“Hmmph! Shaking teacups tonight?”
“They don’t always shake, Sarita, and you know it.”
“Still. I’d just as soon leave my dead alone. Even if they could be raised, which they can’t, why give myself more headaches?”
“Espera. Pero no.” La Viuda raised her palm. “Séance or no séance, the dead are there for more than headaches.”
Silence hung in the room. Coco took the mate from Pajarita’s hand. She poured in water and gave it to María Chamoun.
“Did you hear?” María said. “Gloria’s granddaughter was found by the lighthouse, pushed up on the rocks under a boy.” She dropped her voice. “Her blouse was open.”
“¡Esa chica!”
“She’s been trouble since her birth.”
“I heard she got a good whipping from her father.”
“She’ll never see the boy again.”
“That’s all a bit exagerado. So what if she has a boyfriend?”
“Clarabel! You have the strangest ideas.”
Clarabel also believed that women should have the right to vote, and would soon gain it. She had her friends practice by casting votes on perfumed pink papers that she gathered in a basket and mailed to city hall. They were still discussing the recent election of President Viera.
“I just couldn’t put his name down.”
“What other choice did we have?”
“Granted, he’s not as good as Batlle, but no one can be.”
“Phht. He tried to stop the law for eight-hour workdays. Good thing he was too late.”
“Well, thanks to Batlle, we have it.”
“And education. And pensions.”
“And divorce.”
“And peace.” La Viuda’s hand flew up, a bony bird. “Reprieve from coups and bloodshed. The last century was terrible. I remember.”
They found Pajarita fascinating, with her darker-than-most-of-them skin, her campo origins, her name after an animal. They demanded stories about her gaucho family, and the way she’d lived in Tacuarembó, as if it were all wild and romantic and just a touch unsavory. Pajarita felt a bit like the English tea set, removed and exposed, only not for the fragile glint of china but the leathery musk of campo life. She drank in their presence as a way to taste the city, and slowly it occurred to her that through her they perhaps reached for the land. That’s how it is, she thought; we carry worlds inside ourselves and long to taste the worlds of others, we stare and prod and sip and can’t inhabit. Sometimes she felt their interest as a slight—Oh, look, Pajarita, she is brown, she cannot read, isn’t it novel? Coco was not like that. She came in close, bold as a hare. Sometimes, after siesta hour, Pajarita lingered alone with her, helping her clean up, listening to her chatter and confessions. She gave Coco herbs to ease her female cycles, her nerves, her secret impatience with husband and daughter. They were easy to concoct out of the stash she’d brought from Tacuarembó and the wild trees and weeds in the neighborhood. In return for these gifts, Coco helped her write letters home.
“ ‘Dear Tía Tita,’ ”she dictated, as Coco wrote and eked the last weak flavor from the mate, “ ‘How is home? I miss you. Montevideo is colder this winter than the last. It’s never as hot as in Tacuarembó. Ignazio is well. He has been promoted at the port. He says business is good these days, there are many exports, because of the—’ ”
“War in Europe? No, don’t say that. That’s not happy news. How about ‘because of his hard work’?”
“Ta. ‘How is Papá? How is everyone? The town? The family? The chickens? Send everyone my love. Thank you for the wool. And please let me know if you hear from Artigas. Con cariño, Pajarita.’”
The late-siesta sun seeped through the window, grudging and golden, taking its time. The room smelled of mothballs and fresh sausage and soap. Coco finished writing and then laughed, for no good reason, her laugh a warm brass bell.
“Mi reina,” Ignazio asked in bed, “are you lonely all day without me?”
Pajarita fingered the curls on his chest. “No.”
“Why not? You don’t love me?”
“Don’t be silly. I just like the neighborhood. I’ve made friends.”
“Men?”
“No.”
More grimly, this time, “men.”
“Please, Ignazio—no.”
The lighthouse swept its beam through the silence. It swept again. Ignazio sat up sharply. His broad silhouette blocked out the window. “I wish you would get pregnant.”
Pajarita sat up too. She turned on the lamp beside her and waited until the electric light no longer jarred their eyes. She had been stalling, waiting for the right moment, unable to intimate its shape. “I am.”
Ignazio’s face went blank, then soft, then (just for an instant) pained, then he kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her body. The light clicked off.
