The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  “Pajarita,” Tía Tita said, “we need more firewood. Show our guest the woodpile.”

  He followed her along a foot-worn path, through air still fecund from the heat. She stopped at a pile of cut wood that reached her waist. Don’t think about her waist, he thought, stop shaking. He held out his arms. She gave him a log. She gave him branches. More branches. Twigs. It was a gamble. It was always a gamble.

  “Pajarita.”

  She looked up at him. Her face filled with dusky light. “¿Qué?”

  “Will you, you know, will you marry me?” He wished he could kneel, but his arms were full and he feared that he’d send kindling flying everywhere. “You are so beautiful and perfect and I’m tired of being, well, I want you with me, in Montevideo. Come with me. Be my wife.”

  He could not read her eyes; they didn’t waver. All around them rose the musk of summer grass.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you love someone else?”

  “No.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “I love you, Pajarita. Do you believe me?”

  She paused so long he thought she might never answer. “Yes.”

  “Yes—to what?”

  “Yes, I believe you.”

  “Oh.” He faltered. “We leave tomorrow. I could save some money, visit in the fall. Maybe then you’d have an answer?”

  “Maybe.”

  He strained for something else to say—something gallant, captivating—but she was already walking back down the path. He followed her, spilling twigs. Dinner sped by, and much too soon it was time to go.

  Ignazio slept fitfully that night, and woke up queasy. He could not ingest a thing, not even mate.

  “Ay.” Cacho passed the gourd to Bajo, the midget. “No mate. I see it’s serious.”

  They took apart the tents, booths, and stages. It was a rapid process; they were flimsy, makeshift edifices, after all.

  The Spaniard slapped his back. “Don’t worry, Gondola. There’s plenty of other women.”

  Ignazio said nothing.

  “Look,” Consuelo called from her wagon, pointing to the western hills.

  Ignazio turned and saw two horses on a green crest, one carrying Tía Tita, and one carrying Pajarita, poised amid bags of belongings, looking like a savage angel. They rode up to Ignazio. Pajarita looked down from her saddle. Her eyes were dark waters he could drown in. “The priest is at the church,” she said. “If we go now, he can have us married in an hour.”

  Ignazio glanced at the Spaniard, who nodded his permission. He mounted her horse, his thighs against her hips. They rode together into town, with Tía Tita, Cacho, Consuelo, and Bajo on horseback in their wake. By the time they arrived in the plaza, three dozen tacuaremboenses had joined their caravan. In the church, the pews crackled with attention as Ignazio and Pajarita exchanged vows. For better or for worse, the priest intoned, almost melodically. In sickness and in health. Yes, they said. Yes, again. A sigh rippled through the pews. Cacho wiped his tears with leather rope. An infant next to Cacho howled in satisfaction (she had made terrific tooth marks on a Bible). The priest pronounced it done: man and wife.

  They rode back to the campsite, where the blond twins blared their trumpets, wreaking havoc among the horses.

  “Señora Firielli,” the Spaniard pronounced and, carried away by the moment, bowed. “Welcome to Carnaval Calaquita. We’ll escort you to your new life.” He reached for her bags. “We’ve made room for your things.”

  She moved his hand. “This one stays with me.”

  “Of course,” he said uncertainly, and took the remaining bags.

  Ignazio beamed at Tía Tita over his bride’s head. “Doña Tita, don’t worry. I will treat your niece like a queen.”

  “You will. You must.” Tita reached across the divide between their horses, and pressed Pajarita’s palm. She touched the sack her niece had guarded. Ignazio felt his new wife’s breathing deepen, and tightened his arms around her. Tía Tita seemed to drink Pajarita with her eyes. Then she pulled her reins and rode up the path and out of sight.

  The company rode for many hours that day, all the way to the tranquil shore of the Río Negro. That night, before crossing into the southern half of Uruguay, Carnaval Calaquita camped at the edge of the river. Consuelo, the magician’s wife, Mistress of Disguises, found a secluded grove and made a nuptial bed of cowhide, wildflowers, and the blue velveteen that had curtained the stage the night the couple had met.

