The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  “I found it—the miracle!” Carlita called. “There’s a baby in a tree!”

  Artigas stopped strumming, the couples stopped kissing, and Alfonso the shopkeeper lifted his groggy head from the bench.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Let’s go see.”

  They went to the chapel first, to tell Doña Rosa. Stained light eased over their heads and sidled to the pews, down the aisle, over Doña Rosa’s pious back. Carlita dipped into holy water and made a rushed sign of the cross. Artigas followed suit for her sake (she was so pretty).

  “Doña Rosa,” Carlita whispered. “The miracle. There’s a baby in a ceibo!”

  Doña Rosa looked up from her rosary. “A baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.” She frowned. “What a blessing.”

  They rode the dirt path toward the eastern edge of Tacuarembó. Artigas settled into the hot equine muscle beneath his legs. The sleepless night had left a veneer of alert exhaustion and he didn’t want to rest. He would ride his horse to the edge of town; he would ride his horse to the edge of the world; it was a new century, he would ride and ride, and a baby could be, no it couldn’t, impossible, but if it was. How bright the colors were around him, the green and gold of summer grass, the hot blue of morning sky, the dark-wood brown of the ranchitos out of which more people came to join their travels. Kerchiefed women craned their heads through curtained doorways for the news, then left embers glowing alone in cooking pots. Men drinking mate in the sun untied their horses and scooped their children into saddles.

  The group doubled, and doubled again, growing the way armies do as they sweep through towns. By the time they arrived at the ceibo tree, the sun had brushed its zenith and begun to slide. The tree towered over the eastern well, and at the very top, thirty meters from solid earth, grasping a slim branch, there perched a girl.

  She was not quite a year old. Her skin was two shades lighter than hot chocolate and she had high cheekbones and chaotic hair that spilled to her naked waist. Her eyes were round and moist like birthday cakes. She looked neither afraid nor eager to descend.

  Artigas threw his head back. He burned to catch her eye. Mírame, he thought.

  “She’s a witch!” one woman said.

  “A bruja sent us a brujita!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Doña Rosa. “She’s an angel. She’s here to bless Tacuarembó.”

  “With what? A rain of baby caca?”

  “That’s no angel, it’s just a child.”

  “A dirty one.”

  “Maybe she’s one of the Garibaldi kids. They’re always climbing trees.”

  “Only the Garibaldi boys climb trees.”

  “And they only climb ombús.”

  “That’s true. How could anyone get up this trunk?”

  The necks of fifty tacuaremboenses craned up at the girl. The tree looked impossible to scale. If it had been a native ombú, with its low, inviting branches, there would have been no miracle or legend or ninety years of carrying the story. But here was the tallest ceibo known to Tacuarembó, its lowest branch many meters from the ground. No one could imagine an adult shimmying up with a baby in her arms, let alone a baby’s lonely climb.

  “Very well. Doña Rosa, you’ve got your miracle.”

  “Our miracle.”

  “Miracles are miracles, what more can we say?”

  “Only thanks be to God.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. I certainly do.”

  “I meant no harm.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Look, everybody, let’s not quarrel.”

  “We’ve got to find a way to get her down.”

  “A ladder!”

  “Let’s shake her out.”

  “There’s no ladder big enough—I know, I made them all.”

  “I could climb the tree—”

  “You can barely climb onto your horse, hombre!”

  “We should wait for a sign—”

  “And what? Leave her up there for another century?”

  The infant sat high above the din, impassive, barely moving. Artigas thought: Mírame. She turned her head, this way, that way, and their eyes met. You. You. Their gaze had flesh, their gaze had strength, their gaze was a branch between them, invisible, unbreakable, bound to last forever, or so it seemed.

  “I know her,” he shouted. “She’s my sister.”

  Fifty faces turned toward the boy.

  “Your sister?”

  “What sister?”

  “Ay … he means …”

  “Poor thing.”

  “Look, Artigas.” Carlita Robles knelt beside him. “This can’t be her.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s been gone too long.”

  “She couldn’t have survived.”

  “Little girls can’t survive alone.”

