Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  “Build what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  La Venus took a drag of her cigarette and didn’t take her eyes off Paz. Listening.

  “I keep thinking about those people we met at Polonio this year. Who’d been thrown out of their homes, called faggots, marimachos. People like us. Just trying to live. So we’re going to have a democracy—if we’re lucky, if all goes well. Are people like us still going to get punished just for being? What good is democracy if we still can’t breathe?”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know. We make space for each other. We don’t wait for anyone else to do it. We need a new kind of place. Where people like us can be together. Like the Prow, but in the city.”

  “Like this house.”

  “Sort of. Bigger. I had a crazy thought.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “I won’t. I promise. Seriously, Paz, there is no art without crazy thoughts.”

  “I want to open a bar.”

  “A bar?”

  Paz nodded. “For people like us. Like the visitors to Polonio told us about, in Buenos Aires, in Madrid, that one in New York they’d read about, what was it called, Wall of Stone?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, there’s never been one in Uruguay, not that we know of. We need that.”

  “But would anyone go?”

  “Why not? I would. Our friends would. And now, with democracy back, even if they do arrest anyone, there won’t be political prisons to throw us in forever. A few days in jail, even a few months, is different from a lifetime.” Her own few days in jail shot through her mind, how close she’d come to spending years behind bars. She’d been luckier than so many.

  “There’s still the fear, though,” La Venus said. “Of being exposed to your boss, to your family. That’s not going away. If you’re found out, you can get fired, then you starve.”

  “Sure. But my bar won’t expose people. It’ll do the opposite.”

  “Which is?”

  “Protect them.”

  La Venus seemed to consider this. Then she smiled. “I see your vision.”

  “Good,” Paz said, “because I’ll need your help.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “You mean you won’t?”

  “I mean you always have it.”

  * * *

  *

  March 1985. President Sanguinetti was sworn in without a coup, without a fuss, and, as promised, he passed an amnesty law: most of the political prisoners would be released.

  Romina shook outside the gates of the Penal de Libertad. The trembling shamed her but she couldn’t stop. A revolutionary stands strong before the gates of power, defiant, and on a day like this, she trembles? Weren’t the gates opening, hadn’t they won? But the crowd around her did not feel triumphant, only stubborn in its presence on the sidewalk and fanning out to fill the street. Stubbornness. Longing. Ache. And silence. She stood among hundreds who only wanted their loved ones back and would stand in the cool dawn air as silent as mice if that’s what it took to receive them. The regime turned us into a nation of mice, she thought. They pressed together in front of the gate that led to the inner courtyard of that wretched place she never saw without the urge to spit at it and perhaps now, one day, she would. Her mother on her left, her father on her right, Malena just behind her. It annoyed her that Malena stood behind and not directly with them, but what was there to do? It was a family moment, wasn’t it, and Malena was, in her parents’ reality, just a friend, not part of this, not part of them. Not the way a husband would be, and Romina had failed to have one of those. Still, Malena had insisted on joining them, even if it meant standing behind her like a second thought. Romina was glad she’d come. Her warmth a balm at the nape of her neck.

  The double doors swung open and a stir rose in the crowd. Jostling. Murmurs. Names called out, Joaquín, Tomás, Alberto, as if names were magnets that could pull men to your side. But how many Albertos were there in the prison? And wouldn’t the guards announce who was coming out? Surely there would be a line, papers, some sort of procedure? But there was not. Perhaps it had already taken place inside. No way to know, the guards said nothing, the inner courtyard was filling with prisoners now or rather ex-prisoners and if they couldn’t find their families, who cared, not the guards, they could have let the crowd into the inner courtyard, couldn’t they? but no, the sons of bitches had to leave the citizenry outside on the street as if to say we still call the shots around here at least today and don’t forget it and if that means you stand in the street where a car could run you down that’s not our problem, though the truth was that no driver in his right mind would drive down this street on this morning, cars did not own it, the people did, spilled in a flood as unquestionable as time, and there were voices now that signaled that they’d seen who they were looking for through the outer gates, Tomás became Tomás! Tomás! and then dissolved to weeping, Mamá started saying Felipe, Felipe, tentatively at first, Romina tried to join her but her throat was so dry she could not speak, she ached, and then the outer gates opened and the crowd outside collapsed onto the crowd inside and to keep from being pushed apart she grasped her mother’s hand and her father’s hand—where was Malena? no one took her hand, they lost her in the chaos—and in a chain they pushed forward and forward for what seemed like hours until her brother rose out of the blur of bodies and dissolved in their embrace.

