Cantoras
Page 29
The first sign of trouble came when she was twelve.
She was in church, bored by the sermon, staring at a painting of the Virgin during the Annunciation. Her family was more devout than others; her mother took her children to Mass every Sunday and taught them from an early age to pray. To love the Virgin and be humble before her. The Virgin was pure. She was holy. And yet, gazing at this painting, Malena thought that the Virgin was also beautiful, flushed with ardor that was presumably for God, who, she’d just learned, was going to put his seed inside her body. Her hands were crossed over her breasts, her eyes half-closed in pleasure as the angel Gabriel told her his news. Malena wanted to be the angel Gabriel, the one to cause this heat in the Virgin’s cheeks, the rapture on her face. Dimly, she understood that this was not the right way to love the Virgin, but it was too late. At night she dreamed of growing wings and flying to the Virgin’s home to tell her of the seed that would be entering her, to watch her slow surrender to the entering.
Then, at fourteen, Malena met Belén.
She was a year older than Malena, fifteen, though so shy that it felt the other way around. She lived three doors down. One day, Malena had stolen a glance at Belén and found her staring too. It had grown slowly, the hum between them, at the delicious pace of honey spreading across a rugged table. The first kiss had been hurried and electric, in Belén’s bedroom with the door open and her parents watching television a few meters away. The second time was in Malena’s living room. Open heat. As natural as singing to the trees. As impossible as trees who sing back. It was obvious that these were things you were not supposed to do, and yet they felt so right that Malena did not question, did not stop, any more than she would stop herself from breathing. Belén’s skin was full of songs, Malena made music against it with her fingers, and it all should have been perfectly safe because it was cards night and her mother always stayed out late when playing canasta at her sister’s house, the house of Tía Carlota, and her father was working late, her brother studying at the university, so the house was theirs, or so they thought, the world should not have ended that night, her mother should not have come home unexpectedly to see her daughter topless with her hand up the neighbor girl’s skirt. Later, Malena’s brother would explain to her that Tía Carlota had sent her guests home soon after they arrived because her daughter Angelita had had the bad manners to show symptoms of coming down with the flu, that is to say, she’d vomited right into the bowl of green olives. For this reason Malena’s mother had come home early, enjoying a leisurely walk through the streets after dark. It was 1965 and there was nothing suspicious, then, about walking after dark, or about congregating in a group of five or more to enjoy a game of cards. You could just walk, back then, or gather and play, and no one even thought to see these freedoms as precious things, possible to lose. Malena’s mother, on that evening walk, had not yet heard of Tupamaro guerrillas, nor had she heard of girls who put their hands up the skirts of other girls; one of these forms of innocence was broken when she burst in on her daughter in the living room. Years later, as a thirty-five-year-old woman attempting to escape the life she’d built, Malena would look back on that night and wonder fiercely what would have happened if her cousin Angelita had not vomited into the olive bowl and thereby set in motion a subtle yet violent shift in destiny. Would she, Malena, have continued as the curious, expansive girl she was before? Would she have kept meeting secretly with Belén, long enough to feel the treasure between her legs without that thin cotton that barred and thrilled her fingers at the same time? Would she have become a doctor? Would she have been happy? Had there ever been a chance for her of such a thing?
Her mother in the doorway. Sharp intake of breath. A gasp as if fighting not to drown. No, Malena thought, and then, wildly, you’re not here. She pulled her hand away from Belén, and Belén shrank from her, a double retreat, but it was all too late.
“I have to go home,” Belén said, reaching for her coat as if for a life raft, head down in shame, and when Mamá said nothing Belén rushed past her and was gone.
Her mother didn’t speak to her that night, and woke her the next morning for school with a tight face. Malena might have thought it had all been a dream, if not for her mother’s brusque movements as she made mate and toast, and her father’s refusal to meet her eye. He also knew. She kept her eyes down on her toast. Her stomach in knots.
“Why is everyone so quiet?” her brother asked. And then, leaning toward her conspiratorially, “For goodness’ sake, Malena, what did you do?”
His joking words fell flat at the center of the table.
At school that day, she couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t eat. Belén was not in class. What would she say to her parents that night, if given the chance to speak?
The chance came after dinner, washing dishes, Mamá’s back to her. “How could you? How could you do something so—disgusting?”
Her hands trembled. “I’m sorry,” she said, flooding with shame, not for what she’d done, but for this lie, a betrayal of Belén and of the butterfly thing they’d fleetingly become.
“This is not how we raised you.”
Pray for us sinners went the Hail Mary, which her mother sometimes murmured as she stirred tomato sauce or breaded meat for milanesas.
“You promise me that you’ll never do anything like that again.”
Malena froze. Her mouth would not move to form those words. Stubborn mouth, rebelling against the mind, insisting on shapes of its own.
Her mother turned to look her in the eyes for the first time that day.
