The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  Ignazio felt a hot and creeping slime beneath his skin. He longed to leap into the dark canal and swim very far and never come back. He nodded and pushed the gondola out onto the water.

  Six months later, on a cold winter night, Diego cracked his wife’s skull against the wall and loped outside. The canal growled under the wind. From the window of his room, Ignazio saw his father’s shadow teeter on the edge of the canal, then fall as if thrown from an invisible fist.

  Ignazio lay silent until he heard his sister-in-law’s cry from the kitchen—dead, dead, Mamma is dead. He closed his eyes. His mother flooded across his mind: embracing him at six years old when he’d scraped his knee, her thick breasts covering his ears so that they filled with sounds like the inside of a shell; humming, tenor-low, while kneading dough for gnocchi in the kitchen; watching him as he put his coat on with his brothers, flesh swollen around her eyes. His chest burned. If his father had not thrown himself into the water, Ignazio could have killed him with bare hands. He heard Nonno sit up in the bed across from his. “Eh? What happened?”

  Ignazio spent the next five hours cleaning blood from the walls and the body.

  Two days later, Diego’s body washed up at the front steps of a count whose gondola order had never been completed. He surfaced just in time to make the journey to San Michele with his wife.

  The corpses crossed the water, thronged by the living. The sky was pale with shock. A fleet of mourners—sons, daughters, wives and husbands, children, great-aunts, uncles, drenched in black—rode their gondolas in an entourage behind the coffins. San Michele loomed before them, with its township of tombs, soaking in the prayers and wails that ebbed over the water.

  Ignazio rowed numbly. The world was not the world but a mere painting of itself; apart; impenetrable; all the grieving people only brushstrokes; he in the midst of it, pretending to be real, wearing a life of someone else’s making. Only Nonno Umberto still seemed viscerally true. His breath labored as they disembarked, audible through the drone of Hail Marys. He leaned on Ignazio’s arm. He smelled of soap and vinegar and a bitter trace of sweat.

  Sepulchral rows, priestly mutterings, aunts weeping, slate moved aside to lower caskets into ground. Ignazio watched the remains of his parents (man and wife, he thought, killer and killed) sink slowly, together, into the dark. The stone slab groaned as his brothers pushed it back into place, shutting in the dead.

  “Ignazio,” his grandfather said. “Take me for a walk.”

  They escaped the praying crowd and walked the cobbled path. The tombs of the rich loomed around them, edifices twice the size of the Firielli kitchen, wrought with statues. Sylphs and ancient gods and grieving angels gazed their way. They moved past them to a row of simple tombs, unadorned boxes submerged in the ground. Nonno stopped at one of them. Ignazio read the names etched into marble: PORZIA FIRIELLI. DONATO FIRIELLI. ARMINO FIRIELLI. ROSA FIRIELLI. ERACLA FIRIELLI. ISABELLA FIRIELLI. He chanted them, one after the other, in his mind, Porzia, Donato, Armino, Rosa, Eracla, Isabella, his aunts, his uncles, frozen children, unknown ghosts.

  “Your father,” Nonno said. He stared at the ground. “You can’t be like him.”

  “No.”

  “But you have to accept him.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Exactly.”

  Ignazio kicked a pebble. He nodded blankly.

  “Are you going to leave?”

  “Leave?”

  “You know you can’t stay here.”

  Ignazio felt transparent. He did know. Or he had wondered. His mother was gone; the family business was dead; his older brothers fought like vultures for its remnants; his sisters had married away. The house was a hull of shadows.

  Nonno Umberto looked immensely tired. “You should go. Our name is cursed. And soon Italy will be at war again.” He bent in closer. Ignazio smelled the tang of his white hair. “Listen. I have a little money in the floorboards, and I’ll send you to the New World if you swear you’ll build something. Gondolas, maybe, or something else, something useful over there, something worth building. Anything. Swear.”

  It broke, then, the canvas stretched over the world, and Ignazio was not numb, not in a painting after all: he stood in a raw, unfinished world, surrounded by the dead, exposing a fresh layer of living skin.

  “I swear,” he said.

  As they turned back toward the burial, Ignazio looked across the water at Venezia. The city sprawled in all its dense, corrosive beauty. Gondolas split the water with their motion, with their silence, with their prows that aimed at faraway lands, at long-backed rivers and broad-backed seas that led to God knows where, to something new.

