Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  La Venus came in close behind her and took a deep breath. “Mmmmhm. Nothing like the smell of mold to make you feel at home.”

  Paz hadn’t noticed the smell. “It’s not so bad.”

  La Venus wrinkled her nose in disbelief.

  “In any case,” Romina said, close behind them, “it’s nothing a little wipe-down can’t fix.”

  “What’s this?” Flaca was in the doorway, cigarette dangling from her lips. “We’ve just arrived in paradise, and already talk of housework?”

  “It’s our paradise, you nitwit,” Romina said, crossing into the kitchen corner and running a finger along the narrow table they’d been using as a counter. “It’s up to us to keep it beautiful. Or, what, did you think we had bought a palace full of servants?”

  “I wouldn’t mind servants,” La Venus said, thinking of Olga, who came twice a week to her Montevideo apartment and would surely make this place gleam in a matter of hours if she got her hands on it. Of course, if La Venus left her husband, there would be no Olga and no groceries or the rest of it.

  “Spoken like a true bourgeois lady,” Flaca snapped.

  Everyone froze. No one said a word. Malena had been lowering her heavy bag, and lifted it back to her shoulder as if it suddenly feared the ground.

  Romina felt the impulse to say something—ouch, perhaps—but she held her tongue. The tension had been palpable between those two since leaving the city. Flaca seemed out of line, but it was best not to intervene. She started to unpack a few rags for cleaning, then remembered that there was no running water. Flaca was the one who knew the pump.

  “Excuse me?” La Venus said. “Who’s the bourgeois one?”

  Flaca crushed her cigarette butt against the doorway. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You’re a prude, as bad as any of them.”

  Prude? Paz thought. Flaca, a prude? She couldn’t imagine such a thing. She shouldn’t be staring—Romina was fussing with her bag, Malena had slipped outside—but she couldn’t help it. They’d been forming a kind of family, woven from castoffs, like a quilt made from strips of leftover fabric no one wanted. They wanted each other. They had to stay woven. They could not fray.

  “Goddamnit, Venus, that’s not what I—”

  “Isn’t it, though?” La Venus’s voice was rising steadily. “What else, then?”

  “We need drinking water,” Romina announced, theatrically. “And bread, if Alicia has baked any today. Paz, will you come with me?”

  Paz wanted to hear the argument, every word of it, but she knew that there was only one right answer. “Sure.”

  Outside, Malena joined them, and the three of them left the couple in the hut and headed toward El Lobo’s. At a fork in the dirt path, Romina turned toward the ocean.

  “El Lobo’s is this way,” Paz said.

  “I know,” Romina said, “but aren’t you dying to see the ocean?”

  “I know I am,” Malena said.

  Romina glanced at Malena. She hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived. The longing in her voice was palpable. She always seemed so serene, Malena, following the flow of the group, holding back quietly until suddenly something burst from her. In this case, desire. For the shore. What else did Malena long for? What else was she not saying? “Well, there you have it. And in any case, it’s probably good to give those two some time to fight.”

  “And maybe start cooling off,” Malena said.

  “Who knows about that,” said Romina.

  “What’s the matter with them?” Paz asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  Paz shook her head, chafing at the thought that others had known before her, that she was being treated like the little sister, the baby of the family, kept in the dark.

  “La Venus has a crush on someone. Not just anyone, but a famous singer.” Romina grinned. “And Flaca is going mad with jealousy.”

  “She did that to Flaca?”

  “First of all, we don’t know how much La Venus has done yet.” Romina laughed. “Secondly, if she has done it, she didn’t do it to Flaca.”

  “Which is exactly the problem,” Malena added, laughing too.

  Their amusement stung Paz. She wasn’t a child. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant,” Romina said. “But here’s the thing: Flaca’s never had this happen to her before. I suppose I shouldn’t enjoy it so much. There’s nobody in the world I love more than Flaca.”

  Paz listened for the silent sentences beneath that one. Not even my parents. Not even my brother in prison.

  “But to see her get a taste of her own medicine—well, that’s something.”

  “She cheated on you,” Malena said thoughtfully.

  Romina shrugged. “I won’t deny it. Not that I care. It’s ancient history. But it might do her good to know the other side of the story.”

  “But they’ll make it through this, won’t they? They’ll last?” Paz imagined Flaca and La Venus still swooning over each other as wrinkled old ladies with canes. Side by side on a park bench. Themselves. Manless. Holding hands like aging sisters. Hiding in plain sight.

  “What does that mean, ‘last’?” Romina was walking briskly now. “There’s no thinking that way for people like us.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t have lasting things. We get no forevers, no futures, no bride in a veil and all that bullshit.”

