Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  You could become one of them.

  It was a way to live, wasn’t it?

  A place to go.

  Dr. Vaernet the younger’s hand, forever closing in.

  She hurried past them, averting her eyes.

  She walked and walked that night, through all the city, thinking of calling her parents, afraid to call, afraid to be sent back. She had only two goals: to stay alive, and to stay free of the Drs. Vaernet. If she went home she could not meet the second goal. Which meant she could not meet either one. She walked her city, Montevideo, avoiding the eyes of strangers. She was a fourteen-year-old girl alone. Show me, she shouted in silence at the city. Show me there’s a shred of space for me somewhere.

  The only building that spoke back to her was a church. Its doors opened just before dawn. Look, it said. Look at my doors, how tall and wide they are, when so many doors are closed.

  She went inside, crossed herself with holy water as she’d learned to do, and sat down in a back pew. Her legs were tired and she welcomed the rest. But she also felt tense with fear. House of God. And she with so much shame and so many sins she could not speak.

  But where else?

  There was a convent in the back of the church. She’d seen it from the street, the small cluster of nuns through the window, like the cluster of women at the port only turned inside out. She would lie to them. She stared up at the crucifix over the altar, at Christ’s painted blood, as she formed her plan. She would tell them she’d been pressured into prostitution and had run away from the room where she’d been left with her first man. She would be vague and weepy about what had and had not happened in that room. She would be sinful and suffering, stained and innocent, all at the same time. She would tell them she was sixteen, a little older, and that she’d always felt a boundless love for God. That last lie was a slippery one, shot through with a new horror, for hadn’t the Nazis embraced Christianity? Hadn’t there been a crucifix on the wall of her room in the clinic, and even in the Room with the machines? But she would have to find a way to make the lie believable. To infuse the word God with enough passion for the nuns to take her in. She leaned forward in the pew and stared at the red slash on Christ’s torso. When she said the word God she would replace it in her mind. She would tack another word beneath it like the lining sewn beneath the surface of a dress. Every time she said God—or Christ or Holy Spirit—she would secretly, in her own private code, be saying the word forgetting. Oh, Forgetting, hear our prayer.

  * * *

  *

  Flaca answered with a thick, groggy voice. “Hello?”

  “You used to be up at this hour.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  The hotel room swirled. She’d opened another bottle of grappa. Another swig. “You don’t know me?”

  “Malena? Malena.” Rustling. Audible breath. “Where are you? We’ve all been looking for—”

  “I’m not in Montevideo.”

  “Then where?”

  In Treinta y Tres, which is sleepy and boring but also a sweeter place than you’d imagine, and I’m spending the night in the same building as my first love but, ha-ha, it’s not what you think. “Outside.”

  “We’re all worried about you.”

  “Oh, really?” She was shamed by the bitterness in her own voice. “Romina’s crying all day?”

  “She’s worried too, Malena—of course she is. We all are. Please. Come home.”

  She gripped the phone cord. “I can’t.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  She wanted to laugh. What did that mean, trouble? Where did trouble begin and end? “Would you care?”

  “¡Chica! Of course I would!”

  Malena waited. Raw inside. Suddenly she imagined Flaca bursting through the hotel room door, shouting that’s it, you’re coming with me, and carrying her in her arms all the way back to Montevideo. Whether that was a dread or a wish, she couldn’t tell. Her eyes stung. She blinked.

  “Malenita, have you been drinking?”

  “Fuck you, Flaca. Like you don’t drink.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Malena, please. Tell me where you are.”

  Malena crouched against the wall, a cornered cat. “None of your damn business.”

  “It is my business.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love you, Malena.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Come home.”

  But there was no home to come back to and it had been a terrible idea to call. Flaca was sobbing into the phone now, saying something through her tears, but she was somewhere far away from where Malena was and even further from where she was going, and there were no words or Uruguayan highways that would ever close the distance. “Goodbye, Flaca,” she said with her finger on the cradle, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth she pressed down to hang up. When she let go, the dial tone blared at her. She listened to it for a long time.

  * * *

  *

  The nuns were good to her, and after two years at the convent life began to occasionally feel bearable, but in the end she could not bring herself to make the vows. There were too many lies layered over lies, and she knew that her God was not the same as theirs. They loved the Virgin, and so did she, but her own love of the Virgin was now shot through with fear, tangled in danger, not enough to carry her through a lifetime of wearing the veil. The nuns helped her find her way beyond the convent, recommending her for her first job in the secular world, helping manage the books at a local cemetery that held handwritten registries of the dead. Malena had tidy, elegant handwriting, and she did well in the dusty back office where she could spend hours at a time in silence. The pay was not very much, but the groundskeeper let her sleep in the back room of the office until she saved enough to rent a room. He took pity on her because he believed what the nuns had told him, that she was an orphan rescued from the streets, and, in fact, this was not exactly true but not entirely a lie. Her parents were alive but she could not go back to them. She’d called home just a few times over the years. The first time was two months after fleeing the clinic, which was as soon as she dared. She’d had to wait until after all the nuns were asleep to sneak down the hall to the Mother Superior’s office, and had dialed with trembling hands. Her mother picked up. Her mother stayed up much later than the nuns, and she sounded normal, awake. It’s me, she’d whispered into the phone, and her mother had hesitated, as if wondering who me could be.

