The doctors had the same last name. Father and son. The son was already beginning to go bald. He came into her room at night without his clipboard. You have to learn how to be a woman, he said, though very quietly, as if he didn’t want anyone outside her room to hear, and then he put his hand under her hospital gown and touched her in places that had been electroshocked and places that had not, and then he took her hand and wrapped it around his sex and moved it back and forth until he finished on her nightgown, which stuck to her after he was gone.
You wet yourself in the night, the nurses said in the morning, disgusted. And she had no reply.
But one of them, one morning, stood looking at the stain for a long time. She had moonlike eyes in a gentle face, and when she looked up at Malena her expression was sadder than anything Malena had ever seen.
The following night, the nurse with the moonlike eyes appeared in her room. “Fourteen ninety-one. Are you awake?”
She nodded, afraid to speak.
“Are you—all right?”
She shrugged. It was not a full answer but it seemed dangerous to say more.
The nurse sighed. Her voice went quiet, secret. “To be honest, you don’t seem like a bad girl.”
The rough covers made her legs itch but she didn’t dare scratch.
“That older girl, she must have pressured you. I heard your story. Poor thing.”
She couldn’t breathe. There had been a girl. Her name. Her name. Belén. A wisp of brown hair in the darkness. Ache.
“Listen. I’ve got something to tell you. You’re on the surgery list. For the brain procedure, the lobotomy.”
Brain procedure. Not a good. Think, damnit. Not a good thing.
“Your parents can’t help you, they haven’t been told. Dr. Vaernet is eager to try it out on a female, you see”—she broke off—“but you’re too young, don’t you think, who knows, you might be able to change on your own, with the right guidance, but not if at night—” She paused. Took out a pack of cigarettes, fumbled to light one. “Anyway. I can’t let it happen, can I?”
She couldn’t see the nurse’s face. Her silhouette a plush darkness in the bare room. She had to think. Shouted at her own mind to wake up. Awake. This could be a trap, a complicated ruse set in motion by the doctors: see which patient agrees to rebellion, then report to us. A spy. But if it wasn’t? If this nurse, who was also a young woman who lived somewhere in Buenos Aires and was also, try to see it, a human being—if this nurse sincerely wanted to help? Cigarette smoke filled the room, the scent of the outside world, and she opened her mouth to gulp in what she could.
“Honestly,” the nurse went on, “he just wants to keep on doing surgeries. He doesn’t even know whether it’ll work. It’s all experiments to him, the way it was on those poor people in the camps—” She clamped a hand over her mouth. “I’m talking too much. Did you know about that? About the concentration camps?”
She shook her head, though the gesture was shrouded by the dark. Horror beginning to creep through her.
“Of course you didn’t, why would you know?” She took another drag, blew out smoke. Her hand shook. “Dr. Vaernet was a Nazi. Is a Nazi. He worked for the concentration camps in Europe, operating on homosexuals—they let him do whatever he wanted—let him—” She stared at the wall as if it hid the missing words behind it.
Her limbs. She could not feel her limbs. Body cold against the bed. Her mind went lucid and she understood two things: first, she was in a worse place than she’d known; second, the longer this nurse’s visit went on, the less chance that the young Dr. Vaernet would come tonight. Keep talking, she thought. Go on, go on, even if into a nightmare.
“Then after the war, he was going to be tried for war crimes but he got away and came here, and so, those bastards at the Ministry of Health what do they do? Send him back? No, why do that when you can give a monster money to keep hacking people up?” The nurse was weeping now. “They don’t know I’m half Jewish. I shouldn’t be telling you. My mother—her family—she escaped as a girl but they—”
Malena had never seen an adult cry like this. Sobbing and ferociously restrained, all at once.
“I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t, when I took this job. Only later did I suspect. So I went through his papers and—oh, child, I’m sorry. We’ve got to get you out of here before—” She broke off again.