  “But she did,” Artigas said.

  Carlita and Doña Rosa exchanged a glance.

  “Besides,” he added, “if it’s not her, where did this girl come from?”

  Doña Rosa opened her mouth, then closed it. No one spoke. Artigas looked up again at the infant in the treetop. She stared back. She was far away, close close to heaven, yet he could swear he saw the texture of her eyes: dark pools, wide awake, red veins in the whites. He imagined himself soaring up to meet her.

  “Wait for me,” he called into the foliage.

  He mounted his horse and galloped down the hill.

  He found Tía Tita outside their hut, plucking a chicken. He dismounted in a rush and told her everything about the morning plaza, the crowd around the ceibo, the child up on the branch. She listened. She tilted her face to the sun. Her lips moved without making any sound. She wiped her wide hands on her apron and untied it. “Let’s go.”

  By the time they arrived at the ceibo, most of the town had formed a ring around it. Women had brought their children, children had brought their great-grandparents, men had brought wives, the stray dogs from the plaza had brought one another. Horses grazed. Doña Rosa had sacrificed the front of her dress to kneel on the ground and pray intensely with her rosary that had been blessed sixteen years earlier by the pope. The shopkeeper’s son brandished a wooden flute. Dogs barked and brayed. Several mate gourds and baskets of empanadas circulated from hand to hand. Arguments rose and broke and rose again, about the girl, about the pastries, about who drank how much and did what with whom last night in the plaza. The infant stared at them from the high foliage, which held her like an adoptive guardian’s arms.

  Tía Tita and Artigas slid from their shared saddle. The crowd grew quiet. Tía Tita was not tall, but she was large somehow, hard-jawed, commanding. “Leave us alone,” she said, looking at the baby but speaking to the throng. No one wanted to miss the story, break up the party, let someone else fix the problem. But Tía Tita—odd, unfathomable, needed for the cure of old men’s creaks and the froth on soldiers’ mouths—could not be easily denied. Slowly, grudgingly, the crowd dispersed.

  “You too, Artigas.”

  He did as he was told. Horseflesh moved damply below his thighs. The air was hot and thick and heavy. He joined a cluster that had formed in the shade of an ombú, and turned to watch from his saddle: Tita and that high speck of a girl, still and dark against a ruthless sky. Tita raised her arms and seemed to wait, and then the treetop shook and rushed with leaves and sudden-downward-streaking and her arms closed around a thing that thudded against her chest. Artigas watched his aunt walk from the tree, away from town, returning home on foot. By the time the moon had risen, all of Tacuarembó knew the story of the fall that turned to flight or flight that turned to fall.

  They called her Pajarita. Little Bird.

  ———

  Not all lives begin that way. Look at Ignazio Firielli. He never disappeared or reappeared or had a village call him miraculous. He did have his day with magic, once he was a grown man far from home, but even then it was for a sing
le day that only served the purpose of forcing him toward love. That’s how he told it, anyway, years later, to his grandchildren—especially to Salomé, listening, smiling, fatal secrets tucked away. He would say the sight of a certain woman made magic spring from his hands. It was only as a carnival performer, bumbling through tricks in a gaudy suit. But memory is an expert at sleight-of-hand: it can raise up things that glitter and leave clumsiness and pain to be swallowed by the dark.

  Before Ignazio knew a thing about magic, or Uruguay, or women born from trees, he knew Venezia. He held Venezia in his body: the canals, vast, veinlike; the lilting brass of his language; the smells of brine and basil and freshly cut wood in his family home. Above all, he knew gondolas. It was the family business to make gondolas of every size and style. Arcs of wood leaned beside the window; he could trace them with his hands and eyes and know where he belonged. Their shapes could keep a person gliding on the surface of the water, he could not drown, he would not drown, surrounded by planks and prows, gondolas for fishing, for coupling, for heading to the market, and, most of all, gondolas for taking the dead to the tomb-ridden Isle of San Michele.

