She’d been driven out of Polonio, blindfolded, hands cuffed behind her back, as if she stood a chance of getting away from three armed soldiers in a truck—and now she was somewhere else, back on the grid, that much she knew from the single dim electric bulb outside her cell.
She’d been told nothing.
She had to pee but there was no toilet in the cell and she didn’t dare wake the guard. She hadn’t been beaten yet, hadn’t been raped, didn’t want to give them a reason. Hold it. Hold the pee, hold it in, hold in everything.
Morning came and with it a visit from the guard, with a plate of stale bread and a cup of water. He pushed these through the bars without a word.
“Excuse me, sir.”
He turned to her.
“May I please use a bathroom?”
He handcuffed her before he led her down the hall, as though she had anywhere to run, as though she were the dangerous person in this jail rather than he, and she wiped herself as best she could, at once relieved by the release and mortified by the watching guard, and yet, she thought as he led her back and locked her up again, and yet he hasn’t raped me. Why not? Wasn’t that how these things went? Were they waiting for something—and if so, what? Every muscle in her body tensed, vigilant, waiting for a sign. She would fight like a beast. She would not fight. She would let them do what they wanted but refuse to make a sound. She would kill them. She would beg them to go easy. She would give them anything as long as they didn’t cut her, would there be knives? She couldn’t stand the thought of knives. Couldn’t stand the thought of—
Stop it. Try to eat.
She tried a bite of bread, couldn’t swallow it, spat it out. Water. Tepid, but good, a coming back to life as it went down. She didn’t dare more than three sips, intent as she was on putting off further trips to the toilet.
The hours passed.
Around and around her thoughts spun, a wheel unhinged. She herself was unhinged, she thought, more than once, as she struggled to rein herself in. The guard listened to the radio down the hall, shuffling to the door every once in a while. Voices outside, their words indecipherable. She would keep her head down and ask no questions, not tempt fate. She’d be lucky if she got out. She might never get out. Thousands of people had not gotten out. The shape of her future twisted horrifically, beyond recognition.
She tried not to think.
She thought of the ocean.
Its roar, its welcome. El Lobo’s keen eyes.
She longed for El Lobo’s oxygen mask, imagined tearing it down from its nest of bones and holding it to her face. Just the thought of this steadied her breathing.
It was almost dusk when the guard came and took her from the cell to a bare little office with a single brown desk, behind which sat a man with an air of authority.
“Sit,” the man said.
She sat.
The man nodded to the guard, and the guard stepped out and closed the door behind him.
“So,” the man said. “You’re Paz.”
She nodded.
“And you’re eighteen, huh?”
She was not quite yet eighteen, but knew better than to correct him.
“Young and stupid.”
She could not argue with this man. She bit her tongue to keep herself from speaking.
“What the hell were you doing out on a deserted beach with those women?”
“Just—trying to—” have fun, she’d almost said, but those words seemed dangerous. She shunted them aside. “Trying to appreciate nature.”
He looked at her. “Aha. Nature, is it.”
He stared as if he could bore a hole through her by looking. He wasn’t very tall, but he was burly, broad-shouldered; she could wrestle him back for a few seconds, perhaps, but not much longer. He had a paunch and the pinched face of a surly corner grocer. He seemed to be assessing her and she tried, with all her strength, to look ugly. All those nights in the bathroom at home, staring in the mirror, feeling ugly, her face wrong, too angular and wide-jawed for a girl; she tried to summon those times, summon all that ugly up into her skin like a shield.
“You shouldn’t be away from your family,” he said. “Much less with the likes of them.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and immediately was flooded with shame at the disavowal.
“You could get into trouble.” He studied her again. “You don’t want that, of course.”
“No, sir.” She was disgusting. Pathetic. Groveling for her life.
He looked at her silently for a long time, and his expression grew strange, almost bewildered, though she couldn’t imagine why. Finally, he said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
He hadn’t told her why she was here, though she guessed it had to do with the Fur Woman, the talking back, the refusal of a teenage girl to sit with her legs closed. Nor had he told her where they were, in what town, how long they were planning to keep her, nor even his own name. She could ask, but he hadn’t invited questions and every single thing it crossed her mind to say seemed spiked with danger. “No, sir.”
He knocked on his desk, and the guard returned and took her back to the cell. He opened the door and, as she stepped through, he brushed against her breast with his hand and she went rigid it begins but then the door slammed and he was gone.
The rest of the night she waited for him to come, hands in fists, but he did not, and the next morning it was another guard who brought stale bread and stared as she fumbled to wipe herself at the toilet. This guard limited himself to stroking her ass and, the next day, pushing his erection against her, but she pretended not to notice and almost wanted to laugh at these country people, they clearly weren’t trained, weren’t used to political prisoners, didn’t they know what went on in the city? and then the almost-laugh caught in her throat, the saddest poison on earth.
* * *
*
On the fourth morning, the guard from the first day was back, and, to her surprise, after breakfast and the toilet he took her, handcuffed, to the front door. Two men stood outside. They were in ordinary clothes, and yet she knew them from their faces. They were two of the men who’d taken her from the Prow. Soldiers. Panic poured through her.
