Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  But then she did.

  “It’s just not fair,” Flaca said now, staring out the window at the ocean. “That you won’t tell me what happened when you went to her house.”

  La Venus looked at her with something resembling pity. “I thought we were free women. No ownership. Wasn’t that how you put it? Choosing to be together because we wanted to, not because anyone told us to. Free love, like the hippies, only better because we’re free of men. Defying the fetters of marriage—your words, Flaca.”

  “I know what I said. And we’re not married.” Obviously. What a stupid thing to say. “But—” She searched for the right words. What right did she have to be jealous? How many times had she let her attention and even her hands roam when she was supposed to be with another woman, when the woman she was supposed to be with was devoted to her? She’d always thought it one of the good things about being an invertida, a breach of nature, a woman made for women: that she could live beyond marriage. Not be owned by anyone. Follow her own urges, the truths that sprang from her body.

  The problem was that her body wanted La Venus: hungrily and truthfully and without end.

  “You could have told me you were going to her house.”

  “I have to tell you everywhere I go?”

  “This is different.”

  “Why? It was a party. I can’t go to a party without telling you? For God’s sake, now you sound like Arnaldo.”

  Flaca stared at her. You didn’t invite me, she thought, but held back from saying. When La Venus had first told her that she’d gone to a party at Ariella Ocampo’s house, she hadn’t believed it. Though parties were no longer against the law, the permitting process for gatherings of more than five was so onerous and people were so wary that large gatherings were rare, and she ached for the loosening of an apartment full of bodies, drinks, music, laughter, the way birthdays used to be, for everyone’s birthdays: her parents, her sisters, her little nieces and nephews, great-aunts, great-grandfathers, all occasions for cake and pebetes and whiskey and tangos and guitars. But it only took a bit of investigation to learn that it was true: Ariella Ocampo held parties, at her old mansion in El Prado, where she could blithely make her art and not worry her pretty brow over how to pay the goddamn bills every goddamn week because she was rich, not from her art but from the family into which she was born. Must be nice, the parties were nice, or so it was said. Incredibly, the regime seemed to turn a blind eye. The catch with those parties was that unless you lived right there in the neighborhood it was best to stay until morning to avoid the night patrols. Which led Flaca to the question with the obvious answer that she had not yet dared ask. “You stayed all night?”

  “Flaca. Can you hear yourself?”

  “Why won’t you answer?”

  La Venus turned away. “Most people stay. It’s a long party and it’s safer to disperse after sunrise.”

  “So what did you do, then, until sunrise?”

  “You want to know all the details, Flaca? What I ate, what I drank, what time I took a piss?”

  Flaca felt something in her crumble. She looked out the window, at the dirt path to the beach and the strip of blue beyond it, and struggled for breath.

  “Flaca?”

  “Just tell me you don’t want to see her again.”

  The silence grew vast between them, draped over the distant chant of waves.

  Flaca thought of those waves, the way they kissed the sand, over and over, always returning to the same caress. But was that really true? Wasn’t each wave composed of different water, or the same water arranged in infinite combinations? Were two kisses ever alike? She’d never wanted so intensely for a thing to stay the same. She’d been so stupid. Thinking that La Venus was her discovery, a housewife she’d brought over to the Other Side, the invisible side, where women took their hidden joys. She compared herself to her lover’s husband, and delighted in her triumph. She was better than him, gave his wife more pleasure, she was winning. She’d been so self-satisfied that she hadn’t seen a thing like this coming, a rival right here on the Other Side, a rich and glamorous rival, with a house of her own, money, fame, forbidden parties, all these things that Flaca lacked. And beauty. Of the feminine kind that enraptured onstage. Flaca had abandoned femininity years ago, striding away from it, all relief and motion, no looking back. She had no urge whatsoever to return. There were always women who’d be drawn to her the way she was, angular, lean, brash. She got the nickname Flaca in early adolescence, when the other girls grew hips and breasts and she stayed flat and reedy, and she’d embraced it with good humor and a kind of pride. And yet. And yet thinking of La Venus with that damn opera star made Flaca suddenly feel ugly, misshapen, and small again, rained on by the stones of older boys on the walk home. She could feel the thump of the stones on her skin, hear their cruel, coppery voices in her ears.

  “I can’t,” La Venus said.