  “I know all that,” Paz said defensively. “Obviously. But can’t we—couldn’t we—” She struggled to form the thought. She didn’t want to sound like an idiot. It had something to do with forming their own path of forevers, outside the bride-and-veil world and maybe outside the real world altogether, but what sense did that make when, these days, even the sweetest most upstanding old ladies in her neighborhood lived in fear? She didn’t want to think anymore. She craved the ocean, its salt and heaving, the break from gravity. Perhaps Romina was right; perhaps it cheapened the present moment to burden it with thoughts of a future that didn’t and couldn’t exist. She glanced over at Malena, who hadn’t said a word. Sometimes, in conversation, she grew so quiet you could almost forget that she was there. But she was listening, wasn’t she? “What do you think, Malena?”

  Malena took so long to answer that Paz thought perhaps she hadn’t heard. “I think the future doesn’t belong to us. I think forever is a strange word. It can’t be trusted. I do know that Flaca and La Venus love each other deeply and it’s something I’ve been privileged to see.”

  This raised a thousand questions for Paz, but she didn’t know where to begin, so she said nothing. They reached the shore. Feet in sand, approaching the waves, which were low today, almost languorous, reaching toward them and pulling back into a body of endless blue. Paz thought of all the creatures below that calm surface, their slick bodies, the way they must slip and glide through corals, currents, shipwrecks long barnacled by the years. She tried to imagine the sea lions, the seals, their great majestic bulk as they swam and coupled and fed their young. Marine mammals; of the ocean, yet not. Could the babies suckle underwater?

  “Ssshp,” Romina whispered. “They’re here.”

  Paz had no idea what she was talking about. She began to turn.

  “Don’t look.” Romina kept her voice low. “Not at the same time. You first, Paz, then Malena.”

  Paz slowed her gaze, turned to the left, and saw empty beach. To the right. Three figures, no, four, out at the rocky outcropping where the beach curved away, sitting on the last of the sand. Men. She could tell from their postures, the boastful sprawl of them. And the uniforms. Splotchy green and beige. She turned back to the water. Soldiers. “You can look now, Malena.”

  “I don’t want to.” Malena’s voice was tight. “We should go.”

  “We have to go?” Paz said. “Just because they’re here? It’s our
beach too!”

  “It’s not our beach. It’s always their beach. Every grain of sand in the damn country is theirs, punto.” Romina pushed back a wisp of hair that had escaped its rubber band to writhe in the wind. “But still, that doesn’t mean we have to leave.”

  “I’m just saying,” Malena said, “that we can go if you want.”

  It struck Paz that Malena wasn’t suggesting they leave for herself, but for Romina, to protect their friend. Their once-captured friend. Romina seemed to think of the same thing. She looked over at Malena, then down at the sand.

  “I don’t know what I want,” she said.

  They stood uncertainly, listening to the waves.

  “I want to break them all into pieces.”

  The rise of a wave. Ebbing. Another rise, more powerful than the last.

  “What are they doing now?” Romina’s voice was very quiet.

  Paz glanced back at the men. One of them seemed to be looking in the women’s direction and pointing, but he hadn’t stood. His companions broke into laughter, then passed something around between them, a bottle, a book—no, they were putting it to their mouths and what’s your problem, Paz, you really think these guys would share a book? Burning. All those pages burning beneath the grill, among hot coals.

  “They’re not coming over here,” she said. “I don’t think they will.”

  “Let’s walk,” Romina said.

  They headed in the opposite direction of the soldiers. Sand slipped and sank around their feet.

  “It’s not that I want to kill them,” Romina said, then stopped.

  “It’s all right,” Malena said, “if you do.”

  Romina took a deep breath. What a thing, to open your mouth with soldiers right there in the distance and want to break them into pieces. How many of them were there, in the Polonio barracks? Would the beach always be infested with them? She’d had her doubts about coming back, had assumed that the soldiers’ presence would shut her down in fear. And yet, she felt strangely expanded, seeing them there on the beach, human-size, visible yet out of earshot as she said the forbidden things out loud. “I mean, I would kill them. If I had to, to protect us—to set the country free. But that’s not what I want. What I want is to take our power back. What I really want to break is the—” She stopped, took one step, two; even here, even now, with the wind at her back and waves at her side, she couldn’t say the word dictatorship aloud with them so close at hand—“the Process.”

  “Yes,” Malena said gently. “I understand.”

  Does she? Can she? Romina thought, but she didn’t ask those questions, distracted as she was by the hunger to speak. “I want to get involved again. You know, with the resistance. I’ve been thinking about it for some time.” Her brother rose in her mind, behind bars six years now, and if she ever saw him again would he be whole or broken? proud of her or ashamed?

  “So why haven’t you?” Malena said.