  Where the hell are you, her mother had hissed.

  Somewhere safe.

  You don’t know what you’ve cost us. In money, in shame.

  I’m sorry.

  Come home.

  The pull inside to comply, to see her childhood home again, to melt into her mother’s arms. Will you promise not to send me back there?

  How dare you?

  I can’t go back, Mamá. I can’t!

  The doctor didn’t finish his treatment. He says you’re a terribly hard case.

  You still speak to him?

  Of course. He’s your doctor.

  He’s a Nazi.

  That’s enough! Malena!

  Where’s Papá?

  Out. And then, you don’t know how you’ve made us suffer. Her voice rising with pain.

  Malena hung up quickly. She stayed in the darkness of the Mother Superior’s office until she could breathe normally again and sneak back to her cell.

  * * *

  *

  The bus route from Treinta y Tres to Polonio was complicated, requiring an overnight stop in the coastal town of Rocha, where she spent the evening in a café writing a long letter that she left with the hotel concierge the next morning, to go out with the day’s mail. Once she arrived at the Polonio bus stop, she waited again for a horse cart to take her over
the sand dunes, as she didn’t have it in her to hike to her destination and in any case there was no reason to pinch pesos anymore. She walked to the Prow and paused outside, but didn’t enter. If she entered she might lose her resolve.

  The Prow stood dwarfed by the gathering twilight.

  A shack at the edge of the world.

  Ocean enfolding it on all sides.

  Still shabby, and still beautiful.

  A perfect home.

  So many pricks of happiness over the years, like tiny points of light.

  But still, when she looked at the Prow, she also remembered what she’d done for it. How they hadn’t had enough pesos between the five of them, and she’d promised to take care of it. And gone down to the docks. It hadn’t been as hard as she’d thought it would be, though she made less than she’d hoped and the work was more laborious than she’d imagined. Still she went through with it, every time. The other women of the docks glared at her for invading their turf but didn’t chase her away. She didn’t go more than once a week because she couldn’t bear to, it took her all week to feel her skin as her own again. And she tried to dissemble herself, hide, so that no one would ever connect the woman down at the docks with the Malena of her ordinary life. She had so many hidden layers now, the girl from the clinic, the girl who escaped, the girl who joined the convent to avoid the docks and because she had nowhere else to go, the woman who returned to the docks so she could scrape out a place for herself in the world with her bare fingernails, and not just for herself, but for her friends. A place to love. A place for love. For years, she’d feared being recognized, found out as a puta. In a small country, that was always a danger. The men you’d put inside your mouth roamed the same streets as you did. She’d been lucky, though, except for that one awful day in the café with her Polonio friends, when the man had put his hand on her shoulder and said she looked familiar. She’d recognized him too. She hadn’t gone with him; he’d wanted a lower price than she was willing to accept, and he’d groped her brutally and left in a huff. When he recognized her in front of her friends she felt the keenest panic, followed by equally sharp relief at seeing that they suspected nothing.

  She’d always wanted them to suspect nothing.

  Oh, Forgetting, hear our prayer.

  Perhaps she’d done it all wrong, this living, but it was too late now. She was tired and had nothing left. She turned her back on the Prow and walked toward the rocks. Night had fallen but there was enough moon to see the way. Her last victory had been to get here. To not end her story in Treinta y Tres, in Rocha, in a drab hotel room. She had almost done it; but the pull of Polonio had been strong. She’d thought of this so many times, over the years, looking out at the water and picturing it swallowing her whole. Had walked these very rocks so many times, imagined the leap, taken its measure.

  Which was why she now arrived at the right place with startling speed. The lighthouse loomed at her back but no one was there, no one could see her, she was alone. She was high on a jagged outcropping, and waves crashed roughly below. They seemed otherworldly in the moonlight, rising ferociously, over and over, colliding against the rocks. Without shame. Without tiring. Without cease. Water could break and split from itself and in moments return to wholeness.

  Or rip away and never return.

  She couldn’t linger. Couldn’t change her mind.

  In the last moment before she jumped, she saw her mother’s face twisted into a scowl of disgust (and her father, behind her mother, staring past Malena as though she were not there, as though she didn’t exist, had never existed) and she saw Romina too, blank-eyed, indifferent, the faces blurring into each other as one united truth, a thesis confirmed, this is this, this is not that, will never be. Spring, release, away from all that, into the ocean, the living ocean, the great blue arms of the only one she knew would never hate her, and she’d been planning for so long that she had no right to be surprised at the willing coil of her knees, the forward leap, her legs obedient and ready. Still, the air shocked her as she hung aloft, suspended so gracefully that it seemed for an instant that she’d been freed from the rules of gravity, that she wouldn’t fall after all, that the sumptuous night would hold her in its embrace forever, and in that instant the urge to live rebelled in her chest and hammered criminally at her heart right as she began to fall, eyes wide open, wide enough to see infinity in each second as black night slowly collapsed all around her.

