Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  “I saw it too,” Paz said, thinking of the afternoon on the beach.

  “I think they’ll be very good for each other.”

  “But what about this situation with La Venus?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What does it mean for the rest of us?”

  “It’s our breakup, not yours.”

  “But still—” Paz tried to gather her thoughts. In so many ways the world now slid and shifted beneath her feet. She couldn’t bear the thought of this makeshift tribe breaking apart so soon after it had formed. It was everything to her. She had no one, nothing else.

  “Still what?” Flaca sounded annoyed.

  “Well, we’re a group, aren’t we?” She’d wanted to say a family, but hadn’t dared. “We have the house now.”

  “So you think she’s going to leave the group? Or that I’m going to kick her out?”

  “I hope not.” Although they’d bought the house together, in equal parts, it seemed to her that if anyone had the power to determine who stayed and who was cast out, it was Flaca. It was Flaca, after all, who’d led them to this, Flaca la Pilota, who’d rounded them up and realized the dream.

  “I don’t know, Paz, I really don’t. I don’t know how we can all be together there again.”

  “Ever?”

  “I can’t think about ‘ever.’ I can barely think about today. I mean—if she were to bring Ariella—what a nightmare!” Flaca tried to laugh, but the sound came out strangled. “We never made any rules about who could bring whom. It’s all of our house, I see that. But we didn’t plan for something like this.”

  “We didn’t plan at all.”

  “Now, Paz, that’s not fair, what about—”

  “That’s what makes the Prow so wonderful. It wasn’t a plan. It was a dream we brought to Earth.”

  Flaca laughed. “I didn’t know you were a poet.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Don’t be so sure. It could come in handy one day, you know—with the ladies.”

  “Noted.”

  “No, really!”

  “Yes, really—I’m keeping notes on all your advice for the ladies, Flaca.”

  “You’re going to be tremenda.”

  They laughed, and Paz felt a flush of joy for the first time since the arrest.

  “Look,” Flaca said, her tone serious again, “about La Venus. It’s still her house, and I know it. I hope that’s enough for you.”

  Paz stared into the dark. “Why not.”

  “Now, what about you? You’re going to class tomorrow?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. Do I have to?”

  “I’m not your mother.”

  “And thank God for that.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “Sorry. You’d be a great mother.”

  Flaca snorted.

  “No, really.” The thought of a mother who was anything like Flaca made Paz ache all over. To be seen, mirrored, from the very beginning of life? By the person who birthed you? It was more than she could even imagine. “It’s just that I’m sick of mothers right now.”

  “Does she know where you are?”

  “No.”

  “Paz.”

  “She doesn’t care.”

  “Of course she cares. She’s your mother.”

  “Not all mothers care.”

  “Give it time, Paz.”

  “I’ve given it time. I can’t live with her, Flaca. I can’t, not now, not ever again.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  For this Paz had no answer.

  * * *

  *

  What to do: she had no idea.

  For days she burned like a lit thing, determined, aching.

  She would not go home.

  She would not.

  She would rather walk the streets with the ladies of the night than go back home. Even though the thought of that work, unzipping men, made her stomach churn. Not to mention that, with the night patrols, such work had become more dangerous than ever.

  Still, this much was clear: leaving home meant no more studying. Not if there were bills to be paid.

  She called her mother, from Flaca’s living room, with Flaca sitting in a rocking chair beside her, holding her hand. She told her that she was safe, and her mother sounded indifferent, or perhaps still angry, or else afraid of talking on a surveilled call, but in any case she said little and asked for no more information than Paz gave. The call was brief, curt. She didn’t go to class, instead roaming the city, walking the unkempt parks, the gray streets, the Rambla with its breeze coming in over the water like the breath of an enormous lonely soul. She walked until evening, then ducked into Flaca’s house and helped Flaca’s mother hang laundry and make dinner. Flaca’s mother was a small woman, surprisingly spry, full of chatter warm enough to soothe your aches and pains. She would let me stay, Paz realized. She wouldn’t throw me out. She probably even knew, by now, what Flaca was, though they’d never exchanged a single word about it, and even so she kept clattering away with her pots and pans and gossip, while Paz’s own mother had gone cold without even knowing the core of her daughter’s crime.

  At night, she slept fitfully, gathering pieces of her future in her mind like shattered glass.

  On the tenth morning, she got up and packed her rucksack, and by seven o’clock she was at the bus station, waiting for the 7:15 bus down the coast.

  * * *

  *

  When she reached Polonio, before doing what she’d come to do, Paz went to their hut alone for the first time. The painted sign still hung over the door, reading THE PROW, with all those other names buried in swirls of paint. She opened the door and was relieved to see that the inside still looked the same. Almost as if the soldiers had never come.

  But they had come.