Malena tried to hold her gaze. That look. The deepest revulsion. She hadn’t known her mother was capable of such a face. She hung her head and stared at the floor tiles.
“Malena.” Her mother’s voice was shaking. “You have to promise.”
“Look what you’re doing to your mother.” Her father, from the doorway, how long had he been standing there? “She’s trying to give you one last chance.”
A crack in the floor tile. Hair-thin, right in front of her feet. She’d never seen it before. She traced it with her eyes. Silent crack. Silent Malena. One last chance for what? One last chance, or what?
Her mother started to cry.
“I told you, Raquel,” her father said. His stout body seemed tense, like a wire, like an arrow in a bow. “Sin has taken hold in her, it’s no use.” His voice, too, was unfamiliar. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”
He left.
Her mother followed.
Two nights later, Malena and her mother boarded a boat to Buenos Aires.
Her mother didn’t say anything about why they were crossing the river, or for how long, and Malena didn’t dare ask. They rode across the Río de la Plata all night, and Malena didn’t sleep, nor did her mother, who kept her eyes closed, but Malena knew her mother so well, the way her chest and eyelids settled heavily when she slept, the deepsea rhythm of it, and knew this was a different kind of closing. Pretended sleep. The boat cut the black water, drank the starlight. Malena had no jacket, no hat. I’m cold, she thought of saying to her mother, into her ear, shaking her arm, but she didn’t dare. After the way her mother had looked at her in the kitchen, she would rather brave the bite of night air.
Once in Buenos Aires, they took a taxi through the city, and she watched the proud streets blur by through the window. It seemed a grand city, majestic and sprawling, an unlikely place to seek atonement. Maybe her mother was visiting that old high school friend who’d come to live here with her diplomat husband. Maybe she wanted to do some shopping at the boutiques that everyone knew had more to offer than anything in Uruguay, fashions fresh from Paris, something to distract her from the horrible pain of having a disgusting daughter, but then why would she bring that disgusting daughter along? To keep her from getting into trouble? As a way of forgetting? Wipe the canvas, begin again, nothing happened here. Maybe.
The taxi pulled up in front of a nondescript building on a tree-lined street. Only later would Malena realize that she hadn’t caught the name of the street, or the name of the neighborhood, had no idea where she was in the maze of the city, and how can you plot escape when you don’t even know where you are? Everything was large in this city, startling. Larger than anything in Uruguay. She’d thought she knew big cities, having grown up in the capital of her country, but Buenos Aires made Montevideo look miniature, almost toylike. They entered the building and a clean, polite nurse led them down the hall to an office. Malena followed, thinking, why a nurse? Her mother was sick? And hadn’t told her? In that case she’d burdened her ailing mother with more problems. Shame burned her. She’d be a better daughter, she would find a way to help.
“In here,” the nurse said brusquely, looking right at Malena.
Malena entered and put her suitcase down. Her arm ached from carrying it.
“Sit there until the doctor comes.”
Malena did as she was told. Just as her weight arrived in the chair she heard the office door shut behind her and a key turn outside in the lock. She was alone in the room. And trapped. Her mother had not come in with her. Why not? Mamá, where are you?
* * *
*
She knew what she was going to do, and knew, even, that it wasn’t Romina and the paraguaya’s fault, not really, it was all more complicated than that, much more complicated than anybody wanted to know. Including herself. She was tired of hearing her own mind. She took a room in a drab hotel at the outskirts of the city so she could put her suitcase down and find a bar. She walked. It didn’t take long to find one. She ordered a whiskey and cupped her hands around it in a posture of prayer. A liquid rosary, she thought as she drank. What would the nuns from the Convent of la Purísima have to say about that?
Everyone else had been lifted by democracy, allowed somehow to expand the edges of their lives. Political prisoners were free. Exiles were returning. Journalists exercising their right to harangue. La Venus had picked up her paintbrush, Flaca’s father loved her as she was, Paz had opened a bar for cantoras and maricones, one fucking miracle after another, and now this, Romina in love, everybody finding room to breathe. Everyone but her. The world pressed down on her unbearably. It had surprised her, at first, that the more the dictatorship faded into the distance, the more bleak she felt inside, when the rest of Uruguay seemed to be swimming in the opposite direction. As if she were dragged by currents only she could feel. When the battle had been everywhere, the bleakness around them all, she’d at least been able to connect with others in the stream. Carrying Romina had given her meaning, a way through the world. Romina had needed her, and this need had made Malena matter, given her a corner of the world to tend. It was more than that, too. They had merged souls, or so she’d thought. She, at least, had surrendered her soul to the merging. Loving Romina had completed her, given her refuge, streaked her days with blessing. She had been home inside Romina’s arms. Romina and the Prow: the only two homes she’d ever known. With all that gone, she’d lost her anchor, and there was no replacement; nobody wanted to carry Malena the way she’d carried others, nobody wanted to see what she’d seen, she was useless, exhausted, a burden on the world, every day a fight against drowning.