  Gondolas linked Venetians to their dead. Gondolas linked Ignazio to his dead. A history of death and gondolas lived buried in the corners of his home. When Ignazio was eleven, his grandfather revealed the past as they sat alone in the workshop. Nonno Umberto was not usually loquacious. He spent long hours by the window, bony hands at rest, swaying in the rocking chair he’d carved as a boy. He stared out at the houses reflected on the water, at linens on clotheslines, calm, quiet, no matter how loud the shouts got in the kitchen. He was deaf. He pretended to be deaf. Ignazio was never sure which one was true. He came and sat on a low stool at Nonno’s feet, in search of calm or at least a pretense of it, and finding, one day, the telling of a story, slippery, secret, as furtive and as heated as confession.

  Long ago, said Nonno, the Firielli family made a modest living building simple gondolas. They had done this for centuries, and assumed they would do it for centuries to come. He was born into the business. He grew up. He married. He had seven children, and his family also lived among saline slabs of wood in raw states of formation. It was a bad time for Venezia. Cholera ran rampant; no one had enough to eat; corpse after corpse swelled the cemetery of San Michele. “The Austrians.” Nonno Umberto gripped a fistful of the quilt on his lap. If the quilt had been alive, Ignazio thought, it would be choking. “They had blood on their hands. They took from us and let us rot.”

  Sun streaked the walls and fell on the skeletal boats around them. Nonno stared out the window. Ignazio stared out also, and he saw the old-time Austrians, big men with monstrous faces, wearing crowns, reclining in a gondola and laughing at beggars on bridges and shores. In the kitchen, the shouting continued, his mother, his father, a slap, a fall, more shouting.

  Nonno went on: the revolution came. It was 1848. Venetians chased out Austrian rule. Umberto and thousands of others danced on the cathedral steps until the sun came up. The city churned with hope: freedom was theirs, they were independent, Venezia would be restored. For a year that was true, and then the Austrians returned. Cholera flared back up and burned across the city. Within six months, six of Umberto’s seven children had died of cholera. Four daughters and two sons. Only Diego survived (“your father, Ignazio; your father was the only one”). On the night that his last sister died, nine-year-old Diego went silent and said nothing for two years and thirty-seven days. On that same night, Umberto sat beside his silent son, empty as a rag that has been wrung over and over. The undertaker arrived, shrouded in black, his face masked in a hood with slits for eyes. He stared at young Diego through the slits.

  “Don’t look at my son,” Umberto said.

  “It won’t harm him.”

  “Don’t look at him.”

  The undertaker raised his hands. Umberto punched him and the man reeled back and Umberto punched him again until the hood lay flat and crushed against his head.

  “May fever take your house,” the undertaker shouted. “May you all rot.” He stumbled out without the girl’s body.

  Later that night, Umberto woke up to a rustle at the foot of his bed and saw an angel (“I swear it,” he told Ignazio, “an angel, with wings and all!”). Umberto sat for a minute in the glow of silence. Then he asked the angel how his last son might be spared. The angel said God hears what crosses the water. A wing tip brushed Umberto’s head, and he fell back asleep. The next morning, he entered his workshop and stayed for three days and three nights without sleeping, and built a funeral gondola that shocked him with its beauty. Four pillars held a ceiling upholstered with lush velvet. He carved his prayers into the wood: ornate crucifixes on each pillar, rolling vines and grapes and fleurs-de-lis, cherubs with their trumpets, a witch tearing her hair out, sylphs engaged in coitus, Hercules weeping on a mountain, and, at the helm, Orpheus with his golden lyre, poised to sing the way to Hades. The day that gondola crossed the water with their last daughter’s body, it caught the eye of a duchess and she commissioned one for her husband, who had died of syphilis. After that, Firielli gondolas carried the corpses of Venezia’s finest dead.

  That’s how Nonno Umberto told it. Ignazio listened, surrounded by wood chips, sure that Nonno was a liar. He could not accept his grandfather hammering at a gondola three days straight—when now his arthritic hands barely brought fork to mouth. He could not accept an angel perching anywhere. Nor could he see his own father, Diego, as the small boy mute with pain, when now he was the farthest thing from silent, the farthest thing from small. There always seemed to be too much of him: too much volume, too much hair, too many wine bottles emptying too quickly. Too much laughter at the wrong times (his laugh had claws; it unfurled sharply). He eclipsed everyone—Ignazio himself, his brothers, his sisters, his mother with her broad hips and bullheaded love, and Nonno, with his rocking chair, his window, his corrugated skin, the loosened hold on life that caused him to stop carving, stop trying to shape things, just let them float or sink in their canals.

