“Those are the questions,” Romina said.
“The questions that what?”
“That we can’t answer.”
“We can only hope, I suppose,” Flaca said.
“We’ll get the prisoners freed,” Malena said. “They’ll have to be freed. Why would a new government want to hold on to them? And exiles will come back. They already long to come home—you can see that clearly in the letters and essays Romina smuggles underground.”
“We smuggle,” Romina said. “You help me smuggle them.”
Malena shrugged, but she seemed pleased.
“But will this still be home for them?” Paz said. “For the exiles?”
“Of course it will,” Cristi said brightly. She was slightly younger than Flaca, in her early twenties, a cook in her parents’ restaurant. This was her first relationship with a woman, she’d told them earlier, with the cheerfulness and pride of a gardener pointing out her first batch of successful tomatoes.
“I’m not so sure,” Romina said. “Their letters don’t sound as homesick as they used to. Maybe they’ve made new homes.”
“It can’t be the same,” said Flaca. “They’ll never be as at home in Spain, in Mexico, France, Sweden, Australia, or wherever as they can be in Uruguay.”
“Are we at home in Uruguay?”
The women looked at Romina in silence for a few beats as the ocean poured its liquid music all around them.
“I am,” Flaca said.
“More than anywhere else,” said Paz.
“I’m not.” Romina picked up the flask, which had idled by her side.
“I am,” said Cristi, though she sounded uncertain.
“I don’t know what that is, home,” said Malena.
Romina passed the whiskey back around the circle without drinking. Malena’s drink, she saw, was long and deep. She never used to drink so much, but now it seemed that she was the first to bring the bottle out, and the one to drain it and reach for the next one. Romina fought back the impulse to stop her, to slow her down. Why did it bother her? Was it a need for control? Relax, Malena had said to her the only time she’d brought it up. Maybe she should.
“Maybe La Venus will come back,” Paz said. “I miss her.”
They were silent for a while.
Flaca swigged whiskey and wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. “So do I.”
Her friends stared at her.
“You?” Romina said.
“Yes,” Flaca said. “Me.” She tried not to notice the way Cristi stiffened beside her. Spry, delightful Cristi, a woman like a spring breeze. Cristi knew that La Venus was a past lover, though not that she’d been the second woman to break Flaca’s heart. Those were words Flaca had never said aloud. She’d never admit them to anyone. “Can’t I miss a friend?”
“Let’s sing a song,” Paz said, and as their voices rose she dared imagine La Venus with them, her rich soprano rising into the sound of them, the circle complete again, at last.
* * *
*
The voting strategy paid off. The next month enough leftists rallied behind the antiregime candidate that he won his party’s support, in a landslide, beating out opponents who were the generals’ puppets. It was only a primary, and for a general election that might never actually happen, but still, the people had thumbed their noses at the government again. Romina felt euphoric for days, as if the streets had turned to clouds and she were walking through the sky, a sky that vaulted high above her sordid country, where things were light, were possible. And five days after the vote, she received a surprise. She was home frying milanesas for dinner, Mamá mashing potatoes beside her, when the phone rang. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Romina.”
She waited, reflexively. People who didn’t announce themselves could be dangerous.
“It’s me.”
It took her another beat to understand. “Venus?”
“Who else?”
Romina’s breath caught in her throat. La Venus never called from Brazil, except on Romina’s birthday. International phone calls were exorbitantly expensive as well as intensely surveilled. “The call sounds so crisp—”
“That’s because I’m here.”
“Where, here?”
“In Montevideo.”
“What!”
“I just got back. It was sudden.”
The word sudden made Romina’s spine go tense. Brazil, after all, was a dictatorship too. “You’re—all right?”
“Yes. I think so. I mean—if you mean—I’m fine.”
In the pause that followed, Romina heard her mother down the hall, stacking plates in the cupboard, clink, clink.
“I’ll explain when I can. How are you?”
“Fine. I mean. You know.”
“I do. Or maybe I don’t. I’ve thought about you all so much.”
“We all figured you were having the time of your life in Rio.”
Silence.
“Where are you now?”
“At my mother’s house.”
Not with Ariella, then. She wondered what had happened, and waited for more, but it didn’t come. She didn’t press. “We missed you.”
“I’m dying to go to Polonio.”
“We’re going next week.”
“Ah!”
“Yes, for New Year’s.”
“ ‘We’? Who’s ‘we’?”
“All of us. Me, Malena, Paz, Flaca.” And likely a couple of girlfriends, she thought, though she held back on this, as she was never sure until the last minute who Paz or Flaca would bring.
La Venus sighed. “I suppose Flaca won’t want me there.”
“Don’t be so sure. You should talk to her.”
“You think so?” The hope was raw and naked in La Venus’s voice.
“Absolutely, I do. A lot’s changed since you left, you know.”
“I don’t doubt it. All right. I’ll give it a try.” Pause. “Romina?”
“Yes?”
“You and Malena—are you still—”
“Singing?” Romina could hear that Mamá was still clinking, though less frequently, perhaps straining to hear scattered clues to her daughter’s life. She kept her voice neutral. “Oh yes.”