  * * *

  *

  Paz, Romina, and Malena returned from El Lobo’s with the supplies they’d gone for, plus three large pieces of cardboard and a bucket of green paint.

  “What on earth are you going to do with those?” La Venus asked, amused, and also relieved at her friends’ return, the change of subject.

  “We’re going to make signs,” Paz said. “They’re from El Lobo, a housewarming gift. The paint is left over from the shelves in his store—which look lovely now, by the way, wait till you see.”

  La Venus smiled at Paz. That girl, able to take such fierce joy in cardboard and a bucket of paint. How long would that last in her? In times like these? She was so young. But not carefree—no one had that anymore. “What kind of signs?”

  “Paz hasn’t told us yet,” Romina said. “It’s all very mysterious.”

  “No, it’s not,” Paz said. “We’re going to make a sign for our home, announcing its name, the way fancy people do in the fancy beach towns.” She looked up at the others for a reaction, at Flaca, who was in the back doorway, smoking a cigarette and picking at her nails. She didn’t seem to be listening.

  “But what is its name?” Malena said.

  “That’s what we’ll have to figure out,” Paz said. She hesitated for a moment; she’d imagined this differently, all five women in a circle, the way they sat at night, only this time around a green-dipped brush, making this thing together. She looked at Flaca again, but Flaca wouldn’t look at her.

  “How about Paradise?” Malena said.

  “Shanty,” Romina said.

  Malena shot her a look of mock outrage. “What!”

  Romina grinned.

  Paz reached for the brush, dipped it in green, and started writing. “Go on.”

  “The Seashell,” La Venus said.

  “The Hovel.”

  “The Palace.”

  “The Church.”

  “The Temple.”

  “The Cave.”

  “The Ship.”

  “The Prow.”

  “Freedom.”

  “The Edge of the World.”

  “The Fireplace.”

  “The Fire.”

  “The Voice.”

  “The Song.”

  “The Dream.”

  Paz was painting furiously, words all over the cardboard, straining to keep up with the names.

  “The Fisherman’s Dream.”

  “The Woman’s Dream.”

  “Yes!”

  “The Tongue’s Dream.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Flaca said from the far wall, and Paz felt a jolt of happiness that she’d returned to them, the ring of them complete again.

  “The Two Fingers of Your Right Hand’s Dream—”

  “Come now, why not three?”

  “You’re blushing!”

  “You’re blushing!”

  “The Five Fingers of—”r />
  “The Right Hand’s Dream.”

  “The Left Hand’s Dream.”

  “Left?”

  “I’m a lefty!”

  “The Cunt. The Hips.”

  “The Happy Hips—”

  “The Happy Cunt—”

  “¡Chicas, chicas!”

  “That’s it! Chicas, Chicas is a perfect name.”

  “Oh, of course. That won’t attract any attention.”

  La Venus gestured toward the brush. “Can I take a turn?”

  Paz handed her the brush. “It’s yours.”

  La Venus painted around the words for a while. The others watched. Names in cursive, names in block letters, shouts and whispers, arrows, swirls. Riotous vines of green.

  “Wow,” Paz said. “You never told us you could paint like that.”

  La Venus scratched the back of her neck. “I’m not sure I knew.”

  “But you know we can’t hang that,” Romina said. “Ever.”

  “We have to!” Paz said. “This is our house.”

  Romina just looked at her. “That’s beside the point.”

  “Actually,” Malena said, “that is the point. Because it’s our house, we have to be more careful than anyone.”

  “We could put it inside,” Paz said, doubtfully.

  “I have an idea,” La Venus said, and she picked up the paintbrush again. She painted over the clustered words, brushing green sweeps over them, drowning them in whorls of color.

  Paz made a whinnying, disappointed sound.

  “Wait,” La Venus said. “I’m not done.”

  As the paint dried, she set to cutting letters out of the remaining cardboard. She set those letters in over the green, swirled surface. L-A-P-R-O-A. La Proa. The Prow.

  La Venus looked at Paz, who was still sulking. “All the other words are still under there, Paz. Remember that.”

  Flaca had brought a hammer and nails from the city, and they used these to hang the sign to the right of their front door. In the hours that followed, Paz stole looks at it whenever she could, watching the way the green shifted in the changing sunlight, first brightening, then sinking into deep shades that made her think of witches and their thick, ancient brews.

