Perla

by Carolina de Robertis

  Perhaps that was why I had come here, against the current of my own conscious mind.

  To be recognized.

  Even though nothing terrified me more than the notion of one of those kerchiefed women capturing me with her eyes, across the veils of time, opening her mouth to speak or weep or spit at the lonely, silent girl. I looked out across the empty plaza, where the invisible Madres walked with the dignity of people who know more of pain than fear. I was certain that I could almost see them; they, however, did not seem to see me. I stood at the lip of their world, small, separate. Never in my life had I felt so small.

  The breeze had disappeared, leaving the humid press of Buenos Aires air. There was a bench nearby, but I could not bring myself to sit. I stood and stood and stood.

  Alone in the house. The room is quiet. The sofa has abated its attacks. The swan dreams but does not quiver. Even the books on the shelf seem to have forged a temporary truce with their pages. His mind goes to the girl. He would like to follow her with his consciousness, to see what she is doing, where she roams, what colors pulse through her heart. But he can’t find her with his mind, and so he waits, watching the invisible dance of light and air.

  Psshhht.

  A voice from the corner of the room, from the shadows at the edge of the curtain, where he has seen Gloria’s neck and knees waver in the semidark.

  Psshhht, come.

  Again he hears it, and he could swear it is not only in his mind, not just a memory, a sound as real as the voice of the girl or the rain. Could it be? It was not the turtle, who is across the room, in the doorway, eyes closed, unflapped. The room is still. He gathers himself.

  Gloria?

  Why won’t you come?

  Gloria. Gloria. I don’t know where you are.

  Water is timeless. Search for me.

  The curtains quiver. The walls pulse. And now the light in the room is agitated, searing, bright with secrets, knifing into his mind; it can cut open anything, illuminate anything, he wants to call for her but is afraid his voice will break the spell and so he reaches out the currents of his mind to her, to Gloria, to the source of the voice inside the curtains. There is no more response. The curtains are emptied of sound. And so he reaches inward. His mind turns into a dense liquid that shimmers from within, it throbs with light and moisture, it can pour anywhere water is timeless and he closes his eyes and plunges into the dark glow behind his eyelids through which tunnels soar, he is soaring through them, slipping through gates of time and space, further and further until he is deep inside the caverns of the past and then he sees her. He is with her, Gloria, in a dark small place. The floor is dank and sticky and the smells are familiar, piss and fear and the metal undertones of blood. She is naked, there are bruises on her thighs and arms, her belly is like nothing he has ever seen, the most incredible protrusion of flesh, curved and taut and much larger than the last day he saw her blindfolded and tied to a chair in front of which he sank into a vortex of men, now the baby inside her must be planning its escape, must be torn between love for the womb and longing for more freedom than the womb can provide. Gloria let me enfold you, kiss you, save you from the spiraling abyss in your mind, but Gloria has not fallen down the spiral, she is distracted from despair, her body is too busy opening its ancient revelations, her eyes are closed, her lips are open, her hands do all the speaking as they glide across the expanse of her belly, slowly, fearlessly, her hands are lioness tongues, drawing on a thousand generations of beastly instinct to stroke and calm and cover what’s inside her, Gloria calls out to a guard, he cannot hear the voice but he can see the motion of her throat muscles, the guard takes a long time to come and when he does he wears a face too stern for his young age (he looks like a boy dressed up in his father’s suit, the ridiculous hanging sleeves) and Gloria mouths the words, they’re getting stronger, the guard shakes his head, we’ll take you when it’s time, she says it’s time, he says shut up bitch and then he’s gone. Gloria is alone, but not alone, I’m with you Gloria, can you feel my ghost-hands next to yours? fluttering across your belly? slowly, warm sweat slippery on your taut skin, time is as brittle as reality—and reality can collapse into the nightmare of this underworld that you and I were cast into where humanity does not apply to humans; if reality can collapse then so can time; I have always been here in this moment of the past, a wisp of a man, disembodied but awake, carrying memories of the future. There are three of us in this room and one will live and one will die and one, you, Gloria, I still do not know, but for now, for all the dark stench of this place, I still can’t help but revel in the joy of touching you again, of offering you the paltry futile comfort of my touch, the heave of your breath makes my fingers rise and fall, your body strains, another wave of contractions is arriving like a storm whipping the sea toward the rocks, a sea that will rage against the rocks and crash around them but will not—do you hear me, Gloria?—will not destroy.

  I was still wandering the city, with nowhere to go, walking the streets that caught the light with wide and stony arms, slowing at a café to smell fresh coffee and hear the bustling clinks of cups against spoons before continuing on. I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t want to drink or eat; the smells and sounds and sights were as much as I could stand to imbibe. The brush of a man’s perfume. A spike of laughter. A wave of car exhaust and radio blare, the gleam of sun on boutique windows, the silent mannequin alone in her boutique, a woman scowling at her watch under a dark red awning, the percussive beat of shoes on concrete and on cobblestones, a man talking to another man and gesturing angrily at the sky, a plaintive child-voice please Mamá, the smell of fresh empanadas from a shop where the cook bustled as if all of Buenos Aires had been waiting impatiently for this, his pastries, his prize. How easy it was to drown your thoughts in the swirling streams of the city. How difficult to find a toehold for your mind.

