It was the greatest gift she could give her daughter, Romina knew: her blessing to not wash the pots and dishes, to occupy herself with bookish pursuits after dinner as if she were a husband or a son. Over the years, they’d grown accustomed to sharing the small kitchen in silence, one studies, one cooks. It was generous of her, though sometimes Romina wondered whether Mamá only did this because Felipe was gone and there was no son to coddle, and then she felt guilty for her own cynicism. “No, Mamá, you’re the one who should rest.”
“I’m fine,” Mamá said, but she let Romina take over the sink without further protest. They began working quietly, side by side, Romina washing, Mamá drying, an ancient mother-daughter ritual that surely harkened back to the days of Exodus, the plates washed in slavery under the Pharaoh until that famous night the Jewish people left in haste and probably left stacks of dirty pots and pans for the Egyptians to handle on their own. Passover was Romina’s favorite holiday, embedded as it was with a liberation story, one that held more fascination now than ever, and standing here, washing beside Mamá, with the Polonio waves still fresh in her mind, Romina thought about that great escape that was her inheritance and thought, what if—
Come on, finish the thought.
She thought it furiously, again, what if—?
Soapsuds foaming, circling, seeping into the skin of her hands.
What if she shed her fear?
What if she could be brave?
Arrests like the one she’d recently been through were meant to immobilize, to terrify people into obeying the government so it never happened again. But now she saw how what they did—their punishments, in her case, for no known or stated crime—could have the opposite effect.
Because if it can happen to you when you keep your head down like a good little rat, then she’d cracked open their secret: obedience did not protect you.
In which case, why bother obeying?
Why not resist?
She scrubbed hard at a pot with stubborn grime.
There was one reason.
Her parents.
Romina glanced over at her mother, who was carefully drying a pan. She was a small, compact woman who wore a kerchief over her hair while doing housework—which was most of her day—in the fashion of the Old Country. She had a gentle soul and a deep reserve that made Romina wonder whether she simply didn’t want anything, or hid her wants so well, subsumed them so successfully for her family, that they became invisible to the naked eye. She suffered without complaint, her mother, which only made Romina feel worse about wanting things for herself. Especially now. With Felipe gone, everything depended on Romina. On her building a life. On her making them proud. On her making up for the hole he left. Her life was not solely her own: it belonged to her parents, who’d given her everything, and in fact it had begun before she was born, when her parents had fled the Ukraine, or else before that when her grandparents had fled pogroms in Russia. Romina’s grandmother had been the sole survivor of a family of six when, one Easter Sunday, a Christian mob had celebrated the resurrection of their Savior by terrorizing the Jewish Quarter. They had burned down her family’s home, though nobody knew exactly how the deaths had happened, whether Abuela’s parents and brothers and sisters had been stabbed or shot or burned alive, as Abuela never spoke of the details. She, Romina, only knew that their survival had resulted in their arrival here, in Uruguay, where she and Felipe were born as a new generation of hope, the pinnacle of all that suffering and sacrifice. And this had always been enough of a reason for her to stay locked up in her maze. Until now. Until Polonio.
“Mamá,” she said, and the sound of her voice startled them both.
“¿Sí, Romina?” Her mother’s back stiffened, but she did not turn or stop drying the dish in her hands. “What is it?”
I can’t stand it anymore. Why not resist. Also I will never love a man. Zero chance she’d be understood. And she had zero right.
“Never mind,” Romina said. “It’s nothing.”
* * *
*
Paz returned to Montevideo with a flush of courage. Her mother seemed not to notice any difference, caught up as she was with her boyfriend, a widower twenty years her senior with a sixth-floor apartment in a gleaming building with a doorman and balconies that overlooked the river. The boyfriend worked for the government, doing what, Paz didn’t know, though she guessed that he knew nothing of Mamá’s past sympathies for and assistance of guerrilla fighters. Mamá was rarely home. It was still summer; school was weeks away. Paz slept all morning, lolled around the house all afternoon, then went out to walk the neighborhood, gripped by sexual fantasies about the young women—and some of the not-so-young women—she passed. She’d been sparked. Her body was a knotted bundle of flames. Only walking eased the ache of it, and so she walked: on the Rambla, the promenade that sinewed along the shore; down the main artery of Avenida 18 de Julio, crowded with shops and kiosks and café tables crammed onto the sidewalks; into the Old City with its ornate, exhausted buildings and narrow streets tucked into each other like cobbled secrets; through plazas whose statues of various heroes wore their pigeon shit with an air of resignation. She walked until darkness pushed her back indoors because, though there was no longer a legal curfew, the nights were not safe, police and soldiers prowled the streets, and if they stopped you they’d ask for your papers and where you were going and why and anything else they chose to do was covered in night. Inside, at home, she read all night, pulling down books from her mother’s shelves, Jules Verne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Homer, Juan Carlos Onetti, Juana de Ibarbourou, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dante Alighieri, the books she’d been able to keep under military rule. She sorely missed the other books her mother had burned in the parrilla the night after the coup: Benedetti, Galeano, Cristina Peri Rossi, Cortázar, and even Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, all the Russians emphatically had to go, since any Russian name smacked of Communism. Orange flames had licked the pages, made them curl and blacken and disappear. How quickly flames consume things. How her mother had wept as her books shriveled and went up in smoke. It was a silent weeping, completely still, a stony face streaked with tears.