  Ignazio lay down with Pajarita under the round light of the moon. He kissed her shoulders. He untied her braids and shook her hair loose and it poured into his hands, dark, rich, as smooth and dangerous as water. She reached for him. He meant to touch her with slow reverence but urge propelled him into her and she was ready, wide, sighing. Afterward they slept an opulent sleep.

  He woke. She was in his arms. It was still night. He listened to the low, wet murmur of the river, and breathed the scents around him: sex, grass, eucalyptus, leather, and, above all, her. His mind roamed to the sack she’d kept with her. It lay a few paces from their bed, plump with whoknowswhat inside it. He crawled out of the hides and carefully opened the bag. Out spilled armfuls of ceibo leaves, ombú fronds, eucalyptus, plants he did not recognize. Rough barks. Black roots. Sharp little kernels. Their acrid smells deluged his nose and imagination. He felt a surge of horror—he had married a stranger; his life was entwined with a stranger’s life. The thought struck him like a slap, both harsh and thrilling, like the moment he’d first left Italian land. When he finally fell asleep, Ignazio dreamed of gondolas full of ceibo leaves, gliding down the Río Negro, perturbing the dark waters in their wake.

  Dos

  ——————

  STRANGE WIRES

  AND STOLEN SACRAMENTS

  Montevideo was unspun wool, full of rough billows, gray mazes, raw promise.

  Monte. Vide. Eu. I see a mountain, one of the first Europeans to sight this land had said. Pajarita had never seen a mountain, but even she could tell there were none here. This city had no slopes. No, that was not true: its ground lay flat, but buildings pushed up everywhere, gathering their height into the sky. If only she could be a bird in more than name: she’d soar above the city and then—what would she see? A mesh of cobbled streets and walls, riddled with people, crushed up against the sea. No, not the sea: it was a river, that long smooth water, fringed with rocks. Argentina lay somewhere on the other side. Perhaps, in her high glide, she would glimpse it winking into view.

  Here, in this city, one could think of flying. Here it was easy to forget about the ground. Like, for example, in their new Ciudad Vieja apartment, where everything seemed vertiginously high: the flights of stairs to the door, the brass bed frame that suspended their mattress over air, chairs twice as tall as bull skulls with upright wooden backs, the stove made for cooking standing up instead of squatting. And the window at which she perched to absorb Calle Sarandí, with its stony breath; its men in clean black hats and women with their baskets; the clap of horseshoes and the subtly sighing trees; the sweet press of a far accordion and the hawking voice of the grocer who had told her that the world was at war.

  In that first autumn of 1915, Pajarita spent long hours watching the street from her window while Ignazio worked at the docks. At night, every night, she discovered him anew, like terrain whose growth and wind patterns keep changing. Ignazio. Unslakable. He liked everything she fed him. He succumbed on a nightly basis to his appetites. He arrived home after dark, sea-salted, tired, just in time to eat, make love, and sleep. These happened in the same order every time. A rhythm formed between them: the fall of dark, Ignazio’s steps home, Pajarita in the kitchen, milanesas frying noisily in the pan, their home suffused with the oily scents of living. They came together around a small square table. Dinner sang its crisp and clinking sounds. Ignazio, revived by beef and wine, filled with his other hunger. He turned down the oil lamp and stared at her; she let herself
be seen; he reached across the table to touch her. She heard her fork fall to the floor. He carried her, half naked, to the bed, and there she writhed and shook and wept as if the world had broken open, as if knives of intense light punctured the world.

  Then, before dawn, she slid from his arms and cleared the table for breakfast. He was gone to work before full morning’s light. How strange, thought Pajarita, to live so close to a man and rarely see him in the sun. Daylight was shared only on Sundays, when, after mass—or instead of it—they often strolled along the edge of the river, husband and wife, hand in hand, shoes sinking into sand. Here, the thick feel of Montevideo untied slightly, easing out over gentle waves. Rounded stones and sudden seashells lined the ground. Fishing boats caught long arms of sun. Here it was the easiest to envision flight: a lift of salty breeze and there she was, above the shore in the expansive sky, soaring toward the blue crown of the world.