La Venus’s raucous laughter filled her ear. “Well, thank goodness you make her sing. What’s a life without music?”
* * *
*
A week later, they were back inside the Prow, the five of them together again, with two girlfriends in tow: Flaca had brought Cristi, and Paz a new girl called Yolanda. The sleeping blankets rose high and rich, the kitchen had been built up with a counter and shelves jutting from the walls to hold cups, grains, spices. The walls clamored with hangings, little paintings, and seashells, each a treasure with sentimental value, no doubt, a story inside each object to which La Venus was not privy, and she felt a stab of sadness at all the life she’d missed. Still, it was the same hut, the same room, and the same women. Her family. Her people. More so than she’d understood. She’d braced herself for awkwardness with Flaca, but as soon as they saw each other at the Montevideo bus station there was, to their mutual surprise, only joy, like that of sisters who’d grown up so close that squabbles were easily forgotten. They’d laughed and passed the mate on the long bus ride from the city. She’d already been asked several times about Brazil, but had insisted on saving the long version until they were all together at the Prow, when there was time and space and freedom, when the air could open for them all. And now they were here, the air lay open. The last time they’d all been in this room at the same time, she realized, Paz had been dragged out by soldiers. Three years ago now. Their presence in this room again, the five of them, the original five who’d found this place and made it theirs, seemed
at that instant to have the power to restore them, to undo the violence of that night like knots in a half-made tapestry, in which they were each a strand, threading relentlessly through time, railing against the limits of the loom, making themselves stronger every time they found a way to interweave with each other. A five-colored tapestry. She didn’t believe in God anymore, didn’t believe in her country, and wasn’t even sure she believed in the fundamental goodness of human souls, but she could believe in this, the shimmering power they generated collectively by being awake and together in this room.
“We should get beds one of these days,” Paz said, glancing shyly at Yolanda, fearing her disappointment at the cramped quarters, though she’d tried to prepare her beforehand.
“Beds!” Flaca said. “What are we, queens?”
“I think it’s perfect,” Yolanda said slowly, gazing at Paz in a manner that made La Venus, watching, look away with a flush on her cheeks. Paz was grown up now, a woman, able to inspire that kind of look. Yolanda had seemed so reserved, demure even, on the bus ride up the coast, that Venus could not have seen this coming. But that’s how it was, she remembered. Things were clamped down tight here, more so than in Brazil, where cities were much larger and lust a more ordinary thing to see on a woman’s face. All the hiding and push-it-down of Montevideo meant that once you got out to a place like this, a place beyond your imagining, beyond the chains of everyday life, the pushed-down could burst upward with volcanic strength. Hiding either extinguished lust or made it burn all the more fiercely when it survived.
In the afternoon, the women scattered for a delicious swim and a trip to El Lobo’s for greetings and supplies. El Lobo was warm as ever, his grandchildren shockingly tall: the girls were in their early teens now, while Javier, at ten, was a lanky and pensive boy who loved to read. Paz had taken to lending him books from the city, and she brought him a stack now to exchange for the ones she’d left with him before, while his mother, Alicia, insisted on preparing them her famous seaweed buñuelos to take back to the Prow, though they didn’t make it back warm because Paz and Yolanda took a long detour to hide among the rocks and lose themselves in each other’s bodies on the way home.
Later, that night, once they’d all gathered in the kitchen to slice and season and kindle in preparation for dinner and the mate gourd had started its lazy round, Flaca said, “All right, Venus, chica. You wanted to wait until we were all together, here we are.”
“That’s right,” Romina said. “We’re waiting for your story.”
“But why me? We all have stories.”
“You’ve been gone. We’ve got to catch up with your life.”
“I’ve got to catch up with you, too, all of you.”
“You will, you will.”
La Venus took a deep breath, cut into the flesh of a potato, and began. It had been good at first, she told them, life in Rio, in their high-rise apartment overlooking Copacabana, that breathtaking beach, longer and larger than she’d known a beach could be, always pocked with people lying in the sun, building sand castles, swimming, drumming, selling young coconuts from which to drink. She often watched them for hours from the balcony, playing with Mario, keeping the house tidy for Ariella’s return. Ariella was often gone from morning until well into the night, rehearsing, meeting with her fellow artists, performing. The nights were bright and alive. Music poured in from all directions, from drums and radios and samba singers on the streets, but also from the growl of cars and clop of horses pulling carts, the shouting and fighting and laughing of passing groups.