“It’s so quick,” Mamá finally said.
Paz, twelve years old, had been watching, not daring to say a word.
“Fire,” Mamá added, as if that explained everything.
She looked beautiful in the flickering light. And sad. A sad and pretty woman, and, for the first time in her life, Paz looked at her mother’s face and saw her as young. I was so young when I had you, she always told Paz, with my future still ahead of me until you came along.
“Before you know it,” Mamá said to the flames, or into them, “everything is gone.”
Mamá went to bed that night without cooking, and Paz ate María cookies with dulce de leche for dinner, in the kitchen, alone.
Ever since then, she’d felt as though the fires lit in that grill still held, somehow, the ghosts of those books, that the embers they used to slow-roast meat glowed with the light of vanished words. Mamá didn’t barbecue often, but when she did, Paz would chew her chorizo or bell peppers very slowly, imagining that she was taking in lost sentences along with her food.
Now the books in their house were fewer, more limited. To compensate, Paz had developed a habit of turning back to the beginning of a book the moment she finished it. As if a story were a circle, its ending secretly embedded in its opening line. As if a book were a long and unclasped belt, with the first chapter at the buckle and the last page the end tip, an extended supple thing she could bend and wrap around the waist of her mind, curved, fastened, solid enough to stay. Endings morphed into beginnings and new meanings were revealed. King Lear, raised from the dead, was haughty again, gathering his three daughters, responding to betrayals by returning for more. Dante, after seeing everything, returns to the lip of the Inferno and still feels its pull. Don Quixote d
ies and then promptly becomes—what else?—his own self in that library where he fell into books and was first inspired to make his absurd helmet, as if his madness were also a kind of arrival into heaven. Time was a loop and people were caught inside of it, trapped by inevitable destinies, their futures fastened to their pasts. But was this true? And what was her inevitable destiny? You’d go crazy if you stayed, El Lobo had said. You haven’t seen the winter storms. He might be right. But the heroes of books never heeded such warnings. That reckless Dante, he just kept walking to the lip of the underworld, didn’t he? Determined to follow his soul, to see what was there, and to hell with the price of the journey.
Her walks grew longer. She was never sure what she dreaded more, finding Mamá with her widower boyfriend, being alone with Mamá, or being the only one in the house. Each possibility held its own thorns. Her walks started landing her at Flaca’s butcher shop, at first with the excuse of buying some meat, later just to dawdle and be with her. It was comforting to be around Flaca. It made her feel more herself, as if there were room for who she was in her own skin.
“Give me something to do,” she said one day.
“I’m sorry.” Flaca pulled out a tray of cuts of beef to tidy them. “We can’t afford to hire anyone.”
“I don’t want money. I just want to help.”
“Ha!”
“I mean it. I’m bored, I want to do something.”
“Don’t you have homework?”
“It’s boring and I could do it in my sleep.”
And so she started working, a few afternoons a week at Flaca’s side, making herself useful in whatever way she could. She sorted money, ran errands, learned to cube beef just right for stews, grind certain cuts for sauces, slice the fat off other cuts so they could be sold as lean steaks. When March rolled around, with its end of summer and new school year, she continued to come twice a week and help, donning a blood-streaked apron over her school uniform. Over time, as they worked side by side, she heard the story of how Flaca came to run the butcher shop four days a week. She’d started helping out behind the counter when she was five, watching her father closely, and playing butcher, fashioning both her knives and her pretend meat out of cardboard and paper. Her father had only had daughters, and it grieved him not to be able to one day pass his store on to a son, as his own father had done. Flaca’s older sisters had married men who showed no interest in becoming butchers for the worthy neighbors of Parque Rodó. Flaca’s father had tried to change their minds, but to no avail. And so he’d taught his youngest daughter the arts of butchery, an apprenticeship she’d always wanted. She’d already been working the cash register and carrying things for him when his back ached, which was more and more often, and now, for the past three years, she’d been doing all the jobs that he did and giving him days of rest.
All of this fascinated Paz, the idea of having a father who taught you his bloody and noble trade, the idea of having a father at all. Flaca’s parents, who sometimes came through the shop, were always warm with her. They were stout, with kind and tired faces, and older than Paz had expected them to be, in their early sixties. Flaca had been the last child, conceived when her mother thought her childbearing years were done; the opposite, Paz thought, of her own mother, who’d had a baby before she’d had a chance to see herself as a woman.
She didn’t ask about La Venus, not wanting to pry, but she saw the way Flaca lit up when talking about her, and how, on other days, she grew rigid at the mention of her lover. There were clearly ups and downs between them. Paz listened for the smallest scraps, wanting to memorize this way of being. Even the most mundane detail of their relationship screamed itself up to the status of miracle, two women!
Autumn gave way to the cold winds of winter, biting Paz at the neck.