A man sat down beside her, bought her a drink. Yes, she thought. Enough thinking. Try to be normal, isn’t this what a normal slut would do? He was middle-aged, hunched over from years of office work, and didn’t seem unkind. Sadness beamed from him. Also longing. If she were a normal woman, would she want him back? Could pretending to want him make her normal?
They didn’t talk much.
It was all so easy.
She let him walk her to her room. He seemed kind enough, but as he thrust his way toward climax, she saw that the question she was asking her body could only have one answer. The disgust she felt for him was slight, and tinged with pity, but the disgust she felt for herself was so intense it took her breath away. The man sped up, mistaking her reaction for arousal. She should have known better. Than to think. That she could not be. What she was. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she would get on the bus and head northeast.
The man collapsed against her in a sweaty heap and stroked her shoulder with a tenderness or gratitude that made her ache with sorrow.
* * *
*
Her name was taken. Stripped away. You’ll have your name back, Dr. Vaernet said, when you’re ready to be discharged.
I’m not sick, she said, still thinking that her mother would burst in any moment and somehow explain the mistake, even though, by then, she’d already been held down by three nurses to be injected with she didn’t know what, even though she was restrained, now, by belts on a bed in a bare white room.
You are.
I don’t feel sick.
His eyes were a cold blue. He had a thick accent she couldn’t place. That, child, is exactly the problem.
Call my mother. Please.
That’s enough, Fourteen ninety-one.
That was her name now. 1491. The patients wore their numbers on the insides of their forearms, written in permanent marker that the nurses refreshed each morning along with breakfast and medications. It was hot in the clinic, despite the season, because the windows were tightly sealed and the air was thick, so the patients all wore short sleeves that left their numbers exposed. She didn’t see the other patients for the first few days, which she spent restrained in her room, but she heard their shuffling footsteps in the hall. Later, she’d see that they were mostly male, one young woman. Speaking between patients was forbidden. Her mind was a thick fog, so that it became more and more difficult to hold on to time, to think of her mother, to formulate sentences that could insist on release, to remember the reasons for kicking and struggling against her restraints. The world blurred. The nurses called her 1491, and she wanted her name back, wanted her name to fill her ears, chanted it to herself quietly in the night, Malena, Malena, but not during the day as when she said it with nurses in the room they slapped her and said, 1491. Time melted, so she didn’t know whether it was on her third or fifth or thirteenth day that she was wheeled to the Room for the first time. The Room had gray walls and black machines. The light was dim. Two doctors stood in the shadows, the one from the first day and a younger one, both with the same cold blue eyes. Her mind was a slow beast, she couldn’t understand, why were they attaching wires to her forehead, armpits, the meeting of her legs? Why were they reaching up her gown as if into a bag of potatoes? Fingers that attached the wires and lingered there, slithered against her where nobody had touched her except herself when she wiped, the younger doctor’s clammy hand. She could not close her legs, they had been tied apart. The shocks began. Time shattered. Rubble of it everywhere. She tried to scream. Something over her mouth. Survive it. Shards of yourself, grasp them. Live through the instant. Now this one. This one. Seconds too long, minutes unthinkable. Finally it pauses and the voice comes. You will answer our questions. We are here to fix you. Her mouth is back. She says call my mother call my father. The man’s voice says your parents asked us to do this, it’s their will and laughs a little before saying a little more. She says No says no no no but the wall swallows her voice and the pain takes her skin and shreds it into pieces.
Later, she would learn that the worst part of electroshocks was the way they burrowed into your flesh and stayed there, ready to spike without warning hours later when you were alone in your room, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of sleep. Electricity, intruder. Stowaway in the hurt ship of her flesh.
Later she would see many things.
She must be changed.
She was plagued by aberration.
It must be expunged from her.
The doctors, they knew how to do that.
They had methods. Machines. Surgeries they spoke of sometimes in triumphant tones.
She had to be broken.
She had been so wrong, the way she was, that she needed to be broken.
She struggled to rise over these thoughts toward another place, the one she’d known before, in which she could be alive, in which she had a name.
But she couldn’t reach it. She was in too many pieces and before she could gather them they flung apart again.
She had been left here.
There was nowhere else to be.
She tried screaming.
She tried begging.
She tried praying to a God in whom she could not believe, a God who must surely hate her to have flung her so far away from what He saw as good; prayed to nothing; prayed to the void yawning around her.
She tried submission, made herself as pliant as the surface of a lake. An outer calm that would stay with her for many years to come.
A psychologist came to her room twice a day. Asked her a list of questions, about her impure thoughts, when they had started, how often, what they entailed. She never knew what she was answering. What her voice would do next.