  ———

  Four days later, Ignazio bought a ticket on a steamship. It was February 1, 1911. The boat was headed to Montevideo, a city he’d never heard of, but he was restless to embark, and in any case, the more anonymous, the better. He boarded and stowed his scanty possessions, then found a sailor and asked what Montevideo was like.

  “The whores are cheap. Fishing’s good. It’s on the Río de la Plata.”

  Ignazio nodded and tried to smile.

  They crossed the vast blue dazzle of the Atlantic. The Italians reeked and retched and bent their hopeful words to sound more Spanish. Babies shrieked and grown men wept like babies. Ignazio would have shriveled from loneliness if it had not been for Pietro, a Florentine shoemaker, the kind of man who could talk a statue into dancing. When they first met, Ignazio watched him roll a cigarette: he flicked the paper just so, as if it had been waiting to bend to his will, then twisted the ends, sealing all escape routes (surrender, tobacco, no fate for you but smoke). He brought it to his lips, the sun setting into the sea behind him as if slowly falling to its knees. Ignazio cleaved to him. He wanted to be like him, light, confident, disdainful of discussions of the past, swaggering across the deck as though the future were a naked woman, waiting, open-limbed.

  They spent long afternoons leaning on the rails. They stared at the ocean. They smoked, stared, lit up, and smoked again, until the tobacco ran out and they just stared and gnawed on substitutes—fish scales, shreds of cloth, errant twigs from the homeland. Pietro treated Ignazio like an entertaining little brother (he was ten years older, twenty-seven or so), though he softened once Ignazio beat him at cards. Nights in brothels had made Ignazio a good gambler. Pietro laughed when Ignazio showed him his twelfth winning hand.

  “Not bad. You’ll need this skill in the New World.”

  New. World. It sounded fresh and large and daunting. Ignazio shuffled the cards and stole glances at the horizon, thin and blue and pressing at the sky.

  Three months later, Ignazio—stinky and exultant—disembarked at the Montevideo port. A strange and satisfying stench assailed his nostrils: a mix of cowhide, sweat, piss, and the brash alkaline wind. The port burst with ships bearing flags from all over the world: England, France, Italy, Spain, the United States, and dozens of unfamiliar design. His fellow travelers poured around him like dazed children. He had thought Pietro was right behind him, but now he turned and turned and saw him nowhere. The air was heavy, humid. Voices rattled and screeched out singsong strings of Spanish words. People bustled everywhere: sailors, vendor women, grimy little children picking at dead fish. A boy looked up at him from the fish bins he was scrubbing. The boy’s nose sloped widely to either side, and black eyes looked out of a face more darkly hued than he had ever seen. Pietro had assured him that Uruguay was full of Europeans and their descendants. A civilized place, he’d said. Ignazio’s eyes met the boy’s. He felt a surge of—what? fear? fascination? shame? It struck him, then—the obvious and unthinkable fact that he was in a strange land, worlds and worlds and long blue worlds away from home. His ribs tightened inside him. He longed for his only friend. He searched, pushing past women’s wide baskets and sailors’ hard smiles, until he finally found him, smoking a cigarette (how had he found one?) and leaning nonchalantly against a stucco wall. “Don’t worry,” Pietro said. “We’ll get used to
it.” He laughed. “Here, have a smoke. What do you say we find a place to eat, a woman or two? We can think about jobs and rooms in the morning.”

  He slapped Ignazio’s back, and they began to navigate the brackish din of Montevideo.

  Monte. Vide. Eu. I see a mountain, said a Portuguese man, among the first Europeans to sight this terrain from sea.

  Monte. Vide. Eu. But Ignazio saw no mountain at all, just flat, cobbled streets.

  Monte. Vide. Eu. City of sailors and workers, of wool and steak, of gray stones and long nights, biting-cold winters and Januaries so humid you could swim through hot air. City of seekers. Port of a hundred flags. Heart and edge of Uruguay.

  It was El Cerro they’d been talking about. Those Portuguese. They had glimpsed El Cerro from their ship, and spawned the city’s name. Monte. What an exaggeration. Ignazio beheld it every day from his work at the port: a mound the shape of a huge fried egg, spread long and low across the other side of the bay. It was absurd, barely a hill, pathetic, and he should know, coming from a nation with true, majestic mountains, the Alps, the Dolomiti, the Apennines, Vesuvius, Presanella, Cornizzolo, real mountains that he himself had never seen but could be trusted to exist, to have weight and height and substance, not like this thing they called El Cerro he stole glances at all day as he worked, aloft on a steel crane, remembering those first fools to have seen Uruguay from sea.

