Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  She poured herself into the resistance. They were gaining traction. On some days, she thought she wouldn’t live much longer, that each day she wasn’t rounded up was a miracle. On other days, she thought she glimpsed her nation’s freedom around the corner just one big collective push away. There was another election coming now, in November 1982—next month already!—for political parties to choose their own internal leaders, a massive step, given that political parties had been forbidden to operate for so many years after the coup—and she dared hope it might push things further open, though, with all the fierce factions on the left, it could splinter and shatter them too. Either way, she was determined to keep on pushing, determined to continue on.

  She had also come to know Felipe again, in slow patient visits to the Penal de Libertad. Her father still didn’t go, but she and her mother traded off visiting days. She came to see, through subtle signals, that he was well. That the visits fueled him. One day, though, he said, out of nowhere, “You’re not married yet?”

  She gripped the leg of the table, out of view. Why ask a question when you already know the answer? “No.”

  “Any contenders?”

  “No.”

  “Romina. I’m sure you’ll find someone.”

  “I’m fine the way I am.”

  He went grave, then. “Our parents need grandkids, hermana, and”—he gestured around him with his eyes—“I can’t provide them. I need you to be the one.”

  She bit her tongue.

  “Think about it. Our last name might never get passed down.”

  The man was in prison, had suffered what she never would, so be nice, she thought, but it tumbled out anyway. “If my babies wouldn’t have the right name anyway, what does it matter?”

  “What’s wrong with you? I never said that. I’m just saying, our poor parents, try to make them happy.”

  “I do everything I can to make them happy.”

  He stared off at the bare, cracked wall for a while before responding. “You owe them this.”

  His harsh tone surprised her. He wasn’t giving in. She stared at him, and he stared back, and for a moment they weren’t prisoner and visitor but big brother and little sister, he explaining to her how the world worked, she folding his underwear and socks while he explained, she clearing his plate from the dinner table as he drifted off to relax or study or watch television while she scrubbed and wiped and cleaned. “It’s my life,” she said, then immediately drowned in a flood of guilt for saying it. She was the one on the outside, the one who had a life, while he—the pain on his face conveyed that he was thinking the same thing.

  He put his palms up, a man under attack. “Calm down. I wasn’t—”

  “Time’s up,” said the guard.

  On the bus ride home, she burned with rage and shame, a hot tangle that could not be undone. That night, she knocked on Malena’s door unannounced, and they stayed together all night for the first time, at a cheap hotel, where they clung to each other in a bare anonymous room that belonged to neither of them, with a passion that made Romina forget for a few bright moments about belonging, the need to belong at all.

  “Move in with me,” Malena whispered into her hair at dawn. “We could get a little apartment. Between the two of us, now that you’re teaching, we could manage.”

  “I can’t. You know I can’t.”

  “You can. We can. I can’t stand the thought of you waking alone.”

  She wished she could say yes. She did. But it was bad enough that she’d stayed out for the night without asking her parents for permission, not even leaving a note or daring to call for fear that they would talk her out of this fistful of freedom. They must be worried. No matter that enforcement of night patrols had loosened up, these days: her parents worried. Pogroms were too close in her mother’s past for her to feel safe with a daughter out in a city like this one, which had swallowed each of her children at different times and never given one of them back. How could she abandon her parents? Daughters didn’t move out until they had husbands. She would never have a husband. Try to make them happy. She was failing them. They needed her. She was all they had left, with Felipe gone. Her mother’s sadness was a river that she swam through each day, tending to its currents as though she could give them shape, rather than the other way around. It was murky in there, thick with life-forms, some foreign, some shudderingly familiar. No, she could not leave. She could never be like Malena, who had rented a little room in an old couple’s home, who had cut ties with her own parents, something that never ceased to amaze Romina, as well as bewilder her, since Malena had yet to share the details of their estrangement. There had been conflict. They had not seen eye to eye. Well! What cantora had parents with whom she could see eye to eye? How could that be a reason to break with your own parents? There had to be more to it, more hollows in the telling. She longed to know the whole topography, but Malena always changed the subject, deftly, like the stroke of a honey-coated knife.

  Malena. Honey-coated Malena. Romina adjusted herself on the horse-drawn cart so that they were facing the same direction as the cart turned onto the beach, the Polonio lighthouse and scattered huts at last in sight. She couldn’t go live with her, for reasons Malena refused to understand, and for all the harmony between them this had now become a recurring argument, just beneath the surface, a fault line that awoke at the slightest touch, made all the more painful by the fact that Romina was arguing against her own desires. Of course she’d like to come home each night to a private sphere that she—that they—could fill with their real selves. An almost obscene luxury. What would they do with so much honest space? They had sex less often now than they did early on, but whenever they did, the gentle power of it always poured back in, remembering the way, like water in the thrall of gravity. Their sex together was oceanic, embracing, open, never forced. Malena waited for signals from Romina before ever initiating, even if the signals vanished for weeks. Which they sometimes did. She never knew exactly why; it wasn’t necessarily when the Only Three pushed into her dreams, or when she felt the most frightened of the future. There was no pattern. Erratic tides. They left, then rose again, impelled by forces Romina could not explain. Only later, as their bodies merged, would she feel Malena’s own hunger under the surface, waiting, quiet, like a creature unsuited to the hunt. It was enough and a relief to Romina. It seemed, at times, that this was the only way the world would be remade as the heroes had dreamed: one woman holds another woman, and she in turn lifts the world.

