The next morning, Romina woke beside Diana and watched her sleep for a while, a miracle. This woman who had blended lives with her. Who asked her every morning to share her dreams. You, Romina always wanted to say, and sometimes did. You are my dream. Or she might say I dreamed a beautiful Paraguayan let me kiss her breasts. Oh, am I supposed to be jealous? No, Romina would answer, flattered. And Diana would protest, dreams are powerful, amor, you’re not taking this seriously, but the swatting away of hands was playful and often turned into something else. Afterward, the dreams poured out, and Romina was always shocked by Diana’s uncanny insights.
“Good morning,” Diana said, without opening her eyes.
“Good morning, esposa.”
“¡Esposas! Such a strange word. Meaning wives, but also handcuffs.”
“I know. It’s the patriarchy.”
“Have we joined it now? The patriarchy?”
“It certainly doesn’t feel that way to me.”
“Me either.” Diana’s eyes were wide open now.
There was so much to do, to get ready, to reach the station on time for the bus to Polonio. The older Romina got, the longer everything seemed to take, and at fifty-eight years old she knew it was unwise to linger in bed instead of starting to prepare. And yet, she longed to stay where she was, to savor Diana’s skin beneath her fingers, to hold this moment deep inside herself. Why on earth had she planned a group honeymoon?
But she knew why.
Diana relaxed into the pleasure of Romina’s touch, and Romina thought, oh hell, we’ll be late, so be it, and then Diana said, “You’re thinking of her.”
“What?”
“Aren’t you?”
“How can you tell?”
“I know you, querida.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do not be. How can I be jealous of the dead?” She said it playfully, but when she saw the expression on Romina’s face, she added, “You’ll always love her. And you should. That’s part of why I want you, what I treasure about you: that you can’t get a woman out of you once she’s found her way in.”
Romina squeezed Diana’s hand as she thought of this now, many hours later, as the jeep pulled onto the Playa de las Calaveras and Polonio came into distant view. The sight still took her breath away. She could die happy in this moment. She thought this, sometimes, when beauty struck her from within, that if this was the last of it she’d have no reason to complain. Death hovered close now, every waking hour, despite her good health, a presence that had no need to seduce you in order to slide between your sheets. A presence that grazed your flesh like a promise, the only one that would definitely be kept. Coming fast or coming slow, it was coming for her, as it did for everyone, whether you ran from it or hurled yourself in its direction as Malena had done, as she had failed to stop Malena from doing. The sand and waves roared past her fast, faster, already they were turning onto the cape itself and then they were approaching the center of Polonio, the crossroads that now had the warmth and bustle of a town plaza. The jeep came to a halt. Tourists began to spill from their seats, gazing around them at the stalls full of seashell jewelry, the brightly colored signs, the restaurants boasting fish empanadas and beer, the beach and ocean and lighthouse beyond. The travelers’ expressions seemed satisfied, as if to say, yes, indeed, it’s paradise. But as Romina descended from the top deck, holding carefully on to the ladder, she thought of the first time she’d brought Diana here, just the two of them, soon after they became a couple. Those had been heady days, Diana’s first time seeing the ocean, their first time entering the waves together, a quiet unleashing for them both. On that trip, they’d learned that Benito, the náufrago, the shipwreck survivor, had died of a heart attack, and his son had taken over running the Rusty Anchor.
“Imagine that life,” Romina had said. “Living in a place because your father was a náufrago.”
“But, my love,” Diana had asked, fingers in her lover’s hair, “aren’t we all children of náufragos?”
* * *
*
Paz received them at the door of La Proa, book in one hand, kitchen knife in the other.
“Where’s Virginia?” La Venus asked.
“Down in the water. I told her I’d meet her later, I wanted to welcome you all.”
“Brrr! A swim?” Flaca grimaced. “In October?”
“It’s warm for October.”
“Climate change,” Romina said, kissing Paz in greeting.
“There she goes,” said Paz, grinning. “Even on her honeymoon, she can’t stop worrying about the world.”
“Fighting for the world,” Romina said.
“How romantic,” said Paz.
“That it is,” said Diana, and all the women laughed together.
“I can’t wait to swim,” said La Venus. “Cold or no. Shall we all go?”
Soon they were walking toward the beach, avoiding the village center, still full of tourists from the recently arrived jeep, taking pictures and fingering merchandise and eating fish empanadas. There was no way, Paz thought, that any one of them could ever love this place as she did, that they could even see it clearly, but then again, she too had once been an outsider here, flung in from somewhere else. Whenever her mind grumbled for too long about the hippie boys with their blond dreadlocks and guitars and designer windbreakers or the Brazilian businessmen looking down their noses at the hippies, she thought of El Lobo, heard his voice, come back and I’ll tell you the story. El Lobo was gone now. Polonio was still sleepy when he died. Now his grandson, Javier, ran a hostel behind the store and the beds were full throughout the summer.