  “My parents. With my brother gone—for now, perhaps forever—I’m the only one left. They couldn’t stand to lose me and it seems unfair to do that to them.”

  They had almost reached the end of the beach. They walked in silence for a while.

  “What do you think?” Romina said, embarrassed by the nakedness in her own voice. She knew that Paz was likely to encourage her to do whatever she wanted—she was young and hadn’t yet learned to fully weigh the risks of things. But it was Malena, solid and reliable Malena, who surprised her by answering first.

  “What I think?” Malena’s voice was tinged with steel. “You do not owe your parents your life.”

  “They’ve had it very hard, you know,” Romina said. “My grandmother survived pogroms and she—”

  “Your life doesn’t belong to them,” Malena said. “No matter what.”

  Romina stared at her. There it was again, the bright burst of passion in Malena’s voice. Here was a woman capable of great calm, and also fire. A woman who did not speak to her own parents, a circumstance that she, Romina, found difficult to imagine. She started to form a thought about how you couldn’t flatten the pogroms with a no matter what, there was no escaping those histories or the way they pushed up inside your skin, she didn’t understand, couldn’t understand—but she was stopped by Malena’s eyes. They were wide open, liquid, full of the unspoken, full of mystery and she could stare into them all day, she realized, plunge into that darkness and be wrapped in it, enfolded, remade. She was fond of Malena, but had never seen her as sexy—mainly because it hadn’t occurred to her to consider it; she hadn’t been attracted to anyone since the time of the Only Three, the thought of having a lover made her gut clench—and certainly she’d never wondered how Malena might look in pleasure, in her naked pleasure, whether her lips would part, her back arch, her eyelids flutter closed, or would she stare with her eyes wide open, what a thought, for Malena was still staring at her now.

  Paz coughed.

  They both turned, away from each other, toward the girl who stood a few paces away, looking a little sullen. “I’m going to El Lobo’s.”

  “I’ll come,” Romina said quickly.

  Paz shrugged.

  “Me too,” Malena said. “We’ll need as many arms as possible.”

  * * *

  *

  When the others left, Flaca began by striding back and forth in the hut, searching for words that would not come.

  “Will you stop?” La Venus said. “You’re making me nervous with all that pacing. You’re like an animal at the zoo.”

  “You want to tell me what to do?” Flaca said. “With my body?”

  La Venus flung up her hands. “I’m sorry, my tiger—pace away.”