Being pregnant felt like turning into an orange: her skin turned taut and round and she was full of potency. She ripened more each day. The thing inside her made her sick until it made her euphoric, full of tears and heft and motion: the strange being inside her turned and lurched and pelted in the middle of the night, making her ravenous for the future.
Birth came the day that men across the oceans signed a paper to end war. On November 11, 1918, while the streets of Montevideo filled with drums and confetti and loud sweat, Pajarita lay at home in white-hot labor. She survived the birth without injuries, with the small exception of a scolding from the doctor for having squeezed the baby out while he was gone from the room. He had left to confer with Ignazio in the kitchen, when they heard a cry and ran to the bedroom to find Pajarita, red-faced, heavy-breathed, a drenched blue infant wailing between her thighs.
They named him Bruno. Friends filled the house, including Cacho and his wife, Consuelo, who had sewn baby clothes adorned with sequins; Coco and Gregorio Descalzo, with Begonia and their new baby girl and the ribs of a whole cow; the Punta Carretas women with their baskets of hot food; the Spaniard and Bajo the midget, bearing poker chips; and Pietro (tall and sparkly) and his wife and baby. Their little house swelled with noise and laughter. Cacho did magic tricks that made Sarita gape and Clarabel cheer like a sailor. The Spaniard fawned on La Viuda like a fresh young suitor, making the old woman blush for the first time in twenty years. María sang baby Bruno an Arabic lullaby as he drowsed against her prodigious breasts. Bajo, to his delight, beat Pietro several times at cards.
After the last person had left, Pajarita still felt the loud, tender breath of guests. It curled around her as she lay in bed, cradling Bruno, listening to her husband turn off the kitchen light, enter the room, and sink down beside her. He lay completely still. She touched his shoulder.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Being a father.”
She stroked his skin. “Are you happy?”
He didn’t answer. He turned away. She stared at the outline of his back.
“Ignazio?”
No answer.
She lay still for a minute, then another. Bruno squirmed and began to whimper. She raised her nightgown and placed him on her breast. Lay silent in the dark while he ate.
That night Ignazio dreamed he swam underwater, in a Venetian canal, looking for the body of a woman. His father’s corpse, blue and engorged, floated toward him. Rotting arms pushed forward to enfold his body. He tried to scream, tried to resist, but when he opened his mouth it filled with putrid water.
A prison arose in Punta Carretas. Right there, across from Carnicería Descalzo, the crank and haul of strange machines brought it into being. A vast wall formed, with an arching gate at its center, and behind the gate a huge box of a building was taking shape. It was imposing, castlelike, the most majestic structure Punta Carretas had ever known.
“At least it’s pretty,” Sarita said, leaning on the sausage counter.
“But it’s a prison,” Coco said. “It blocks our view of the lighthouse. And what kind of neighbors will we have?”
“There’s n
o stopping it.” La Viuda spread her hands in a gesture of doom. “The whole barrio is changing. Punta Carretas is pure city now.”
This was true. The stone and density of downtown was creeping into Punta Carretas. The city had claimed the barrio. Pajarita’s door no longer opened to a vague dirt path, but onto hard stone sidewalk. By the time she gave birth to Marco (a solemn baby, compared to Brunito’s restless roving), Punta Carretas had changed beyond recognition. Houses thronged to either side of them, pushing wall right up to wall; cobbles filled a street outside their door; a church took shape beside the rising prison. The air thickened. The lighthouse stopped reaching its slow beam into her home. And all of this, the mayor said, the president said, was progress; the city was larger, modernized, developed, Montevideo a worthy capital for this nation, the Switzerland of South America, full of hope and promise.
Amazing, Pajarita thought, how much the world could change. How accustomed she could grow to electricity, high stove, high chairs, high bed. How land could disappear beneath homes and rock-hard paving, and how men could turn into husbands who then turned into—what? What was Ignazio becoming? Someone different from the joven she met years ago; a man she sometimes barely recognized. It began with the birth of their first son and deepened with the second. Something inside him—pale and pained—had swollen to unmanageable size. It bulged. It never showed its naked face. It sank into the sea of all the liquor he drank. It kept him far away from her: in an era of eight-hour workdays, Ignazio came home later and later, drunk, face drawn tight like reins on an unpredictable horse—or, other nights, face loud, loose, unfettered. I don’t deserve you. You don’t love me. How could you. Why wouldn’t you. Did you did you yes you did. She tried to answer but there weren’t enough words and he never really posed a question. He grew obsessed with the idea that she had a lover. They fought over this phantom man’s existence. There were nights when they fought until they collapsed against each other, and only in those hours could she reach for who she was and who he longed to be and open them toward each other, strain to fuse them in a crucible of heat. On other nights she woke to feel Ignazio rustling into place beside her and he reeked so strongly of drink and women’s musk that she sent him out to sleep on the living room floor so she could lie alone, free of his scents, and miss his body.
