He is still with Gloria, has been with her for an eternity, a swath of liquid moments that spill over any boundaries of time, she has been laboring and laboring and now the guards have come with a bed on wheels and a blindfold and chains, no please not chains but no one hears him, they tie her down and mask her eyes and roll her down a hall of gloomy doors that look the same and have no names or numbers to identify them or what lurks behind them, he follows them into an elevator that sinks down to the basement floor and down a hall into a bare room where two female nurses wait, the guards deposit their cargo and depart. Gloria is transfigured by the journey, she is naked and restrained and cannot see, the strong tongues of her hands cannot run across her body, and he cannot touch her either in the sour light of this room, he is pushed against the wall and cannot reach her, he is helpless to do anything but watch, Gloria is pinned and open, her belly huge as a pale whale, she is heaving like a beached whale, she sweats, her mouth is wrenched into a moan but he can’t hear it and perhaps the moan is its own whale song, a sound that could travel for miles under the sea and be understood, recognized, an underwater music that speaks everything that never can be spoken and yet must be, must be, hurls out of her wideflung throat just as something else hurls out elsewhere, hurls slowly slowly through the tunnel of her flesh, her legs are spread wide open to the air and to the nurses who won’t speak to her, they’ve been instructed not to do so, they know nothing about this woman exposed on the table except what they can guess, and they try not to guess, they are in a basement with no windows and it’s dark and the first nurse would like some fresh air and a cigarette, the second nurse would like to bury her face in her man’s chest and feel his hands rip off her dress and make her forget this place, this woman, stripped of name and clothes and sight but isn’t she lucky she’s allowed to scream although they cannot understand the sound as they aren’t underwater, never have been, their touch is cool and professional, they don’t remind her to push, they don’t say you can do this, push, Gloria, push, Gloria, you can do this look you’re doing it, he forms the words he never had the chance to say but Gloria cannot hear them and she also does not need them, she is not just pushing, she is bursting, breaking, growling, swelling, crashing, he has never seen her face like this, she looks like she could tear the world to pieces, her sex is large and throbbing and it splits open like a fruit that cannot bear its own ripeness, it widens until he glimpses flesh inside that is not hers, smooth, hairy, glistening, just a tiny teardrop patch of flesh at first and then more as Gloria’s sex opens even further, becoming larger, the second nurse wraps gloved fingers around the head as it slips out, there is a face, there are cries, he cannot hear them but he sees the tiny fishmouth pop open and the eyes crunch (and there she is, the girl, you won’t recall this place or this moment or your very first cries but they are yours and perhaps this moment will stay with you as you grow up, forming a silent nest inside your body, in your chest or nape or hips or spine), and Gloria’s face changes again, falls open in wonder, she arches back as far as the chains will let her and the little body abandons her like a moth flying from its broken chrysalis. The nurses examine the baby, hold her upside down and smack her buttocks as if to ensure that she is made of materials solid enough to withstand the pressures of this world. Gloria breathes with her whole body, and when the afterbirth has come and gone and the nurses sponge her down and dry her off and the baby’s cries seem to have settled into whimpers, she tells them thank you, the water is warm and the hands gentle but when she says boy or girl? boy or girl? the nurses, well-trained and afraid, wheel her from the room without an answer.
On my way back from Gabriel’s apartment, before returning to the house with its wet guest, I stopped at a neighborhood grocery store, where all the cans and cuts of meat stood in a fog. I could barely see the aisles because of what had happened to the air inside my mind, how unspeakably clear it had become. On the outside I was placing items in my basket like an ordinary woman in an ordinary world, but inside the world had cracked wide open and out swirled its stories in an unrelenting mesh of obvious truths, from genesis to denouement.
Once there was a boy whose name was Héctor. He was little and his father hit him and broke the jaw of the turtle that he loved, but he was a good boy who grew up to work hard and be proud of his pressed uniform and the strength he swore to use to serve his country. He would be the kind of man whose chest would glint with medals and whose presence stirred the perfect mix of awe and fear. He would hide his tender places and reserve them for his future child—only for her—to see. He married a girl called Luisa who had found her heart in the galleries of Madrid and then dashed it against a black and maroon canvas, leaving a sour cavity in its place, but who still mustered enough emotion to make vows to him in the most expensive wedding dress her family could find, a dress that should only portend great fruitfulness and multiplying of their goodness as the holy word had deemed for them at the very start of time.
