“It was horrible,” she told La Venus now. “It was a relief. A good and awful waking. I can’t put it into words.”
La Venus nodded, took the mate, drank.
The next time Romina had gone to visit Felipe, they’d both been a little more prepared. I have an itch on my forehead, he’d said, and then he’d repeated the words more slowly, eyes darting at the guards to make sure they weren’t paying attention. She’d wanted to reach over to scratch his forehead for him, her handcuffed brother, and would have done so if it hadn’t meant putting any future visits at risk. Only later, on the bus back home, had it occurred to her that he could have been speaking in code. Forehead. Frente. Frente. The Frente Amplio, the leftist party formed out of a coalition of Communists, Tupamaro guerrillas, socialists, and many others—if the Frente was the itch, what did it mean? Either it was bothering him or it was on his mind and he supported its efforts, wanted her to know. Which was it? That night, as she washed the dinner dishes, her parents murmuring in the other room, she convinced herself that the word itch meant that Felipe was bothered by the Frente, didn’t support its growing resistance efforts or its imprisoned leader, was suspicious of blending so many factions into one. But then, the next day, she woke up sure that the opposite was true. He was pro-Frente. He was with them. Itch meant that he’d been giving them thought. He was following the unfolding of underground organizing through secret information channels, and he wanted to support it as he could. Was it possible that he’d even heard of her involvement? Was he saying that he was proud of her (a flicker of warmth)? Or was he trying to ask her, obliquely, whether she was involved? She was deeply involved. Every day she plunged deeper. She smuggled articles from other countries into Montevideo so the resistance here could know what exiles were publishing overseas, how the human rights abuses here were being decried. She waited for hours at the port for ships on which a single sailor carried the contraband, the secret stash of words, which he then handed off to her in a packet of peanuts or stinking fish, between the newspaper layers. And now, there was the plebiscite, coming up in November, when the Uruguayan population was being asked to vote on a new authoritarian constitution for their nation, making law the persecution of “subversives” and giving the National Security Council power over any future civilian government—all the same old things the regime had been doing, seeking the legitimacy of law. The foreign human rights report had been part of pushing them, she was sure of it. Of course it hadn’t been covered in the news here, but it was all over the bulletin articles and international newspaper clippings the exiles sent, that she helped smuggle into the country: a group called Amnesty International had named Uruguay as the nation with the most political prisoners per capita anywhere in the world. And so the generals wanted to get out of their spotlight, by demonstrating a mandate from the people. In Chile, Pinochet was attempting the same thing. Terror breeds submission. Voters were afraid. If the measure passed, the horrors would only deepen. But what if they could win this vote? What if they could beat the regime? This was what kept her up all night, and risking herself to deliver communications from exiles to local leftist leaders. If they could succeed where Chile had failed, take this vote and turn it around to throw back in the generals’ faces, flex the muscle of the people in a way heard by the world—then what?
She looked up at La Venus, who was waiting, listening, taking in her silence without asking for more.
“I don’t know where this all ends,” Romina said.
“Where what ends?”
“All of it. The nightmare. We might never have our country back, but even if we do, then what? How do we restore what’s been broken? If you shatter a plate, it’s never whole again.”
“A country isn’t a plate,” La Venus said.
“Maybe not. But it can break. It can go from being one large thing to many broken pieces.”
“It’s not the same. They can come back together.”
“How do you know they can? Will all the exiles come back? Will the tortured become untortured?”
“No,” La Venus said, “but torture ends. Or it can end. And when it does, people can heal.”
“How do we know that’s true? Have you asked the tortured?”
“Romina,” La Venus said, “I’m on your side.”
Romina sighed. “I know. But. All this time we’ve been living in our own corners, wondering about the people on the other side of the bars, fearing the worst for them. Going inside was like seeing a tiny crack in the dam. Just the smallest leak. But it’s enough to drown in. It’s worse than I feared, but also more ordinary in a way I couldn’t fathom. I don’t think I’m making sense.”
“You’re making sense,” Malena said, and La Venus marveled at the tenderness in her voice.
Romina took the gourd back from La Venus, filled it. “God knows what’ll happen when the dam comes down—if it ever does.”
“It will,” La Venus said.
“But how do you know that?” Romina said, surprised by the heat in her own voice. “It won’t happen on its own. Only with enough people pushing and pushing and pushing.”
La Venus looked her in the eyes, then looked away.
“I hope it does, of course,” Romina said, more quietly, so her words would be draped by the wind. “That’s the dream, right? For prisoners to be free, for exiles to come home. It’s just that, now that I’ve seen Felipe, I’ve realized that the story won’t end there.”
La Venus let her gaze rove out to the horizon. It was a blue day, deceptively calm. “I hope you’re not angry at me. For leaving.”
“You know what, to hell with that. We’ve all got to figure out our own way through.”
La Venus scratched at the stones of the promenade’s low wall. All the people who’d sat here before her. All the ones who’d now flung themselves across the world and might never come home.