She bore a third son. Tomás. Who looked so much like her brother, Artigas, that it hurt to look at him. Those same lean bones and bright eyes. She went to séances at Clarabel’s house and asked about her brother. Nothing came. He couldn’t be dead, couldn’t be dead, couldn’t be alive and not have written.
The pile of pesos Ignazio brought home each week slimmed down. It was too thin, barely stretched to feed the boys. She cornered him on a Sunday morning at the kitchen table.
“Ignazio. You’re not bringing home all your pay. You have three sons, querido. You have to stop.”
She had thought, she could have sworn, that he would fight; that his jaw would tighten, his voice would raise, his fist would crash on the table. Instead he stared at her, then out the window, toward the lighthouse hidden behind the prison-almost-finished. He was quiet. She waited. His profile stood crisp against striped wallpaper.
“Remember,” he said, “when we first came to the city? How we walked along the shore of the river? As if it had no end. As if we could walk and walk and find only more waves, more sand, more water. I always wanted to put gondolas on that water. I’m going to do it. A peso per ride. We’ll have more than enough for all of us.”
Pajarita let her hands rest on her lap. They grasped each other. “How much would it cost to build them?”
Ignazio shrugged. “A sum.”
“And where would that sum come from?”
“Leave that to me.”
That night he was voracious with her, even more so when she dug her nails into his back and broke the skin.
Three days later, the prison across the street opened to great fanfare. Montevideanos from all parts of the city came to see. El Penal de Punta Carretas, it was christened. The mayor appeared on the steps and cleared his throat.
“My fellow montevideanos, we are here today to celebrate progress, to celebrate this formidable new building, but above all to celebrate this city.” He wiped his forehead, rich with sweat, and adjusted his wool suit. “Montevideo is one of the most beautiful and modern places on the continent. Our climate, our beaches, our literature are unparalleled, and in the past twenty-five years, we have become a world-class city. Immigrants from Italy, Spain, France, and other nations have found a home here. We have established a democratic system inspired by the highest humanitarian ideals—the ideals of batllismo, the ideals at the heart of Uruguay.” The crowd clapped, and the mayor paused, his chest puffed out like a sparrow’s. “Yes, yes, we have accomplished this—while our giant neighbors, Argentina and Brazil, only dream of such stability. We may be small, but we are an exemplar of a nation; we are claiming our place in the world!” He pointed his index finger vigorously at the sky, and held it aloft as applause washed over him. “And so, my dear montevideanos, as we mark this day, as we open this state-of-the-art facility here in Punta Carretas, let us also look to the future. With all we have achieved in this century so far, just think of what awaits us in the rest of it. Our children and our children’s children will stand on the foundations we have built for them, and carry us forward to our destiny. We are a city of the future. The future belongs to Montevideo!”
He sliced the red ribbon that hung across the gate, dripping sweat, beaming in a deluge of applause. Sarita Alfonti shouted behind Pajarita. She felt the crowd’s excitement, its hunger and pride. Champagne corks popped. An accordion pushed out chords. El Penal’s cream-colored walls loomed, high, clean, unmoved.
That night, Ignazio did not come home. Pajarita awoke at 4 a.m. in a still-empty bed. She stared at the ceiling until it grew pale with dawn. Then she rose and made breakfast for the children: toast and warm milk and what was left of butter. Today was Ignazio’s payday. When he arrived, more butter would come.
But he didn’t arrive that day. Or that night. Or the next. Onions—she had onions; she could fry them for dinner and serve them on bread. More bread with mayonnaise for lunch.
He arrived on the sixth night. He looked ashy and haggard and did not meet her eyes. He smelled as if he had just been spit out of a war zone. He slouched in silence at the kitchen table. It took Pajarita two hours of pouring mate to coax him and discover what he’d done.
After his last night at home, Ignazio asked his boss for an advance on the next two months of work. He was a faithful employee, and so the request was granted. The loan constituted a third of what he needed for a fleet of gondolas. He took it straight to El Corriente, to triple it at the poker table. It didn’t triple. He lost it all.