  Flaca knew that she’d meant it lightly, as a way of cutting the tension, and my tiger sank into her skin like honey. But she wasn’t about to admit it. Not to this new Venus, the one caught in Ariella Ocampo’s spell. What a mistake, to have taken her to the concert at Teatro Solís, what had she been thinking? That a night out would revive the spark between them? For too long now they’d been meeting furtively, always behind closed doors, and she could feel La Venus’s interest waning, see the faraway look in her eyes as she put her clothes back on, ready to go home. I have to leave him, she’d told Flaca. I can’t take it anymore. I flinch when he touches me, I can’t hide it, and he doesn’t even care. Rage at the thought. Hands curled into fists. Flaca wanted to punch this husband she’d never seen, beat him to a pulp. Don’t let him touch you. He has no right. But La Venus would only gulp in broken air and say, That’s not true, Flaca. You don’t know a thing about marriage. And then Flaca would be angry. Of course she knew. She’d seen her mother, her sisters, watched the way they wrapped their days around their men, the way it worked, a code she’d always known she’d avoid for her own life, who wanted it? what was the point? It wasn’t worth having a man no matter how much people mocked you for lacking one. She’d never understood the appeal of marriage, her sisters’ flushed delight as they approached their wedding days and had the seamstress tuck and nip their mother’s wedding dress to fit their own bodies, and one day we’ll do this for you, Flaca, her sister Clara had said, we’ll have to pull it in furthest for those nothing hips of yours—kindly, laughing—but that was years ago, when her family still seemed to believe there might be a husband anywhere in her future. Husbands. People crazy enough to think that washing their boxers and cooking their food and listening to their boring rants for the rest of your life would make you happy. And yet, she had to admit that her sister Clara seemed happy with Ernesto, and Flaca’s own mother had always seemed happy at home; she was a shy woman outside the family, but with Papá she flowered open, laughing at his jokes and teasing him back with the giddy joy of a schoolgirl. Flaca could never imagine Papá pushing his touch on Mamá. They flirted, she batted his hand back in the kitchen when he came up behind her at the sink, but she was obviously pleased, p
laying out a dance of two bodies happy to be aging by each other’s side. This Arnaldo, this husband of Venus, was another sort of man. Flaca couldn’t stand the thought of him near La Venus. He had no right. Didn’t deserve. Unable to stop the source of her lover’s pain, she searched for a balm to ease it, if nothing else through a distraction. This concert, a night of tango and opera brashly mixed together, seemed as good an antidote as any. It was the talk of the town, the concert, or so it seemed from the posters outside the grand Teatro Solís, which was the only measure of culture Flaca knew about. This was her first time buying tickets for a show at Solís. Their nation’s opera house. Her parents had only gone there once, when they were first married, and her mother still talked about it as the most romantic thing her man had ever done. The butcher and the butcher’s wife, at Teatro Solís, surrounded by the voluptuous curtains and elaborate frescoes; Flaca could just see them, dressed in their wedding best, dazzled and a little cowed. Now it was her turn. The butcher’s daughter. She could be cultured. She could be a gentleman, a caballero. Or a caballera (what a word, what a not-word!). If anyone saw them out together and reported back to La Venus’s husband, she could say she went out to see music with a friend. Nothing outlandish, nothing forbidden. The only problem was that Flaca would have to wear a dress. She hadn’t worn a dress in seven years. She borrowed one from her sister Clara—the middle child, four years older than Flaca, always the most understanding—who laughed gleefully as she rummaged through her closet, what, Flaca, you’re going cultured now? I’m going to drown you in ruffles, chica—and then, after finally settling on a more sedate gown, simple lines and a lime green that had been in fashion ten years ago, back when fashions used to reach this city: whom are you trying to impress? Spoken gently. Clara knew. Not everything, but enough. Flaca had always sensed it; here was proof. Still, she put no words to the matter. She only answered the question with her eyes. She had a dress, she had tickets, they were going to pretend for a single damn night that nothing was wrong with this country or their homes, and yes, she knew what Romina would say, sure why not go listen to opera while political prisoners waste away but what else was there to do? weren’t the prisoners going to suffer whether there was opera or not? La Venus looked gorgeous that night, shimmering in an electric blue gown. It was her color. Every color was her color. Flaca walked into Teatro Solís feeling like the king of the universe, beside this woman who stole the gaze of every single man they passed. And me. She disrobes for me. The one she wants is me. Their seats were only four rows from the front. The concert began, and Ariella Ocampo took the stage. She was not what Flaca had expected, although she’d seen the posters outside of an elegant woman with red lips, and the woman on the stage before her had the same elegance and the same red lips. Now she wore a glittering green dress that made Flaca think of mermaids. She looked younger than in the photograph, almost vulnerable, and for a moment Flaca feared for her, though she couldn’t have said why. But then Ariella sang. Time stopped. Time stretched open, pulled apart by music. Pulled apart by Ariella’s voice. She was singing an aria that glided into a classic tango, then back to opera in a single melodic line. The orchestra followed her like a flock of sheep, as if her voice were a staff, pointing the way, cutting it open. Flaca had never heard anything like it, not that she knew the first thing about music, but she could feel that the more cultured audience around her was equally riveted and amazed. They were not, in that moment, trapped in a small cage of a country; they were transcendent, aloft, made aerial by sound. Sound that was theirs and not theirs, close and foreign, high and low, opera and tango, slipping into each other, made one. And then, in the fourth song, Ariella’s gaze had settled on La Venus. It stayed there for a minute that seemed eternal. She glided across her melody as if caressing La Venus’s curves. Flaca felt her lover’s body light up beside her. The whole great hall seemed to fall away, leaving only the two of them, the singer and the beauty, suspended in space. The song lifted them up together onto a melodic stratum only they could reach, together, quivering, aloft on a taut ribbon of sound, and then Ariella stopped in the middle of the song and flicked her gaze across Flaca, one, two, as if to size up the kind of company the Electric Blue Woman kept and what it meant about her—as if to say so she’s one of us too—but Ariella? This Ariella Ocampo? A woman like that? It couldn’t be. But there it was, the subtlest glance, over in an instant, recognizable only to those who know. The singer was a cantora—the cantora, a cantora!—and the pun was so ridiculous that Flaca almost laughed aloud. She bit her tongue to hold it back. Ariella’s eyes were elsewhere, and did not return. Flaca breathed a sigh of relief that only lasted until the intermission, when an usher brought a note to La Venus. What is it? Flaca asked. What does it say? La Venus refused to show her and they spent the rest of the concert tense. Flaca kept waiting for the singer to look at La Venus again, as if daring her, ready with a blazing defense, but it didn’t happen. Ariella Ocampo, regal in her mantle of music, a queen. On the bus ride home, La Venus had finally relented and laid the note bare. Nothing but numbers. A phone number. No words. But you won’t call it, will you? Flaca blurted out, immediately embarrassed at her own petulance. Of course not, La Venus said, not looking at her.