  She sat down at the center of the floor. Took a breath. The scent of mold a comfort. Anything can be a comfort if it smells like home. It was her eighteenth birthday and all she wanted was to be here. The air was thick with afternoon light. Sweat clung to her from the long hike over the sand dunes, on which every step had been an incantation, I will, I will. She would what. Live. Survive. Do whatever she had to do. Belong. What did that mean? How to belong? How can you be of a place and also unsafe there? How can you be of a place when soldiers could pull you from it at any time? Stupid thoughts. She should know better. There was no other kind of place, not in this damn country. No inch of it was beyond the reach of soldiers. And so. She tried to think. And so. And so she had two choices: either she could belong nowhere—nowhere in the whole world, because leaving Uruguay, if it were possible, meant being a foreigner forever—or she could claim a space and demand it be her home, the way one demands water from the desert, juice from a stone—and why not here. In this wild place. This room. Where Flaca and La Venus had fought, where Romina and Malena had quietly entwined their minds—she’d felt them do it—where she herself had laid out cardboard and painted dozens of names, flamboyant, silly, towering. Where her friends had known what she was and loved her for it. Where Flaca had taken a punch for her. Where the five of them had laughed and whispered as the candles burned down and the whiskey bottle slowly lightened its load. This room. And also, the land below this room. Land older than the soldiers, the generals, their wives. Older even than the country’s name and borders. She tried to reach down with her consciousness, under the packed dirt floor, to the layers of sand and bedrock beneath. If she could reach the land directly, would its own mind rise to meet her? Could they tangle roots and claim each other? The soldiers had not taken this place from her. She’d been torn from this room, bruised and dragged, and yet, returning, she felt no fear. Only a rising up inside her, a stubborn stalk pushing toward growth. Here, she thought fiercely. Here. She sat still for a long time.

  * * *r />
  *

  When she walked into the grocery, El Lobo looked up at her with pleasure but no evidence of surprise. “Welcome back.” And then, scanning her with probing eyes, “I knew you’d return to us.”

  She waited for him to say more, to mention her arrest directly or ask whether she was all right, but to her relief he did neither. His gaze was warm but he did not smile.

  The shipwreck stories he had told her swirled in the air, invisible gusts, holding specks of dust aloft.

  She stood in the doorway, trying to make herself tall. “Tell me more about the skin trade.”

  Part Two

  1980–1987

  5

  Flights

  FREEDOM. TO GLOW WITH IT. Ariella in the morning, draped in sun. Ariella at night, radiant, laughing loud, as if nothing mattered, as if the police couldn’t do a thing to her or if they could she didn’t care, to hell with it, she was alive and would laugh when she wanted. Even now, nine months into their relationship, La Venus felt her world expand in Ariella’s presence. She wanted to expand the way this woman did, to crack the code, the secret. To be this impossible thing: a woman in times like these who said and did what she liked.

  A living miracle.

  And an artist. A true one. Not like Arnaldo, who used to talk of future stages and fame, but an actual artist who lived to create. To live in her orbit was to live inside of art.

  Enough to get drunk on.

  And, in the past nine months, she had.

  * * *

  *

  The first night she saw Ariella, at the opera, she’d come home and lain awake beside Arnaldo with the note crumpled in her hand. She already had the numbers memorized, and yet she could not put the note down. It curled and grew warm and damp against her palm. She would call. She would never call. In the morning, Arnaldo reached for her without opening his eyes and fucked her before getting out of bed, as he sometimes liked to do. Better than coffee, he used to say back when they got along, when he still checked for her mood before taking what he wanted. It was a stalemate now, her refusal to show signs of pleasure false or true, his bitter insistence made all the more acute by her refusal. For God’s sake, it’s like having sex with a limp rag, he’d said to her one recent morning, and she’d felt a thrill of victory, followed by shame: this was what her life had been reduced to? The triumph of becoming a bad fuck? She thought of Flaca, patient, eager to please, a joy to be with though there was also a growing weight to their time together; Flaca was young and poor, dependent on her humble working parents; she could hold La Venus’s pleasure, but not her growing despair. Now, on this morning, the morning after the opera, she lay in bed listening to the hiss of Arnaldo’s shower and staring at the crumpled note on the nightstand. Ariella radiated. She surged with poise and mystery. She’d held that whole grand hall of people in thrall and fixed her beam on me.

  She forced herself to wait three days to call. She was accustomed to being the pursued, couldn’t let her hunger show. Ariella answered after the third ring. The call was short, so short that Ariella never even asked her name.

  “I’m having a party on Saturday,” she said. “Come.”

  A party. Had she misheard? The invitation had been less of a question than a statement, an assumption. This ruffled La Venus—that this woman would command her to attend, that the invitation was not just for her but for who knew how many others too, and what did that mean, in any case, a party? who had parties anymore?—and she thought of not going. But in the end, Saturday found her appearing at the door of that mansion in El Prado, combed and glittering. A woman in a black evening gown opened the door when she knocked, then walked away down the hall without introducing herself. She followed the black-gowned woman to a large room lit by an old-fashioned chandelier, of the kind the wealthy had purchased at the turn of the century, heady with the thrill of electricity’s arrival. There were maybe two dozen people, milling and laughing, and at the center stood Ariella, luminous in a yellow dress and—La Venus couldn’t breathe—a red tie slung around her neck. Nobody seemed to react to this transgression, the mixing of male and female. The tie hung long and thin, like a flame. La Venus hung back by the drinks, determined not to chase this strange woman, this luminous, maddening singer. Why had she come? She would leave. Any second she would leave.

