The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  Eva watched her mother and Clarabel settle onto stools. Clarabel was crying already. Eva looked up at the red haunches that hung from the ceiling, the bloody chopping block, the ready knives. When she grew up, she’d be a pirate. She would seek strange and fabulous lands, dig up treasure, and bring it all the way home to Punta Carretas. Mami would be laden with more gold than she could wear. And everyone in Montevideo would gather in the plaza and say look! look! see what Eva Firielli has brought home. And there would be a big party with toasts and streamers and Tío Artigas would play and Mamá and Papá would dance and she would wear a huge magnolia behind her ear the whole night long.

  Or maybe Papá wouldn’t dance. Papá, after all, could not be predicted. He was like a planet, with atmosphere and gravity all its own. Eva knew about planets and gravity and atmosphere from Señorita Petrillo. She knew that every planet has its own kind of air draped around it, and that every planet pulls things close in its own way. Her brothers seemed to understand this too; they orbited her father like three vigorous moons, Bruno, Marco, Tomás, sidling up to the moody air around her father in a cloud of boyish noise until they blended with one another, Brunomarcotomás. Her mamá called them from the street that way. ¡Brunomarcotomás! Their presence was instinctive, constant, like breathing. They were always there and yet their club was closed to her, along with its coded ways: the sprint behind a soccer ball, trail of sweat behind them, loud ease around the planet of her father. That planet’s weather changed often. One day it glistened, moist with rum; the next day your skin could crack from its aridity. On dry days it was best to let him sit, undisturbed, in his rocking chair that creaked back and forth. On the wet days there was banter, the glad gauze of cigar smoke, magic tricks performed for Eva’s bright staccato applause, poker games with Brunomarcotomás, played with seashells as their betting chips (no money gambling in the house—this rule Mamá enforced with steely will), or another game that called for throwing cow vertebrae with stones, a real gaucho game because, as Cacho, the magician, once proclaimed, “Your Papi is a real uruguayo.” The real uruguayo game filled the living room with bellow-laughs on those good nights. The laughter careened into the kitchen, where Mamá washed dishes and Eva dried and stacked. In every corner of the kitchen, plants mixed their sweet-leaf breaths with the air and the calm and the full-bellow laughter. We are rising, they murmured in their green way. We are rising into all this kitchen air.

  Mamá had her own way of navigating Papá’s planet. When Eva was nine years old, Papá began taking Brunomarcotomás to a place called El Corriente. Mamá drew out all her weapons. First came logic. “por Dios, they’re still children! What kind of example does this set?” Then came memory. “Have you forgotten? Have you?” Finally, and most brutally, came silence. Eva watched her mother turn her father into the Incredible Disappearing Husband. Now He’s Here, Now He’s Not. Now the man of the house does not exist. There—Ta Da!—is a Ghost Eating Toast in the Morning. Mamá boiled water for a phantom’s morning mate, placed the gourd on a table where no one sat.

  “Querida,” no one said.

  Mamá said nothing, as there was no thing to answer.

  “Por favor …” There was no man here, saying words that dissolved into colluding air.

  After nineteen days, the Man That Does Not Exist broke down and sobbed into his gourd. This gave him flesh again. Papá returned to the table, opaque and fully formed, and from then on Brunomarcotomás—to their dismay—stayed home.

  One summer night Papá did not come home. Eva sat in the kitchen, subtracting fractions, while Mamá scrubbed every surface and shifted plant pots late into the night. Forty-seven minutes after midnight, Eva ran out of fractions and drew numbers, over and over, pretending to add, to multiply, to make them into more than what they were. The next day, Eva returned from school exhausted and collapsed into her bed. When she awoke, her room was dark. There was no moon. A warm figure sat on the bed beside her.

  “Psst. Eva.”

  “Xhana?”

  “Prima, I thought you’d never wake up!”

  Eva dragged her mind up from the fog of sleep. “Is Papá here?”

  “He was. He’s out again. My papá and your mamá are in the kitchen talking.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you hear?”

  “What?”

  “That your father lost his job.”

  Eva sat up against the pillows. Air pressed humidly against her. “No.”

  “That’s why he’s so upset.”

  Eva’s eyes adjusted, a little, to the dark. She saw the barest outlines of Xhana’s face—hairline, eyes, a sweep of nose.

  “Do you know why it happened?”

  “There’s a problem with our economy.”

  “Oh.”

  “We have an export economy.”

  Eva had heard the word export before, to describe the company her father worked for. She had always thought it meant Very Big Crate. “What’s that?”

  Xhana switched on the lamp. Eva blinked, eyes gulping in the light. “The thing is,” Xhana said, “we have a lot of sheep and cows. Uruguay, I mean. ¿Ta?”

  “Ta.”

  “So people export—that means sell things far away. To countries that are richer and who like our wool. And beef. And leather.”

  Eva nodded. Xhana had two blue ribbons in her hair. They matched her blouse. They looked so pretty.

  “But then these rich countries, they woke up one day not so rich. And said, those uruguayos, let’s not buy their things. And then, after that, uruguayos don’t have money. And so they tell people not to go to work.”