“We missed you last month, though. In Polonio.”
“How’s La Proa?”
“The same,” Romina said.
“Better,” Malena said. “Paz keeps going in and making repairs. She’s stopped up the holes in the walls and roof. Says she wants to be able to visit in the winter.”
La Venus smiled, tightly. She longed for the Polonio house, and it was hers, too—but she didn’t dare go, even now. She couldn’t take Ariella as she’d never understand, couldn’t go while Flaca was there, and she balked at going alone, telling herself it was the rustic discomforts that put her off though it was really something else, what she might hear inside herself while alone at La Proa, what La Proa might do to her solitary mind. In any case, she was of another world now, Ariella’s world. She wondered which world she belonged to. Wondered why the question made her ache. “I’d love to see Polonio in the winter. Those legendary storms.”
“We’re planning to go, this July,” Malena said.
“Maybe one day I’ll see it, when I come back,” La Venus said, thinking as she spoke that she had no idea when that would be.
“You’ll have plenty of beach, anyway, where you’re going,” Romina said. “Copacabana. Ipanema. And it’s never cold there, I hear you can swim all year long.”
She’d said it as a kindness. To ease her friend’s flight. But La Venus knew in that moment that there would be no Polonio in Brazil. There was no Polonio anywhere but Uruguay. Suddenly she ached for her small, drab country. Sullen country. Broken country. Land of the tired. Land of cold ocean, of hidden shores, of a flat muddy river stretching to the lip of the sky.
They lingered quietly over their mate after that, gazing out at the water, each watching her own ghost on the horizon.
6
The Seeing
OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARS, La Proa blossomed.
New cracks appeared in the walls, let in the wind, then burrowed under layers of plaster. A bucket, rope, and pulley appeared in the bathroom, a homemade shower,
with holes along the bottom of the bucket through which water could drip, sprinkle, pour.
The kitchen bristled with knives, spoons, pots and pans from the city, gathered chaotically along the shelves, like refugees.
Bedding piled higher with every passing season.
Shelves sprouted along the inside walls, hammered slats of wood bearing books, matches, candles, seashells caught up from the beach, crumpled pesos, painted stones, painted sticks, more books.
Grime thickened in the corners and along the floor by the stove. Deep cleaning peeled the layers back so they could gently accumulate again.
Furniture gave slow birth to itself: a table started as a plank on four stacks of bricks, then became a slab of swirled driftwood, found on the beach and dragged back home, cut, placed over the bricks at first until the attempt began to hammer on legs and to sand the knots and whorls on the top into a more even surface. It never became a completely even surface. Instead, everyone learned how to balance cups and plates along the rugged landscape of the Polonio table, and though there were spills, though bowls teetered, the table stayed, always stayed, the right table for them, hunched low on all fours, alive with patterns, as strange as it was beautiful.
Paz came the most often. Business brought her to Polonio at least once a month—to check on supplies, organize a transport, discuss the season’s seal counts and calculate skins with El Lobo and pull a few old stories out of him if he was in the mood to get talking, if possible one of the old shipwreck stories that seemed to glimmer with new details each time—and she always tried to come earlier than needed so she could spend time at the house. Work brought her, but she didn’t only go to Polonio for work. She went to be alone. She went to listen. She went to unclasp herself. She’d hike in over the sand dunes and arrive sweaty or cold or wet from rain, depending on the season, and then she’d sit inside the house in silence for a long time. She walked on the beach for hours, long enough for the burning inside her to subside to a bearable level, long enough for the city and highway to fade from her mind and the ocean to fill it, wash it clean. There were no more visits from the Minister of the Interior and his wife, and as for the lighthouse soldiers, they left her alone now. They knew who she was, she kept to herself, they didn’t care. They changed guard constantly, it seemed, or perhaps they just seemed faceless to her, interchangeable, as that was the thing about soldiers, wasn’t it, they were like the sun: not to be looked at directly for too long. It was a relief to be away from the city, and from her mother, whom she now spoke to on the phone about once a week and met occasionally for tea in one of the cafés downtown on Avenida 18 de Julio, for tight exchanges that set her teeth on edge and made her chest ache at the same time. Mamá was dutiful about these teas, and mainly seemed relieved that Paz had forged a life for herself that didn’t require much from her mother anymore.
And, on these solo trips, it was even a relief for Paz to be away from her friends; they loved her and she loved them back, but sometimes they were too much like aunties, fussing over her as if by doing so they could fix the holes and rips in their own pasts, gaping at her through the prism of their prudery. Even Flaca had chided her once, for having two girlfriends at the same time—Flaca! She was one to talk! Sometimes she thought that it had been a mistake to tell them about Puma, years ago, when she first came to Polonio. They’d never understood it (though, to be fair, she sometimes felt that she didn’t fully understand it herself). There were things about her they’d never fully see. That’s how it was. How the world was. Even when loved, you were never fully seen.
Only the ocean—the Atlantic, the wild unfettered waves of El Polonio—could see all of her. Or at least enfold her. A wholeness beyond compare.