How smooth the wooden table was between them. Solid, it seemed—and yet one bite of an ax could, at any moment, break it open. Send halves reeling. Pajarita gripped the table’s edge as though that act alone were keeping it in place. Gone. Two months of pay. And days yawning in front of them like mouths.
“What will we do?”
No answer.
“Ignazio—”
“Shut up, woman!” Ignazio stood so suddenly that the table knocked from her hands and fell. “Shut your stupid fucking mouth.”
Pajarita stood too. “Don’t shout at me.”
Ignazio tightened backward in an enormous bow and arrow and the force of him flew forward in a fist that crashed against her face so that she fell against the wall, toward the floor; she curled around her burning face—the world was turning turning, full of shouting, full of stars, full of silence. Silence. Pain ebbed slightly. She was alone. No, not quite alone; his sounds came from the living room. She should go to him. She would not. She would stay here, furled on the floor, while he wept. But she was bleeding. She stood and sought a rag to wipe her face. The taste of iron tinged her tongue. She wet the rag and wiped again. Thank god thank god the children were asleep.
She lifted the table into place, back onto four legs, and cleaned blood from the floor. Dizzy. She listened for living room sobs. None. She went to look. There he was, her husband, tear-streaked, drunk, fast asleep in the rocking chair. She walked past him to her room, to bed, to sleep.
The next morning, when she woke, the rocking chair was empty. No Ignazio. She used the last of the flour for bread that day. Crackers. There were still crackers. The days went by. No Ignazio. The crackers ran out. Only a quarter jar of mayonnaise left. Her hands (scrubbing, folding, brushing Bruno’s hair, opening her blouse for hungry Tomás) shook.
Coco saved her with free meat, and an idea.
“First of all,” Coco said, pushing a hefty package into Pajarita’s hands, “you’re taking this meat. I don’t care what you say. I know your husband’s gone—the desgraciado.” She sat her ample body down at Pajarita’s table. Pajarita stared at the gift.
“I have no way to thank you.”
Coco continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Secondly: your plants. They’re strong. You should sell them.”
“Sell?”
“To women in the barrio. You can start in the store, behind the counter with me. Look, once word spreads about your cures, better than a doctor and cheaper too, you’ll be putting food in those boys’ bellies.”
It had never occurred to her, but she couldn’t think of a reason not to try. She took her children and a basket of leaves and roots and barks to the butcher shop. The boys resumed an epic pretend game of gauchos-in-the-campo, riding imaginary horses among the chunks of flesh that hung from the ceiling. In one corner of the room, between the chopping block and meat hooks, Pajarita arranged two small wooden stools and sat down on one. Ignazio, she thought, I want to kill you, to kiss you, to carve you like a flank; just wait and see how I’m going to live without you by my side.
Coco served as a living advertisement. Women began to come. Some of them just needed to be heard; they told sprawling, unkempt tales of death in the family, brutal mothers-in-law, financial pressures, wayward husbands, violent husbands, boring husbands, loneliness, crises of faith, visions of Mary, visions of Satan, sexual frigidity, sexual temptation, recurring dreams, fantasies involving saddles or bullwhips or hot coals. She offered them teas for comfort, luck, or protection. Other customers came with physical conditions—pain in their bones, a stitch in their side, numbness in hips, ears that rang, forgetfulness, sore knees, sore backs, sore hearts, sore feet, cut fingers, quivering fingers, wandering fingers, burns, headaches, indigestion, excessive female bleeding, a pregnancy that wouldn’t come, a pregnancy that had to end, cracked bones, cracked skin, rashes no doctor could diagnose, aches no doctor could cure. There were housewives, maids, sore-handed seamstresses, sweaty-handed adulteresses, great-grandmothers swaying with canes, young girls swooning with love. Pajarita listened to them all. She sat still as an owl as she listened. Then she handed them a small package and explained what to do with its contents. Word spread. Women came to see her from all corners of the city. She could barely keep up with harvesting from cracks in the sidewalk, nearby parks, and the pots in her own house. To Coco’s delight, the seekers often picked up their daily beef along with their cures. Pajarita set no price. Some gave her pesos, others fruit, a basket of bread, a ball or two of handspun wool. Anonymous gifts appeared on the Firielli doorstep—baskets of apples, jars of yerba mate, handmade clothes for the children. They had enough.
The Invisible Mountain Page 6