They reached the shore, blue everywhere, flung open majestically before them. The waves were cold but Paz welcomed their bite as she waded in. Flaca was yelping and protesting the cold, Romina threatening to splash her, Diana gliding in to the neck. Paz had seen this before. Malena submerging her body, the first to surrender—that very first time—and there it was, the pain, the always pain. Malena, the water is cold today, I’m heading in deeper, cold, do you see, Malena? If she stayed near her friends they might read her thoughts, and that didn’t seem right. This was a honeymoon. She looked for Virginia, and when she saw her out on the rocks she swam toward her.
“How are the brides?”
“Happy,” Paz said. “Glowing.”
“As they were yesterday,” Virginia said. “It was such a beautiful ceremony.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Paz said. When a group of gay rights activists had started meeting at La Piedrita, she’d thought to herself, gay rights? what rights? Marriage had seemed preposterous, an imported idea that had started in the first world but had nothing to do with Uruguay, where gay couples didn’t even tell their coworkers or their families what they were. These younger people spent much more time on the Internet than Paz did, and knew a great deal about what was true for people like them in other parts of the world and therefore was possible. She’d gladly helped them, offered them the space in which to organize, at first touched by their earnestness and soon amazed by their collective power, at the tenacity with which they fought for their dream, unhampered by memories of what it took to survive the Process, which, of course, they’d never had to do. “A gay wedding—it still sounds strange.”
“I know.”
“Like some bizarre experiment. Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Ha! Don’t let the brides hear you say that!”
Virginia threw her head back as she laughed. Paz swam closer, kissed her neck.
“Mmmm, they could be watching.”
“So?”
“You’re the worst,” Virginia said, biting Paz’s ear.
The waves enfolded them, held them up, and it amazed Paz that no matter how much her body changed—she was fifty-two years old, larger, heavier, rounder in some places and flattened in others, yet
steady in a new way, as if time had rooted her in the soil of truth—the ocean’s body was as fresh as ever, and as ancient as ever, knowing just how to surround her. Wrap her perfectly. Press her with the gentlest force. Press her and her lover together, in a rich embrace. She could hear her friends’ voices in the distance, yelping from the cold, arguing cheerfully about how long they’d be able to stand it. “Are you sad that we’re not marrying, too?”
“Not sad, no.”
“But you want to? Because you know I would.”
“You’ve made that clear.”
“All right.”
Virginia was silent for a while. “Paz,” she finally said, “you’re mine. We’re bound to each other. And the thing that binds us together is holy. No matter what.”
Paz ached inside. Three years now they’d been together and she never tired of the way Virginia said the word holy. After Flaca and Virginia broke up, years ago, they’d fallen out of touch, and Paz hadn’t seen her for almost twenty years. Then they’d run into each other on Playa Ramírez, at the annual festival of Iemanjá, where thousands of Montevideans thronged to make offerings to the Yoruba goddess of the sea. Candles shone in pits dug into the sand, bright with prayers. White flowers sprouted and swayed in the waves. Watermelons rolled out into the water, sticky with molasses and hope. Little boats struck out laden with offerings, pushed forward by believers dressed in white. Song erupted along the shore. Priestesses offered cleansings to strangers who lined up for their turns, while vendors hawked popcorn, candles, and prayer cards embossed with a picture of Iemanjá rising from the water, stars spilling from her hands. Paz had gone to watch the lights set out on the water and to hear the chants of devotees, whose faith she found moving even though she didn’t share it. She spied Virginia in a long white dress and head wrap, sitting at the edge of a hole in which she’d lit candles with her friends. They talked. They kept talking. Paz knew immediately that she wanted to stay at the edge of that hole as long as Virginia would let her, and this turned out to be a long time. Weeks later, as they lay naked together, Virginia told her what Iemanjá meant to her, sacred and female and black, no separation, all vast like the ocean, all holy and all one. Like the energy we just generated together, which also belongs to the gods. And Paz had thought of the Polonio ocean, how vast it was, unknowable. How the first time she saw it, at sixteen, had been her first time feeling free. Ocean as church, she thought. Woman’s body as church. She had so much to say to Virginia, then, but only said it with her hands.
“You,” she said now, holding Virginia close inside the body of the ocean. “You are what’s holy.”
“I don’t need the piece of paper,” Virginia said into her ear.
“Well, if you want it.” Though Paz herself didn’t want it. She wanted only the word holy spoken in this woman’s voice, and the woman herself, enfolded in waters that reached to the horizon and beyond.
* * *
*
That night, they held a wedding feast: Flaca grilled chorizos, lamb, fish, eggplant, bell peppers, and sweet potatoes, while the others prepared the salad, rice, and sangria. La Venus had made alfajores the day before, back in the city, and brought these out as dessert. As they ate, the lighthouse beam swooped over them, swish—swish, as it had done for so many years.
“Is it just me,” Flaca said, “or have the tourists gotten even ruder this time?”
“I know. Polonio’s changed so much.”
“They think they own the beach.”
“In other ways, though, it hasn’t changed at all. The ocean is the same.”
“Remember when we had the beach to ourselves?”
“Remember when we could stay out on the beach all afternoon because there was no hole in the ozone?”