And so she came, repaired things, fixed the roof, made a shower out of rope and bucket, hammered wood, built the house and loved it with her hands as best she could, always thinking of the way they’d bought this house, her pathetic contribution, the smallest of the five. Now that she had an income of her own, she’d tried to pay them back, but her friends would have none of it. It’s what we agreed to, Flaca would say, and that was that. And so there was this: her repairs, her work, the sweat and muscles of her hands improving the house. Her way of paying in.
She would always be the younger one to her friends, the chiquilina, even though she was now a grown woman of twenty-one. Sometimes it shocked her to look in the mirror. She felt at once younger and older than she was, a strange creature, outside of time. Not like any other woman of twenty she’d known. A university dropout who knew passages of Cervantes by heart. An avid reader with a laborer’s muscled arms. A woman who often smelled like slaughtered seal, even though she spent hours scrubbing in the bathtub after her hauls, determined to leave the stench behind, but it wasn’t so easy, she now knew, the smell of your work had a way of settling into your skin. Like Flaca’s father, who always had a whiff of raw meat about him, as if the butcher shop had seeped into his body—that’s how it was for workingmen, factory men, laborers, men of the land, like her, woman of the land, of the sea, smelling like men’s work.
She’d been supporting herself for almost three years now, with a man’s job, paying for a room of her own in the apartment of a couple whose only son was locked up at the Penal de Libertad; she slept in the son’s room, the prisoner’s room, and gathered her pesos as if each bill were a ticket to freedom. She worked hard for every bit of it, shepherding those skins from the edge of the world to the capital. At each stage of the journey—the gathering at El Lobo’s, the horse-drawn cart across the dunes, the hired truck from a farm outside Castillos, the garment factory in the Jewish Quarter of Montevideo—there was a man to interface with. She stripped the femininity from her appearance as much as possible, so they would take her seriously. Hair slicked back into a ponytail, like a male rock star or soccer player. Trousers, baggy sweater. Grim face—not unfriendly, for that too had its hazards, but just the right amount of set jaw for men to resign themselves to her rate and rules and silently thank their lucky stars that their own daughter had not turned out like that. She couldn’t enter the men’s world—not that she wanted to be a man; what she wanted was their power—but she could, she realized, skirt its edges as a kind of non-girl, as a failed girl, an in-between, and this role had a better chance at grudging respect than pretty girls ever would and she had never been a pretty girl anyway, not even close, so she took it. She ran with it. She channeled her ferocity into math, the brisk unrolling of bills. This much for you, this much for you, and no that’s enough or do you want me to call another driver next time? And all the swagger she’d learned on the job was what got her up the skirts of women too. You had to carry yourself as if you knew all sorts of things and didn’t need a damn soul. It had taken her months of practice, of thinking, of rehearsing alone in front of a mirror, to approach a woman for the first time. It had been at a bar in the Jewish Quarter, after delivering a load of skins. It was in her first year of trading. She’d had a pocket full of damp bills and had felt euphoric, loathe to go home to her quiet little room with the old couple’s television sounds pulsing through the walls. And so she’d ducked into a bar, the kind of neighborhood spot where you could get a beer and a sausage fresh off the grill, with couples at tables, a few bigger groups, no children, no women alone. She’d sat at a table in the corner and curled around her beer, thinking that, anytime now, she’d go home, and then she felt eyes on her. A woman. She seemed to be in her early thirties, heavily made up, in a red dress that looked home-sewn. The man she was with was much older, and he was talking with the other men at his table, arguing uproariously, ignoring her. The woman’s eyes were a deep brown, she was plump and had a sensuous air and a frank hunger on her face that made her, surely, the most beautiful woman in Montevideo. Paz looked back at her and willed herself to hold the woman’s gaze as if she’d done this a hundred times. The men were laughing now, still not paying attention. To them, Paz was just a sorry girl in the corne
r. But the woman was still looking at her. Paz got up and headed to the bathroom. On the way she brushed past the woman’s table and glanced down rapidly, meaningfully, come. When she arrived in the back, she was flummoxed to find that the bathroom was no more than a single tiny room off the kitchen. No privacy to speak of—though neither the waiter nor the cook seemed to have noticed that she’d slipped through the door. She was sweating, hot with nerves. She’d wait five minutes and then go. What was she doing. What had she been thinking, what—and then the woman appeared in the small bathroom and without a word turned off the light and locked the door. Dark. Limbs. Heat, body. She so close, waiting, and Paz for a single instant terrified that she would lose this chance because she was too awed to move, but then she did move and the woman’s mouth was everything, was joy in her own mouth, her skin a balm to fingertips, her breathing sharp as they kept on in absolute silence, there could be no sound, no words, only touch and rhythm and as there was little time Paz lifted the woman to the small sink as if it were a throne, and there, right there, thighs opened like the thighs of a queen, demanding worship with a gesture to which Paz complied, thinking and breathing worship, pouring that word into her hands.
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