“Just call and tell them you have a headache,” Ariella said. “It’s what I do.”
She called, and was bumbling through her apology when she heard an all-too-familiar voice in the background.
“Mamá. Who’s that?”
“Who’s what?”
“Arnaldo’s there? You invited him, knowing I was coming?”
“Ay, Anita, you two need to talk. It’s not right that you won’t even give us your phone number, I mean you’re crazy, really crazy and we’re worried about y—”
She hung up. Heat rushed through her. She felt the urge to run. It was strange: she’d lived with Arnaldo all that time, even put up with him when things soured, but now that she had some distance and had started sleeping in a bed free of his weight the very thought of him sent panic through her body. It made no sense. You’re crazy. And perhaps she was.
From then on she only called her mother at random times, sporadically, and never on Sundays, hanging up at the first sign of harangue.
No matter. She wasn’t alone. She had her Polonio friends (all but Flaca). And she had Ariella; she was sailing Ariella’s high seas.
She was an artist in every way, that woman. She created herself anew each day and each languorous night. It seemed that she’d found a way to live beyond the masculine-feminine divide, not so much crossing it as flouting it entirely. She peppered men’s clothing into her attire, wearing a necktie over a ruffled blouse, a men’s suit jacket with silver bracelets that clamored brashly as she talked, a fedora with a sequined dress and feather boa. She only did this at home, never outside, and not just for parties; often, on days when no one else came over, Ariella changed her outfit two or three times in the course of a day, feverishly adding and removing pieces that pushed and merged the edges of gender, her clothes an expression of her restlessness, her frenetic creative mind. Her moods changed more often than her clothing. She sparked, shot, brooded, blazed. She lived outside the rules of the world. She received La Venus’s presence as if she’d always been in the house, always been part of her sphere. In those early days, they spent many nights awake by candlelight (Ariella believed that no light held as much power as natural flame), making love and talking. Ariella told her of her travels, how trapped she felt in Uruguay, her longing to leave the country, to breathe foreign air again and fill it with her song. She had first gone abroad at the age of nineteen, with a scholarship to a school called Juilliard, in New York City. The land of the Yanquis had enchanted her: people there acted as though they were all born for big lives. The city had hummed and roared around her, a living music. She befriended musicians, dancers, painters, poets, actors; she attended parties where talk and art and drugs and seduction blended into a single, glittering whole. It was in New York that she first went to bed with a woman, a jazz singer born in the southern state of Alabama who played the clubs up in Harlem and took her home for a single radiant night that would for the rest of Ariella’s life be the measure of passion. Harriet was her name. She sang to put the stars to shame. Her voice could have melted walls of stone. Ariella had gone up to Harlem with a small group of fellow students, among them a baritone who’d been trying to bed her for weeks, in vain. In Harlem, she felt she’d crossed into another realm, like the Barrio Sur and Palermo of her native city, only not like those neighborhoods at all, not like any other place in the world. Harriet shimmered on the stage, her poise regal, surrounded by a band that held her sound aloft as if to say, our song, our beat, our voice, and even the most cocky of the Juilliard white boys were reduced to grudging silence at the power of the music. Harriet spotted Ariella from the stage and met her eyes for one long breath of song. Ariella knew that she’d been claimed, that she’d do anything to stay inside that gaze. When her fellow students left the club, Ariella stayed, against their protests. Harriet’s rented room turned out to be eight blocks away. Afterward, they smoked cigarettes and Ariella answered questions in her tenuous English: she sang opera, she was a student, her country was called Uruguay.
“You have your own music? In Uruguay?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“What kind of music?”
“We have the murga. Tango. Candombe. The candombe, it is of black people, like you.”
Harriet raised her eyebrows and said nothing for a long time.
“And these black people, from your country,” she finally said. “They don’t ever come to Juilliard.”
“I don’t know,” Ariella said, immediately feeling stupid because it probably hadn’t been a question, and also because what she’d just said wasn’t true; she did know. The black people she’d known personally back home were maids in her parents’ house. They had less of a chance of reaching Juilliard than of reaching the moon.