“You’ll come with us,” one of the soldiers said.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Where do you think?” the second soldier said.
She didn’t know what to think, but soon the handcuffs were removed and she was walking away from the little jail which she now knew, from the sign outside, was the tiny police station for the town of Castillos. They walked to the highway and out of the town, walked for what seemed like hours, until they reached an isolated bus station and stopped. She didn’t dare ask what they were waiting for, a bus or the arrival of some nightmare. There was a single bench and no one on it but the soldiers stayed on their feet, smoking cigarettes and saying nothing, so she didn’t sit, not that she wanted to anyway, her body ached from nights on the pallet and lack of food and the vaulting blue above her head was enough to get drunk on, the sky, the sky, had it always been so relentlessly beautiful?
A bus arrived, and the soldiers led her onto it and to the back, where they sat in the long row of seats and flanked her on each side. They rode in silence. Through the window, she watched the landscape blur and shake. Fields and trees and squat little huts with naked children and laundry hung like desperate flags. It seemed like the road to Montevideo, which stirred hope in her, even though it also stabbed her not to return to Polonio, to let her friends know she was all right.
When a woman boarded in a town to sell empanadas from a basket, the soldiers bought eight and gave her two. They were fresh, manna compared to what she’d eaten in jail.
“Thank you,” she said, and then she felt humiliated by the act, thanking her captors!
But they could have chosen not to feed her.<
br />
These soldiers whose superiors couldn’t spare a car for a prisoner transport.
Backwoods, pathetic—but she was grateful. She was safer on a bus than in a car.
She’d been right about heading into the city. Gradually, over the hours of riding, the bus began to fill. By the time it reached the outskirts of Montevideo it was crowded, every seat near her was taken, and though at first she’d feared repulsing others with her smell—she hadn’t bathed in four days—she soon realized that nobody noticed. Nobody saw. There she was, a prisoner flanked by soldiers in plain clothes, and yet she looked as free and normal as anyone else. The essence of dictatorship, she thought. On the bus, on the street, at home, no matter where you are or how ordinary you seem, you’re in a cage.
* * *
*
The soldiers got off the bus downtown and walked her into the city jail, where they deposited her unceremoniously in a cell with one other woman and left without a word.
Paz watched them through the bars as they walked away. Fear clawed at her.
“What did you do?”
It was her cellmate, who was more of a girl than a woman, and a prostitute, judging from her low-cut blouse and heavy makeup. She sat with her head cocked, waiting for an answer.
Paz hesitated for a moment. “I talked back to a rich lady.”
The girl laughed. It was a sharp laugh. “That’s it? Just talked?”
Paz shrugged.
“She wasn’t paying you?”
“No,” Paz said before she fully understood the question. When she did understand, her mind roared. Paid? By a woman? That’s what she thought? Had this girl actually done that before? So she knew what to do, she was willing to—and did she—what if—
“What did you say?” The girl was open-faced now, curious. “When you talked back?”
“Not much.” Paz took a closer look at the girl. She had a narrow face and rich black hair. They were about the same height and age. She was pretty, Paz realized, and suddenly their looking at each other acquired another layer, something thick about it. The girl staring at her so frankly. Paz looked away, then back at her. The girl seemed to be searching her for something. There was something keen in her eyes, what was it? Paz couldn’t breathe. And then it ended, the girl’s face closed, became a wall of exhaustion. Without another word, she lay down on her pallet and closed her eyes.
Fitful sleep that night, on the ground.
The next morning, a guard arrived at the cell door and motioned at her to come out.
He pushed her down a hall toward the front entrance.
There, in the lobby, stood her mother.
The look on her face worse than all the soldiers put together.
* * *
*
The bus ride home was dead silent. Inside, her mother went straight to the kitchen and put on the kettle, then stood over it, rigid. Paz hovered in the doorway. She had to speak, but didn’t know where to begin.
Silence spread its dark, wide wings. She couldn’t bear it. She longed for a shower, fresh clothes, a real bed. These things would clear her mind. She turned to leave.
“You’ll stay right there,” her mother said in a voice Paz didn’t recognize.
Paz waited.
“How could you? Don’t you know better? Haven’t I taught you anything?”
An icy ache spread up her body. In the days of hiding guerrilla fighters, Mamá had always fretted over the guerrillas’ well-being, what they must have suffered behind bars, were they hurt, they deserved a doctor and what a crime that they couldn’t safely be taken to see one. Now she didn’t seem to care what had happened to Paz. She hadn’t so much as checked her daughter’s arms for bruises. “I didn’t know this would happen. We were just—”
“You were acting stupid. In times like these.”
“You’re the one who hid subversives in the house!”
“Will you lower! Your! Voice!” Each word spat out in a low hiss.
