La Venus looked at Paz, who flushed and shook her head, then at Romina and Malena, who sat holding hands in a united front of no, at Cristi, Yolanda.
“You do it,” Cristi said. “Show us, Venus. Please.”
La Venus complied. She took her dress off—there was no other way, the skirts would bunch. She was still wearing her bikini from their swim that afternoon. She turned her back to the women and pulled the straps up, clipped, pulled, fastened, pleased that she remembered the way, even now. Ariella slashed through her memory, on the bed naked, impatient—no, Ariella, get away from here, this is not your house, this is not your toy. It’s mine now. Ours.
She turned around.
Her friends stared up at her in awe, at their friend, their Venus, standing with her open arms and glorious breasts and hard red cock at attention—the Venus of Uruguay, Paz thought wildly, the Venus of Polonio. A sight like no other in the history of the nation. An altar should be built, right here in their hut, to commemorate the place, the night, the apparition.
La Venus cupped her palms upward, dramatically, as if calling powers from the sky. The lighthouse beam slid through the window and washed her with soft, brief light.
“Happy New Year,” she said.
7
Open Gates
FLACA HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT that the end of the dictatorship would bring relief, even joy, that when the news came—if it ever came—the sky would open and sing blue. But it did not. It hung gray and exhausted outside her window. It was November, late spring, no sign of the summer to come. She was in the kitchen washing dishes as her father sat with a book open before him on the kitchen table, though he wasn’t reading it as the radio announcer’s voice sidled between them, measured, trying to contain its excitement about the results of the vote: Sanguinetti, the Colorado Party candidate, had won the first presidential election since the establishment of military rule, and would take his oath of office in March 1985, as Uruguay’s next president, for a new era of democracy.
Democracy. That word. She hadn’t heard it on the radio since her teenage years. The sound of it pierced through the fog of numbness. She wanted the man to say it again and again, wanted to hear it loud and slow, loud and fast, always loud, wreathed in the crackle of public airwaves.
Stubborn grease on the pot in her hands. She had been scrubbing but now found it hard to move. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that her father was not moving either. The election result was not a surprise. With all the protests in the past year, the workers’ strike, all the talks between regime generals and political candidates, this result had seemed to be on its way. What surprised her was the sorrow. How it poured in, flooding. Sorrow a sea filling the kitchen, submerging her, submerging the counter and her father and the knives and the dish rack, so that she stood under its waters, breathing not air, but sorrow. That the Process had swallowed the whole of her adult life so far, the past eleven years, and that now, at twenty-eight, she would never know how much of who she was had been deformed by dictatorship, like a plant twisting its shape to find light. That so much had been lost or broken. And for what.
That her mother had not lived to see the end of it. That she’d died in the middle of the story, in a nightmare that looked like forever.
But it wasn’t forever. She tried to force herself up out of pain. The nightmare was ending, or at least shifting. Loosening its hold. Yes, those monsters were leaving the country a mess, with an economic crisis and endless human rights violations, families torn apart by exile, but at least they were giving up the reins. Mamá, can you see, can you hear?—it was not forever—
She turned to her father. Tears clung to his face. Their eyes met and she wondered whether he was thinking of her mother, too.
She put water on the stove for mate, and began preparing leaves in the gourd. Her hands trembled. Her father was still silent under the news announcer’s chatter. So much silence. So much unspoken. Perhaps if there had not been so much silence in the country, there would have been less silence in her own life. In this house. Perhaps the plant of her would have risen taller and shown itself more fully in the sunshine. Perhaps not. It was too late to go back.
But not too late to go forward.
She drank the first mate, then filled the gourd again, and placed it in front of her father. She sat down.
“She would have been happy today.”
He nodded. Tears fell freely down his cheeks. It was the second time she’d ever seen him cry; his wife’s death had been the first. He brought the mate to his lips, drank. “It’s a good day,” he said. “A long time coming.”
She thought of her friends in the Prow, chanting break the dam! break the dam! and for a single absurd instant she imagined that their chants had worked, that they’d cast a spell, had some small part in the breaking. “Papá, I have something to tell you.”
He passed the mate gourd back to her, his hand grazing hers. “Then tell me.”
“I’m never going to marry.”
He glanced at her. She couldn’t read his expression. He looked down at his book, fingering its pages. “Of course you aren’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that—” He closed the book, opened it again. He turned the radio down so that the announcer’s voice faded to the background. “That I know.”
“Know—what?”
“About you. And your friends.”
Breath trapped in her lungs. She looked up, into his eyes. It was all there. Had it been there before? How had she not seen it? Her last serious girlfriend, Cristi, had encouraged her to tell her parents, if any of us have a family where it’s possible, it’s you, but then Cristi was a bold spirit who’d surprised them all by moving out to Polonio after breaking up with Flaca and opening a restaurant there for the gently growing tide of tourists. Cristi was a rare creature. Flaca missed her. “How do you know?”