  “I see,” Eva said slowly, though she didn’t. She saw only her papá’s face, sad and arid, surrounded by a cloud of sleep she longed to disappear in. “Are you staying the night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yes.”

  Eva lifted the sheet from her bed. Her cousin sluffed off her shoes and crawled in, blouse and ribbons and all. Sleep rose around them, one dark swath surrounding their two bodies.

  The autumn months unfolded coldly. March. April. May. It rained hard. A new sort of silence filled up Eva’s home, and it was not a good or pretty silence, not a fishing-morning silence; this one was sour and sticky and it settled deep between the fibers of the rugs, in the corners of the house, filmy and translucent over chairs and forks and napkins. It was everywhere, silence that could stain your hands and prick the back of your neck. Noise did not expel it. Any word or laugh or song just layered over it for a moment, hovered in the air, then fell apart and landed in flecks on the big silence. Life happened on it and around it and within it: Papá’s absences, and his tense arrivals; his bone-dry brooding and slurred jokes; Brunomarcotomás, banished from soccer by the weather, peeling apart into Bruno (gambling madly for shells), Marco (lost in books), and Tomás (gambling for shells and polishing his father’s forgotten shoes); Mamá, pushing forward like a steady prow, her fist pounding bread crumbs into beef, her braids tight and dark each morning. Mamá kept filling her basket each day with freshly cut leaves and roots for the carnicería. Women still came for remedies, though they had less to give in return than before. Eva saw this, watching from her pirate ship, clasping hands with Capitán Andrés of the Invincible Eye Patch. She watched women sit on that stool across the seas, faces strained, hands empty, bodies stooped in the shape of a question mark.

  In the winter, in the thick of August rains, Eva discovered a trick, a way to leave the house without leaving the house by diving into words. Each thing, after all, had a name; and each name was a word that could imprint the air, becoming larger than the thing itself. The letters rose one by one, a tall-as-the-ceiling presence in the room. Anything could start it: like the slam of the front door and her father lurching in, hat wet with rain, wool sweater dripping.

  Mamá at the edge of the hall. “Where have you been?”

  “Out.”

  Eva sat on the rug, next to the rocking chair.
Chair, SILLA. The letters were huge and graceful. S—snakelike, slipping, an enormous, coiled blue boa (S is blue, always blue).

  “I noticed that. It’s been three days.”

  The drops from Papá’s sleeves made two dark spots on the rug. “Leave me alone.”

  (I, a high stone tower, the kind where maidens languish under spells. The kind with pirate treasure.)

  Mamá said, “You’re drunk.”

  Papá said, louder, “Leave me alone.”

  (LL, two high brown walls with a hiding place ensconced between them. Safe and dark but tricky to climb out of.)

  Mamá stepped forward, back straight, arms crossed. She was much shorter than Papá. “How could you? How could you? When we don’t have enough for the children.”

  “Money!” (A is very strong. A, a letter in a class all its own. A, a mountain with its top half steeped in snow.) “That’s all you care about, the lack of money.”

  “No.” Mamá’s arms uncrossed. (Look at those slopes in A, so steep. They could be unclimbable. Who has scaled them?) “It’s the lack of you.”

  In the silence that followed (sour and sticky), and even once her father had stormed out, Eva looked them over and over, these shapes that filled the room—snake and tower, walls and mountain:

  S-I-LL-A.

  They shimmered with the mystery of words stripped down to essence, down to parts, without which there could be no names or stories. She crawled inside the letters, scaled their heights, tried to find their center, the hidden core that made them throb with meaning. She never found that core but she kept conjuring letters anyway; they rose up for her over and over again. There were, after all, a million things with names to them—as Eva discovered that winter, as the names of things (book and basil, quilt and door, cow bone and oil lamp and itchy woolen sock) came to floor-to-ceiling life.

  In the spring, Eva heard her name through her parents’ bedroom door. She was walking down the hall to pee. It was two-thirty in the morning. She heard her mother first.

  “Eva?” Mami’s voice was loud, and Eva stopped as if she had been called.

  “Shhhh, Pajarita—sí. It’s for Eva.”

  “Ignazio—”

  “Now wait a minute, mi amor. Just listen. You’ve asked me to look, I’ve been looking. Please sit down.”

  Pause. Shuffling. In the hall, Eva’s bare toes curled into the rug, little hooks keeping her in place. She leaned against the wall, thinking, not for the first time, WALL.

  “Bueno,” Mamá said. “I’m listening.”

  “Pietro explained it all to me. The work he has is best for someone younger. It’s spring: the port might need me again soon. His store is doing well, so he can use extra hands and he can pay us. He knows how much we need it.”

  Eva’s toes were cold. She had to pee. No corner of her pink nightgown (sewn by Mamá) was allowed to rustle.

  “But why Eva? She’s only ten.”

  “Probably so the boys can stay in school.”

  “Eva’s in school too.”

  “Yes. Pero mi amor. Marco could become a doctor. Eva, a wife. Think. This could be a good experience.”