  * * *

  *

  They arrived at La Proa and found Paz smoking a cigarette in the doorway, waiting for them, in a bathing suit and men’s shorts. She’d gotten brazen that way, Paz, wearing whatever she wanted while she was in Polonio. Delight lit up her face at the sight of them.

  “How was the ride up?” she asked.

  “Long.” Flaca gave her a kiss, then went inside to put her pack down. “This is Cristi.”

  Paz smiled. “Cristi, hello. Welcome to the Prow.”

  Cristi smiled, looking relieved at the warm reception. She had a birdlike beauty, and seemed sweet, though also nervous in her own skin—or perhaps that was because it was her first time gathering with that kind of women, beyond just two, and there was no manual of what to expect.

  “How was your first day?” Flaca lit two cigarettes and handed one to Cristi. “What have you been doing?”

  “I fixed another crack in the roof,” Paz said.

  “Excellent.”

  Romina and Malena came in, and soon the group was boisterous, laughing and all talking at once, and soon they were putting on their bathing suits to head down to the water.

  The ocean received them greedily, stroking their skin with pale tongues.

  Flaca and Cristi swam out to the rocks—her classic move, Paz thought, remembering the first time. How stunned she’d been to hear her and La Ve
nus out there, making love. How it had changed her inside, closed the door on normalcy and opened the way for the life she had now. How young she’d been then; how lucky to stumble into this place, into such company, like that girl Alice finding a different land beyond the rabbit hole. Without that twist of fortune, who knew where she’d be? At the university, perhaps. Still living with her mother? Engaged to some boy? It strained the mind to think of it. Romina and Malena, meanwhile, floated and bobbed side by side, close enough to be touching underwater, though whether or not they were, it was impossible to say. The couples were being couples. She was alone. She would not think of Mónica. Damn herself for thinking of Mónica. Water. Salty depth. Vast and wet surrounding, hold me, take me, see me, she thought, strangely as the ocean had no eyes—or did it have millions?—and she felt in the lush waves that the ocean did.

  That night, they made a feast under the stars.

  They fell into a comforting rhythm, one chopping, one peeling, one cleaning the fish, one stoking the fire, preparing their meal the way, Paz thought, other families must do on their summer holidays. A warm sensation swept over her. Safety, or satiety, or connection, or some raw mix of these things. As a child, she’d heard other kids talking about their family vacations on the coast, in one of the many beachfront apartments or cottages that sprawled all the way up to the Brazilian border, from shabby to gleaming, and it seemed that everyone went to the coast in the summer: even before the dictatorship had hurled people off to exile, Montevideo had been a ghost town from Christmas to Carnaval. But Paz had never had a big family with whom to have such rhythms. It was always just her and her mother, and they usually just took the bus down to the urban beach in Pocitos and that was it. When they had taken summer vacations, before the coup, it had been just the two of them, at her cousin’s borrowed house, or the two of them plus a boyfriend of the moment to whom Mamá gave all of her attention, nothing like this, the simple joy of cooking together, of feeling the sun and salt on your skin and people by your side who want you there, food under your hands and an eager belly, the animal pleasures of the tribe.

  That night, around the fire, they talked about their lives, like old times, going deeper than they could in the city. Paz told stories of her adventures with vendors and cart drivers, escapades that made her friends laugh. Flaca told them about her mother, who’d become ill, though no one knew with what, and had taken to her bed. Flaca now oversaw all the housekeeping, and also took care of her mother and ran the butcher shop. Her father helped, of course, but he was also tired. Sometimes, when Flaca woke in the night to tend to her mother, she sat up long after her mother had gone back to sleep, holding her hand, staring into the darkness.

  “I’m sorry,” Malena said. “Truly, Flaca. Your mother is a wonderful person.”

  Flaca smiled at her across the fire and wondered for an instant whether Malena was thinking of her own mother, to whom she didn’t speak, for reasons that had never truly been explained. Did it hurt her, to hear of other mothers? She searched Malena’s face for pain but found no trace. It embarrassed her to speak of her mother in front of Malena, the way a glutton might be ashamed to feast before a starving peasant. And yet, if Malena ever felt a sting when the subject arose, she never showed it. She was kindness. She was solace. She comforted her friends through breakups, tended to her lover after long days of hard work, answered La Venus’s letters from Brazil with more patience than anyone else. All that listening to others, and yet she barely talked about her life beyond Romina. Did she still have a life beyond Romina? Did she want to have one, or was swimming in her lover’s currents more than enough? And what was that writhing thing beneath her layers of calm? Sadness? Self-hatred? Grief? A sense of defeat from forever ago? Perhaps some blend of all those things, or something else Flaca couldn’t guess at, could only feel pulsing deep inside Malena and never see or reach because Malena didn’t want her to, she bristled if you tried, tensed like a hurt street dog and clammed up and pushed you away. It exasperated Flaca sometimes. It was the kind of exasperation you can only feel with a sister, with someone you wholly love. She turned to Romina. “Tell me, chica, how goes the revolution?”