“Flaca. Please. You’re my daughter.” And then he smiled. His teeth had grown a greenish yellow, and two were missing now. He was aging rapidly, but his warmth had not abated, he was still the man who’d cleaved meat sunup to sundown to feed his family, who’d given everything for them and would have given more without a thought.
He knew.
Had her mother known?
If she’d done this when Mamá was still alive—
She thought of asking about Mamá, but couldn’t form the words. Instead, the child rose up in her, the little girl who’d watched him rake the embers in the grill as if he were the King of Fire, wide-eyed, absorbing lessons that usually went only to sons, and before she could stop herself she said, “And what do you think of it?”
An aching silence fell across the table. Until, said the radio announcer, as if from a distant place, then blurred speech from which words sparked intermittently into meaning, tabulation and transition and foreign powers.
“What do I think?” He took the mate from her again, but did not yet drink. “I think that you, Flaca, are my daughter. And I think you know how to love.”
Flaca blinked fiercely to hold the tears back but when she saw that her father was weeping again she lost the fight.
Her father turned the radio back up, and they sat together in the gray light of spring as a stranger’s voice wove cautious optimism into the air around them.
* * *
*
That night, at one a.m., Paz went out for a walk, and at first every centimeter of her skin prickled in protest, it had been so long, the curfews had begun when she was a child and been followed by the years of patrols, and now here she was, twenty-three years old, walking at night and defying a regime that had announced its own death. The streets were quiet. She saw no soldiers, no police, not a soul. Dimly she remembered that when she was very small, people would come to the stoops with their mate and thermoses, talk, laugh, greet their neighbors as they passed through the hot night.
It had been another country then and she had been a different creature. And now? She stared at the strips of light between window frames and closed curtains, the heavy wooden doors carved with the ornate décor of a long gone era, the scant trees, the apartment buildings rising dully toward the sky. Now, what kind of creature was she? What kind of creature would the country become? Uruguay like a snake shedding its skin. She walked and walked and no one came to stop her. A few years ago she’d have long been stopped by soldiers, and even a month ago she would not have risked it. But now the night air cracked open for her, parted and let her through. The cold slapped her face awake. It was November; any moment now the nights would warm and soften. Then, summer. And at the end of summer, a new president and an end to the nightmare, if it could be true, if the radio could be believed. And then—? What would her life be like? She’d never planned for anything but survival. She reached the river but couldn’t bear to stop, didn’t know what would happen if she let herself sit, so instead she walked on along its edge, looking out at the black water, thinking that the river seemed to feel the same way she did: ravenous for the world.
As she headed home, she wondered who would be awake when she arrived. It continued to amaze her that her childhood house belonged to her. Ten months ago, Paz’s mother had married a wealthy Argentinean and moved to Buenos Aires, where her new husband had gotten a job at a foreign company expanding its operations now that democracy was back, a high-paying job, fancy man, good for him, good for Mamá, who’d always wanted to get away, and Paz had convinced her—not without effort—to let her, Paz, have the house. Not as a gift. Her mother had still insisted on a sale, though she’d lowered the price for her daughter and made absolutely sure her daughter knew how much of a deal she was getting. Paz had used up all her savings from years of smuggling sealskins up the coast, all the building of her illicit business that had now slowed to a crawl because even rich ladies were pinching their pennies these days, sealskin coats were a luxury and the economy had gone to shit, that’s what happens when you let a bunch of bloodthirsty generals drive your country into a ditch, but so it goes, no matter, Paz had managed and was managing still with odd jobs of every and any kind, painting houses, construction, repairing the neighbors’ pipes in exchange for a platter of freshly fried milanesas, everything mattered, everything counted, and now she had her dream come true: a house in the city to share with friends. A cantora’s house. A house for invertidas and invertidos. She had moved back into her childhood room, and persuaded La Venus and Malena to share the room that had been Mamá’s. It wasn’t at all hard to persuade them; La Venus had been desperate to get out of her mother’s house but couldn’t afford much on the receptionist’s job she’d gotten, while Malena had welcomed the chance to move out of her rented room with the old couple. Paz offered them less expensive rent than they would get anywhere else, and, more important, the privilege of being true to yourself at home. Malena and La Venus made a schedule of when they had the bedroom, and when they had the sofa, and Malena could have Romina over on her nights, while La Venus could have this or that girlfriend over when her turn came. Even now, Paz got shocks of pleasure from seeing friends in the living room where she’d grown up, reading in the rocking chair, having a snack at the table, curled up on the sofa to sleep, as if they belonged there, as if the house had always been theirs.