“And you. You don’t sing Uruguayan music.”
“No.”
“Why not? Wait, let me guess—you don’t know the answer to that either.”
I said nothing then, because, Venus, I was too foolish, I didn’t yet understand anything, but the conversation would swim inside me for years and later give birth to my most important work. It started there, right there with a woman who burned forever into my mind, don’t be jealous now, Venus, I’m just telling you the real story so you have it, a woman who redefined the world for me but who closed herself off to me while I was still lying beside her, naked. I snuck out from her room in the cover of dark. I never went back to Harlem. She hadn’t given me a number, hadn’t asked me to call or come around. There was something hard in her eyes after I said Juilliard, something aching, pain flung up between us like a wall, and it was too big to cross. There would never have been a place for her, or for her music, up at Juilliard, as we both knew. Here I’d seen all the Yanquis as the ones on top, the ones with power, and me from my poor little Latin American country, but with Harriet the pieces all seemed rearranged. Well. After that, there were lovers, but not so many, I was busy with my lessons and classes and performances, working long hours, you know, the artist’s life. I got very little news from home, sporadic references to the growing unrest from my mother on long-distance phone calls, but Uruguay was never in the newspapers, except in 1970, when the Tupamaros kidnapped that Yanqui, Dan Mitrione, you should have seen how they made him sound, like a hero and a martyr and not a word about how he came to Montevideo to train torturers. Oh don’t look at me like that, I can say it here, the neighbors can’t hear us and anyway they’re all asleep. So when I finished my studies, in ’seventy-two, I had to leave because my visa ran out. I found a job in Chile, at the National Opera there, and I wanted to keep seeing the world, so off I went to Santiago. It was there that I began performing, in my spare time, with a local tango troupe—the seed of Harriet’s question started taking its first flower—and together we embarked on experiments with fusion. Opera and tango, blending their bodies, like two women having sex. You know. Like we do. As if centuries of rules didn’t exist. As if sex were new—as if sound were new. That’s how exciting it was. Everything was exciting, back then, in Chile. Allende was president, the socialists had won, and sure, the economy was a mess, the right wing furious, getting more violent every day, but still it seemed like we were on a glorious ship headed into the sunrise or some shit like that, though of course we all know what really happened. ’Seventy-three, that’s what happened. First Uruguay fell, then Chile three months later. Pinochet rose up, and that was it. Half my tango band disappeared. I was lucky I got out; they could have taken me too. I tried to get on a plane to Argentina, since it wasn’t a dictatorship yet—my God, those poor Chileans and Uruguayans who fled to Buenos Aires for refuge! how many of them are gone now without a trace! And I could have been one of them—but I was only permitted to go back to my own nation. And now I’m stuck here, forced to make my art in this jail of a country, where you can’t have a performance without filling out several forms and submitting them for approval to the police, where you can’t walk through the st
reets at night, where you have to watch your mouth and everybody looks like they’re on their way back from a funeral all the time.
La Venus shifted in the bedclothes. It seemed to her that freedoms were much greater on this side of town. The people she knew, the people she’d known before Ariella, all lived in apartments or small, squat houses that shared kitchen walls and night sounds, you always knew when the neighbors were fighting or laughing (rarely) or, sometimes, succumbing to the pleasures of the body. In quarters like those, people watched what they said and kept their voices down, the curtains closed. Here, in the majestic neighborhood of El Prado, with its clean streets and ample trees, it seemed that the Process didn’t reach as deeply into people’s lives. Neighbors were far-flung and kept to themselves, nestled in their large houses. In the land of the rich, there was more privacy, less surveillance. Fewer landings on which neighbors could spy on your apartment door, listen for stray footsteps, hear forbidden music or conversations through thin walls.