  Part in flight, and part beside him, she listened to Ignazio. He spoke of work. Of dreams. Of Venezia, though not about his family: Ignazio never said a word about his mother or his father or any other relative. The whole territory of Venetian memory seemed devoid of human presence. From his telling, it appeared that Venezia held only gondolas, elegant, unpeopled. These swarmed through the city, cool, carved creatures, water-beings made of wood. He spoke of them with the timbre of obsession.

  “I won’t always work at the docks, mi amor.” He picked up a flat, pale pebble. “Gondolas will make us rich. I can feel it. I’ll build them, and we’ll sail them, right here on the Río de la Plata.”

  He scanned the river’s surface as if measuring it with his eyes. He threw the pebble; it skipped along the water and then sank. “A peso per ride. People will love that, don’t you think?” He clasped Pajarita’s hand. “I can just see it now, our little fleet gliding across the water. Our fleet. Our water.”

  Pajarita felt his eager squeeze around her fingers and squeezed back. She felt the scar on the finger whose tip had been cut off, somewhere, sometime, in a story she did not know. A fishing boat with red peeled paint glided near the shore. A fisherman stood inside it, hauling a net onto deck. It looked almost empty: nothing but a flapping trout or two. Other days, she’d seen nets rise and glisten with a mass of silver bodies. No one knew the rhythms of the deep. On an angry day one hundred red boats could stay empty.

  Ignazio put his arm around her shoulder. She felt his calloused palm against her neck.

  “Before all that,” he said, “I’ll build you a house.”

  And so he did. He borrowed money from his friend Pietro, who now owned a shoe store on a dense little street near the Plaza de Zabala. With this loan, Ignazio bought supplies—planks, bricks, saw, nails, hammers, doorknobs, sheets of glass, mysterious new things called electrical wires, the right to a little patch of land on the outskirts of town, in a rustic area called Punta Carretas that reminded Pajarita of Tacuarembó, with its open air, flat earth, low grass, and small ranchitos. Only here, of course, a saline shore breeze swept through her hair as she walked dirt paths. A nearby lighthouse beamed a slow, slow swirl across the night.

  “With that farol there,” Ignazio said, “we’ll never get lost in the dark.”

  Board by board, their house arose. Brick by brick, it strengthened. Ignazio hammered, measured, mortared, hauled; Pajarita sewed and watched him. She watched for when he needed something from her basket—hot mate, a spinach buñuelo, an empanada she’d stuffed with ham and cheese the night before, a handkerchief to wipe his forehead, extra caresses, extra nails. He worked on it for months. Each nail pierced a dart of hope through wood. Each strange electric vein ran prayers through the walls. Each corner came to being through their wanting, through their sweat. No prior lives had seeped into these spaces: they could leave the past outside and begin their own story, a sprawling narrative encased in four fresh walls, with unknown chapters and generations and twisting turns whose very notion made her long to crane her neck into the unlit reaches of the future.

  “This is our palace, mi reina,” he called down from the roof. “I can see everything!”

  Pajarita, standing on the earth below, called back, “Careful, don’t fall.”

  “These men,” a voice behind her said. “They’re always climbing a bit too far for their own good.”

  Pajarita turned. A woman stood a few meters away, holding a large basket. Bloodstains streaked her apron. She stepped closer.

  “I’m Coco Descalzo,” she said, “from the butcher shop.” She pointed down the path at a house with a hand-painted sign. “What’s your name?”

  “Pajarita.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Tacuarembó.”

  “Really! So far north!” Coco squinted up at Ignazio, at work again. “Your husband too?”

  “No. He’s Italian.”

  “Ah.” Coco moved her basket from one ample hip to the other. “When your house is finished, come get a nice churrasco from my shop. A welcome gift.”

  Pajarita and Ignazio painted their house the color of sand and filled it with a bed, three chairs, a table, and mint-and-lemon wallpaper. They cleaned out their apartment in La Ciudad Vieja and left it for good. They ate milanesas and rice in their new kitchen under the lighthouse’s pulse. In bed, their rhythm slowed to match the beam gliding over them: a beat of light, then pulling back, a beat of light.

