Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  It was over fast. The woman came hard against Paz’s palm. Paz would have liked to do more, much more, fingers still enclosed in heat, but there was no time and they both knew it. The woman clung to Paz’s neck for a few beats as the kitchen clanged and rattled on just outside the door, and then she pulled away, flipped the light on, and briskly smoothed her hair in front of the mirror.

  “What’s your name?” Paz whispered, but the woman only smiled, not at Paz, but at her own reflection, then was gone.

  Since then, she’d had much more practice. She’d learned how to reel in a woman, learned that you could do it anywhere. At bakeries, on the bus, on the street. It was all a matter of the eyes. The gaze couldn’t waver, it had to hold everything, both questions and answers. Make promises women longed for you to keep. But the gaze had to be balanced, tempered, just long enough to make its point, but brief enough that if you’d misread a woman she could tell herself that of course it wasn’t what she’d thought, that she’d made it up, that you were a perfectly nice girl who perhaps mistook her for someone else. Without speaking, everything could be asked and known, and you could stay safe from authorities because there would be nothing for spies to report, no reason for the government to recategorize you from A to B class of danger to society, or B to C. Keep your mouth shut and your eyes alive. Keep your body awake and you will know.

  Finding women wasn’t the trouble.

  The trouble was, they never stayed.

  She remembered what Romina said, years ago, when Flaca and La Venus were still together, about how there was no such thing as lasting, no future, no forever for people like them. Romina of all people, who’d now been holding steady with Malena for almost three years. They almost seemed like a married couple, so fused were they. What would she have to say now?

  Not that Paz always wanted women to stick around. Some connections were fine for a night, a week, a few adventures. There had been women whose depression or frenetic need had overwhelmed her, women who expected Paz to not only give them pleasure but also save them from a wretched marriage or an overbearing father, more than she could do. Then there were the women who didn’t want to leave their misery, for whom Paz was like a bottle of whiskey that could help you warm up for a while and forget. There were women whose names she never learned, whom she loved in park bushes and café bathrooms and cheap hotel rooms when cash was flush. There were women whom she got to know, who spilled confessions as they lay naked in their husbands’ beds (Paz didn’t dare use her own room in the old couple’s house, they were always home and knew nothing, they’d gone through enough by losing a son to the regime, so she kept her sex life separate from their home). No matter who the woman was, and no matter the place or circumstances, Paz always loved the sex. She was at home between the legs of women. Alive there. As if she were the sole member of some occult, forgotten sect, a persecuted devotee with no church in which to pray, the women’s bodies were the church, the site of consecration. Or was it desecration? What was this rite in which she plunged into women until they begged for mercy or wept with savage joy? Some of the women—not all of them—reciprocated, but nowhere was the pleasure more intense than in the giving. Strange rite. Lone believer. Cosmically alone, except when she reminded herself of Flaca and the others, her Polonio tribe, the five of them a circle of the possible.

  Many of the women had men in their lives, husbands or boyfriends or lovers. “You’re the perfect cheat,” a housewife told her once, naked, stroking her hair. “You can’t get me pregnant or give me syphilis. It’s a dream.” Paz was left wondering how many of the women felt that way about her. The perfect cheat. Safe. Safer than a man—not as serious. Was it possible that some of them weren’t really cantoras? (And what made a cantora real?) Or could it be that they chose to bury what they were, so as to keep their lives intact? She didn’t care. She told herself she didn’t care. For a while, she believed it.

  Then, last year, when she was twenty years old, she’d met Mónica. Wild Mónica, brass-laughing Mónica, single and tied to no man, cheerful secretary at a downtown office by day, good daughter by night, except when she was out with Paz demolishing her virtue. Sex with Mónica was like hurling herself into a volcano. Mónica was the first girl Paz brought to Polonio, once with the group, who welcomed her, and before that just the two of them for three days of naked light.

  “I love this place,” Mónica had said, tangling her fingers in Paz’s pubic hair. “It’s magical.”

  Paz laughed. “You’ve barely seen it.”

  “I have too seen it.”

  “We’ve barely left the Prow.”

  “We’ll leave soon enough.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “You keep making it impossible.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault?”

  “Obviously.”

  “You innocent flower.”

  Mónica widened her eyes in that mocking I-am-so-pure manner that always made Paz ache with lust, even now, hours into sex. “Secondly: the Prow is Polonio. Why do I have to go outside?”

  “Well, there is the small matter of the ocean—”

  “—which I can hear from this corner. And even taste.”

  “Oh?”

  “Right here.”

  “Mmmmmm.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “Do.”

  Five months, they’d lasted, and Paz had not been with any other women, had begun to imagine Mónica as her last woman, her forever. How stupid she’d been to think that, to let herself hope.

  In the end, Mónica hadn’t known what she wanted.

  Or perhaps it was worse than that: she knew exactly what she wanted and it involved children, a ring on her finger, a man she could bring home to Papá.

