Months into their relationship, La Venus still felt a thrill at being with Ariella, at entering a room with her. Each of them turned heads on her own; together, they took a room’s attention and wound it around them, claimed it. In bed, Ariella was demanding, precise. There were nights when she’d whisper into La Venus’s ear the number of orgasms she wanted to give her that night. “Six,” she’d purr, and her word was law, even if La Venus was sated after the fourth, or even worn out, longing only for a nest of sleep. And she couldn’t fake it, the way she had sometimes with Arnaldo for reasons of convenience or diplomacy. Here, there were no substitutes. On other nights, Ariella demanded to be serviced. It was she who wanted the orgasms, and they had to be vast, vigorous, nothing counted but the blaze. Thrilling. Thrilling, except that in the early morning, La Venus was the one who rose when Mario cried, who made his breakfast, started his day, no matter how late his Mami had kept her up the night before, because she was that person now, Mario’s main person, the one he sought out when he woke up, the one he reached for when he scraped his knee. Sometimes, in the morning, as Mario played and Ariella slept and La Venus stumbled through preparing the mate, she thought that her lover’s lust might kill her. And then she’d light a cigarette and say to herself, there are worse ways to go. She was being ridiculous. She was, after all, living the dream.
“And how long do you expect to be able to live off this rich lady?” her mother asked on the phone one day.
“I’m not living off of her. I contribute. I help take care of her boy.” She tried to keep the impatience out of her voice. They’d been over this before, and yet her mother insisted on the question, as if repetition could squeeze out a different answer.
“Whom she had out of wedlock. I mean really, Anita. What are you doing with your life? Babysitting? As if you were some teenage girl, or servant—you think I raised you for that?”
“Mamá. That is not what I am.”
“Then what are you?”
She couldn’t answer.
“Ay, hija. Where on earth is your life headed?”
She had no idea. She wasn’t thinking of the future. There was no future in the godforsaken country, much less for women like her. She’d settle for living in the now.
* * *
*
“Look at this,” Ariella said over lunch one day, placing a letter on the table. “I’m getting out.”
La Venus read the letter, once, then twice. It was an invitation to Brazil, embossed with the name of a university in Rio de Janeiro. A fellowship. Visiting artists. Two years long. The start date was three months away.
Ariella was watching her closely. “You’re not happy for me?”
“Of course I’m happy.” La Venus tried to sound as if she meant it. She made her voice light, pushed food around her plate. “You’ve earned it. You’re brilliant—the greatest genius in all of Uruguay.”
Ariella snorted. “That’s not saying much.”
La Venus felt stung; her country might be small, and provincial, as Ariella sometimes put it, but it was still her country and she had no other.
“I mean, all the great minds are gone now, aren’t they? Off in exile. I’ve been so alone here.” She stared out of the window.
La Venus felt a knot rise up inside her, hard as a fist.
Ariella looked at her. “Oh, not like that—you’ve been wonderful, of course. Delicious company.” She smiled, stroked La Venus’s hand. “But I still need more. Things are open in Rio de Janeiro, for artists. There’s more embrace of mixing genres. Fusion is the future. Not just for art, but for all of culture, all of life. Art is the place where changes begin, and then, before you know it, they’re everywhere.”
La Venus nodded, though she had no clue what Ariella meant.
“Of course that only works if the artists can survive. Look at all the exiles, all the desaparecidos—look at Victor Jara. You know I sang with him in Chile, a few times, before the coup? A good man. A brilliant man. They killed him just like that.”
In moments like this one, Ariella seemed a different kind of being, larger than life, shimmering right there at the kitchen table with the superhuman glow of fame, of history, an aura that anointed any mortal permitted to approach.
Ariella was looking off into the distance, and La Venus thought that she was lost in her memories of Chile, of the coup. But then she said, “Come with me.”
“Where?”
“To Brazil.”
“Me?”
“Who else? Is there anyone else here?”
Victor Jara, La Venus thought, but she said nothing. Ariella didn’t believe in ghosts.
“I want you with me.”
