Paz had not.
“Well then, where did they put them, if schoolgirls like you don’t learn about it?”
“I don’t know. We don’t learn anything at school.” It was all lies, stupid government-approved lies, and she’d come to detest school days.
“I would have liked to go to school.” El Lobo glanced at his grandson, who’d settled into a corner. “At your age, I was out on the hunting boats with my father.”
She felt like an idiot. Ungrateful. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Alicia’s great with the little ones, they’ll learn more than I did. And anyway, I loved hunting. It was hard work, but there’s nothing like the power of those bodies, the thing that happens inside you when you’re wrestling a great creature like that at the end of its life.”
Blood in the foam, she thought.
“I want to wrestle creatures!” said Javier.
“One thing at a time,” El Lobo said, which seemed to satisfy the boy.
“I told you I’d live in Polonio one day,” Paz blurted out.
El Lobo smiled. “And here you are.”
She waited for him to say not living here, not really, but he didn’t. “What do people say about us?”
He looked up at her thoughtfully. He was whittling again, and it amazed her that he could keep carving with precision with his gaze turned elsewhere. “It’s unusual, of course, a group of female cousins in a fishermen’s hut.”
She did not breathe.
“But, of course, it is no problem.”
She felt her muscles relax. Maybe no one knew. Maybe all was well. She listened to the sound of El Lobo’s knife, the soft scrape of it against wood, and realized that his strokes kept time with the low, constant sound of ocean waves, a single rhythm, sand and water, blade and wood. Did he do that on purpose? Or did he do it without thinking, having lived so long in this ocean-place that the song of it seeped into everything? He seemed to live as if military rhythms couldn’t reach him. As if they didn’t exist, or, at least, were drowned out by the everywhere of waves.
“You know, I have an idea for connecting you more deeply to this place.”
“Another one?”
“Yes.”
She felt a prickle of hope. “The first one worked out well.”
“We could start a business. Together.”
“What!” Paz laughed. “After saying that you can’t imagine me living here.”
“Well, I can’t. That’s true. But that’s not what I’m talking about. You would still live in the city, but you’d sell seal skins there, to make those coats the fancy city ladies love to wear. I’d gather the skins here, you’d get them to Montevideo, where there are plenty of buyers.”
“Isn’t there already a skin trade?”
“Bah, the government runs it—the hunters barely earn a peso. This would be”—he leaned forward, squinted—“under the table. We’d share the profits. You’d get thirty percent of everything.”
Why not fifty percent? Paz wondered, though the thought was fleeting and she didn’t dare speak it. The whole idea was ludicrous anyway. She’d just finished high school the month before, with little fanfare, and at the end of the summer she’d be starting at the university, studying literature, which she’d chosen because it was her only passion that had anything to do with school. It was what she was supposed to do: keep studying. Where it would lead, she couldn’t say. Still—her? A smuggler? The last thing she needed was an illegal job. She wondered how risky it would be. El Lobo didn’t seem worried. But still, even if it were safe, how would she transport those skins—as mounds on the bus? The bulk, the weight, the smell—it all disgusted her already. Her fantasies of freedom had never looked or smelled like animal corpses. Then again, what had her fantasies looked like? Open. Nebulous. No sign of earning a living, that impossible, essential thing. She wasn’t like her classmates, with their dreams of becoming a doctor or teacher or rich man’s wife. Her only ambitions were to live and to be free. Making a living wasn’t a clear part of the dream, while marrying money—the ambition of many smooth-haired girls—was out of the question (she’d rather die). Her life goal was the same as the first time she’d come here: to follow Flaca’s example. But Flaca had parents who seemed to like her even though they saw at least flickers of who she really was, and, what’s more, they had a store she could run, work she could step into. Paz had none of that. Not the family-that-likes-you or the family store. “I don’t know,” she said.
“It’s not for you, then forget it.” El Lobo waved, as if swatting the idea away. “In any case. Tell me, are you and the girls going to celebrate your new home? Old Carlitos has some lambs, you know, he could slaughter one for you.”
He started talking about Carlitos’s lambs, the best meat on the coast of Rocha, and Paz let the question of the skin trade fall away, though it would keep snaking through her mind, slow, sinuous, curling at the dark edge of thought.
* * *
*
The friends were excited about the lamb and the idea of celebrating their new home, all of them except La Venus, who said that it was too much meat, a whole lamb or even half a lamb, they couldn’t afford it, what would they do with so much food? Flaca suggested that they invite the locals to partake of their abundance. “They’re our new neighbors, after all. And that’ll really make it a party.”
“But we don’t want the neighbors around,” La Venus said.
“They’ll be around no matter what we do,” said Romina.
“Exactly,” said Flaca. “It would be a show of goodwill.”