She turned her face up to the nurse. One word she’d said hung in the air like a rope. Out. She pushed herself to speak. “What do I have to do?”
* * *
*
The bus ride northeast to the town of Treinta y Tres was green and open, fields and low hills dotted with occasional huts. Malena had never been to Treinta y Tres, and didn’t plan to stay for long. She wanted to see Belén. Thirty-six-year-old Belén. She didn’t know what she’d do if she succeeded. She wasn’t even sure whether Belén was still there. It had been about a year ago, soon after the democracy began, that Malena had run into a childhood classmate at the grocery store and had learned, in the course of their brief chat (Malena always tried to keep such conversations brief so as to avoid too much probing), that Belén was now married to a hotel manager in Treinta y Tres. Malena had stored that information in a deep recess of her mind. But it surged up without warning, sometimes, pushing her toward her third or fourth drink of the night. What was Belén like now? The last time Malena had seen her, she’d been running out of the front door in shame. And in that moment, that Belén-running moment, Malena had still been whole, not lost, not yet split in two, still the seed of a future woman that she, Malena, would now never become. A woman who’d never set foot in Buenos Aires, though perhaps she might visit for the theater or the architecture, the cafés, the bright lights of Avenida Corrientes, the bookshops that never closed, the city’s famous pleasures. A woman who only knew of electricity as a source of light (and yes, that woman-she-could-have-been would still see electricity become a source of horror in her country, but even that was different from the clinic because government torture, at least, would one day be known by the masses, people like Romina would gather testimonies, survivors would be held in reverence, stories would be told and decried, and this telling, this decrying, would give the horrors room in the fabric of the world). The woman Malena could never become would have finished school and gone right to college. Become a doctor. Fulfilled the whole-girl dreams. Lost-girl dreams. Where was she, now, the lost girl? The one who’d touched Belén’s thighs with a pure joy? She wanted to find her. Wanted to search for her in the face of this older, married Belén.
Treinta y Tres was a plain, sleepy town. She’d thought she’d have to do some detective work, but there was only one hotel, which, she learned, was on the main plaza. She walked there, carrying her single suitcase, working up a sweat. There was no trouble with booking a room. That night, she sat in the plaza, where she was thankful that none of the locals tried to talk to her, so she could stare in peace at the statue at the center, which depicted the thirty-three men for which the town was named, who’d bravely fought for Uruguay’s independence. Revolutionary heroes. Their faces frozen into expressions of bravery and pride. Only five of them in the statue, to represent the thirty-three, because, she thought, the country they’d fought for was still poor and could not afford a bigger statue. Five, for Uruguay, was not so bad. The sculpture sang of action frozen in time, arms raised in every direction. Though the men were all the same dull greenish color, she could tell that one of them was black from the form of his nose and the tight curl of his hair, and she could hear what Virginia would say, we’ve been written out of all the histories, which made Malena think of her old living room and Flaca with her arm around Virginia and Paz passing the mate gourd around and La Venus painting and clucking her tongue at the unwriting of histories and the pain of it stabbed Malena, that she was gone from them now, from the only real family she’d ever known, and they probably hadn�
��t even noticed, had they, she washed away the question with a long swig from the whiskey bottle in her hands.
She didn’t see Belén that night in the plaza, nor in the hotel halls the next morning or the morning after that. Finally, on the third day, she said casually to the man at the front desk, as she renewed her room for another night, “And, are you the manager?”
“No, señora.”
It irked her, this señora, made her feel old and worn. When had she stopped being señorita? “May I speak to him?”
The man looked worried.
“Just to give him my compliments.”
“Ah, of course. As it happens, he’s away on business.”
“I see.”
“I can give him the message.”
“Thank you.”
“They’ll be back the day after tomorrow.”
“They?”
“He traveled with his family.”
“Of course.” His family. So she wasn’t here either. “How nice, that he has a family. Do they live nearby?”
“Right in this building, señora.”