She gulped those words into her mind, tried to savor them as they went down. “I can’t leave the country. I’d only get a tourist visa. I’m not the one with the fellowship.”
“We’ll figure something out.” Ariella thought for a moment, then smiled. “I’ll put you on the application. You can come as my nanny.”
She bristled. Which word was the sharper thorn? Nanny, or my? She didn’t feel like Mario’s nanny. He’d started calling her Mamá. She never corrected him. It hadn’t happened yet in front of Ariella, and there was no saying how she’d react.
“Come on. The world is so much larger than Uruguay. Don’t you want to live? Dream? See more of the world?”
La Venus reached for the pack of cigarettes on the table, took two out, and lit them. She handed one to Ariella, not meeting her eyes. Of course she wanted to live, to dream. But whose life? Whose dream? She was being too touchy. Ariella was freedom, adventure. But even so, something inside La Venus galloped and flashed, untamed, resisting the harness of someone else’s plan. Brazil. Rio. A sprawling city, spiked with mountains, shouting with light. Beaches swallowing the sun. She thought of Polonio, the way the ocean there enfolded her, made her feel for dizzying instants that the world could one day be whole. It was the same Atlantic, kissing Rio. It was violent there, or so she’d heard; there was poverty; the Brazilian dictatorship was older, more established, than the one in Uruguay. But perhaps, in a bigger city, there was also more space to get lost, to breathe. She would have to learn Portuguese. She’d have to hurl herself into new currents. The world seemed to open before her, unfurling like a tightly wrapped flag, and she knew that there was only one possible answer.
* * *
*
The Río de la Plata stretched out before them, long brown water all the way to the horizon. The flagstones of the Rambla spooled out beneath their feet, a sinuous promenade along the shore. Romina and Malena took this stroll every Saturday afternoon, with their mate, their one concession to leisure. They’d invited La Venus to join them before, but she was always busy with Mario. Saturdays were rehearsal days for Ariella. Today, though, she’d left Mario with Sonia. He’d protested and raised his arms up toward her, and for a second she’d thought of bringing him, but she wanted to have a few moments to herself with her friends. She didn’t have a lot of time left. She hadn’t yet told them.
“I always forget how pretty the Rambla is,” La Venus said. “How it feels like looking at the sea.”
“It calms me,” Romina said.
“Though it’s a shame that we can’t see Buenos Aires from here. Such a beautiful city.”
“Not all of it,” Malena said sharply. “It’s ugly, too.”
“I didn’t know you’d been there,” La Venus said. There was a great deal that she still didn’t know about Malena. She supported, she soothed, generous acts that gave so much to others yet at the same time might serve another purpose, La Venus thought, a kind of emotional sleight of hand to keep people from noticing what she didn’t share about herself. In the early days, La Venus had tried to draw Malena out, with little success. Even now she felt that there were undertows inside her friend that she would never see or understand. “When
was that?”
“A long time ago.”
They kept walking. Romina stole a glance at Malena, passed the gourd to her as if it held a secret only they would taste. She was coming to know Malena’s body language—it was ripe for the reading, if you knew how to look—and she saw the struggle now to keep memories at bay. Bad things had happened to Malena in Buenos Aires. Romina didn’t know all of it, just part of the story. It had begun to spill out one night as they lay naked together, having just made love after arguing all night about the idea of moving in together, a thing Malena wanted to do and Romina knew she couldn’t do, not when her parents needed her, when her brother was still in prison for God knew how long and she, Romina, was all they had, but you don’t owe them that, Malena had said, to which Romina had responded I owe them everything. Malena had gone quiet and that might have been the end of it, but then Romina blurted out, “You almost never talk about your parents.”
“So what?” Malena said.
Romina groped for the right words. It seemed bizarre to her, incomprehensible, that Malena lived in the same city as her parents but had not spoken to them in years. It couldn’t be good for her; she had to be suffering. She’d tried to broach the subject before, tried to hint at the idea of reconciliation, but was always met with a wall of silence. If she knew more about what had happened, perhaps she could find the opening, however small, through which to help her lover reconnect to her own people. “How can I know you fully if I don’t know about your family?”