  * * *

  *

  The body was discovered the following evening by Javier, the teenage grandson of El Lobo, as he snuck a cigarette among the rocks. The identification of the body was not difficult, thanks to the wallet in the pocket of her jeans. Paz was the first to receive the news, as their shared address was on the identification card, and though she did not have Malena’s parents’ phone number, she knew their first names and was able to find them in the phone book and convey this information to the police. To Paz’s relief, they did not insist that she be the one to make the call. She learned, from the officer in Castillos, that the death had been deemed either an accident or a suicide. “Though who can trust the Castillos police,” Paz had said through choked sobs, and everyone remembered her time in that tiny jail under the same rural jurisdiction. She called the police station again the following day and was shocked to learn that Malena’s parents had declined to have her body brought to Montevideo for burial, that they weren’t even paying for a headstone.

  “But that’s not possible,” Paz said. “She has to come home, I’ll pay for her transport if I have to.”

  “You can’t do that, señorita.”

  For a fleeting moment Paz thought how strange it would be if she’d met this man before as his prisoner, or perhaps how ordinary, since there could only be so many officers in Castillos and where else would they go? Focus. Stay calm. “And why not?”

  “Because you’re not family. Only close relatives can authorize transport.”

  Paz went to Castillos to argue her case, speak to superiors, and try to bring Malena home. It was no use. She was nothing more than a housemate and a friend. La Venus and Flaca were with her, and La Venus tried her classic strategy of showing cleavage and lowering her voice to a purr, but even this failed to secure anything except a discount on a headstone in the local churchyard, which at least was better than the unmarked grave to which Malena would otherwise have been consigned. They attended the burial together, the three of them, along with the priest and a few of the good people of El Polonio: Benito, Cristi, El Lobo, Alicia, Óscar, Javier, Ester, and Lili. Malena’s parents never came, nor did her brother, who lived somewhere abroad, Sweden, or Switzerland perhaps, no one could remember exactly. It was Romina’s absence that cut Flaca the most. The night before the burial, she’d called Romina from the dingy little inn that passed for a hotel in Castillos, and begged her one last time to come.

  “We were her family, Ro. We were all she had.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “And don’t you care?”

  “How can you ask that?” Romina sounded strangled, though it could also be a bad connection. “Of course I do. But what if her parents come?”

  “They won’t. They want nothing to do with this.”

  “But we don’t know for certain. And we wouldn’t be welcome.”

  “Who cares about—”

  “And anyway, I don’t need to go, that’s just a body in that box, it’s not Malena anymore.”

  “Just a body? A body you loved.”

  Romina was weeping now, but quietly, fighting to stifle the sound. “I know.”

  “How can you be so cruel?”

  “Please stop.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, I can’t bear it, Flaca.”

  “You’re glad she’s gone.”

  The line went silent. Flaca thought she felt Romina on the other end, gathering her rage into a wea
pon. But instead, she began to wail. It was the most terrible sound she’d ever heard. She wanted to comfort Romina, though she also for an instant had the deranged thought that, if Romina suffered, Malena might come back. She sat frozen with the receiver against her ear. Waiting for Romina’s wailing to subside. Waiting for the ache to stop. “Please come,” she whispered.

  “How dare you,” Romina said, just before a dial tone swallowed her away.

  For the second time in their lives, Flaca and Romina did not speak for a year.

  * * *

  *

  Three weeks after the burial, Malena’s letter arrived: a missive penned by the dead, defying the river of time. It had crawled through the postal system from Rocha to Paz’s house, which was also La Venus’s house and La Piedrita’s house and even Malena’s house before she disappeared. The envelope named Paz as the recipient, but the letter inside opened, simply, with one word.

  Friends—

  Part Three

  2013

  9

  Glowing Magical Creature

  IT WAS THE TWENTY-SIXTH ANNIVERSARY of Malena’s death, though Flaca wasn’t sure any of the others would remember and that wasn’t why they were heading out to Polonio, why the dunes sped past her now in all their splendor, the same dunes as always, the dunes of today, made unique each moment by the unrepeatable ripples of the wind. This was a celebration, so best not to mention Malena at all.

  It was still strange to her, this riding into Polonio in a double-decker commercial jeep, packed tight between tourists eager to see the brightly painted bohemian restaurants and hostels, take pictures of themselves with the lighthouse in the background, buy necklaces beaded with local shells and peace pendants manufactured in China. Polonio was a tourist destination now, named in Brazilian and Argentinean guidebooks as a jewel not to be missed, as a gay and bohemian refuge, as well as a sea lion refuge, a confluence of language that made Flaca feel like part of a species subjected to protective measures and gawking. Also, Playa Sur had grown in appeal among luxury vacationers, with white stucco cottages sprouting up along the rocks, featuring private generators and whalebone sculptures and diaphanous curtains, behind which, presumably, the wealthy pursued the erotic delights of paradise. Nothing like La Proa, which remained as stubbornly shabby as ever, though La Venus’s mural of sea creatures entangled in what resembled love had given the front wall its own bright character as well. Despite its humble appearance, La Proa now fetched high rents for them in the summer months when they weren’t using the place themselves, an income for which they were all grateful, times being what they were.