  The next morning, Pajarita made her husband breakfast, saw him off, and walked the path to Carnicería Descalzo. The butcher shop had low ceilings and sharp, pungent air. Two women talked at the counter. Coco presided behind it. Pajarita lingered near the door and examined the beef. It was good meat, red and lean and freshly slaughtered. The women were talking about war. The English, apparently, were winning: the woman who was shaped like a soccer ball had heard this. The lady in the huge hat had a son who liked the war because soldiers need uniforms, and Uruguay had wool.

  “¡Por favor!” Coco said. “That makes it good? Do you know how many boys have died already?”

  “I suppose,” said Huge Hat Lady. “In Europe. But here we’re doing well.”

  “Hmmph,” Coco said. “That’s thanks to batllismo, good schools, good pay, not the war.” She pursed her lips. “Pajarita. Come in!”

  Pajarita approached the main counter.

  “This is our new neighbor. I promised her a churrasquito.” She bent to look for one among the thin, lean sheets of meat.

  “I’m Sarita,” the big woman said, staring at Pajarita with frank curiosity.

  Huge Hat Woman squinted at Pajarita. “Well? What do you think?”

  She looked uncertainly at the woman. Her eyes were small and mouselike. “About what?”

  “About the Great War! Is it good or what?”

  She hesitated. These women spoke of things that happened so very far away, as though they saw across great distances and were accustomed to appraising the turning of the world. She thought of Europe, a nebulous place her mind could not bring into focus. She thought of soldiers, like the ones who’d joined the rebels in her grandfather’s time, returning to Tacuarembó with missing limbs, howling dreams, twitching mouths.

  “It must be ‘what.’”

  Sarita laughed. The woman in the hat scowled, took her package, and left.

  “Don’t worry about her.” Sarita looked vaguely victorious. She smelled of vanilla perfume. “She loves to complain.”

  Coco handed Pajarita a neat paper package. “Welcome to Punta Carretas.”

  Pajarita returned the next day and the next, and within a week she began drinking mate upstairs from the carnicería, in Coco’s home, during siesta time while the butcher shop was closed. Coco’s husband, Gregorio, stayed down in the shop, cutting and carving and hanging up meat. Their baby, Begonia, crawled underfoot. In days where work began before dawn and went into the night, the siesta hour at Coco’s was a refuge, a raft of time, a stolen sacrament for those who came. The Descalzo living room teemed with knickknacks, bright décor, and an authentic Engl
ish tea set enshrined at the center of the mantel. Coco was extremely proud of her Anglo cups and saucers, which gathered dust while her mate gourd made daily rounds. Above the tea set hung a photograph of José Batlle y Ordóñez, the recent president, who, Pajarita gathered from conversation, had transformed Uruguay into a modern, democratic nation with his thoughts and laws and words. The photograph, framed in silver, showed a large, jowled man gazing gravely to the right of the camera. There was always a large platter of bizcochos, whose sweet-pastry layers melted in the mouths of Punta Carretas women. These women. Like Sarita Alfonti, with her inescapable scent of vanilla, her laugh like two copper pots colliding, her hands that cut the air when she spoke. And La Viuda, who had been widowed so long that her original name had been forgotten. She sat in the corner, on the rocking chair, and blessed or dismissed comments with a wave of her hand. And María Chamoun, whose grandparents had come to Uruguay carrying the spices of their native Lebanon. Sometimes she still smelled of them, very faintly, a nuanced aroma that made Pajarita think of summer shadows. María had hair like a prize stallion’s, lush and dark. She had perfected the art of making alfajores al nieve. The two biscuits were smooth and slender, dulce de leche joining them with calibrated sweetness, powdered sugar pressed on curves with delicate tenacity. María Chamoun oversaw their consumption with the pride of an unrivaled champion. Clarabel Ortiz, La Divorciada, always leaned into sofa cushions, the first woman in Punta Carretas to exercise her legal right to divorce. In Coco’s living room, this gave her notoriety and an intangible mystique. Her face was pallid, her lips painted pink. Her body was shaped like a fence post. Clarabel held occasional séances in her newly empty home. Some women joined her. Others scoffed.