“I am not my family.”
Romina meant to protest this—her parents had years ago learned the Italian proverb he who doesn’t know where he comes from doesn’t know where he’s going and repeated it so often it felt to her like law—but then she saw the gleaming hurt in Malena’s eyes, and she reached out to stroke her face and back and hips and any part that would have her, which, that night, was all of them.
Afterward, naked in bed, Malena turned to Romina and started talking. Head on Romina’s chest, face hidden. Her parents had sent her away when she was fourteen, she said. To fix her, she said. To a nightmare of a place. To this day she wondered how they’d learned of its existence. It happened after her parents found her with the neighbor girl, touching her, Malena said, and at this Romina had a thousand questions but voiced none of them, amazed. All this time she’d thought that Malena, when they met, had been the repressed one, the one who didn’t know herself, who was scared to look inside and see what she was. That was how they’d all seen her. As a reserved, straitlaced woman to be brought out of her shell. But maybe she’d broken from that shell long before. She’d done something at fourteen that Romina herself would never have dreamed of at that age. Touched a neighbor girl. How? Where? Did the neighbor girl like it? Was Malena—could it be—the one who started it? How far did they get before they were discovered? Was she, Romina, Malena’s first, or wasn’t she? This Malena, who had told her friends on the beach about the convent but not about the neighbor girl. This living enigma. She shut up and listened. Malena went on. The neighbor girl fled, buttoning her blouse as she ran. Her name was Belén. Malena had been terrified that her mother would call Belén’s mother. There was a tenderness in her voice when she said that name, Belén, that Romina had never heard before. Mamá didn’t call Belén’s mother, and at this Malena breathed a sigh of relief, thinking her worst fear had been averted. But it turned out that she still had a lot to learn about fear. Three nights later, she was on a boat to Buenos Aires with her mother, who didn’t tell her where they were going or what awaited them on the other side of the river, who said almost nothing to her for the whole eleven-hour glide across the water. She’d thought that perhaps they were going to visit her uncle, go to the theater, start pretending nothing had happened, because her mother was an expert at pretending. But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, Malena said, I was locked up for four months.
“In a prison?”
“In a clinic.”
“Oh,” Romina said, and relief washed through her. The word clinic, coupled with the name Buenos Aires, evoked the farthest thing from a prison: polished brass, crisp lab coats, nurses waiting on your every need, fancy doctors attending to your every hangnail, crystal cups of water just a bell’s ring away. Things her own family could never afford. “A clinic. I see.”
“No.” Malena pulled away. “You don’t see. You don’t understand anything.”
What was the matter with her? What had she, Romina, done wrong? “But I want to understand.”
Malena said nothing.
Romina reached out for her.
“Stop it.” Malena batted her away, a new sharpness in her voice. “Forget it.”
“Malena, please. Tell me the rest of the story.”
“There is no rest of the story. I’m tired, I want to go to sleep.”
And that was it. Romina decided not to bring the matter up again, to wait until Malena brought it up herself, but she never did. She hadn’t liked the clinic. She hadn’t wanted to be there. The doctors must have looked down on her for what she’d done with the neighbor girl, been less than understanding. What was a luxury to some was a nightmare to others. No two prisons are alike, not all of them have bars, she should have been more open-minded, she’d do better next time. Now, here they were at a next time, strolling on the Rambla with the name Buenos Aires hanging in the air. She put her hand on Malena’s back, as if to let touch speak for her, and Malena paused and leaned into Romina for a moment before passing back the gourd.
La Venus, watching them, felt a sting of envy. It was so palpable, the bond between those two, that it almost felt solid, a thing you could grip and tug. She wanted that. She had that. She thought she might possibly have that. Do I? And if I don’t, what in God’s name am I about to do? She pushed the thought away.
“I went to Buenos Aires once,” La Venus said. “As a child. I thought it was wondrous. It expanded my horizons, getting out of the country.” She paused, drew in breath. “Which is what I’m going to do now.”