  “Not so bad.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yes.” Romina leaned her head back to face the stars. What a relief to be able to talk about it here. The soldiers were off in their lighthouse barracks, minding their own business, or minding someone’s business but not hers. The sound of the ocean, sssshhhh, ssssshhhhh, was working magic on her body, opening her back up deep inside. “I think these elections might really help us on the way.”

  “You’re involved with that?” Cristi asked, not hiding her awe.

  “Romina,” Flaca said, sweeping the air with her hand, “is involved with everything.”

  The fire sparked and hummed.

  “I admire you,” Cristi said.

  Romina shrugged. “It’s what I have to do.”

  “I’ve heard there’s controversy,” Cristi went on. “About how to vote.”

  “Me too,” said Flaca. “What should we do?”

  Romina stared into the fire, and launched into her best explanation. It was longer and more convoluted than she meant it to be. There was nothing simple about the situation: the military junta had decided to allow political parties to hold their own internal elections, selecting leaders, though whether those leaders would have any power or were merely symbolic, a circus for the public, remained to be seen. And only the two old parties could participate. The Blancos and the Colorados. The leftist Frente Amplio, a new third party, was still illegal, along with all the other minor factions on the left. They were not allowed to hold a vote, or to exist. As a result, the left was fiercely divided. What to do? Support the antidictatorship leaders of a moderate party because they were legally allowed to run, and because this gave them a small chance of one day toppling the regime? Or submit blank ballots in protest of the Frente Amplio’s exclusion, holding to their values and flexing the muscle of the true left?

  Debates pushed deep into the night, in their meetings in the backs of abandoned laundromats, in airless basements, in shoemakers’ cluttered workshops. The meetings exhausted and riled her. There were former Tupamaros, leftist politicians, socialists, Communists, all working together at levels that had been impossible before the coup. They’d always fought with each other, but now they were the Frente Amplio, the Broad Front, a coalition putting aside their differences so as to win, so as to hold the slightest hope of overcoming the great beast before them. They either worked together, or were lost. It amazed her, often, that these people could all gather in a room. Coalition didn’t always work. It crashed, soared, collapsed again. And now, this party election was the greatest test the united Frente had faced. It threatened to tear them apart.

  She herself swayed between arguments: as she listened to appeals from both sides, she at times was in favor of the blank ballots—Frente Amplio or nothing, push for revolution, hold to our values and don’t let those monsters set the terms—and at other times she supported backing a Blanco candidate, backing any candidate willing to stand up against the regime that had stolen their democracy, any candidate that had a chance of winning and a chance of saving them from the worst possible future, a future of eternal military rule.

  Look at Paraguay, one man said, Stroessner’s iron grip for twenty-eight years and counting, can we really afford to gamble with this chance to end the nightmare? and she thought, yes, it’s what we must do.

  Then another man cut in: but if we betray our Frente principles, our vision, we’ve lost everything. And she was pulled in by his words.

  Haven’t we lost everything already?

  Back and forth, swinging, swimming.

  Frente leaders even chimed in, in letters smuggled out of the prisons where they were held. Their words circulated underground and stoked the fires. One night, Romina heard a letter read aloud that laid ou
t the case for voting for a viable candidate, and she finally landed on one side. It was not betrayal; it was strategy. It was their best hope and therefore the right thing to do. Not everyone agreed with this. The factions kept fighting. Romina’s role was often intermediary; where conversations broke down and tensions rose, she facilitated, made peace, sought the common ground. It often wore her out, but she did it anyway, because she could. She could see all sides, negotiate, calm frayed nerves and fragile egos. She was, she realized, less of a purist than a pragmatist: she cared less about Communism than about ending the nightmare, less about the words of the dead (Marx, Guevara) than the needs of the living. She was one of the ones who’d been spared arrest, and this was what she could do with her guilt at having suffered so little when her brother and thousands of others had suffered without end.

  “So that’s how you’re going to vote?” Paz said, prodding at the embers with a stick. “For the Blanco candidate?”

  “For the Blanco. He has the best chance of beating the supporters of the regime—that’s all that matters.”

  “That’s what I’ll do, then,” Paz said. It was her first time voting, and the thought elated and frightened her at the same time.

  “Me too,” said Flaca.

  The whiskey flask went around.

  “So what will we do,” Flaca said, “if it really works?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if eventually, one day, we return to democracy? A president, a parliament—all of that? Will the censored newspapers return? The exiles? Will the prisoners be freed?”

  Paz thought of all the books her mother had burned, which could never be returned, though for a moment she pictured them rising from the grill out on the patio, shaking off flames with their paper wings.