Though even here, there were precautions. Guests stayed until the sun was up and the night patrols were done. So Ariella served dinner and breakfast, with plenty of drinks in between. In the middle of the night, the artists came together in a haze of cigarette smoke and talked, argued, burst into song, made sounds with their voices that wove strangely into musical fabrics La Venus had not thought possible. Meandering sounds, sharp sounds, lazy, biting, aching, sensuous. Sometimes they seemed to make it up as they went along, while at other times classic melodies—Puccini, Piazzolla, tangos from the Old Guard, folk songs from the border towns of Salto and Paysandú—threaded through the smoky room. Couples vanished into corners of the house, into bedrooms on the second floor, bathrooms with the lights out, the dark garage that used to be a stable in the old days, when horses still pulled the world. The house was like a grand old lady, her dress full of folds, pockets, secrets both sticky and smooth.
It surprised La Venus to hear Ariella speak of Uruguay as a constraining place, as causing her suffering. Ariella’s parents owned the mansion and paid for its upkeep as well as for the live-in maid, Sonia, a young black woman whom Ariella gave instructions without looking in the eye and without saying please or thank you, which unsettled La Venus every time and made her think of Harriet, sending Ariella out of her bed into the New York cold. Sonia was sweet-mannered and either never was annoyed or never showed it, even managed to be graceful in her movements as she cooked meals and made beds and washed clothes and looked after the little boy.
Because there was a little boy. Another surprise. La Venus stumbled into him on her second day, playing with a toy train in the living room. His name was Mario, and he was three years old. He smiled up at her with a friendliness and open warmth that caught her off guard. None of her nieces or nephews had ever beamed at her that way. She felt an old ache rise up in the pit of her belly, a dull hunger for what she could not have, and she could see the bloody mess in the toilet bowl again, the rivulets down her leg, her failure to keep life inside. But what if she had succeeded in staying pregnant years ago? Where would she be now? Later, she learned that Mario was conceived accidentally, with a certain unnamed “hippie guitarist,” in Ariella’s words, who’d been passing through town, on tour from a European country she refused to identify. She had found the guitarist amusing and pretty, and she’d let him keep her warm for a couple of sleepless nights, even though she liked women better than men. This too fascinated La Venus, that a woman who loved women could also take pleasure in a man. So it wasn’t all or nothing. She hadn’t been sure. Her Polonio friends all seemed to have sworn off men entirely, and even, when they were out at the beach drunk on whiskey and stars, scoffed at the very idea. She stayed quiet when they did. That wasn’t how things were for her, and she’d ended up feeling as though she were somehow lacking because she’d enjoyed being with her husband, at least in the early days, when things were still good between them.
Mario was an energetic boy, sweet-tempered and curious. La Venus had her days stretching out before her, with nothing to do. She started playing with Mario, during the day, at first to amuse herself, and, soon, to contribute to the household. Ariella had her rehearsals and performances, very little time for the boy, and Sonia had her hands full with the cooking, washing, and cleaning. Although she never complained aloud, it was clearly a relief to her to have La Venus’s help with the child. Meanwhile, caring for the boy gave La Venus a way to be of use, to fill her days. She learned to wipe his bottom, make snacks, tell stories silly enough to keep Mario’s attention. She came to crave the boy. His limbs were plump and softer than petals; once, when he raced into her arms, she saw wings spread out from his delicate shoulders, white wings like those of an angel, the angel she’d lost years ago to the toilet bowl, what if this was him, if a spirit once inside her had returned as this boy? She caught him in her arms and dared to think it true. For his fourth birthday, she made him a boat out of fruit crates, painted it blue and white, with a sail made out of an old sheet strung on a chipped broomstick. It was large enough for the two of them to huddle inside of and sail away, she thought, into his dreams, into wherever they wanted to go.
“Venu!” he’d cry out—“Venu! Come see!”—and his high pure voice would not exactly break her heart, but melt it, make it a soft, expanded thing, threatening to pour out of her body.
* * *
*
She invited her Polonio friends to their parties, all except for Flaca of course—she’d never come, it would take time, wouldn’t it? for them to be friends again? don’t worry about her, Ariella would croon in the pale wash of first dawn light after the last guests had finally left, she’s just jealous, she’ll get over it—but the others. They all came together once: Romina, Malena, and Paz. Romina and Malena never left each other’s side, hewing to the periphery of things. La Venus approached them just as Romina was listening to a bearded man, a painter, passionately reminiscing about the Paris of his youth. “None of us go to Paris anymore,” he bemoaned.