“You’re leaving the country?” Romina looked at her with raw surprise.
“Yes.”
“For where?”
“Brazil.”
Romina dropped her voice. “How?”
“I’m getting a work visa, through Ariella. She has a fellowship and she’s including me on her application, as a nanny.”
Romina stared at her for a long time. “Her nanny.”
La Venus fought back a slash of irritation. She’d said a, not her.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Well, what else is she supposed to call me, her husband?”
Romina and Malena both laughed.
La Venus felt her face grow hot. “So, then? What else are we supposed to do?”
“Is she going to pay you?”
“Technically, yes. I mean, she wrote some salary down on the application. But of course that money will really go to groceries for all of us—you know, to living.”
“Hmm.”
La Venus fidgeted. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. She’d imagined her friends barraging her with questions, but instead they were quiet, and she found that all she wanted to do was change the subject. “And you? How are you?”
Romina stared out at the water. “All right.”
“Tell her,” Malena said. “About Felipe.”
“Felipe? Your brother?”
Romina nodded, eyes still on the river. “I went to see him.”
“You got in?”
“Yes. Our requests were finally accepted, who knows why—nothing’s changed about us but we’ve been denied so many times that the last thing we’re going to do now is complain.”
La Venus nodded. The authorities were like that: fickle, random. Ariella had stories of musicians who’d submitted paperwork for concert permits and had them approved, only to have the appr
oval revoked ten minutes before the show, with no reason given, as if the giving and removing were itself a kind of whip. You took what you got, you didn’t protest, didn’t trust you’d still have it tomorrow. “How was it?”
Romina had no answer. She didn’t know whether she’d ever be able to describe the experience in words. She and her parents had all been stunned when they received the news. Mamá had read the official letter aloud three times in a single evening, then handed it to Papá, who didn’t even glance at it, just let it hang limp from his hand for a moment before dropping it to the floor. To Papá, Felipe was still the wayward son, who’d betrayed the family by joining the Communist Party without a thought of what such a choice might do to those who loved him. As if the ruin of Felipe’s life had been by his own hand. Was Papá really so anti-Communist, or did he believe this because it was somehow easier to think that Felipe had sabotaged his own life than that all of this had been done to them? Felipe. Delicate, bespectacled Felipe of the big dreams and lanky gait, who stayed up too late reading and never went to the bakery without bringing home a pastry for his sister. Romina had counted the days, the hours, until the first visit day, then took the bus into the neighborhood of Punta Carretas, her mother beside her, gazing straight ahead. Her father had decided not to come just the night before. Her parents had fought about it in their bedroom, into the night, and he had not emerged for breakfast. Now Mamá clutched her purse on her lap as if it were a life raft. Romina had dressed conservatively in case this helped placate the guards, but in fact there were no problems when they arrived, only a long tense wait in a dull little room with a glass wall down the middle that contained a single round hole. Felipe entered, handcuffed, and the guard pushed him toward a bench in front of the glass. He leaned toward the hole in the glass, the place through which they could speak. She stared at him. He was unrecognizable, a ghost of his past self, a tired old man long before his time—what had she expected? It had been seven years. Brutalities beyond name. How are you? her mother had asked, a stupid question that had hung in the air between them, impossible to take back or erase. Felipe had looked at them both for a long time, unsmiling, raw sadness in his eyes. Happy to see you, he replied. The rest of the visit was filled with empty words, about the weather, the neighborhood, careful words, all calculated to raise zero alarms among the guards. It wasn’t the words that mattered. It was the drinking each other with their eyes. The glass barrier between them seemed to melt away with all their looking. He was still here. He existed in an alternate dimension, one hidden from the ordinary world, but he was here. The scars of torture were not visible on his skin, but could not be kept from his eyes. Romina left the Penal de Libertad that day more determined than ever to fight the current government, to work for human rights. She couldn’t stop, not for her own safety or even for the safety of her parents. Who was she to give up when Felipe was still there, inside?
Cantoras Page 19