  I finally stopped on a very familiar street. Gabriel’s apartment building stood across the road. How did I get here? What are you doing, Perla? I had had no plan of coming here, I was just wandering, it must be a coincidence that the motion of my feet had brought me here. If I were on the couch for any of my peers in the psychology department, none of them, not a single one, would let me believe such a thing. Buried desires, they would say, are the strongest ones, the ones that propel our unexplained actions and form the blueprints of our dreams. And as they said this they would look victorious, thrilled to see the theories brought to life, here, before them, in this tale of a woman’s wandering feet. I had turned to textbooks in search of keys, but they only caused more problems: they made it harder to deny my own deep-sea urges and fears, without giving me the ability to escape them. I walked up to the door and rang the bell. His voice, wrapped in static, came through the grating. He was home.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me, Perla.”

  “Oh.” Undisguised surprise. “Hello.”

  “I was just in the neighborhood.” Right, of course—for what?

  “Would you like to come up?”

  “Could I?”

  He answered with a long buzz to let me through the front door.

  Upstairs, he was waiting for me in the open doorway. He smiled at me, though the smile seemed ambivalent and he didn’t kiss my cheek. “Come in.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Were you writing?”

  He shrugged. “I was.”

  I glanced around his living room. It was full of stacks of papers that had always struck me as having the upper hand in the small space, like a strange and hardy species slowly asserting its dominion. The papers had not abated since my last visit; if anything, they had grown even more chaotic and triumphant. They ruled the kitchen counter, the coffee table, the edges of the floor. Gabriel had not removed the photograph of us from his bookshelf, the one where we beamed at the camera with our faces pressed together in the living room, slightly askew because he’d taken it himself with an extended arm.
It still stood in its frame beside the larger photo of his family, the one I had studied so many times: the five of them, together in Montevideo, at an asado on the patio of their home. The two parents stood on either end, his father holding a plate of raw meat ready for the fire, his mother beaming with no makeup on, while Gabriel stood in the middle, one arm around each of his sisters. The close lean of their heads said everything. They looked as though they were that moment wordlessly hearing each other’s thoughts. Gabriel loved to talk about his sisters. He was so proud of them. Carla was now a lawyer, though still living with her parents as she could not find enough work to get a place of her own. Penélope, the youngest, was at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, studying chemistry. I had never heard a person say the word chemistry with as much tenderness as Gabriel, talking about his sister. She was five years younger than he, a gulf that surely made her seem a perennial child in his eyes. But she was two years older than I. I had brought this up only once, and Gabriel had laughed, but uneasily, and the truth was that it made me uneasy too. Neither of us ever brought it up again. I was moved by Gabriel’s closeness to his sisters, but it also roused other emotions in me, a hot and sticky tar. For a long time, I didn’t want to look at my reaction, know what was inside. Guilt was part of it. Look at that lovely family, and here I was, avoiding meeting them, refusing to join in the way he wished I would. Didn’t he deserve the kind of girlfriend he could take home to visit without so much fuss? But after some time, I finally realized what plagued me most about his sisters. It was envy. I envied him—envied them all—for having siblings, for their miraculous trust and knowledge of each other, born at the very beginning of their lives, which gave them a lifelong antidote to loneliness that an only child could never hope to have.

  Gabriel was waiting for me to speak.

  “I had to see you,” I said, before I could feel the thought in my own mind.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Does something have to be wrong to want to see you?”

  He held up his hands like a man under attack. “I didn’t say that.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know why you put up with me. The fact is, I thought you’d refuse to see me.”

  “Why?”

  “After the way I’ve treated you.”

  He picked up a lit cigarette from an ashtray, and took a long slow drag. He didn’t look at me. It was almost as though I’d said nothing at all.

  “You should be angry at me,” I said.

  “Should I?”

  “Of course.”

  “About what?”

  “Come on. You know.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  I longed for a cigarette, but it didn’t seem like the moment to ask for one, and he didn’t offer. “I shouldn’t have hung up on you the other day. And, more importantly, I shouldn’t have left you.”

  He studied me. “You’re right. You shouldn’t have.”

  It was my moment to say the words I’m sorry, but they got trapped in my throat.

  “I worried about you, Perla.”

  “You did?”

  “Why so surprised? You think when you run off and don’t say where you’re going and it’s the middle of the night and you’re far from home, people won’t worry? Sometimes I wonder about you.”

  “Sometimes I wonder about me too.”

  That seemed to soften him. “You could at least have left a note.”

  “I just had to go.”

  “Perla,” he said, gently, “nobody ever has to do anything.”

  “But they think they do.” The words hurt, thorns in my throat. “I thought I did. I’m sorry.”