With the flush of excitement of her new house, and the regime’s enforcement waning, Paz began to throw parties. She still kept the music on the quiet side, but she let people pile into the tiny living room, as many as cared to come, and care to come they did. It was remarkable how hidden people found each other. Once you’d been lovers with people, you knew what they were, and they knew that you knew and they brought their new lovers with them and so the web of secret threads wove on. Women and more women, and a few men who either liked men or didn’t mind women liking women, or who liked men or women or both but most important wanted to dress as women when the front door was closed and freedom opened its throat. Slowly, they—Paz, the women, and the few men—shed their Street Selves as the nights wore on, becoming people that the streets never saw. Flaca stayed all night, at these parties, and kept a nest of blankets in the basement. Romina stayed too, though less often, caught up as she was in the hard endless work of resistance—which, on this night, was clearly paying off—and when she did stay, she and Malena often retreated to the bedroom early, whether to sleep or talk or make love it was impossible to say. They never took Red, as they’d come to call La Venus’s contraband from Brazil. In the year and a half since Red had arrived, Romina and Malena never wavered in not wanting a part in it. They left the friendly bickering to the rest of them—Paz, Flaca, and La Venus—and bicker they did, counting the days until their turn, haranguing when one woman exceeded hers, couldn’t she stop, did she think she was the only one who’d found the gates of heaven? There were many ways through the gates of heaven. Red was only one of them. Its own glory. An exotic one, rare and precious like a spice from a faraway continent in the era before steamships. Paz had been shocked to discover that, when she wore it, she could climax right inside a woman, like a man. Or how she imagined it was for a man. She couldn’t know for certain, had never seen a man do it, and even if she had she wouldn’t know it from the inside. Red became part of her, fused to her body, a conduit for all its heat and pleasure. Was this normal? Did that happen to La Venus, to Flaca? Or was she the only woman on earth who could pour into a woman that way? She didn’t ask, she couldn’t ask, she lacked the words. Twice, Paz had had an ex-lover come back and ask to borrow Red. Both times she’d laughed. No. No! She’d almost shouted it. She could make new friends, keep old lovers as friends, but Red belonged only to the original circle, her tribe, her family, the women of the Prow, and they were five and would be five forever (or so she thought).
Paz reached her front door and stepped through. La Venus was in the living room, wide awake, surrounded by paintings in various stages of creation, brush in hand. That was the thing about living with La Venus: it was life at the center of a crucible. Who would have guessed that La Venus had had this in her, this explosion of color and vision? I’ve always had it in me, she’d told Paz, it’s just that no one thought to look. I married an artist, ran off to Brazil with an artist, always somebody else’s Muse. Was I drawn to artists because they mirrored something inside of me, something I couldn’t dare to claim as my own? Well, to hell with all that, I don’t want to be the Muse, not for a man and not for a woman, I want to be the artist and to find a thousand Muses hidden in the wrinkles of the world. What are the wrinkles of the world? Paz had asked, baffled, and La Venus had laughed and knocked back whiskey and that was the end of that. She couldn’t stop painting. She’d started on canvas but soon realized she couldn’t afford the material. So she’d gathered scraps from construction sites, which wasn’t hard, as all she had to do was show up in a low-cut blouse and smile and the laborers fell over themselves to give her sawed-off chunks of wood, bits of pipe, used sandpaper, even a couple of hammers that she’d covered in exquisitely detailed vines. Mostly, though, she painted women—on planks and sheet metal, on wood and empty wine bottles: naked women with stars pouring from their hands, naked women at the market with baskets on their arms, naked women holding eggplants and tomatoes in delight, naked women dancing and eating and riding bicycles down city streets. She painted and painted with a joyful fever that eclipsed all other pleasures; she painted when newly infatuated with a lover, painted when the new lover was gone, painted before and after and night and day. Women fell for her like dominoes but it seemed to Paz that none of them stood a chance at La Venus’s heart, as it now belonged to painting. She was ignited. She was happy. Even under the regime, she’d managed to be happy. Her favorite book, now, was a used paperback she’d found at the street market at Tristán Narvaja: a translation of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, who was British, and dead now, La Venus said, we were never alive at the same time and yet she saw right into me,
this book is my Bible and Lily Briscoe the only Jesus I need.
“Hello there, wanderer,” La Venus said without looking up from her project, a plank of wood that was beginning to hold an ocean.
“I thought you’d be sleeping.”
“Why the hell would I sleep?”
“There’s work tomorrow.”
La Venus rolled her eyes. “There’s work right here.”
“Of course there is. I meant the other kind of work, the boring kind.”
La Venus finally looked up from her painting. “I can’t believe it’s happening.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m scared to let myself believe and have it taken away again. Anything could happen. March is still a long time away.”
“You think they’d stop the inauguration after all that?”
“Who knows?”
“Maybe you don’t want to believe because it sounds too good to be true.”
“Maybe.” She cocked her head. “The real question is, what changes for us?”
“I don’t know.” Paz lit two cigarettes, passed one to La Venus. That was the question, wasn’t it? The end of the dictatorship was a kind of death, not the sad kind, but one that could make you feel unmoored, because your life has been tied to the thing that’s died whether you wanted it to be or not. If it hadn’t been for the dictatorship, she’d probably have a university degree, the way she’d always thought she would. But then again, if it hadn’t been for the dictatorship, she would not have met La Venus or the rest of them, would not be sitting here smoking, at peace in a house from which she’d once run away. “It all makes me feel restless. Like I want to do something. Build something.”
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