  Many things looked different from the top of a crane. Boats. Mountains. Smooth water below. The long, heaving arc of a day’s work. Cranes were new to Montevideo; the first ones had arrived the same week as Ignazio. He quickly learned their language, the hoist of pulleys, the lever’s growl, the careful gait along their big steel snouts, exposure to damp cold and scorch of sun, the metal muscle of modernity, the thrill in lifting giant crates into the air.

  At dusk, Ignazio walked on streets lined with wrought-iron balconies and ornate doors to Calle Ejido, where he lived in the shadow of cannons that had once guarded La Ciudad Vieja when it was not just the Old City but the whole of the city itself. Strange, that the first settlers here had built their little town with an armed wall around it. They’d built a port wide open to the waters, yet closed to surrounding land. What had lurked in the earth around them? What lay around them now? Just across the wall, in the newer part of the city, roads turned into packed earth, lined with huts like humble boxes made of wood, surrounded by wild and sudden space. There were strange things about this city. Amethysts used as doorstops, leather used for everything, a stone wall between Old City and New. An obsession with the president, a man called Batlle y Ordóñez, who had promised schools, and workers’ rights, and hospitals (secular ones, scandalously so, with crucifixes banned from the walls). All the laborers Ignazio worked with—even the immigrants, of which there were many—spoke of Batlle the way Italians spoke of the pope. These men were also obsessed with mate: a brew of shredded leaves and hot water, concocted in a hollow gourd, then drunk through a metal straw called a bombilla. They drank it as if their lives depended on it, and maybe their lives did, sucking at bombillas on their high steel beams, pouring water while awaiting the next crate, passing the gourd from hand to calloused hand. The first time he was offered mate, Ignazio was shocked by the assumption that he should share a cup. He was eighteen, after all, a grown man. He thought of refusing, but didn’t want the others to think him afraid of tea. The gourd felt warm against his palm. The wet green mass inside it gleamed. The drink flooded his mouth, bright and green and bitter, the taste, he thought, of Uruguay.

  He was able to find morsels of Italy: fresh pasta, good Chianti, the reassuring cadence of his language. El Corriente, the bar downstairs from his dingy rented room, brimmed with the sweethard liquor grappa miel and music from an out-of-tune piano and the company of immigrant men. He headed straight there after work. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he crept downstairs to hear Italian spoken in loud and slurring voices. He needed them. They filled something even whores could not fill.

  Pietro worked for a brilliant but arthritic shoemaker. He met Ignazio at El Corriente a few times a week until, three years after their arrival, he married a Sicilian girl with placid eyes and solid bones. Ignazio stood by him at the altar as the organ sang and the silky bride approached. The priest mumbled, made signs in the air, and gave his blessing for a kiss. Outside, on the steps, Ignazio threw raw rice at them and called his congratulations as the couple ran to their carriage. They rode off without looking back.

  He saw less of Pietro after that. Some nights, loneliness and exhaustion wound together in a slow noose around Ignazio’s neck. He lay on his thin mattress, hour after hour, staring into blackness, forcing canals from his mind. He had food, cash, work, a room, everything he needed to survive, and yet his days felt like mollusk shells with the bodies scraped out—empty, useless, ready for the trash bin. It was not what his grandfather had sent him for. He tried to recall his grandfather’s face, painting it on the black canvas of the ceiling. Its details had grown hazy but he could not let it fade. He reconstructed it with his mind, hovering, enormous, sometimes young and angular, sometimes absurdly scarred. The face shifted with the seasons, with the texture of the nights, and Ignazio fell asleep watching it, as a man underwater watches light on the surface of the sea.

  One November night, as the rays of his fourth Uruguayan spring swept the chill from the air, Ignazio met a group of men at El Corriente. They were playing a raucous game of poker when he came in. He was struck immediately by their bright clothing and odd appearance: a burly giant with a curled mustache, a man in gold hoop earrings and a red bandanna, two robust, blond identical twins, a hairy Spaniard in ostentatious jewelry, and a shark-eyed midget who stood on his chair to reach the top of the table. The laborers at other tables pretended to ignore them. The midget looked up and caught Ignazio’s stare.