“Isn’t that lovely.”
Two days more in Treinta y Tres, and there was no anonymity in this little town but no one asked her what she was doing there and for how long, even though she now knew every crease on the faces of the waiters in the hotel restaurant and the bartender down the block and corner store clerk who now rang up her grappa bottles with an easy smile, and she could guess what they thought of the sad thirty-something-old woman who was not a señorita and who didn’t smile because, for fuck’s sake, she didn’t have to, and she also knew every crease now on the faces of the five frozen revolutionary heroes in the plaza of Treinta y Tres.
On the appointed evening, she sat in the shabby little lobby with a book in her lap, pretending to read. The poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The book had been a gift from Paz, and for this reason she couldn’t bear to focus on it. The black letters were simply a place for her eye to land. She waited. She turned a page. Sor Juana had been a nun, in Mexico, centuries ago. A verse of love to a woman. What did that mean? What was she saying? What did this Sor Juana know about women and love? Absurd question, she didn’t know a thing, she was dead. Dead people know nothing. Dead people rest. Finally the door opened and a family entered. The man in front, a woman and three children behind. The woman was plump, stern-faced behind heavy makeup, exhausted from the journey or whatever life had thrown at her, overseeing the children like a sea captain bent on squashing any mutiny. She looked steely and capable, like so many matrons found throughout Uruguay, her unhappiness only visible in the tightness of her jaw and the blankness of her eyes.
The children were bickering breezily about something. The mother swatted one of them, raised her gaze, and saw Malena. Their eyes met.
It was not her.
It was a woman called Belén but there was nothing left in those eyes of the fifteen-year-old girl she’d been.
Malena went cold inside, then hot. What was she doing here?
The woman stared at Malena, as if trying to complete a puzzle whose pieces had flung to the winds.
“Mamá! She won’t stop!”
The woman turned to her daughter, and in that moment Malena slammed her book closed and escaped the lobby before the woman could approach, because the hunger to speak to her had vanished now, replaced by the need to escape.
She reached her room and closed the door, heart thumping in her chest.
She crumpled to the floor without turning on the light.
The carpet smelled of mold and rain and artificial lemons.
Almost a relief. To know that it was done. No escape left from the tunnel, just the passage through.
Still she lay there in the dark for a long time. Through loss of time. Through a long dark melting of time. Half-waiting to see if a knock might arrive at the door, a question from the past, but nothing came. Grappa. The bottle on the nightstand. She crawled toward it, sat up, drank. Tomorrow she would go. She longed to go. She was done with everything and everyone.
And yet, that night, at four in the morning, she found herself picking up the phone and calling Flaca, dialing numbers as familiar as her own name.
* * *
*
The plan was as simple as it was dangerous. The following night, at 2:30 a.m., Adela—for that was the name of the renegade nurse—would unlock 1491’s bedroom door and leave it shut. Fourteen ninety-one would wait at least half an hour, then slip down the hall past the dozing guard, through another door that Adela would secretly leave unlocked, and out into the night, where Adela would meet her two blocks down. From there, she didn’t know what would happen. She couldn’t think beyond the night. Her whole future collapsed into the coming hours of darkness and a vision of two doors. Two waiting doors.
She lay awake, not daring to doze and miss her cue. It wasn’t hard to stay awake. The challenge was not to succumb to the fog. The younger Dr. Vaernet did not come. No way to know why some nights no and some nights yes. She filled her mind with the two doors, and thoughts of a brain cut beyond repair. Before and after. Click. The unlocking. Soft steps, moving away. Had anyone else heard? Electric bolt through her limbs, through the core of her. So much electricity had run through her by now that she could generate her own. It rose without her calling it. Shock. Shock. Silence in the hall. Safe for now. Half an hour, wait. She had no watch, there were no clocks, how would she know? Time had melted in this place, gone sticky. Viscous time. Try to think. Try to count. A minute. Another? What if she waited too long? What if Adela gave up and left their agreed-upon corner, abandoning her in this maze of a city with nothing but a drab hospital gown to her name? She sat up in bed. Go. To the door and down the hall on feet she willed to float.