  The first night was a celebration. Mamá had cooked for three days and prepared a feast of all Felipe’s favorite foods: milanesas, chorizo, spinach buñuelos, mountains of spaghetti, canelones, alfajores, chocolate cake frosted with dulce de leche, pebetes, the foods of a little boy’s birthday party, enough to feed him for the twelve years he’d been gone. He didn’t eat much, but he smiled and cried, mostly at the same time. Uncles and aunts and cousins came to greet him, and Malena came too and didn’t seem angry at having been pulled away in the crowd, to Romina’s great relief as she carried platters and poured Coca-Cola and tried to smile.

  After a week, though, Felipe fell quiet. There was no plan. He was thirty-three years old, and had not finished the university, had never held a job, couldn’t sleep a single night without nightmares, what was he to do with his life?

  It was a question for all of them: for all the recently released prisoners, the thousands who’d spent the bad years inside. Like ghosts hurled back into the realm of the living. Where before Romina had poured her energy into the struggle for elections, she turned her focus now on gathering the stories of former political prisoners, against the tide, really, because unlike Argentina, where a truth commission had been created to uncover the truth of disappearances, to give atrocities voice and space, here in Uruguay democracy had come with a promise of impunity for perpetrators. It was rumored that the generals had insisted on this before handing over power. Promise you won’t do anything to us and you can have your country back. And so, military officers could not be tried for the worst crimes committed during the dictatorship, when those actions had, after all, been part of their jobs, and so shut up about the torture, the electric machines, the rapes, the cages without trial, the abuse and starvation, the disappearances, the pain of broken people now released back into the world, you wanted them back, didn’t you? Here they are, it’s over like you wanted, off with you. Once again, the leaders on the left were divided. Democracy was fragile, and some thought it better to go along with forgetting, only look forward, at what’s ahead, leave the terrible past behind, where it can’t hurt us anymore. But to Romina, and to others, the past was coming with them whether they wanted it to or not. How could they silence those who’d suffered most? Granted, many of the former prisoners preferred not to talk. Felipe was one of them. He just shook his head when she tried to broach the past, wouldn’t meet her eyes. But there were those who wanted to t
ell their stories, who only in telling their stories could find their way back to the outside, and these were the people Romina went to see, whose stories she gathered and gathered even when they shattered her, even when she wanted to scream that she couldn’t take another minute and it couldn’t really be that they came for you again, that they did that and also that, and she came home each night exhausted, shaking, raw as if her skin had been peeled off, as if the world had shattered into so many pieces that you could no longer walk without shredding the soles of your feet. With Malena now living in a house where she could openly be herself, Romina slept over there more and more often, despite her parents’ obvious discomfort at her sleeping anywhere other than at home, as grown women do not sleep at other grown women’s homes, not even spinsters, though they stopped short of asking too many questions as if they might accidentally brush against information they did not want to touch.

  Romina wept in Malena’s arms.

  “There’s so much pain,” she said one night. “We’ll never clean it all up, we’re going to drown in it forever.”

  “Maybe,” Malena said. “Maybe not. There’s always been pain.”

  “Not like this.”

  “Not exactly like this. But what about the Nazis?”

  “I mean here, in Uruguay,” Romina said. “We’ve never had it here.”

  “The Nazis are nearer to us than people think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I met one once.”

  “You mean—a sympathizer?”

  “No. I mean a Nazi.”

  Romina sat up. “Where?”

  Malena tensed, hesitated. “Nearby.”

  She waited for Malena to say more, but nothing came.