They longed for a child, but no child came in the first years, a fact that brought surprise and a slim thread of gossip to their circles—and then the country changed and their dream came true, thanks to the intercession of God and to the natural order of things. They had a girl, or rather, they could not have her so they stole her from people whose existence was being erased as though they’d only lived in pencil. Surely, in their minds, it was not so much a stealing as a saving, an act of grace that followed an inevitable erasure and that, wrapped in silence, would itself disappear in the forgotten folds of time. The stolen girl or saved girl grew up without knowledge of the bitter glue that made her family, and she loved with her whole heart the man with the pressed uniform and wounded turtle, a man who sat beside her singing lullabies in the dark, smelling of scotch, and when he asked her in the dark Do you love your dad? she said Yes, and when he said And will you always? no matter what? she said, again, Yes, yes, and meant it with every cell of her body, even when, much later, she learned about the bodies he had treated like pencil strokes intruding on the canvas of the world, even then she said the Yes that surely made her monstrous—a monster-girl, deformed by love—but that could not be helped, because this too, this loving of one’s father, is the natural order of things.
And now the girl, in fact a woman but inside her skin the girl, still and always that same girl, walked down the street from the grocery store to the house that was not only haunted by a wet ghost of the past but had been haunted all her life by so many lies and shadows. And her feet carried her home or to the place she had been primed to always think of as her home, her feet braver than the rest of her, braver than the hands that gripped the grocery bags too tightly, the eyes that stung, the throat pulled shut by unseen string, the knees that melted as she fumbled with her key inside the lock and pushed open the door to find the smell of rotting apples and bright fish still present to surround her, and inside the house, the red pool that had held her as a small girl who bathed in lies, and there, inside the pool, the man or not-man whom she had longed to see all day and dreaded also and who, she now saw with her fresh and terrible lucidity, was beautiful. Beautiful. The drops along his skin resembled tears.
She arrives home at last, and stands in the center of the room without putting down her bags. She stares at him with an animal intensity. She stares at the water that surrounds him, high and deep and warm.
He thinks, It’s over. She’s tired of me. I’ll apologize, I’ll leave if I must, even though there’s nowhere to go.
But then she comes to his side. Her eyes are wet.
Very quietly, she says, I know who you are.
THREE
11
Cradle
And the room becomes a cradle of light, holding them close. The walls and furniture disappear into shadows beyond the small sphere that holds everything and anything that matters, just him and the girl.
A thousand questions swarm in him. He cannot form them all at once. How do you know?
For many reasons, she says. The fa
ct that you came here, to this house of all the houses in the country. And things about my family. And your eyes.
He longs to see his eyes in a mirror, if only to search them for hints of her, the annunciation of her coming in the slope and hue.
Now I want to ask you everything.
Ask me.
I don’t know where to start.
Anywhere.
What was her name?
Your mother?
She is silent.
Her name was Gloria.
What was she like?
His mind explodes with light, and he says, She was beautiful. Stubborn. Sometimes she laughed in her sleep. She talked too loud in restaurants, everybody looked.
The girl says nothing.
He tries to gather more memories for her, tries to gather words to translate memory into sound. The gathering is laborious. He says, She came from Azul. She moved to the city when she was thirteen. We met in a bookstore, in the middle of the night. She liked to take long walks and get lost on purpose, just to see what she would find around the next corner and the next.
How old was she?
About your age.
And she disappeared?
They took her. When they took me, they took her.
He stops telling. At the brink of his lips is the image of her tied to a chair, bruised, blindfolded, pregnant, before a dozen black boots pushed him down. But he doesn’t want to tell the image. He leaves the vague words took her in its place. It is an act of protection, a paltry replacement for the many years in which he could not fold his wings around the girl, but it is all he has. Instead, he says, You look like her.
I do?
You have her mouth, her hair.
Her hand rises to her lips, instinctively. And when she—when they took her. She was carrying me?
Yes. She was carrying you.
She stops, seems to gather herself to go on. When you arrived here. Did you already know?
No.
How long have you known?
Some days.
You got here anyway, though, without knowing.
Yes.
How can that be?
How can any of this be?
She moves to the sofa and lights a cigarette. They are quiet together. The air is unbearably full; it shimmers with a translucent weight that strains to spill out. He feels the physical distance between them as an ache throughout his skin, the little nest of their world stretched out too far, holding too much; but then, as if she too felt the pull, she comes back to the pool and sits close beside him. He is relieved. Smoke curls toward the ceiling, and she watches it with the focus of a hunter.
What are you thinking now? he asks.
I can’t say it.
Why not?
Some things should not be said aloud.
No?
No.
All things can be spoken.
Bullshit.
It’s true.
I’m afraid.
Say it anyway.
I was thinking about you. If you hadn’t died. How it would have been for me. Who I would have been.
You would have been yourself.
But not the same self I am now.
What makes the self?
Experiences. Acculturation.
What else?
I don’t know.
What’s within you.
She says, I don’t know what was within me and what got put there by my life as it was lived.
You can never know that.
No.
But there is a you that was there before you were born and that nobody shaped or changed or could have changed, not Gloria, not me, not the others.
How do you know that?
From the water.
What water?
The water I was in after I died.
She is silent.
Who would you like to have been?
I don’t know, she says. Right now I can’t even tell who I’ll be in the morning. I feel completely naked, completely stripped of my own life. Like I’ve taken off the lies and there’s nothing left. I don’t know how else to explain it.