  That was the sign’s color that evening when the military trucks drove by.

  New arrivals from the civilized world.

  One, two, three, in a line, right past their home even though there was no road there, no road anywhere in Polonio, only open sand and dirt that these trucks pressed long continuous tracks into as they churned past.

  Romina had been sitting outside to escape the heat trapped in their home. She didn’t look directly at the trucks and tried to pretend they weren’t slicing her mind in half, weren’t pressing at her body as the wheels pressed at the land, the sound of their engines like the low growl of the car in which she was taken to the cell where—don’t be stupid, Romina, come back to the moment, that’s not where you are, look at the ocean down the way there, they don’t own it, see how blue and endless, fill your eyes.

  Paz was doing a handstand for no good reason except that she liked doing handstands and nobody stopped her here. She watched the trucks pass, upside down. Their upturned wheels made her think of beetles stuck on their backs, waving their stumpy legs in the air.

  La Venus had ducked inside as soon as she saw the trucks coming—she was wearing a bikini and a long skirt and nothing else—and she watched through the kitchen window. She saw soldiers in the covered wagons, soldiers with eyes in their heads, scanning for female bodies. Finding them.

  The trucks drove through the twilight, over the rolling field toward the lighthouse, until they finally disappeared around a bend.

  “Paz,” La Venus called through the window.

  “What?”

  “You should come inside.”

  “I don’t want to. It’s too hot.”

  “It’s safer in here.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. They’re gone now!”

  “We should all go in,” Malena said.

  “And what?” Paz said. “Stay in our traps for as long as there are soldiers?”

  Flaca arrived, carrying the paltry twigs she’d gathered for a fire. There wouldn’t be much of one tonight, but at least they had their candles. The others told her about the trucks, but Flaca already knew from the tracks crushed into the open space in front of their hut. They debated what to do about their fire that night, and dinner. They shouldn’t attract attention. They shouldn’t give up their rights. There were no rights. That shouldn’t be true. It didn’t matter what should or should not be true. They couldn’t go on like this forever. It wasn’t forever, this night of new trucks, a time for extra precaution. They’d been planning to grill. It didn’t matter. It mattered. They didn’t have firewood anyway. They could cook inside, in the cooking pit. They could light candles and sit around them indoors. They would be together. They would be fine.

  With the dinner plan changed, Flaca and La Venus went to El Lobo’s for a few additional ingredients. They seemed to be taking a long time, Romina thought. Perhaps they were patching things up. This gave her hope, then scared her. What if, in patching things up, they’d tried to steal a bit of private time out on the rocks? There was no knowing where those soldiers might wander after hours or what they’d do if they discovered two women entwined. Goddamnit, she thought, Flaca, get the fuck back here.

  Paz slunk outside. She’d been cooped up long enough. What could happen to her? She’d stay right here on this stool, her back to the hut that she owned, that she co-owned, her name on the deed and thank you very much. Here she was, two weeks away from her eighteenth birthday, sitting at the door of her own house like a queen. Nobody in her university classes would ever imagine it, not the professors or the classmates who looked past her at the shiny lipstick girls. She looked out at the landscape, now cloaked in the last dregs of twilight. A beauty she could never get used to, never wanted to get used to, though she longed to know it in every light and mood.

  A figure was approaching from the direction of the lighthouse. A wide figure, not Flaca or La Venus, but not a soldier either. It was hard to make things out in the diminished light, so it wasn’t until the figure was almost upon her that Paz saw it was a woman, a lady, an old lady, dressed in pearls and garish makeup and a fur coat that was ridiculous on this warm autumn night. Immediately, Paz decided that this woman was rich and foolish, the kind of woman who would bring an expensive fur coat to a far-flung rugged beach and then insist on wearing it just to show off that she could, heat be damned. The Fur Woman was looking at her now, at Paz, on her stool wearing a bathing suit and a short skirt. She seemed to expect a greeting, or something more, a show of deference, as if she, Paz, were part of the rabble and the Fur Woman a passing queen. I’m not the rabble, Paz thought, and then it crossed her mind that perhaps she was. The proletariat, with its shabby huts. Well, she thought, it’s my shabbiness and no one else’s. The Fur Woman was still staring. Paz stared back and did not smile.