La Venus sat beside her, taking photos of the passing landscape, as if she were one more tourist who’d never seen this place before, though in fact she was working on a photographic installation on the dunes. Flaca thought it was impossible to capture the dunes on camera, not the slightest aspect of their essence or power. But she was not the artist—perhaps, she thought, precisely because of thoughts like these. Artists don’t give up on trying to render things just because rendering them is impossible. Romina sat across from her, hair wild in the wind. She smiled at Flaca, who smiled back, wondering whether she too was remembering past crossings of this landscape, or whether the present or future had her more in thrall. Romina was pressed close to Diana, and everyone was pressed close here, even strangers, as the jeep was crowded, but still their bodies seemed to hum together, harbor and ship, ship and harbor. Holding hands for all to see. Newlyweds. Flaca still couldn’t believe it and strained to wrap her mind around the thought. Romina and Diana, married. Two women married. Each idea uniquely insane, plucked from the edge of possibility. She tried to imagine telling herself of this, the self who first kissed Romina in the bathroom of a nightclub, when they were teenagers deep in that mode that people now called el armario, the closet. Forty years ago now. She would not have believed it for a second. Yet here they were, fresh from the Civil Registry, one of the first couples to take advantage of the new law. Wife and wife. Romina had seemed nonchalant about it, perhaps because, through her professional life, she’d seen the change coming for a long time. Why shouldn’t the two of them make vows, sign their names in a legal book, get the blessing of a functionary of the state, if they planned to be together forever?
Death and marriage. Marriage and death. Twenty-six years ago today—they wouldn’t remember that, of course, and why should they? She would not remind them. She was happy for Romina and Diana. She celebrated their marriage with as much joy and stupefaction as everybody else. And yet, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that there was someone missing from the mass of people crushed into the city registrar, a hole in the shape of Malena, who should have been there to weep with rage or jealousy or sadness or maybe shudder the way everyone else did at the marvel of light slanting on two brides, in Uruguay, as they reached for each other’s hands.
* * *
*
Flaca and La Venus lived together now in the small house where Flaca had grown up, above the butcher shop. After her father died, she had lived alone for a few years, but once she turned fifty loneliness rose around her like a subtle tide, and she was relieved when La Venus asked to move in. She took over what used to be Flaca’s parents’ bedroom, the biggest one in the modest house, and just as well, as she needed every inch of space and crammed it with canvases in various stages of creation, along with found objects she was painting, as she’d continued doing that for the joy of it, even though she could now more easily afford canvases thanks to her job teaching painting at a high school and the decent stream of gallery shows and commissions that came her way.
One recent evening, a few weeks before this trip to Polonio, they’d opened a bottle of wine and marveled at their strange fortunes.
“Look at us, single in our old age—”
“Speak for yourself—I’m not old.”
La Venus raised an eyebrow. “Ha. As I was saying. Single, as we begin to have, oh, just a few wrinkles on our impeccable faces.”
“That’s more like it. You still turn heads wherever you go, Venus, you know that.”
“Do I?”
“You’re being coy.”
La Venus smiled seductively. “It’s one of my superpowers.”
“Don’t I know it.” Flaca poured more wine into both of their glasses. “What’s really funny is that I used to dream of growing old with you.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding. Before you left me for a glamorous diva who whisked you off to Brazil.”
“What glamorous diva? I recall nothing of this.”
“If your memory’s gone, then you are getting old.”
They laughed. And La Venus thought, then, not of Ariella but of Mario, the boy she’d loved, the child returned into her life a beautiful man. He’d reached out to her ten years ago. When he told her his name on the phone in that deep adult voice of his, the room had melted around her, become liquid and bright. They agreed to meet for coffee. She changed her outfit six times before leaving the house, finally settling on a modest dress, no risks taken. At the café, they took a table together awkwardly, stealing glances at each other as they waited for their coffee. He was twenty-seven years old, the same age she’d been when she first went to Polonio and started dismantling her married life—a phoenix age, she thought, at least for me—and he was crushingly handsome, yet the little-boy face was right there under the surface of his features, open, tender. It flooded back to her, a love so intense she could have ripped a building apart with her bare hands.
The coffee arrived. She stirred in sugar, waited. Tried to breathe.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” he finally said.
“Why not?”
He shrugged, eyes on his coffee. “I didn’t think you’d want to see me.”
She couldn’t imagine it. He was the one, after all, who’d been raised by a grandmother who surely taught him to hate her, or to forget her, or both. She sipped her coffee to steady herself. “I thought you wouldn’t remember me,” she said, almost adding, I think of you all the time.
“What?” He looked genuinely confused. It was his eyes that hadn’t changed at all, that still held three-year-old Mario, six-year-old Mario, all the Marios inside them. “You were like a mother to me.”
She couldn’t breathe.
“I think of you all the time.”
Her words. Her own swallowed words.