The neighbors. “Sorry.” A slash of guilt. What if that outburst had cost her mother her safety? Paz felt hot with shame, but then the shame bled back into rage, because even now she was the problem, it was she, Paz, who was always the problem, as if she were not a girl but a barrier keeping her mother from her life and even now it was her loud voice that was the problem and not the roaming soldiers everywhere, the Fur Woman and her spite, the hands and more hands and cold jail floor and fear and Puma, what about Puma, what about—tangled thought, she could barely trace it—what about the way her mother had protected Puma without seeing the child?
Her mother was staring at her just as brutally as before, though her jaw had softened slightly. She took a breath and put her hand on the counter, as if to steady herself. “Resistance is one thing. Acting stupid is another. Haven’t I taught you anything?”
“Obviously you haven’t.”
“How dare you—”
“Well you haven’t!”
“You’re an ungrateful—”
“Not that again.”
“How dare you?”
“You already said that.”
“You’re a disaster.”
“You’re the disaster!”
Mamá slapped her across the cheek.
They stared at each other in fury and surprise. It took a few moments for Paz’s face to begin to sting.
“Why did you have me,” she said, “if you never wanted me?”
Even then, as her mother clapped a hand over her mouth and blinked back tears, the answer knifed into her mind.
Mamá was young when she married Paz’s father, eighteen years old, and Paz was born six and a half months later, this temporal discrepancy always glossed over in the official version. But sometimes, the silent story is the real one. Abortion could kill you, pregnancy trapped you but at least you had a better chance at staying alive. She’d had Paz because she had to. And now here she was, still young, still beautiful, her husband gone, trying to live her life with a difficult daughter in the way.
Mamá turned from her, hand still over her mouth. Paz tried to summon something to say, but Mamá marched out of the kitchen, and Paz could not move, could only listen to the footsteps and the bedroom door as it slammed shut.
Steam shot from the abandoned kettle for a long time before Paz removed it from the fire.
* * *
*
The following afternoon, before her mother came home from work, Paz packed a bag and walked to Flaca’s house. When Flaca saw her in the doorway she made a keening sound unlike anything Paz had heard before, and then she was crushed in her friend’s arms.
“You’re back.”
Her eyes stung. The ferocity of Flaca’s embrace woke the emptiness inside her and filled it, made her feel small in a manner that she sank into, relieved to be small, relieved to cling, for all her constant protests that she was not a chiquilina, not a child. “Can I stay with you?”
“Whatever you need. Come in.”
Within the hour, Flaca had set up bedding on the floor of her room, insisting that she’d be the one to sleep there while Paz took the bed, waving off Paz’s attempts at protest, saying, “It’s no problem, really, you can stay as long as you want,” and these words flooded Paz with gratitude even though it seemed crystal clear to her that she most certainly could not stay as long as she wanted, which in that instant was forever. Flaca’s parents were kind and generous, smiling at her over dinner as if she’d always been at their table helping herself to milanesas, encouraging her to eat more, eat more, there is plenty, fussing over her yet asking no questions about why she was sleeping in their home. They were the polar opposite of Mamá, older and more settled, thick of waist and large of heart, already grandparents, with the air of a humble old couple made happy just by seeing their family alive and well, which, given the times, was a lot to ask of
fate. And they loved Flaca. She took care of them, washed the dishes while they drifted off to the television, reminded her mother to take her medications. She takes care of them, Paz thought, just like, in Polonio, Flaca takes care of us.
That night, after dinner, and after a call with Romina during which both she and Paz wept more than they spoke, Paz and Flaca settled down to sleep and turned off the light.
“So,” Flaca said, rustling in her sheets. “You’re all right?”
“I suppose so.”
More rustling.
“I mean, yes. Nothing happened to me.” It didn’t quite feel accurate, to call those days nothing—it was the terror of the next that had torn her most—and yet she knew that alongside most arrests that was exactly what they were.
Flaca exhaled long and slow. “Good. And your mother?”
“I don’t want to talk about her. Not yet.”
“All right.”
“Tell me what happened in Polonio.”
And so Flaca recounted how things had gone at the Prow after Paz was taken, the long vigil, the interviews, and Romina’s gamble to protect Paz, the yarn she’d told the officers about the arrested girl’s powerful uncle, counting on poor communication with the capital to keep the story afloat. And it had worked, Paz thought, remembering the guards, the man in the office, their restraint. Romina’s strategy had kept her safe. They’d stayed two more days, Flaca said, during which it became clear that Paz was no longer in Polonio and that their best bet to find her was to head back to the city. Romina had been making calls to secret networks that she wouldn’t name in hopes of finding her. Now she can rest, Flaca said. She’ll come see you tomorrow. Meanwhile, the day after they returned from Polonio, La Venus had knocked on the majestic oak door of the singer Ariella Ocampo’s house in El Prado, and there she had been welcomed in with open arms, not that Flaca had seen the open arms or what the arms had done next as soon as the door was closed but she could imagine it, she certainly could, not that she wanted to, she spent most of her waking moments trying to do the opposite. She had lost La Venus. They were over. But there was good news too. Romina and Malena. They were going to be something. They might not have acknowledged it directly yet, but Flaca had seen it.
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