“How’s Romina?” she asked one day, as an August storm pelted the windows of the shop. She saw the others less often than she did Flaca, and still felt shy about calling them too often out of the blue. They’d all slid back into their own city lives, in which they were grown women with serious things going on and she was a teenager with little in common with them, at least on the surface, where the world could see. The butcher shop was her tether to Polonio, her mundane proof that it had not all been a dream.
“She’s all right, I think. I just talked to her last night and, you know what? You won’t believe this, she asked me about the hut.”
“What hut?”
“You joking? The hut! Our hut. The one you told us about, the one we saw on the last night. She was all excited, saying she had a dream about it the other night, that we were all in there. She thinks we should buy it. All of us together. It’s odd, because Romina is one of the most prudent people I’ve ever met, but here she is stuck on that crazy idea.”
“What’s so crazy about it?”
Flaca laughed.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m sorry, Paz. I take you seriously. I do.”
She seemed about to say more, but a customer entered and they quickly broke off conversation. Paz wrapped the requested meat for the lady while Flaca rang her up and counted out change. That crazy idea. That very one. She had no money to her name, none at all. Would they leave her out? Would they have their home at the edge of the world without her?
When the customer was gone, Flaca took out a cigarette, and Paz boldly reached for the pack on the counter.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” Flaca said, halfheartedly.
“I shouldn’t do a lot of things.”
Flaca focused on the flame of her match until her cigarette was lit. “Good point.” She lit Paz’s cigarette from the same flame. They stood quietly for a few moments, blowing out smoke, watching it disappear.
“I still have the number El Lobo gave me,” Paz said. “For the grocer in Castillos who can send him messages. I could call and get the message to him that we want to know whether the house is still available, at what price.”
“So you don’t think it’s crazy.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Do you?”
Flaca gazed up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. But maybe that’s not the right question.” She lowered her voice, as if the censors could be listening, as if government surveillance might bother to spy on two young women in a butcher shop. “Maybe crazy and impossible are two different things.”
* * *
*
It took almost two weeks for Paz to confirm with the grocer, who sent messages into Polonio when the cart driver took supplies, that the house was still available. Once they knew, Flaca summoned the four friends to her house. They gathered in the early evening so there would be plenty of time to talk and disperse before night fell completely, before walkers became more vulnerable to men in uniform. Flaca urged them each to arrive exactly on time, at staggered intervals—5:30, 5:38, 5:48, 5:55—to avoid giving the appearance of a gathering of five or more, which, as they had no permit, could incite a skittish or vindictive neighbor to report them. Before the coup, life in Uruguay had never clung to clock time; you arrived when you arrived, and the best time to join the party was whenever you wound your way through timelessness to the door. Not so, now. Martial law breeds martial time. You become precise to stay within the lines of safety or, rather, what you pretend are lines of safety, since those parameters could stop working at any moment.
When they’d all arrived, Flaca grabbed the fresh mate she’d prepared, along with a thermos of hot water, and she led the way into her bedroom. Her parents waved good-naturedly from the armchair and rocking chair where they sat watching the news, which was as grim and bland as always, harping on about the heroic regime, the evil Soviets, evil Cuba, heroic soccer, country people gathered in the province of Durazno to thank the government for the great generosity and architectural brilliance of a new bridge in their region.
Flaca’s bedroom was sparsely dec
orated. Nothing hung on the graying walls except a single old photograph of the Plaza Matriz, at the heart of the Old City of Montevideo, with turn-of-the-century men walking past the cathedral in their tails and black top hats. It was a sepia-toned image, in a rustic wooden frame that Flaca had made herself.
Paz thought that there was nothing in the room to suggest that Flaca was the kind of woman she was, not a wisp, not a trace.
Romina wondered whether she would ever be able to set foot in this room without the old days rushing back to her, the afternoons of quiet lust and animal pleasure, even though she no longer lusted for Flaca herself.
La Venus felt slightly suffocated by the small room with so many women in it; it felt wrong somehow, obscene, to share this space that had become her intimate secret.
Malena entered last and stood against the wall, fidgeting with the strap of her purse.
Flaca closed the bedroom door, and the television sounds receded. Her four friends stared at her expectantly. She gestured to the bed, as grandly as she could, as if she were offering them some kind of collective throne.
Romina, La Venus, and Malena sat at the edge of the bed, while Paz sank cross-legged to the floor. Flaca remained on her feet, facing them, and at that moment she realized that they hadn’t all been together since their trip to Polonio. This gathering was a kind of return, and it made her feel complete somehow, fired up, a hum of electricity circling between them.
“All right,” Flaca said. “You all know why we’re here.”
They stared at her.
“We want a house in Polonio. That is to say, a house in paradise.”
The women nodded.
“A house that we can’t afford and yet seems destined to be ours.”
She waited for someone to chime in, to protest, to crack a joke, but no one did; instead, the silence gathered around her like a rising tide.
“It seems irrational to spend money we don’t have on a shack full of holes a day’s journey from here. Not only that, it also seems impossible. And perhaps it is. But none of that means we shouldn’t try. Break the mold. Break the reins. That’s the only way great things have ever happened.”
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