors and the people of her country and her very own ideals, and she’d been ashamed of spewing their lies back out in essays and exams. She’d thought of herself as small-minded, like a rat, running through the junta’s maze, reduced to following their orders. But now, she saw things differently. Was it her arrest that had done it, or her days on the beach? The arrest showed her that no matter how much she kept her head down and obeyed, they could lock her up or assault her whenever they wanted. The beach, meanwhile, had shown her that another kind of air still existed in the world. You had to get to the far edges of reality to breathe that air; it wasn’t easy to find; but if you found it, breathing was still possible.
“You seem quiet lately,” her mother said as she gathered the dirty dinner plates, though she stopped short of asking what was on her daughter’s mind.
“All these exams.” It was the first thing she could think of. She’d been bending close to her textbook at the kitchen table, jotting notes occasionally in hopes that this would fool her mother into thinking she was focusing. But her mother was no fool. “Here, Mamá, I’ll help you with the dishes.”
“No, study—otherwise you’ll be up too late, and you need your rest.”
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