“Sit properly,” the Fur Woman snapped.
“Excuse me?”
“Close your legs and sit like a lady.”
Paz felt her spine tense. She hadn’t realized that her knees weren’t together, that she was sitting with her legs relaxed and spread apart, open in a manner for which her mother had scolded her since before she could remember.
The Fur Woman glared at Paz as if she were a poorly trained dog. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“There is no law against sitting.”
The Fur Woman’s face changed, now, and Paz felt her first slash of fear. She should pull her knees together and apologize, she thought. This was still Uruguay. But her body would not move.
“Where is your mother?” the Fur Woman asked.
Romina was in the doorway now. How long had she been there? “Señora. I am very sorry. The child is very sorry.”
“You?” The Fur Woman looked doubtful. “You’re her mother?”
“No, I’m her cousin. This girl is under my care, and she’s sorry—aren’t you, María?”
The fear cut deeper. Romina saw fit to hide her name. She would only do that if she sensed danger. But maybe Romina, with her past, her arrest, her imprisoned brother, was prone to reading danger when it wasn’t there. All these grown-ups with their fear responses to everything, to everyone, they were part of the cage, weren’t they? It made Paz want to scream.
She didn’t answer and the silence grew deafening.
The Fur Woman’s face had settled into hardness.
“She’s very sorry,” Romina said.
The Fur Woman looked pointedly at Paz’s legs, then at her face, and then she turned around and walked down the path without another word. She vanished into the quickly gathering darkness.
Paz felt a rush of triumph.
“What the hell were you thinking!” Romina hissed.
“Oh, for God’s sake, will you calm down?”
“Paz, that woman came in with the soldiers.”
“You saw her?”
“No, but—”
“Then you don’t know.”
“Think, girl. Who else would she be with? El Lobo?”
“There is no way that woman is a soldier.”
“She doesn’t have to be a soldier to destroy you.”
“Will you please stop worrying? You’re not my mother!”
The look on Paz’s face was so fierce, then, that Romina dropped the subject.
Paz stormed inside, and when Romina followed, she saw her in the sleeping corner, curled around a book.
“Are you all right?” It was Malena, by Romina’s side.
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Romina leaned against the counter. What were they doing out at this beach? Escaping? Some escape! At least in the city you could fear soldiers and shit comfortably at the same time. There wasn’t even a decent kitchen here, the knives weren’t clean, there was no phone, not even a bugged one over which you could speak in code, only the ocean to run to and whose side was the ocean on?
What kind of question was that?
A sob rose up inside Romina. She stifled it. No. If she started, she might not stop. “Let’s clean up around here.”
Cleaning always calmed her, and by the time Flaca and La Venus returned, she was breathing normally again, able to turn the Fur Woman incident into a good story. She coaxed Paz into telling it with her, a kind of peacemaking between them, and as they interjected details over each other—inside, with the door closed, Romina made sure of that—the others burst out laughing.
“I wish I could have seen the look on her face!” La Venus cried.
Paz looked pleased, and proud, the evening’s hero.
Romina felt a wash of relief at La Venus and Flaca’s delight, their utter lack of concern. Perhaps she’d been overreacting after all. Then again, perhaps those two had found their moment on the rocks and were too full of afterglow to remember the need for fear. Sex could do that to you—sex, and Polonio; both of them could fill you up with beautiful, get you drunk on it, unhinge you from the ugliness that pervaded the world and lift you out of it to soaring heights where you forgot that you were in fact still mortal in a broken world.
“ ‘Sit like a lady!’ ” Flaca crowed. “Oh, if only the poor woman knew.”
* * *
*
It was two and a half hours later, as the friends were chopping onions and potatoes for dinner, that a knock came on the door. Persistent. Hard.
They all looked at each other.
“Yes?” Flaca said, rising to her feet, but before she could get to the door the soldiers crashed through it without any effort because it wasn’t even locked, what’s the matter with us, Flaca thought, that we ever dreamed we didn’t need a lock?
The tall one at the center scanned the room, then settled his gaze on Paz. “Her.”
It happened too fast for anyone to stop it. Three soldiers around Paz, grasping her arms, and dragging her to the door, ignoring her shouts of protest. Flaca was on the back of one of the soldiers, trying to pry him from her friend because they could not could not take her. Paz was shouting. The room was red.
“Stop it,” Romina hissed from somewhere worlds away. “Stop it, Flaca.”
Me? Flaca thought. She’s trying to stop me? “They can’t. You can’t!”
Another soldier came up to Flaca and punched her in the face. Red, more red, pierced by bursts of white.
“Sirs, please, where are you taking her?” Romina again, louder now, and pleading.
The men didn’t answer.
And then they were gone, just as swiftly as they’d come, leaving a single soldier keeping watch outside the door.
Paz, gone.
The world spun.
The four women stared at each other.