  “He wants to marry me” was all the detail she gave, over the phone, about the new man in her life.

  Paz read between the lines: her lover didn’t want a life of hiding, a life chained to a university dropout who smelled like sealskins and could never be presented to her family. Could never make a family with her. The gold in the ring, the approval of Papá, more important than love.

  Flaca tried to comfort her. “For some women, that’s the truth of their desire. What they want more than anything. To have babies, a man. To be a wife. You’ve just got to accept that.”

  “I can’t accept it,” Paz said.

  “Think of it this way.” Flaca handed Paz the mate gourd; they were on the Rambla, perched on the low wall, and the river stretched out long and flat before them, blue today, no ripple to be seen. “Someone’s got to keep humanity going, right?”

  “What for?”

  “Oh, come on, Paz. Lighten up.”

  “Maybe cantoras should start having babies.”

  “Bah!”

  “You said lighten up.”

  “Touché.”

  “It’s just all so stupid—a white veil to pretend you’re pure, a man to slather his surname over yours.” Paz handed the gourd back to Flaca, watched her fill it again. “Then she can act like the noble one, the married one, who did things right, when really she’s living a lie.”

  “How do you know it’s a lie for her?”

  Paz looked at Flaca, steadily. “You know exactly how.”

  Flaca laughed and drank from the mate. “You Don Juana, you.”

  “She’d been with men before, you know. She said it was better with me than with any of them.”

  “They all say that.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  They both laughed.

  Paz turned serious. “Do you think they mean it?”

  Flaca handed Paz the mate gourd, full again, then lit a cigarette and took a long drag before answering. “Most of them. Yes.”

  “And the others?”

  “The others say that to all their lovers.”

 
“Well, Mónica wasn’t one of those.”

  “I believe you.”

  Paz reached for Flaca’s pack and lit a cigarette of her own. These women getting the best sex of their lives and still running back to men. What were the men doing? What did they have that she didn’t? A cock, sure, but given the track record, what else? Veils. Rings. Sperm for making babies. Was that all? Is that all, Mónica?

  Flaca seemed to be reading her thoughts. She had the mate again, poured hot water into the leaves. “It’s the power,” she said gently. “They want the power to be safe, and accepted. To have lives free of shame.”

  “And men give them that.”

  “Exactly.”

  And we can’t. We don’t have those things ourselves so we can’t give them. “Sometimes I think it would be different,” Paz whispered, “without El Proceso.” It was the Process, after all, that had blanketed the whole nation with fear, so that, for some women, the cost of living true could seem unbearable.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” Flaca didn’t look around her, and there was no one nearby, but her body had gone tense and she seemed to be calculating every word. “The silence was here before, wasn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Right. I forget how young you were, before—it.”

  It. The coup.

  “Some things were different, but others weren’t at all.”

  Paz drank down the mate, then watched Flaca drink hers, took another turn. They sat and watched the river kiss the shore.

  “Damn Mónica, anyway,” Flaca said. “There will be other women.”

  And on this, as on so many other counts, Flaca was right.

  * * *

  *

  Romina felt the wind in her hair as the cart rode over the sand dunes. Malena was at her side, Flaca close behind her with her girlfriend Cristi. They were coming into Polonio to celebrate the growing warmth of spring; it was mid-October and the sky brimmed with a clear blue heat. Paz was already at the house, having made some preparations, they’d meet her there.

  Malena. Open warmth. An ease between them, beyond words. Their bodies were not touching but they were close now to the place where they could hold hands, drop the masks, be connected without pretending otherwise. It had become more difficult over the years, this constant lie. Even though it was normal for sisters or cousins to occasionally walk arm in arm, and some cantoras, she knew, took advantage of this to touch their lovers in public, Romina didn’t dare, afraid that her body would betray them with its secret speech, its touching that was not a sister’s touching, how do you make your body lie? Romina chafed at this more than Malena, perhaps because she craved Malena’s touch as a steadying force, an anchor. Hand to elbow, shoulder to head, feet on lap, thighs side by side on a sofa and she was home. It was not lust exactly, not most of the time, and, in fact, this private touch rarely led, these days, to sex, preoccupied as Romina was with organizing, the state of the country, the long slow political overthrow to which she’d devoted her soul. It was something gentler than lust, and more essential: a connection so instinctive it almost seemed an extension of herself. And she needed it. The harder she worked, the more she needed this woman who received her with a patient ear and steady hands, rarely asking anything in return, as if loving Romina, supporting Romina, were her own best sustenance. It was kind of her. Malena was so kind. It was a gift too large to ever repay, and Romina was grateful for it, though sometimes she feared that no matter what she did, she’d never be grateful enough. And at other times, worse, gratitude failed her, and she found herself irritated, sick of being the selfish one, the one with needs, the one to decide everything because Malena never had an opinion about what to have for dinner or whether to walk east or west along the river, either way, Malena would say, I don’t mind, no problem, whatever you want, and sometimes Romina wanted to scream can you just choose for once? do I always have to be the one? are you alive or what? and then she promptly filled with shame. To have a woman who was such a saint, who gave everything for you, and not be grateful—what was her problem? Why do you give me so much? Romina once asked her, and Malena smiled and said because I want to. And so Romina accepted, again, this way of Malena’s, this giving, which was her own way of expressing love, or of spurring the resistance, perhaps, by helping sustain one of its leaders. Which motive was more powerful? Resistance, or love? Malena never said, and Romina did not ask, and as the years passed, their way of being came to feel inevitable, at least most of the time, as natural as the bond between soil and tree, one low and still, the other reaching for the sky.