“My abuela—I can’t forgive what she did to you. It’s horrible, what she said.”
“So you remember.”
“Of course. I remember everything. I didn’t make sense of it until I was much older. It was a confusing time, leaving Brazil. And after that, living with my grandmother—well. She wasn’t kind.”
He looked up at La Venus, expectantly, but she held her tongue. He didn’t need to hear venom for the woman who raised him.
“I can see you’re not surprised,” he said. And he laughed. He had none of the arrogance of the rest of his family. He seemed warm, bookish, like a socially awkward yet bighearted librarian, not quite ready for the thorny world. “Anyway. I can’t believe we’re really here.”
“How did you find me?”
“I’ve been following your career for years. Your work is beautiful, I love it.” He looked sheepish. “I’ve even bought a painting.”
She longed to know which painting. One thing at a time. “But you didn’t try to call me.”
“Not yet. I was a coward.”
They crushed into her mind, the myriad things she longed to say, she couldn’t parse them. She placed her hand on his. He studied their joined hands in silence for some time.
“So can we stay in touch?” he said quietly.
“Of course.”
“I’d like you to meet my daughter.”
Air trapped in her lungs. A daughter? How had time sped like this, so that Mario was the father and not the child? “How old is she?”
“Two. Her name is Paula.”
“I want to meet her,” she said, and then, before she could stop herself, “I love her already,” and in the weeks and months and years that followed those words were over and over proven true.
Now, ten years later, sitting in the kitchen, she watched Flaca light another cigarette. She’d tried to quit several times over the years. La Venus, who missed cigarettes dearly but was determined to hold her ground, watched the smoke curl languorously between them.
“I suppose we are old,” s
he said. “When we first met, I thought sixty-three was ancient.” Just last month, Paula had said Abuela, when I’m old like you as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and La Venus had wanted to laugh from the shock of it, of old but also of that name that even now made her body sing, Abuela. “But here I am, and I still feel like my same self.”
“Except for your knees?”
La Venus spread her arms in a gesture of surrender.
“The thing is, my fantasy of growing old together was a little different.”
“Oh?”
“It was chucu-chucu every day.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Does it?” Flaca looked at La Venus. It was true that she was still striking, a vixen turned elegant, and of course La Venus knew it, carefully applying lipstick and styling her hair. Every once in a while, the question of what could happen between them shot through Flaca’s mind, but then it quickly disappeared into the ether. They’d come too far now. It would be like having sex with a sister. “I don’t know. With this sore hip, I’m not sure I could take the excitement.”
“Oh, come on! What about that Teresita?”
Flaca smiled. She couldn’t help it. She’d run into Teresita at the Feria de Tristán Narvaja a few weeks ago. Teresita, the second woman she’d ever had sex with, after Romina, right after the coup. Back then, Teresita had been a restless young housewife, trapped in her apartment and her fears of expanding repression, and it had frightened her, the thing between them, she confessed right there between the open-air market stalls crammed with zucchini and old antiques and the cheap clothes from China that were putting local craftsmen out of business, you were terrifying to me, Flaca, I wanted so much to have children and a normal life, and I wasn’t in my right mind—no one was, Flaca interjected, and Teresita gestured her agreement and barreled on—but I never forgot you. Not for a single day. They stared at each other in silence as the sun bore down on them. Flaca thought of the young Teresita, her limber thighs and acrobatic passion. Colors brightened in the cluttered stalls. They talked on. Teresita had four children, and five grandchildren. She’d been divorced for a decade now. It was never a good marriage, she said calmly, as if assessing spoiled vegetables in a time of plenty. You look good, she added. Flaca thanked her. I mean really good. Slowly this time, and Flaca took a closer look at the plump grandmother before her, the way her gray hair quaked insistently in the light.
They’d made a plan to meet again a few days later, in the Plaza de los Bomberos. Teresita had brought the mate. They’d stayed, talking, until twilight fell and Teresita had to go to her grandchildren; she’d promised to watch them while their parents went out to a movie.
“Nothing’s happened between us,” Flaca said to La Venus as she put out her cigarette. “Who knows what it is.”
“Oh, come on, Flaca. She wants you, and why wouldn’t she? You make her feel young.”
Flaca thought of Teresita as she’d first known her, lithe and tentative, then fierce and hungry in the dark. How much they’d all changed, their bodies gliding relentlessly on the currents of time.
“And you make her feel hot.”
“We’ll see.”
“Just give me warning if you decide to kick me out, all right?”
“What! Venus, don’t be ridiculous. You’re family, and this is your home.”
La Venus studied a crack in the wall tiles. Flaca couldn’t decipher her face.
The word family coiled between and around them like some translucent dragon, a glowing magical creature of their own making.