Flaca reached up to feel her face. Wet. Swelling. In that moment, she understood that her love for Paz had become a ferocious force—as ferocious as her love for Romina, as ferocious as anything she’d ever felt in her life—and that she’d do anything to save the girl from harm.
But if it was too late.
It could not be too late.
“The songs,” Malena whispered.
What was she talking about? Flaca stared at her blankly.
“These.” Malena reached for the pile of papers that lay under a heap of shells Paz had gathered on the beach that day. Old songs, from the 1960s, from the time before. Paz had found them among her mother’s papers and brought them for the women to see, perhaps even to sing them, curious relics from an era now long past, rare survivors of the fires and raids that followed the coup. Liberation songs. Bohemian songs. Songs that could get you killed.
Romina moved to help Malena gather the lyrics sheets from the various corners and rucksacks where they were stashed, wondering how she did it, how Malena could think so steadily at a time like this. Steady Malena. Calm Malena. Reserved-but-in-control-of-things Malena. Of course, the first thing to do after an arrest was to scan the space for any evidence of subversion, or anything soldiers could construe as evidence of subversion, and to destroy it. How could she herself not have leapt there immediately? What was wrong with her?
They didn’t dare wait for the time it would take to kindle a fire in the cooking pit, so they dipped the pages into a candle flame and watched them burn in a metal pail.
Words turned to flame, then ash.
It was Malena who picked up the knife first, returned to chopping. La Venus soon joined her, though her hands shook. No one spoke. Flaca started the fire in the cooking pit and Romina folded and unfolded her clothes, thinking furiously, a plan, a plan, they had to have a plan.
The stew came out fine, but no one had an appetite. They tried to eat. They still had bowls on their laps when a knock came on the door.
An
other soldier entered, holding a clipboard. “Identification cards,” he said.
The women went to their rucksacks to get them. Romina’s mind raced. They hadn’t asked for ID cards immediately—it had taken them an hour to do what would have taken seconds in the city. They were disorganized, unprepared. A weak spot. How to use it. There had to be a way.
“Sir,” Flaca said, when the soldier had finished recording their names and ID numbers, “if you could tell me where our friend is.”
“So she’s not your cousin?”
“I—”
“She’s my cousin,” Romina said, stepping forward. They had to get their stories straight, or else. “The rest are our friends.”
“And what are you doing out here?”
“Taking a vacation.”
The soldier glanced at Romina, let his gaze travel up and down her body.
She forced herself to let him look, to seem pliant, to seem like nothing.
“She didn’t mean it,” Flaca said. “She’s just a girl.”
“A girl who insulted the Minister of the Interior’s wife.”
Romina went cold, remembering the Fur Woman’s rigid face. The wife of the Minister of the Interior. It was worse than she’d thought. “My cousin would be glad to apologize.”
The soldier’s gaze drifted over to Malena, then to La Venus, where it landed, raw, hungry. “Where are your husbands?”
Flaca dug her fingernails into her palms to keep from punching him.
“In Montevideo, sir,” La Venus purred in a seductive voice, the voice she’d used for years to bring men to their knees, a voice that belied the fear shooting through her spine and that she hoped could help save Paz by taming this man, though it could also backfire if he took it as a reason to come back and rape her. But it was worth the risk. If he wanted to rape her, after all, he’d find a reason no matter what.
Romina marveled at the genius of La Venus’s grammatical construction. She’d told the truth: her husband was in Montevideo. And yet, she’d given the impression that every one of them had a husband, caring about their whereabouts, making them more respectable.
“We’ll be conducting a thorough investigation,” the soldier finally said, eyes still on La Venus. “You stay inside.”
He walked out, but his steps didn’t take him away from the doorway, so Flaca shushed her friends and took a glass to the door, to hear him speak to the soldier posted outside the door.
“Got a smoke?”
Shuffling. A sigh.
“Thanks.” A pause. “Crazy girls. They’re either drug addicts or Tupamaros. We just need to find out which.”
Two hours later, just past one in the morning, the interviews began.
* * *
*
“She’s the niece of an important general,” Romina said.
She was sitting across from two soldiers, the tall one who’d come in before, and another one with pretty green eyes. He must hate his eyes, she thought. Pretty is no help at all for a soldier.
They were in a fishing hut that had been emptied for these interviews. Just her and them. Separate your suspects. See if their stories match, see if one of them will break.
The soldiers kept their faces blank, and glanced at each other. The tall one hesitated before he spoke again. “What’s this general’s name?”
“She won’t tell me his name.”
“But you’re cousins.”
“Yes. It’s on her father’s side, not the same side of the family as I’m on, and, you know, she’s very modest, an innocent girl. Once, in fact, when we were—”
“You’ll limit yourself to answering my questions.”