“Now we’ll be lucky if the ozone hole is our only environmental problem,” Romina said, though she too chafed at the restriction of having to go inside and avoid the sun’s rays between noon and 5:00 p.m. every afternoon. The UV ray warnings had started as a three-hour block, and had now expanded to five. Gone were the unfettered rhythms of the old days, when you sunned yourself and swam whenever you liked. “Sea levels are rising everywhere. All of Polonio could be swallowed up one day.”
“Do you think our house could end up underwater?” asked Paz. “It’ll be like those shipwrecks that are out there right now, on the ocean floor. Can you imagine future generations diving under to find our things? Calling them treasures?”
“I’m scared to imagine those future generations,” said Romina, thinking of the debate in the Senate about what to do about climate change, the helplessness of a tiny nation whipped by harsh new weather patterns sparked in another hemisphere. They caused the problem, some of her fellow senators said, they should pay to fix it, a line of reasoning that would leave them ideologically pure but ripe for disaster. Her dreams were haunted by violent floods and worsening storms.
“Our house won’t ever be underwater,” Flaca scoffed. “It’s too high up.”
“The whole of Cabo is vulnerable.”
“I can’t accept that.”
“It’ll happen whether or not you accept it. That’s the thing about climate change.”
“Oh God, chicas,” La Venus said, “can we please not talk about this? Enough doomsday. This is supposed to be a happy occasion!”
“All right then, no dreary talk of the future.”
“I think the future is promising,” said La Venus. “I mean, look at this: you two are married.”
“Hear, hear!” said Paz. “Now, that’s more like it.”
“If only our young selves could see it,” La Venus said. “Do you ever think about what would happen if you could collapse time and talk to your past self?”
“Only when I’m very high,” said Paz.
“I’m serious! The past versions of us could be here in this very room, listening.”
“I’m sure they are,” Virginia said.
“They wouldn’t believe it,” Flaca said, “about the marriage. Not ever.”
“I’d tell them about it just to see their faces,” said La Venus.
“Cantoras in shock.”
“Back when we were cantoras,” Flaca said. “When we didn’t have the other words. Now we have all these words and nobody’s a cantora anymore.”
“That’s true,” Paz said, thinking of the young activists in La Piedrita, with their gay and lesbiana and bisexual and queer and amusement at learning the word cantora from her, as if it were a curiosity, a brooch from your great-aunt’s drawer that you’d never wear yourself. “But isn’t it better to have more words? Not to have to speak in code about ourselves?”
“Of course it’s good. Of course it’s better. It’s just—” Flaca strained to think. “I don’t know. Don’t you ever feel like you’re disappearing?”
“We’re not the ones who disappeared,” Romina said. And then she said, “Malena.”
Silence spread through the Prow.
“Tonight she’s been gone,” Romina said, looking right at Flaca, “for twenty-six years.”
Flaca struggled for what seemed like hours to find her voice. “You remembered.”
“You thought I wouldn’t?”
Flaca couldn’t speak.
“I always remember the date.” Romina stared at the rustic wall. “It destroyed me, you know, not to go to her funeral.”
“I know,” Flaca said quickly, though she hadn’t known. In all this time, they’d never spoken of it directly. Her entire body felt raw, as if stripped of skin. “I understand.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” Flaca said, though all she could be sure of was that the past couldn’t be rewritten, that reassurance was a kindness she could give.
In the silence that followed, the lighthouse beam came to wash them with such stealth and persistence that it almost seemed as if l
ight could be made sound.
Diana was holding Romina now, behind her, rubbing her back.
Watching them, Flaca thought of the early years, how long it had taken to forgive Diana for what she’d catalyzed, how long it had taken to see her formidable heart. Diana had never blamed her for the rancor, kept the door to friendship open until Flaca was finally ready to walk through. Had the situation been reversed, she doubted that she’d have been capable of the same.
La Venus broke the silence. “Remember the first time? When we were just starting to become us—how she swam out farther than anyone?”
“She was like that. Quiet but it always seemed that she saw further than the rest of us.”
“Further into things.”
“Exactly.”
“And yet there was so much she never told us.”
“That’s the part that kills me,” La Venus said. “That she didn’t speak, that she didn’t trust us.”
“Maybe it wasn’t that she didn’t trust,” Paz said, “but that she just couldn’t do it. If we’d known—” But Paz stopped, thinking of the letter, where everything had come out, all the horrors, all the secrets, the clinic and the docks, the Nazis and Belén, the hiding and the longing and the pain, all of it in a jumbled roar that arrived too late. The most important word, the first one, still waking Paz in the night like a spear: Friends—
“How could we have known?” Romina said very quietly. “I’ve asked myself this too. I failed her more than anyone else. I was the one right next to her. I kept trying to help her by suggesting she reach out to her parents. I’m so ashamed of that now. I didn’t imagine, I couldn’t know. But look, I never meant to kill her. You have to believe me, Flaca.”
“I do,” said Flaca. The room had tipped and spun, she felt a fear of falling even though she was sitting on the ground.
“I can’t go back and change what happened,” Romina said. She leaned against Diana, a steady anchor. “I can’t spend my life staring down the gun barrel of the past.”
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