  Later, for years, for decades, until the final days of her life, Romina would regret not probing further, waiting longer, listening as gently and as widely as she could. Instead, she felt a flash of annoyance at her lover, who was not Jewish, bringing up Nazis as a way to dismiss Uruguayan pain. “Look, in any case, you don’t have to tell me how bad the Nazis were. What I’m saying is that people are broken, thousands of them, and everybody wants to sweep it under the rug.”

  “I’m not one of those people,” Malena said, tightly.

  “I didn’t say you! Don’t be so defensive!”

  “I’m not—never mind.” Malena turned to the wall. “I’m sorry. I’m stupid. I should have just listened with my mouth shut like I usually do.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  Romina reached out a hand and touched Malena’s back. “Let’s not fight. I can’t take it.”

  Outside their darkened room, laughter spiked and receded, La Venus and Paz telling stories or flirting with a girl, carrying on as if there were still joy to be stolen in the world.

  “I know,” Malena said.

  * * *

  *

  The basement transformed, brick by brick. It was the right kind of setting, low-ceilinged, windowless, impossible to see into from the outside, like a dungeon, and yet it had a front wall that faced the street, just high enough for a low door to be set in, a door for duendes, a door for cantoras and trolos, for invertidos, a door, Paz said triumphantly, for us. She had very little money to build this bar, so she did as much as she could with her own hands. She stripped back plaster. Dug out dirt from the basement. Dug out the crawl space that had once hidden subversives, including Puma, a cave that now became exposed to the light. Years had passed and the air molecules in there would be different ones entirely, and yet Paz stood for a moment, excavating that space, and inhaled as deeply as she could, as if to draw in particles of the past. Then she moved on. So much to dig and scrape and cut and plaster. It was dank down there, but there was space enough to carve out a long room. It took over a year and all her friends’ help to dig the space out, wire the electricity, route water for a rudimentary bathroom in the back, plaster the walls, tile the floors, and install a door in the front wall, for which she built steps out of scavenged bricks and mortar so that when you entered from the street you immediately descended, head ducked, into a small alternate world.

  By then she’d been back to Cabo Polonio and learned more, from the new Argentinean friends, about the bar up north in New York where putos and maricas had fought back against the police who harassed them, long ago in 1969, when she herself was eight years old. A bar named Stonewall. Wall of Stone. It had become famous in North America because of that riot, during which, the argentino said as they glided through water, the sissies and cross-dressers and outcasts had thrown stones at the police, and after that they started changing. Changing how? she asked, bobbing in the ocean waves. By being loud. Paz thought hard about this. She and her friends were not loud, not unless they knew that they were completely alone. Fighting back against the police in Uruguay, in ’69 and especially a few years later, once the democratic government fell, could mean the end of wholeness, the end of safety. Even now, to be exposed meant the end of your life as you’d built it. And so she’d said, we can’t be loud here, not like that. But, the argentino said, it’s not like it was safe for them either, you know. People like us are never safe, not even in a place like New York, the heart of empire. Safe is never given. Safe is what you make with your own hands.

  She named the bar La Piedrita. Little Stone.

  There was no sign, of course, and no doorbell. You had to know about it, and to knock with the rhythm of an old nursery rhyme, arroz—con—le—che, before someone sized you up through the peephole and let you through.

  She left three of the four stone walls exposed. She built in jutting shelves, as she’d done in their hut, and these she filled with pebbles and shells gathered in El Polonio—this was essential, as La Piedrita was in many ways an extension of the Prow, a carrying of that haven into a single underground room in the city. El Lobo, excited to help Paz create her own business, gave her sea lion and seal bones that had been stripped of flesh by the Atlantic and by time, and these La Venus painted with fanciful patterns and mounted in elaborate shapes on the wall. Hip bones splayed like butterfly wings. Ribs radiated from a central sun. Paz also found treasures for the walls at the stalls of the Tristán Narvaja street fair: spoons and glasses, aging postcards, curious pictures of wild animals, even yellowed books that had mysteriously survived the purges to seek rebirth on new shelves. This was her bar and there would be books in every corner, stacked and stashed like pirate treasure. There were more used goods than ever at Tristán Narvaja, perhaps because people were less afraid now of exposing what they’d had, but also because the economy was in shambles and as exiles returned to a city with no jobs, more people looked around their houses each day with eyes for what could bring home a few pesos. Once, in a stack of old records, she found a photograph of Rosa Vidal, a famous Uruguayan singer from the Old Guard of the tango, now living out her old age somewhere in Ciudad Vieja, who, in her time, had been known for performing in men’s clothing, which was common knowledge though Paz had never seen a photo of her in that state, until now: there she was, in a man’s suit, hat cocked to the side, leaning against a wall with a swagger of a smile. Paz could not breathe. She stared at the picture for a long time as the bustle of shoppers crushed around her. She bought the photo and made a frame for it herself, out of salvaged wood, and hung it on the back wall, behind the rudimentary bar where she’d preside, she thought, the way El Lobo did at his own counter in Polonio: with an old ship captain’s calm.