“It’s an excellent price, that Old Carlitos will give us,” Paz said.
Romina nodded, but La Venus said, “The whole point of coming here is to have space to ourselves.”
“Venus, querida,” Flaca said. “They were here first. This is their home.”
“So?”
Flaca flinched at the harshness of her tone. This was a side of her lover that irritated her, the side that could so easily discount men who were laborers, honest people who worked from dawn to dusk. So? as if humble men with rugged faces were not worthy of niceties. Humble men with rugged faces like her own father’s. She was a butcher’s daughter; sharing meat was a language of community, a way to sink your roots into a place. “So, we should be neighborly.”
“I don’t want to be neighborly.” La Venus had been counting the hours until she could get away from her husband, from the constant proximity of men who always wanted something from her and flicked from praise to rage with dizzying speed if they didn’t get what they were looking for or did get it but still felt shitty inside, because that’s all it was, wasn’t it, this male preying and prowling, an attempt to relieve their own shitty feelings, a project with no damn end. Not on your life, Arnaldo had said when she told him she was leaving for a few days, refusing permission though she hadn’t asked for it. She’d dropped the subject and slipped out while he was at work. She’d left a note on the kitchen table, but there was no phone number to give. She already dreaded what awaited her when she got back home. All she wanted was a few damn days in which she didn’t have to cater to men, and now here was Flaca trying to invite male strangers to their fire.
“Venus,” Flaca said, “don’t be so selfish.”
La Venus stared at her in open anger and Paz took a step back toward the wall.
“Listen,” Malena said. “Let’s all calm down. There might be a way for each of us to get what we want.”
“How’s that?” Romina asked. She couldn’t imagine a way through.
“We could buy the meat, throw the party, but hold it somewhere other than our home.” Malena looked steadily around the room at each of them. “Paz, didn’t you say there’s a fisherman who runs a bar?”
Paz nodded. “Benito.” She’d heard stories about Benito, a survivor of the Tacuarí ship
wreck who’d decided to stay on where destiny had hurled him and now fished by day and ran his bar by night, and his dreams of storms before they came and of twisted metal washing up to shore had given him a local reputation as a weather prophet. It didn’t seem like the moment, though, for all these details. “The bar is called the Rusty Anchor.”
“Well then,” Malena said, “what if we ask Benito if we could host a parrilla at the Rusty Anchor?” She looked at Flaca. “Would this satisfy your need for hospitality?”
Flaca shrugged. “Sure. I suppose.” It wasn’t the same but she just wanted the problem to go away.
Malena turned to La Venus. “And you? Would this satisfy your need to feel safe?”
La Venus blinked to fight back tears.
Safe? Flaca thought. This fight was about safe? And if so, how did Malena know? How deeply she saw, Malena. Suddenly it seemed to Flaca that Malena hid an ocean inside her, depths never spoken, full of slippery wakeful things.
“Yes,” La Venus said.
An hour later, everything was settled, and that night they gathered at the Rusty Anchor, which turned out to be no more than a small room built against the side of the owner’s hut with extra space outside dotted with stools and low tables fashioned out of driftwood and scavenged parts from the Tacuarí shipwreck. Word had spread among the residents of Cabo Polonio, and they’d arrived, seven or eight men and two women, among them Alicia, children in tow, playing underfoot as Flaca tended the parrilla and amiably fended off men’s attempts to take over the grill. The drinking began well before dinner, and continued deep into the night. One fisherman brought a guitar, and another turned a crate upside down for a drum, sambas filled the air because they were not so far from the Brazilian border after all, and soon the songs inspired dancing, and the new women of Polonio danced with the fishermen and with each other under the stars, women dancing together, an innocent thing, common enough to slide by without suspicion, and nobody disrespected anyone and La Venus seemed happy and relaxed and unperturbed, she danced, everyone danced, everyone seemed happy, full of tender meat roasted to perfection over embers in the Uruguayan style and wine and locally distilled grappa and the welcome seemed easy and complete until Flaca, finally, at two in the morning, realized what was missing. The lighthouse keeper hadn’t come. She hadn’t met him before, but had hoped he’d consider himself invited; he was part of this land too. Was he ill? Too much of a recluse? She went to ask Benito.
“He’s gone,” Benito said.
“Gone? What do you mean?” How could there be a lighthouse without a keeper?
“The government replaced him.” Benito scowled.
“You don’t like the new keeper?”
“New keepers—a whole troop is coming.”
“A troop—you mean—” She looked out at the lighthouse. Its slow light suddenly seemed to pulse with menace. “You don’t mean soldiers.”
Benito nodded with an air of indifference, or perhaps resignation. Storms, soldiers, they go, they come, what can you do but weather what you must and have a grappa or two along the way.
“How many of them?”
“How would we know?”