* * *
*
Romina leaned into Diana as the jeep carried them forward, forward, through the dunes toward the distant thumb of land that was her second home. Flaca and La Venus sat across from her, lost in their own thoughts. It wasn’t easy, in any case, to talk over the roar of this vehicle that clattered across the sand full of tourists. She and Diana weren’t trying to talk, though for the first time she could remember, they were holding hands on the ride, making no attempt to hide their bond. It was astonishing that Diana had not yet released her hand. When it came to visibility in public places, Diana was even more fearful than Romina. But there they were, hands still clasped, fingers twined and speaking to each other, exhilaration twined with fear. Diminishing fear. They had just married and this was their honeymoon and she’d be damned if she would let go of her bride’s hand to placate any of her fellow passengers, the families, the hippies, the Brazilians or Argentineans or Montevideans, they could come to Polonio if they wanted but they could not steal her day.
Not that anyone seemed to mind. They were two old women holding hands, and so? Who cared about the hands of old women?
They’d been together for twenty-six years now. And yet, they were also newlyweds. At once a forever couple and a fresh one. She was still amazed that it had happened, the ceremony at City Hall, the room where her own parents had gotten married seventy years before, now bursting with people. Diana, of course, had none of her Paraguayan family there, and would tell them in due time, perhaps, when she was ready. Already some of her siblings—the evangelical converts among them—saw her as a defector to Uruguay, land of leftists and sinners and perverts, and she only talked to them on trips back to Paraguay. She didn’t go back for them, but for her mother, whom she loved without bounds, and with whom she only spoke in Guaraní, a language that cascaded from her mouth on phone calls home like a clear, wild stream. Romina loved to hear it, and had tried to learn words from Diana, who was a patient teacher and never teased Romina about her trouble holding on to those new, supple words that slipped through the fingers of her mind. The only sure words were I love you. They poured from Romina’s mouth, always rising, never enough. Rohayhú. Rohayhú etereí.
All of Romina’s family came to the wedding: Felipe and his wife and children, now young adults in their own right, and Romina’s mother and father, ninety and ninety-one years old, leaning on their grandchildren’s arms and walking slowly toward their daughter, who was finally, and in a manner they never would have dreamed of, a bride. They had embraced Diana a long time ago. In the aftermath of Malena’s death, Romina had come to see secrecy as a kind of poison that eats people’s lives from the inside, all the more so when it festers into shame. Still, it took some years for her to tell her family. She’d started with hints dropped here and there, about Diana, hints her parents had let sit untouched like lures in the water, spiked with hooks, not to be bitten. When she finally told them outright, they were almost relieved, and her mother even chided her for the years of secrecy. Why? she said. Romina had tried to explain, about duty, not letting them down, but her mother had shrugged and said, your grandmother didn’t survive everything she did for you to live in hiding. It took days for Romina to recover from the shock. It gradually occurred to her that her mother had had years of suspicion in which to quietly grow used to the idea, to formulate a way of absorbing it. Felipe took it the hardest. He did not approve. He’d had his suspicions. He hoped she wouldn’t be one of those women who tries to distract the political movement from serious issues with, well, things like this. Things like what? she’d asked, unyielding. Faggotry, he’d said. Things were tense between them after that for years, though for their parents’ sake they both tried to stay civil at family gatherings. It was only after she ran for Senate, and won, that he reached out to her again. Suddenly he was proud of his sister, a victorious party leader. They formed a fragile truce. And now here he was, with his family in tow, his children who, as young people in their twenties, found their father’s attitudes backward and embarrassing and bragged about their aunt’s marriage on networks online that they navigated with a baffling ease. Romina was glad Felipe had come, even if, during the ceremony, he looked as if he’d just stumbled into a jungle full of beasts he could not name. Romina’s mother, meanwhile, wept with joy. Cameras flashed, some of them belonging to friends, others to journalists
covering the wedding of this congresswoman who’d voted for gay marriage, helped the law pass, and then publicly declared her intention to marry, it was a new time for Uruguay, the leftist Frente Amplio ran the nation, from the Presidency to Congress to the capital’s City Hall, and here they were, one of the first gay couples to marry legally in Uruguay, the articles would say, inevitably adding, with Uruguay being the third country in America to legalize gay marriage, after Canada and Argentina, and before the United States. The leftist papers would say it proudly, the conservative papers grudgingly. And their photographs would be in the papers. All the more reason to get out of the city. After the ceremony, they’d had a simple lunch at home, with family and friends crushed into the apartment, with nowhere to sit and a buoyant feeling in the air, and that night, as Romina was clearing dishes and secretly hoping the last guests would leave so she could finish packing for Polonio, the phone rang. It was President Mujica, calling to congratulate her on her marriage. The call was brief, warm, and jovial, as things usually were with El Pepe. A man who’d been imprisoned throughout the dictatorship, survived torture, and attempted as a young Tupamaro to overthrow the government, did not become the head of that same government without a healthy sense of humor.
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