  Silence. The backs of Eva’s calves were cold. Arms too. Her pink nightgown was not enough, on this night, in this hall, where she should not be standing.

  “Pajarita,” Papi said, “don’t start. Think what this could do for the family.”

  “She won’t do it.”

  “She will.”

  “You can’t force her, Ignazio. I won’t let you.”

  More silence.

  “At least let me talk to her.”

  Rustle, rustle, no more muffled words. The bedsprings creaked. Eva had lost the urge to pee; she padded back to bed on quiet toes and lay staring at the ceiling, which hid behind the dark.

  The following afternoon, when Brunomarcotomás were outside playing soccer in the tentative sun, and when Mamá had left for the carnicería, and Eva sat at the kitchen table dividing fractions, she heard Papá call out her name.

  “¿Sí, Papá?”

  “Come here.”

  In the living room, light glazed the bookshelf, the framed photograph on the sill, her father’s hair, as if God had picked up the things in the room and dipped them, one by one, in a pot of sun. As she sat down on the sofa next to Papi, she savored a picture of him dangling upside down in the grip of God’s enormous fingers, top of the head submerged in liquid light.

  “You know, of course, how much we love you.” He smiled. The smile was sincere, but a little sad. “Don’t you?”

  “Sí, Papá.”

  “When I was your age, I could build a gondola. Tables I did with my eyes closed.” He glanced out the window. “With my eyes closed.”

  Eva waited.

  “My friend Pietro has offered you a job. In his shoe store. It’s a great … how do you say, opportunity, not to be found in Montevideo, just like that. Your mother thinks you won’t take it—but I think you will. You know why?”

  Eva shook her head. Papá leaned closer. She smelled his semisweet cologne.

  “Because you’re a smart girl. So you know that learning happens in a lot of places. Not just in school. Just think what you could learn at a job.” He put his palm over Eva’s hand. “But that’s not the biggest reason. You know the biggest reason?”

  Eva shook her head. She didn’t know.

  “You love your family. And you want to help your family. Don’t you?”

  “Sí.”

  “Of course! We all do. And here’s your chance.” Tiny pearls of sweat had formed on his forehead. “But of course it’s up to you.”

  Eva looked at the framed photograph on the sill. Her parents—young, just married, freshly moved into the city—stood side by side in front of a plain backdrop. Her father’s smile cocked to one side; her mother’s face was clear and serious. When that picture was taken, even her brothers had not been born. Mamá put the picture up when Eva was five and her papi had just come home (she hazily remembered meeting him, a wet man with flowers, stooping down and calling himself Papi). For years, Eva hated that picture; it reminded her of the strange fact that she once did not exist.

  “Would I have to leave school?”

  Papá nodded. Eva stared at the photograph. She wanted to smash it; she wanted to burn it; she wanted to wrap it in silk and stow it in a high stone tower, under a spell, where no harm could reach it. Her father—not the father in the photo but the real one—ran a hand through graying hair. The light had mellowed. Sun no longer glazed his head.

  She said, “I’ll go—”

  “Eva, that’s—”

  “If you promise to stop drinking.”

  “What?”

  “Only if you don’t drink.”

  He looked around the room as if it had just appeared around him. “But do you know what you’re asking?”

  “Do you?”

  This opened her father wide—in the mouth, in the eyes. His lips worked around words he did not say. He closed his mouth. He opened it. He made a snorting sound. “Carajo, you’re like your mother.” He shook his head. “La puta madre.”

  They were silent for minutes that felt like hours. Papá looked out the window. Finally he turned back and reached out and she flinched, but all he did was stroke her hair, hand warm and rough from years of hauling cargo at the port. Eva leaned toward him, let her body melt against his.

  “All right,” he said.

  “Promise?”

  Through clothes and skin, she felt the pump and push of blood inside him. “I do.”

  Late that night, in bed, Eva couldn’t stop thinking. She saw her mother, standing over steaming pots, pretending not to wait for her husband. She saw Señorita Petrillo, with her sharp face and tenuous bun, the day her class had taken a trip to the river’s edge, and the water had seemed to wear a ruffled brown dress. Another trip was planned for next month but Eva would not be there. Cierre. Cielo. Cerrado. Siempre. Lock. Sky. Closed. Always.

  She rose quietly
, so as not to disturb her brother Tomás’ sleep. She stole a stubby candle from the living room, sneaked into the bathroom, closed the door, struck a match, and opened the drawers of her heart. She fingered what she found there. Tomorrow, she wrote, is the end of school. Words spilled from her pen, one after another, before she could think them, before she could know them, before she could sense their source. I want to eat up all of life. The pen kept moving, faster, faster. Her hand rushed to catch up. Hold on tight. Hold on tight. It was done. She stroked the page in wonder. It felt smooth and full, like a glass brimming with water. She had poured it there herself. She felt a little lighter; she would be all right; she had this thing—a poem? could she call it that?—a string of words, at least, that could be rolled on the tongue, wrapped in the mind, stashed in drawers she would learn to hide.