  But she did not leave, and two hours later she was following Ariella up the stairs. The party’s warm clamor faded when the bedroom door closed behind them. Ariella did not turn on the light. La Venus stood, waited, and when the singer’s hands reached her body she was startled by their sureness, how clearly they wanted, how much they seemed to know.

  Ariella was nothing like Flaca. She was all curves and woman. But she was not shy. La Venus felt her knees shake as the zipper down her back split open under Ariella’s hands. Ariella peeled both dresses off, and her manner was both solemn and efficient, like a high priestess preparing the temple for an ancient ritual. Gowns draped carefully on chairs, she returned, and their bodies pressed together. La Venus felt the familiar sensation of melting, of her body losing its boundaries and definition, of pleasure turning her to liquid that could pour into the liquid of a woman, but she also felt something else, the raw vertigo of starting life anew, of trembling just before you raze your house to the ground.

  Afterward, they lay in candlelight—when had the wicks been lit?—and Ariella said, “I still don’t know your name.”

  “They call me La Venus.”

  “My Venus.” Ariella stroked her skin. “Sent from the gods. You are going to be my Muse.”

  This stayed with La Venus throughout that last trip to Polonio, where she’d fought with Flaca, where they’d lost Paz, almost lost her completely. She thought of it the whole bus ride back to the city and throughout her first night home, which she spent still shaky with fear for her disappeared friend, hands trembling as she cooked dinner for a husband who did not ask her about her trip but who later, in bed, pressed her head down to his groin, payment for her days of absence. Sent from the gods, she thought as he bucked against her face. The next day, she got up and repacked her rucksack with clean clothes and a few beloved books and photographs.

  She might not let me in, she thought on the bus to Ariella’s house. She might laugh at me. Or she might take me inside for a few hours and then send me back to my husband.

  She arrived and knocked. Her hands shook.

  Ariella opened the door and looked at her for a long minute with an unreadable expression on her face.

  La Venus held her breath. The rucksack dug its strap into her shoulder. She didn’t feel like a Muse at all, but like a beggar, her hunger laid bare. It shamed her. It thrilled her.

  Ariella let a subtle smile break over her, the smile of a genius, the smile of a thief.

  She opened the door wide and stepped back to let La Venus in.

  The rest of it was easy. She knew Arnaldo’s work schedule like the pulse in her own veins. While he was out of the apartment, she returned and took as much as she could carry, paring back to her most treasured things, leaving the furniture, much of which had come from her parents’ and in-laws’ homes anyway so who wanted it? They could keep their dainty lamps and submissive coffee tables. She left a note on the kitchen counter that explained the situation in elliptical sentences, which, after roving through the metaphysical limitations of a marriage like theirs, eventually landed on the core point, and I’m not coming back.

  Later, she fielded her mother’s horror on the phone, her sister’s and brother’s incomprehension, her sister-in-law’s spurning.

  “But why, Anita?” Her mother moaned, drawing out the vowels in her words as if to wring them dry. “What did Arnaldo do—did he beat you?”

  “Mamá, no, he didn’t beat me.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “It’s not about what he did, but about what I want.”

>   “What you want! You married him! You insisted on him over Beto, Miguel, that other boy with the big estancia in the north, Artigas or wherever it was—”

  “It was in Durazno.”

  “Fine, wherever. The point is, you already did what you wanted.”

  “It changed.”

  “What changed?”

  “What I wanted.”

  Her mother sighed, a heavy, burdened sound. “Anita. You want to be alone all of your life? This is what you want, to be living with some spinster?”

  “She happens to be a very successful artist.”

  “But why there? Why not come here?”

  Because of this exactly, La Venus thought but did not say.

  “Tell me your phone number.”

  La Venus was silent.

  Her mother’s voice, now cold with suspicion. “And your address?”

  Arnaldo. Mamá might give the information to Arnaldo.

  “Hija.”

  She couldn’t have her mother calling at odd hours, any hours. Or showing up at her doorstep. “I’m sorry, Mamá. Don’t worry, I’ll call you.”

  “What kind of place is this? What did you do, move into a brothel?”

  “No.” Something worse, by your standards. “Really, Mamá, I’m fine.”

  The line spat static into her ear.

  “You’ll at least come over for Sunday lunch?”

  “Of course I will, Mamá. Soon.”

  “When soon? Next weekend! I’ll be expecting you.”

  She’d meant to go, but she woke up that Sunday with a heavy sense of foreboding weighing on her chest. She wasn’t sure she could bear her smug sister and sister-in-law, their lectures and their pity. What would she tell them? There was nothing she could say. And yet they’d be demanding answers.