She tried to tell her friends of the city’s beauty, its shocking mountains, rising steep and green against the sky, pressed close against the crowded streets so that it felt as if all human life were just a strip of noise between two giants, ocean and mountain, blue and green. The statue of Christ the Redeemer loomed over it all from a distant height, arms open as if to embrace even the most sordid corners of the world. And yes, there was a dictatorship there too, but it didn’t press down on her in the same way, perhaps because the country’s size let you be more anonymous, or perhaps because they were wealthy foreigners and floated above the terror, like human clouds. She feared, though she did not say it aloud, that she’d never be able to transmit the city to them in words, that even a photograph could never capture the spirit of the place and what it was to be inside of it, part of it, all that towering, all that vivid color, all that full-throated sound. She’d never be able to fully speak it. She carried so much clamor inside. And what to do with it? How to be? Why did life put so much inside a woman and then keep her confined to smallness? But she couldn’t very well say that. Her life didn’t look small to her friends, did it, when she’d just lived in a thrilling foreign city and been able to return, when they’d all been trapped here in their small broken country, when droves of exiles were locked out of home. So instead she said that the city was beautiful, and that she’d loved spending time with Mario in the apartment and taking him down to the beach while Ariella rehearsed, and that at first there had been babysitters who’d watched the boy while La Venus and Ariella went out to parties, performances, plays. Bohemian gatherings in candlelit salons. Refined soirees overlooking Ipanema Beach. They’d walk in together, dressed impeccably, and cause a sensation. I bet you did, her friends murmured appreciatively, no trace of envy, and the sense of them with her, journeying back through those nights, loosened something inside her. She stopped chopping and let Malena take over, sat down on one of their homemade stools, let Flaca light her a cigarette. She took a breath and went on.
That early period didn’t last. Soon Ariella was leaving her side at those parties and laughing and talking in tight knots of people, her adoring fans. More than once she saw them kiss her, on the mouth, on the neck. Back at home, they fought. You left me, she said to Ariella, to all those prowling old men, they wouldn’t leave me alone and where were you? Relax, said Ariella, you’re not my jailer. I don’t like being at parties alone, La Venus said, surrounded by a language I only half-understand. Then don’t come, said Ariella, and after that she went out alone, or in the company of others, friends she’d made through the fellowship and her musical group, she was a star here after all, while Venus was nothing but a hanger-on with great tits and a titillating name. That’s how it felt at times. Ariella took other lovers. She didn’t announce it, but she didn’t hide it either. There were musicians, a dancer with the ballet, the wife of a German diplomat. You’re not my jailer was her standard line. She was here in Rio to be herself, to create, to shine. La Venus was here to be her Muse, her helper, her lover when desired—and the sex was still terrific, which only made things more complicated, she said now, putting out her cigarette and lighting another—and most important to be her nanny for Mario, who rarely saw his mother and had gotten used to not having her attention even when they were in the same room. Instead, he cleaved to La Venus. He turned five, turned six. They spent most of their waking hours together, cooking, playing, cuddling, telling stories that began in a high-rise Rio apartment and ended in unicorn cities or on distant planets where everybody flew. He did not go to school. She was his school. She taught him how to read, how to count beans and papayas and subtract them away. He came into her bed at night, when Ariella was out, and fell asleep twined around her body. She’d blended into him; their destinies seemed melted into one. You’ll be here forever, Venu? he’d ask, and she’d say, yes, yes, I am your Venu, I am here. Every hug or shared laugh felt like a flag planted in the ground, we belong to each other. And for this reason, when Ariella’s fellowship was extended for two more years, La Venus screamed inside against the thought of staying but she also knew she could not leave.
But then.
“Then what?” Romina said, gently, when La Venus did not go on. Dinner was almost ready, the plates were out, but no one moved to serve anything until the story had had its time. Instead, they’d each gone still, perched on stools, leaning in the door
way, cross-legged on the sleeping blankets, imagining Rio.
“Then her mother came,” La Venus said. “Ariella’s mother. She appeared unannounced. I’d heard Ariella becoming more and more exasperated on the phone with her, but I really didn’t know much about her mother except that she’s rich and bought Ariella that house in El Prado, and also that she knew about Ariella and me, what we were, and didn’t like it.”
Her friends nodded. Of course she didn’t like it, what mother did?
“I opened the door and she barged right in, without even saying hello. Where’s Mario? was all she said. Who are you? I asked, and when she said she was Ariella’s mother the bitterness in her voice made me afraid. I pointed at the kitchen, where Mario was drawing at the table. I’d just bought him fresh colored pencils, he was so excited.”
La Venus began to cry. She tried to collect herself, but only cried harder. Twilight had vanished as she’d told her story, and the lighthouse of Cabo Polonio swished its pale beam through the window of their hut. Someone had lit candles, she hadn’t noticed. Someone was kneeling beside her now, enfolding her in arms, who was it? Malena. Sweet Malena, holder of pain. She let herself sink into her embrace.
“You don’t have to go on,” Romina said gently.
“She took him,” La Venus said. “She took my boy. She grabbed his hand and said it was time to go. Go where? he asked, looking confused—he recognized her from photos but it had been two years since he’d seen her. She said, somewhere wonderful. With ice cream. I tried to stop her, I said she had to wait for Ariella, I grabbed Mario’s other hand and insisted he wait for me to call Mamá. His grandmother gave me the most horrible look, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more horrible look on any human face, not even on the faces of soldiers.” She flashed, then, on the faces of soldiers in this very room, the night Paz was taken. From her friends’ expressions, she guessed they were thinking of it too. But she would hold to her comparison. That woman’s look was worse.
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