  We stared at each other. Pain was naked on his face.

  “Can I have a cigarette?”

  He rooted around the clutter on the coffee table for his pack, then gave me one and took another for himself. “Here, have a seat.”

  I sat down beside him on the sofa. We lit up and took refuge in the distraction of match, flame, inhale.

  Then he said, “But I’ve been thinking. About that night. It wasn’t all your fault. I shouldn’t have pushed you so far, and for that I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t know what to say. One drop and it could all come spilling.

  “I missed you,” Gabriel said.

  “Really?”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “What do you think?”

  I had not meant it sharply, but he flinched.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not myself these days.”

  “Evidently.”

  The door to the balcony was open, and through it I heard the wail of an old U2 song, studded with the sound of passing cars. The singer still had not found what he was looking for. I could see myself with Gabriel, at 5 a.m., kissing on that balcony for the first time, the city flung wide below us like the arms of a gregarious friend.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “Not much. Let’s talk about something else. Are you writing anything new?”

  “Sort of.”

  “About the disappeared?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  I didn’t know how to ask my next question. I tried to sound casual. “What would you do if I told you one of them came back?”

  “One of who?”

  “The disappeared.”

  “From exile?”

  “From the dead.”

  “I’d kiss you.”

  I hadn’t expected this, even in a joking tone. It felt like something of an olive branch, or perhaps a guarded question. “Be serious.”

  “All right. I’d want to meet him.”

  “Or her.”

  “Right, yes, or her.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in that. In coming back from the dead.”

  “I don’t. Of course not. But isn’t this hypothetical?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well then. Hypothetically, I’d want to meet him, or meet her.” He was closer and his arm brushed mine. The light touch made my whole body crave him; I wondered whether he felt it too. “In any case, I might not believe in it, but does that really mean a thing can’t happen? No one believed in disappearance, either. The world does things to people regardless of what we think is possible.”

  I opened my mouth, but said nothing.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “It just came into my mind, that’s all.”

  Gabriel looked worried. “Something’s going on with you.”

  I looked away, out of the window, at the younger couple that was not yet a couple and was no longer there.

  “Tell me what’s really on your mind.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have the words.”

  “Start anywhere.”

  “That’s not the problem.” I imagined his face as he listened to a story of a drenched and dripping figure in my living room, a man who was not a man, who broke in without breaking anything, really just appeared, who smelled terrible and shed constant water and had memories that proved he had been alive and also when and in what circumstance, if there could be such a thing as proof in this mad story of a not-man who eats water, whom I could not stop thinking about, who had drowned my life and all the things of which I thought my life was made. “I just can’t.”

  Very gently, he said, “Try me.”

  “I will, one day. I promise.” And I meant it. It occurred to me that if there were any person in this world who had a chance of taking in this story, of holding it close to the body with both hands, it would be he.

  “As long as you’re all right,” he said, and placed his hand over mine.

  I stared at his hand. Hard as it was to believe, he seemed sincere. He was not thinking of himself, or at least not of the anger or the slights or even the uncertainty of days to come. I couldn’t understand why he cared so much, when even I could stand myself only because I had no choic
e, because I was trapped inside my skin and could not peel it off and run away. Here was the hand that had reached inside me and found what I truly was, a feat my friends could not accomplish since my veneer was so convincing, a feat my mother seemed to avoid with a resistance that bordered on distaste, a feat my father had perhaps attempted but failed in—why?—perhaps for fear of things that lurked inside our bond. That Gabriel should have reached and felt—and that his hand should still return to me, still arrive on mine, like this, warm, supple, with no trace of disgust. That such a thing could be.

  “Gabriel.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish we could begin again.”

  I leaned in to his body. The air seemed to rush and form a shroud around us, dense and humming. His body told me with its bright electric language that desire was still there, that the gap between us could be easily dissolved, was already dissolving, and I turned my mouth in to his neck and closed the circle. He allowed me in, enveloped me, his hands were in my hair, under my shirt, my shirt was gone, his mouth returned to mine, my breasts returned to him, all the flesh that wanted to come home, he tried to talk but I said Shhh, shhhhh querido, don’t say anything, and even here he acquiesced, even this he gave me, sounds free of the cage of language, bodies free of words, he let me strip him, let me take him as a canvas for my deepest colors. I wanted to exalt him with the shout of my bare hands. His tongue spoke to my neck, his hands spoke to my skin, his sex spoke inside me with a force that could surely defy gravity, keep a human from falling, shoot a body to the stars and spill its secrets into black and endless space.

  Afterward, I lay curled on him, wrapped in afternoon light and carnal smells and the noise of traffic through an open window, through which our sounds had surely reached the street.

  “Perlita.”

  “Mmmm …”

  “What are we doing?”

  “Basking.”

  “Yes. But where do we go from here?”

  “Wherever you want.”

  “Are you coming back to me?”

  “Would you let me?”

  “Conceivably.”

  “Conceivably? That doesn’t sound so good.”