  “In the mood to gamble?”

  Ignazio pulled a chair up. The giant dealt the cards with delicate precision. Ignazio felt the Spaniard’s dark eyes resting on him, the way a man sizes up flanks in the market. He did it subtly, but Ignazio noticed. He had learned to notice everything when gambling: the shift of eyes; the drop of temperature around the table as cards were cast against it; the exact tautness of muscle and breath in fellow players. They were his secret weapons, and his thrill. He spread his cards on the table. The giant, having lost the most, grunted peevishly. The others laughed.

  “Come on,” said Hoop Earrings Man. “Let’s play again.”

  The Spaniard dealt this time. Ignazio won another round. Then another. He felt the shift around him: the rise in heat, air tightening like wire. Less laughter, more glances, more swigs. Ignazio used his winnings to buy a round of drinks. The air eased. Muscles relaxed. He won again.

  The midget glanced at Hoop Earrings Man. The Spaniard watched Ignazio more intently. All but Hoop Earrings left the hand. Ignazio raised the stakes; Hoop Earrings stayed. Ignazio spread his hand on the table and met his opponent’s eyes. They were dark green, surrounded by laugh lines; the man reminded Ignazio of a pirate, although he’d never seen one. Hoop Earrings put down his hand: a royal flush. All eyes turned on Ignazio.

  A moment like this could turn into a brawl from one blink to the next. He’d seen it happen. He bowed toward the winner and pushed the cash toward him. “Congratulations.”

  Hoop Earrings fingered his new coins. “What’s your name?”

  “Ignazio. Yours?”

  “El Mago. El Mago Milagroso,” he added dramatically. “But people also call me Cacho. You Italian?”

  “Venetian. From where the gondolas are.”

  Cacho exchanged a blank look with the giant. Ignazio opened his mouth to explain, but the Spaniard leaned in close. “Che. You. Gondola.”

  Ignazio turned toward him. He smelled the pungence of his beard.

  “How about you work for me?”

  “Doing what?”

  “As a stable boy. These men”—he gestured around the table—“are part of my carnaval.
We’re leaving next week for our summer tour.”

  “Our stable boy was shot last night in a duel.” The midget sneered. “Over love.”

  The Spaniard smiled, revealing three gold teeth. “I pay well.” He fanned the cards on the table. “So?”

  Ignazio gazed at the cards, with their red and white backs. He longed to turn one over and crawl into it, searching for himself in stems of spades or diamond slopes. He was greedy, he wanted them all, hearts and clubs and jacks and aces, but life and poker are not like that. You have to choose and follow the road you open. You step on the boat and Venezia fades and the ocean is everywhere, you can’t go back. You give up on a flush and keep your mouth shut if the deck gives you the right card a round too late. You weigh your city life against an offer that glitters, rustic, foreign, unassayed, an adventure in the hands of total strangers. It was a gamble. It was always a gamble.

  “Bueno,” he said.

  The Spaniard sealed the deal with a nod.

  Six days later, Ignazio set out eastward with Carnaval Calaquita, which consisted of a dozen men, a few of their women and children, and several horse-drawn wagons packed with tarps, poles, circus-style tents, wood planks, awnings, collapsible stages, bright game wheels, weighing scales, twisted mirrors, garish masks, flour, rice, trumpets, smoked beef, coops of pigeons, coops of chickens, coops of rabbits, and trunk upon trunk of costumes. The road thickened with the dust each horse kicked up, so that they clattered through low brown clouds. What a road. Ignazio had lived all his life in the city, and had not known that urban bricks could fall away to reveal such open earth. He had known that it existed but had not been prepared for its lush quiet, its immensity, the soaring urge within him as he rode. They rode and rode, and land unfurled, abundant, immodest, naked, fragrant, endlessly green, peppered with sparse huts, full of heat and thorns and animal sounds.

  Their first stop, Pando—a few buildings clustered around a plaza—received them with all the enthusiasm of its early Christmas fervor. The crew slung together a little world of games, mystique, and spectacles. Ignazio sweated and hauled and cleaned up horseshit, and then he stood in a sequined blue suit and watched the carnavaleros ply their trade. In that world they could do anything. Make a saint thrill with urges and a sinner drop the burdens of tomorrow. Make grown men beg, at the edge of humble wagons, for them not to pack, not to go, not to disappear as they did along the wide, hot road.