  One summer night, when dinner was over and heat thickened the house, Ignazio reluctantly left childhood behind. It was a Wednesday. He was twelve. From the kitchen came the clanging watersong of his sisters washing pots and pans. His father slid his arms into his coat sleeves. His cheeks were red with wine. Ignazio’s older brothers followed suit and waited, hands in pockets. Diego Firielli turned to his youngest son and crooked his finger in the gesture of come. The brothers laughed. Ignazio flushed and rushed toward his coat.

  Outside, their gondola sat, dispassionate, on the water. Ignazio stepped in last. The wind curled on the surface of the canal, and they glided along the water in silence. Diego turned to look at Ignazio with a strange expression, expectant, mocking. The thick bush of his hair blocked out the city behind him.

  It was late, even for Venezia, but the house they went to brimmed with light, noise, and women. Red velvet drapes hung to the floor; wine poured freely; languid chords pushed out of an accordion; the women laughed and swayed and rubbed their bodies against men. Ignazio stood in a corner between a curtain and an ornate oil lamp and tried not to look at anyone. He wished the lamp would darken so he could melt into the wall. He stepped farther from its sphere of light, but his father approached, a girl on each arm. “Here,” he said, thrusting one toward Ignazio.

  Upstairs, on the stale mattress, Ignazio’s hand shook as he touched the girl’s knee. It was cool and smooth. Her shoulder preened with freckles. Black ringlets fell around her face. She sat, half reclined, on the thin bed. He was afraid of her, uncertain, humiliated by the fact of his own fear. She drew his hand to the hem of her skirt and he did nothing and she rolled her eyes and reached to unbutton his trousers. Two minutes later, as he pushed into her body, he heard his father’s voice through the curtain to his left, grunting rhythmically, and realized that his father could hear him too. What if he made an audible mistake? He groaned in time, his sounds overshadowed by his father, and the girl
lay still. She felt like a crushed peach, soft, moist, alarming. His father finished and Ignazio bit the girl’s neck to climax in absolute silence.

  It began soon after that. The unraveling. When Ignazio turned thirteen, his voice deepened and his father broke his mother’s ribs. At fourteen, he went to the kitchen one night and saw a thing that itched his skin: his father, seated at the table, sobbing. He made no sound. His glass was empty. His chin dripped with snot and tears. Ignazio crept out and raced to bed, where he lay in the sea of Nonno’s snores, itching, until the sun returned.

  Fifteen: Ignazio cut and sanded, carved and built, until his hands grew raw. He rose for work before dawn, and kept on into the night. One night, in his exhaustion, he sawed the tip off his ring finger. Still, the Firielli business teetered on the edge of disrepute. Orders arrived, Diego ignored them, half-made gondolas lay naked and deserted. Funeral dates came and went, their commissioned vessels unfinished. Customers grew wary; the family soups thinned. By the time Ignazio turned sixteen, his brothers and sisters had married, gondola orders had fallen to half, and hunger felt as familiar as the pulse of water under wood.

  One night, at the brothel, Diego shattered a chandelier and two wooden chairs. He was thrown from the building and told not to return. The next night, at his father’s insistence, Ignazio brought their gondola to dock at the brothel’s steps.

  “Come with me.”

  Ignazio shook his head.

  His father stepped onto land, drunk, unsteady. He banged the brass ring against the gilded door. He yelled that he would enter. Three guards came out and punched him and then dragged him down the steps. They pushed him into the gondola, which swayed beneath the pressure.

  Diego said, “You can’t—”

  “Shut up,” a guard snarled. Ignazio could not see his face; his massive silhouette turned toward Ignazio. “Can’t you control your father? For God’s sake. For your family name.”