Her cigarette goes out; she lights another, and as she does, the small flame briefly illuminates her face. And he thinks, I would give anything, anything, ten years with my soft parts tied to their machines, to have stayed with you and watched you grow in place of the man you call your father.
Tell me about him.
Who?
Your other father.
She turns away.
He loves you?
Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know what that word means anymore.
He was good to you?
Yes. Overall. He has been a good father.
He moves his toes underwater, curls them shut.
He sang me to sleep. I was always clothed and fed. He wanted what was best for me, or what he thought was best.
It is not the whole story—he can feel in his bones that the portrait is incomplete, like a face cast half in light and half in shadow, and because of this, or perhaps because of something else, he longs to curse the man who could rightly be called a beast, an imposter, a prison warden disguised in father’s clothing. He rallies all his strength into the task of reining himself in. He must not burst, he must not rage, and in any case he should be glad to hear that, in her early years, she experienced some doses of paternal tenderness, whatever their source. He must be gentle with the girl; he must control himself, be understanding. He must accept—must strain to accept—that she is not only discovering her parents on this night, but also losing them, or rather, losing the other parents who for years and years were the only ones she had. And no matter who they are or what they’ve done, they are her parents also. They raised her. Their fingerprints are indelible in her mind. He rails against this fact, in full knowledge that the fact will not be moved.
And you still love him.
Would you hate me for it?
Never.
How can you be sure?
I am sure.
Her voice turns to a whisper. Did you see him there?
Where?
In the place you were when you disappeared.
He glances at the wedding photo on the bookshelf, at the groom with the searching, restless gaze. No. I don’t think so.
She looks relieved.
But most of the time my eyes were covered, I couldn’t see.
Oh.
He was there?
I don’t know. It might not have been the same place. She lowers her head, and hair curtains her face. You will. You’ll hate me.
How could I ever?
Because of him.
But you’re not him.
I’m his daughter—or I was. I thought I was.
His hands are not your hands.
But I was here.
You were a child.
I’ve defended him. I still defend him, she says, and pain throbs in her voice. I found out about his work and still said nothing.
It doesn’t matter.
How could it not?
Because of who you really are.
And who is that? Who is that?
A memory juts into his mind, of the first time that he sensed her presence on this earth when she was still a scrap of flesh that had slipped into Gloria’s body like the most carnal and tenacious miracle. He says, You are the glow.
What? What glow?
I’ll try to tell you. Let me give you a memory, I will enter it and take you with me and tell it to you as it happens. It might take time. Will you listen?
She has been crying. She nods.
He shuts his eyes and dives into his mind.
He was terrified, not ready, but Gloria had room for nothing but delight. Six weeks, she said, the heart has formed two chambers, it is beating. A head has formed.
With eyes and ears?
No ears. Not yet. Just hollows where the aural passages will be.
Ah.
Stop looking so scared.
&
nbsp; Who says I’m scared?
She laughed. I do. Come here.
He approached her and she put his hand to her belly, which felt the same as always, smooth and taut and warm, coaxing him down into the waist of her skirt.
Shhp, not now.
Why not?
I want you to feel my belly.
I feel it, it’s sexy, you’re sexy.
Not that. The baby.
Embryo.
She rolled her eyes. Just listen for it with your hand.
It’s too early for that.
It’s not. Just listen.
She was beautiful, he was distracted by the late afternoon light stroking her neck. This memory is vivid, rife with light, he can see the way it slants in through the tiny kitchen window, she sat at the kitchen table looking up at him with parted lips, he could never understand how a shy man like him had landed in the arms of such a woman. In a home with her, married, contemplating this phenomenon, six weeks. He obliged her, placed his hand on her belly, waited. He felt nothing, no motion, no change. He tried to listen with his hand: six weeks are you in there? can you feel me? will you know me when you finally come out? He imagined a tiny being with eyes and no ears, you can’t hear, you can’t see, or if you can there’s only the dark inside of Gloria, your nose your mouth your hands are coming and Gloria and I will be your template, and we will wipe your caca, wake to your cries, will you ever let us sleep? And then he felt it. A delicate glow beneath his palm, as if the nerves inside his hands had suddenly gained a seventh sense. As if his nerves themselves had found a spark in which they recognized themselves, a light in Gloria’s body that was not the normal lust or warmth he had felt in her before; and it could have been his own imagination, but he could swear that near the center of his palm, a few centimeters away, buried in his wife’s flesh, there lay an essence that was linked to him and yet was not him, that was linked to Gloria but was not her, and that that essence glowed in a manner that had never in the history of the universe occurred anywhere else, but that belonged here, would be utterly itself, unique as a face or fingerprint but far more distilled, now, in its primeval state, unformed yet complete, beaming toward his hand, a pure unadulterated essence caught in a long slow gesture of growth.
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