  And what full years they had been. The resistance was gathering strength. Opposition to the regime was still a whisper, but it was a strong whisper, collective, insistent, a gathering hum like that of waves. It had been the plebiscite, two years ago now, that had changed everything—that first vote of the people, for which she’d organized communications for the Frente Amplio, all of them secret as the party was still illegal. The people had done it. They had voted NO. NO to the regime’s new constitution, NO to their grab for more power, NO to their cocky attempt to make themselves look credible to others around the world. And not just that, the vote had come in strong, with 57 percent voting NO. For weeks afterward, she’d walked the streets in love with half the people she passed—even more than half!—for their bravery and willingness to put their lives at risk by voting against those who had the power to crush them or at least who claimed to have it, for what was power, what was crushing, who were those faceless men at the top of that grim thing known as a government? She wasn’t the only one who felt this way. The nation was emboldened. After that November 1980 vote, over half of the population had heard itself speak and finally knew that it wasn’t alone. The opposition had been silent for so long—if you didn’t want to disappear, didn’t want to be tortured, you shut up about the government, punto—and this form of speech, this vote, was the first trembling melody to enter that public silence, like a bird at dawn. People greeted each other more on the street. The grocer had begun looking at her as he weighed her tomatoes, inflecting his quite a nice day, turns out, no? with a momentary sparkle in his eyes. Clandestine meetings grew in size. And there were the caceroleos. Her cell had helped start them, spread the word. Once a month, at 8:00 p.m. exactly, people began banging their pots in kitchens across Montevideo. At first her parents heard the clamor but did not join in or say a word about it, though Mamá’s expression became distant and inscrutable until the neighborhood finally went quiet. But as the caceroleos grew louder, a beat strong enough to shake the earth, even her own mother had joined in, so that now they stood together at the open kitchen window and banged their pots and pans together; on more than one occasion Mamá had broken wooden spoons against metal, and then kept on banging, Romina picking up the flung half of the spoon and using it to make more noise, because a broken spoon can also shout, oh yes it can. Sometimes Mamá wept as she banged, but she never spoke. Papá disappeared into the bedroom before the protest began, not joining, but not obstructing, either. Romina looked forward to those evenings now, to standing with her mother as they sent percussive wails into the night.

  The government, for its part, had responded to the vote as if to a slap. She’d braced herself for assaults on the people, a bout of arrests, a crackdown, but it seemed that the men in the Presidential Palace were in chaos, too busy fending off international pressure and scrambling for the next move. Arrests dried up. The prisons were full, the secret detention centers exhausting to run, perhaps, Romina thought, trying not to wonder about the Only Three and where they were, what this lack of fresh meat meant for their prospects, were they out of work now, out of naked women to rape, forced to turn their weapons on their wives, their daughters? She thought too often of their daughters, prayed that they had none. Wished that she could free herself from thinking about them at all, that she could stop scanning buses and corner cafés for their faces—panicking al
l the while that she’d have no way of ever being sure, having caught very little of their faces and memory being a traitor to the mind—and wished that she could stop dreaming about them as shadows swooping over her, heavy, airless, suffocating, she’d wake up in a sweat but she never spoke of it, because she was one of the women who’d suffered the least, there had only been three and only for two nights, one night with one, one night with three, two nights instead of hundreds, a paltry arithmetic of pain, and so who was she to tell it when her experience was a speck compared to what other women had suffered, were suffering still? It was nothing, a speck in your eye, this Only Three. Shut up, Romina, get over yourself. The dreams were an embarrassment. The only person she told was Malena, who held her, rocked her, listened but gave her the kindness of saying nothing.

  Meanwhile, the new laxness of the government had meant that she could teach. She was classified as a B citizen, which made working at a public school impossible, but she’d managed to find a position at a private school. She taught history to eleven- and twelve-year-olds, in just the careful dry and lying way the regime wanted her to. It was painful to distort history, but she told herself that this false surface would let her do her real work later on, in the night—the work that would give these children the kind of country where they could hope for a decent future. This is for you, too, she’d shout at them silently as she started her dull accounts of Uruguay’s bleached perfection. Her students glazed over, took robotic notes, stared out the window or defiantly at her. Her silent shout did not reach them, and just as well. She had her paycheck and her secret work. Almost enough to assuage her conscience for the lies she fed her students.