  And so she did.

  She opened in February 1986, at the height of summer, as Carnaval filled the city with song, glitter, drums, lit nights. It started with her friends and their girlfriends and ex-girlfriends, plus the ex-girlfriends’ new girlfriends, and a few montevideanos they met out at Polonio who’d been excited to hear the news of this place. Small scattered groups. Some nights were boisterous, some vacant. No matter. Peop
le came when they came. Paz put on music and women danced with women, men with men. If they shouted for tangos, she played tangos. Brazilian samba, Sandra Mihanovich, the more-beloved-than-ever Mariana Righi, the new sounds of Madonna and Michael Jackson: she complied. After the first couple of months, she built a platform along one wall that could, on some nights, act as a stage, and over time performers began to volunteer themselves: men dressed as women, women dressed as men, singing the old songs and some new, because, here at La Piedrita, you could do what you wanted: a man could wear a candombe dancer’s glittering bra and plumed skirt and dance to shake the heavens, and a woman could don a fedora and sing the old tangos of Rosa Vidal, of Azucena Maizani, those singers who in the 1920s and ’30s had so exuberantly invaded the terrain of men.

  La Venus became known for her rendering of “El Terrible,” wearing all her regular feminine clothes and an old man’s hat that lived behind the sofa (which lurked in the corner by the bathroom and was always devoid of light and partially hidden by a curtain tacked to the ceiling, ostensibly to keep the bathroom out of view, but actually because Paz knew how rare privacy was for invertidos, she herself had had sex in public bathrooms and if she didn’t provide a sofa her customers might never get the chance to pee; the sofa was always occupied by bodies pressed together and everyone respected the unspoken code of averting gazes while waiting for the toilet, it was a tattered thing, that sofa, stained, worn, a sacred space) and as she sang La Venus slanted that hat over her eyes in a manner that struck lust and awe into the heart of every woman in the room.

  Money didn’t come easily to La Piedrita. Nobody had much of it. And yet people came, even if they had to make a single drink last for hours to stay, or simply order nothing and sit in a dim corner at a table built out of repurposed crates to watch reality turn inside out for the night. It didn’t matter how much or how little people paid. Paz was determined to keep things afloat, to hold on for as long as she could. She worked at the bar four nights a week, with La Venus covering two other nights, and Flaca one. Flaca, of course, didn’t need the money, the butcher shop provided for her and her father, but she couldn’t bear to be left out of an enterprise like this one. She thrived there. Her shift at La Piedrita was a welcome respite from the hard work of her days, which she spent running the butcher shop and keeping house and caring for her father, who had had a heart attack and needed the additional support, and though this was exhausting, Flaca told Paz, it was also beautiful to spend evenings at home with him, talking in ways they hadn’t for years, catching up, It’s really something, Paz, he’s not just accepted me but my girlfriend, too, these days Virginia sleeps over and he doesn’t say a peep, in fact he treats her like a daughter-in-law or even like a daughter, he begs her to read her poems to him, they laugh together like thieves in the night, and it’s the strangest feeling, utterly foreign, I don’t even know what to call it; wholeness, perhaps, or solidity, I don’t know, I feel like an asshole even talking about it since I know most of us won’t ever have it, but I can be honest with you, can’t I, when my sisters bring the grandkids on Sundays we’re all a big family and the happiness is fierce, concentrated, as if we’re making up for years of lost time.