The night nurse was in fact asleep—she brimmed with thanks—and she poured slowly down the stairs, aching to run, holding back into silence. She reached the doorknob, which chilled her hand and turned smoothly and push! she was out on the street. Bare feet on pavement. Night air a sweet whip. Never had she been so happy to be cold. Two blocks sped by as if her legs were jaws, opening and closing, ravenous.
Adela was at the corner, huddled in a coat and scarf. She draped a coat around her, gave her a pair of shoes that were too big but still a relief, and interlocked arms with Malena. “Let’s go.”
They walked in silence for a long time. The streets were quiet at this hour; it was a sleepy neighborhood, residential, with majestic trees and little corner groceries, bakeries, and butcher shops interspersed among the apartment buildings and ornate houses. All these people, sleeping and dreaming just a short walk from the nightmare. They couldn’t know—and if they did, would they care? She began to flag. Electricity, call it back. Shout it through the body. Wake up.
“What’s your name?” Adela said.
A sting of fear as the name poured back into her tongue. “Malena.”
“Malena.” They walked on. “I can’t take you home with me. You understand.”
“Yes,” she said, though she understood nothing, not even her own breath.
“If they find you there—I’d lose my job, and, worse, you’d get dragged back.”
Their steps rang out. A car growled by.
“You have to leave Buenos Aires.”
“Of course,” Malena said, though she hadn’t thought that far ahead. Out, she was out—it was all she’d been able to see.
They turned onto a wider street: cars, cafés, music spilling out to the sidewalks. Adela flagged a taxi and pulled Malena in with her. They drove to the port, where it was still dark. The ferry station was closed. A sign said it wouldn’t open until 6:00 a.m.
“Your boat is at six twenty-five,” Adela said. She handed Malena the bag she’d been carrying, a ticket, and a wad of bills. “It’s not much,” she said apologetically, “but it’s all I could do.
You’ll be dwarfed by my clothes, I’m afraid. But you’ll be all right—you’ll be home soon.”
Malena stared down at the bills, ashamed, flooded with alarm. Home. Where was that place? If she went to her parents’ house, would they send her back to the clinic? She saw her mother’s face, that night in the kitchen, bathed in disgust. Heard the voice again, Your parents asked. Their will.
Adela gave Malena her ID card, stolen from the clinic files.
“You won’t mind if I leave you here?” She glanced around her. “We can’t be seen together.”
She looked so panicked that it suddenly occurred to Malena that the nurse might change her mind, drag her back to the clinic, report her. As long as she was on this shore and Adela knew where to find her, she was not safe. “Of course. I’ll be fine.”
Adela nodded, then opened her mouth, as if compelled to speak. But then she turned and walked away without another word.
The ferry terminal opened and the boarding began and even then Malena kept seeing Adela running her way, shouting madly, or police officers in angry hordes, or the two Drs. Vaernet with lab coats rising around them like pale wings—but none of that happened. She set foot on the ship. From a sign on the wall she learned that it was a Wednesday, and that over four months had passed. The unhitching from the dock set off tremors in her belly. Water folded around her, black and sleek as the night sky. She watched it from the window until sleep rose up and mauled her from within.
She woke to the sound of chatter around her, from her fellow travelers. It was evening; the trip was almost over.
As soon as she saw her city—or, rather, the city that had once been hers—the thought arrowed into her chest: she had nowhere to go. The port teemed with people. A few women stood along the edge of the dock, scanning the disembarking men for possible work. Mujeres de la calle, she thought. Women of the street. That was how she’d heard them spoken of. They stood tired and erect in the growing darkness. She shouldn’t be staring, they could glance over at any moment, she should avert her eyes, but before she did a thought tore across her mind.
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