“They’re not here yet?”
“Just one for now. More are on their way.”
“When do they arrive?”
He shrugged.
Flaca went and sat down on a stool at the edge of the gathering. She watched her friends dancing, still smiling, scanned the whole gathering. Their refuge. Invaded already. All their savings and scrounged money poured into a hut, a dream of sanctuary, and meanwhile the regime was moving in just up the path. Suddenly she felt exhausted, emptier than she’d ever been in her life.
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
It was Paz, hand on her shoulder.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“Not here. I’ll tell you later.”
And so Paz waited as the party wound down, as fishermen ebbed toward their homes well before dawn because they only had a bit of time before their boats had to launch out onto the sea, there were fish to catch and mouths to feed, and the women followed their flashlight beams to find their way home. When they were back inside their hut, the second the door closed behind them, Paz said, “Out with it, Flaca.”
“Out with what?” said Romina.
“Something’s wrong.”
Romina stared at Flaca, searching her face for a denial.
“For God’s sake,” La Venus said, “what’s going on?”
“We should sit,” said Flaca.
They settled down onto the sheepskins they’d just bought that day from Old Carlitos, their mattress and blankets and seating all in one.
And Flaca told them.
As she talked, the others became very still. Malena stared at a spot on the wall as if it held secret hieroglyphs. Romina’s eyes closed against the world. Paz felt her jaw clench the way it did at school when she saw boys approaching and readied for a fight.
“I can’t believe it,” La Venus said. “We came so close.”
“What do you mean, close?” Flaca said. “We’re here.”
“Yes, well, so are the soldiers,” Romina said. “Or they will be any moment now.”
La Venus rose, went to her bag, and pulled out a nightgown. She turned her back on the group and changed. Her hands trembled as she pulled off her clothes. “We just bought this place, and now it’s lost to us.”
“No! It’s not. How can you say that?”
“Because it’s true, Flaca. It’s not safe here anymore.”
“She’s right,” Malena said sadly. “The soldiers will be just up the way.”
“So? Isn’t that something we’re used to by now?”
This silenced the group. The ocean sang, unchanged. Suddenly, the hut seemed shabby to Romina, nothing like a palace at all, just a battered shack in the middle of nowhere, vulnerable to storms.
“I thought—I thought this was our refuge.” La Venus was back in the circle now, brushing her long hair. Her nipples were visible through her silk nightgown. “Our escape.” She could hear her husband’s voice, stupid Anita.
Paz had been feeling her world collapse around her—their refuge, gone already, the whole dream of a secret tribe on the verge of dying—but the sight of La Venus’s nipples distracted her, shifted her mind, and made space for something else. A wave of delight. A wave of hope. “It’s still our escape,” she said. “I don’t like the soldiers either, but Flaca’s right, we all know a thing or two about how to handle them.”
Flaca glanced at her gratefully.
Paz made two fists against the sheepskin. “We can fight them if we have to.”
“We won’t have to fight them,” Flaca said. “Listen, all of you. This is still our damn refuge. You know why? Because it’s our home. And those motherfuckers, they don’t get to take that away from us.”
“I hope you’re right,” Romina said.
And then Flaca did something that surprised them all: she crawled over to Romina, right over the sheepskins, and gathered her into her arms. Paz, watching from across the circle, expected Romina to stiffen, to resist—for when was Romina not resisting? when did she ever loosen her grip?—but instead Romina seemed to melt against Flaca like a scared child, cradled, emitting a small sound between a hum and a moan.
“You’ll see, querida,” Flaca said. “You’ll see.”
4
The Woman’s Dream
THEY RETURNED THREE MONTHS LATER, during the fall holiday, in that last stretch of reliable sun before the days slowly shrank their way to cold. This time, they splurged on a cart to take them over the dunes, and the breeze filled their hair and thrilled their skin as they traveled across the sand.
“Let’s agree,” Flaca had said just before they boarded their bus in the city, “not t
o talk about the lighthouse for at least the first day.”
They’d all agreed to this, though Romina was reluctant and mustered no more than a shrug. Lighthouse, in this case, as code for soldiers. They could very well not talk about them, she thought, but soldiers weren’t ghosts: they didn’t disappear just because you put them out of mind.
Still, on the ride in, she was glad of the pact they’d made, and saw the logic—classic Flaca logic—of changing the subject so as to immerse yourself in the moment, in your actual surroundings, so as to let the dunes become as real as distant looming troops, the sand palpable, shifting, shaped by the wind, heavy as hills, larger and older than your thoughts or problems, a balm to the mind.
As soon as they’d unloaded their rucksacks and bags from the cart, Paz ran ahead, determined to be the first through the door. Back. Alive again. Surrounded by their small dim room, she felt large inside, able to face the world.
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