Romina’s face was tight. “There are plenty of Uruguayans in Paris,” she said. “Right now. More than ever.”
The man coughed. “Oh. Sure there are. But I didn’t mean exiles.” He placed the word in the air carefully, as if proud of his daring. “I meant artists. Les Deux Magots and all that.”
“Many of our exiles are artists. Writers. They’ve been publi—”
“Certainly, of course. Yes. Well, in any case, if you could see the Louvre, the Notre Dame, you’d never be the same, I’m sure you’d agree.” His eyes were glazed now, roaming. “Ah! Venus! The goddess herself!”
La Venus smiled. “There’s more sangría in the kitchen.”
“Aha! I’m off to find it. If you’ll excuse me, ladies.” He bowed deeply, and was gone.
La Venus turned to her friends. “Are you having a good time?”
Romina glanced at Malena, and they shared a look. On becoming a couple, they seemed to have forged an intimacy that sustained them both. “That man. So ignorant.”
La Venus nodded. Romina had become involved with a secret circle of dissidents who smuggled written words into the country: letters, essays, and newspaper clippings from Uruguayan exiles speaking out abroad about the human rights abuses back home. Apparently, out beyond the nation’s borders, there were publishers who listened, readers who cared. It all seemed insanely dangerous to La Venus. Why risk yourself for the impossible? How could those words change anything here, where the authorities held all the reins? And then there was Romina’s direct political work, here on the ground; she wasn’t sure of the details, but she’d heard the rumors of new networks of subversives, sprouting up and organizing acts against the regime. But what would it change, all this meeting and word smuggling? Only the safety of those who did it. She wished her friend would come to her senses, but didn’t dare say this to her, as she knew it was the last thing Romina wanted to hear.
“I’m sorry,
” she said. “But at least you can talk about these things here.”
“I suppose so.”
“I mean, these parties are a kind of oasis, no? Like our Polonio.”
Romina gulped down the rest of her wine. “No. Not like our Polonio at all.”
La Venus tried to hide her irritation. What was it in her that angled so sharply for these friends’ approval? They went to Polonio without her, were going soon. She should go sometime. It was her house too. She didn’t dare take Ariella—it seemed an invasion, and in any case Ariella would be horrified by the cramped space, dirt floor, bucket for a shower—but she could go by herself. And yet she did not go. She missed Polonio but could not find, inside herself, the will to go alone.
Malena reached her hand out to Romina and rubbed her back. No words, just touch, but Romina seemed to calm and flower open under her lover’s hand. They were good for each other, La Venus couldn’t deny it. They seemed to have a secret language that ran under the surface of things, always connecting, always hearing each other. For all that being with Ariella lit her up inside, La Venus knew that her lover would never in her life spend an entire party close at La Venus’s side, the way these two women kept to each other. Ariella flitted around the room, absorbing everyone’s attention. She gloried in it. Romina and Malena didn’t cling to each other, exactly, but they kept close, as if absorbed in an invisible and constant conversation that no one else could hear.
Paz, though, was a different story. She dove into the party with abandon. There she was now, talking with a couple of young women La Venus had never met. Since she’d moved out of her mother’s house, Paz had blossomed. She smuggled seal skins from Polonio to the city, and seemed to have become adept at managing all the business relationships with men. She was renting a room from a couple in Cordón whose only child was twenty-four and long imprisoned. For Paz, these parties, locked in all night with drunk artists steadily getting drunker, were a golden opportunity. La Venus saw it in the way she scanned the room. She looked older than she was, twenty at least, though in truth she was only eighteen, unmoored in the world. For now, it seemed to suit her. Paz was going to end up in some corner with one of those young women before the night was through, that much was clear from the way they angled themselves toward her, like sunflowers poised to catch the sun.
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