“Yes, sir.” She’d overplayed her hand. She should pull back. But still, her strategy could work; if they looked into the claim and discovered it to be false, there could be reprisals, but if she kept the story vague she might succeed in planting a seed of doubt. A seed was a seed, however tiny. And this wasn’t Montevideo, where the well-oiled machines of torture waited for new bodies to consume. They had no clear plan. They’d sent some poor man stumbling out of his bedclothes to use this hut—the sheets were whorled and tangled on the single narrow pallet—because, for some reason, they didn’t want to bring their suspects to the barracks. They probably hadn’t even known where to hold Paz. Who was she with? The soldiers? The lighthouse troops? The local police? There was no way to find out—asking would only anger them—but either way, they wouldn’t be expecting a prisoner like her, and if they were less prepared they might be less cruel.
Or more cruel.
“So you don’t know her uncle’s name?”
“No, sir. But she spoke of him with great admiration. In passing. She loves him. He’s of great service to our country.”
The officer took another good long stare at her, scanning, she thought, for sincerity or sarcasm. Act like you mean it. Her throat was dry, her chest hollow and cold.
“Your ID.”
How stupid. He’d already seen it. Was he stalling? She handed it over again, trembling.
It was Pretty Eyes who walked her back to her hut afterward, and on the way he put his hand on the small of her back, as if to steer her, as if she didn’t know the way to her own damn house, as if she wouldn’t notice when the hand traveled down to her ass and that’s exactly what she pretended, that she hadn’t noticed, that it wasn’t happening, that she was simply walking beneath the starry sky to a place she loved without a hand on her ass and the memories of the cell and the Three the Only Three surging up inside for her to push back down.
She was still pushing at them when she walked back through her door.
“You next.” Pretty Eyes gestured toward La Venus, who rose and followed him out. She’d done her best to cover her body with a shawl. And yet she walked regally, Flaca thought; she couldn’t help it. She was queenly all the time. For a second she flashed on an image of La Venus walking away, not with a soldier, but with Ariella, with glittering Ariella just as regal by her side, and then shame flooded her for having such a petty thought at a time like this.
She turned to Romina, tried to read her face. “Well? How did it go?”
Romina shrugged. All of a sudden she felt sick. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I told them about Paz’s uncle.”
“Wh—”
“The one who’s a general, a powerful general, whose name we can’t remember.”
It took Flaca a second to understand. “You’re a genius.”
“Ssshhhh.”
“What else did they—”
“I can’t, Flaca. Leave me alone.”
Romina went out to the back of the hut, where the soldiers had not posted a guard. She couldn’t deal with Flaca now, her invasions, her eagerness, she meant well but what did she know? What did any of them know? They’d never been inside the machine. Her stomach clenched. She sat down on the ground, her back against the wall, and let the sound of the ocean reach up and enfold her. They’d surrounded her, the men, the Only Three, especially the one who’d come the first night, he’d encased her completely in the smell of his sweat, and he’d been so heavy on her body that she’d thought her ribs might break, she was almost breaking under him and he didn’t care, it didn’t matter, she didn’t matter to the man surrounding her, she could drown in his flesh and he’d just keep on going, no, it could not happen to Paz, the thought made her want to tear her skin off. She flinched at movement just behind her. A figure joined her on the ground. Malena. Breathing deeply, and only then did Romina realize how ragged her own breathing had become. Her breath steadied, slowing to the rhythm of Malena’s breath. To her intense relief, Malena made no attempt to speak. She only sat. Her presence a thing you could lean on. A quiet. A comfort. A calm.
Flaca saw them from the window. Two figures in the night, unmoving, not turned to each other, yet somehow l
inked in silence. Two figures at home in a shared silence. Why hadn’t she seen it before? That the two of them could be? It seemed obvious now, and yet the thought had never crossed her mind. Perhaps because they both seemed so tightly shut, each in her own way, Romina skirting away from her arrest and what had happened in those days, as well as anything else (her brother’s imprisonment, her parents’ disappointment) that pointed toward pain, while Malena was so quiet that one could almost forget she was there. She was a listener. A woman who kept things tidy, tucked into their place. But maybe it wasn’t that simple. Maybe she too bit back the stories of her life and pushed them down, pushed them out of view, to survive, and maybe that was why they saw so little of her inner world, which could in fact be as vast as anyone’s. How could two such women ever form a bond? And how would they ever—? Who would stoke the fire, rip the panties off or sidle past them? It seemed unlikely, almost laughable. Yet here they were. After it had come to seem certain that Romina had renounced passion forever, left it behind in whatever bleak cell they’d kept her in—after all that, here they were. And in the rich air between those two, the way their bodies seemed to tune in to each other without touching, the peaceful yet alert way they sat and sat—in all of that Flaca could see that the thing between them, unlike the affair she herself was in, had the power to last.
* * *
*
The cell was small and rank. Rat shit crusted the pallet on the floor. Paz stood at the bars for a long time, for an endless stretch of time, before sitting down on the pallet, eyes open in the dark. She could not sleep. Sleep was a thing buried in the impossible. Night stretched long and dead around her. There was one more cell beside hers, empty. She was alone save for the guard whose snores occasionally ebbed down the dark hall.
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