She walked to La Ciudad Vieja, past proud old buildings, Spanish balconies, carved stones heavy with history. She paused in front of Cabán’s Cigar Shop and breathed in the Old City, with its smell of cars and frying oil. Noise and movement swarmed the street; electric trams moaned past on high-flung lines; men called to one another and tipped their hats while striding, purposefully, somewhere; broad buildings stood like aging sentinels, keeping quiet watch over the city’s central veins.
The shoe store was nestled on a narrow street near La Plaza de Zabala, on the first floor of a four-story building. Its roof crawled with stone cherubs. She opened the door with a tentative hand and stepped into a room thick with racks of shoes. Their leathers—black, red, brown, cream, beige—warmed the air with their scent. A sign next to the cash register read: ONLY THE FINEST URUGUAYAN LEATHER, CUT IN THE FINEST ITALIAN STYLES. A scratchy tango played on an unseen phonograph.
Pietro appeared from behind the racks, two pairs of boots in hand. “Eva. Welcome.” He gave her a quick greeting kiss (he smelled like spearmint). “I’m just clearing up from the last customer. Make yourself at home.”
She sat on a plush chair next to the window and waited as Pietro gathered boots and shut them into boxes. He was a tall man with an easy smile. He whistled off-key, along with the tango. She relaxed a little. Her memory of him had been hazy, though she knew he had a wife, three daughters, and her father’s undying loyalty (“That is a good man,” he said last night at dinner, “bueno, pero bueno”); he was her father’s oldest friend, the friend from the Italian steamboat. She harbored an image of Papá and Pietro laughing at the helm of a ship, gripping the rails, wearing long capes that flapped in the wind as they raced across the Atlantic, like superheroes from the yanqui comic books her brothers liked to read.
“Bueno.” Pietro approached her. “Let me show you around.”
That afternoon, Eva learned the basics of the store: the racks of shoes, standing at attention in tidy soldierish formation (boots, buckled loafers, laced-up oxfords, slim-heeled pumps); the cushioned chairs where customers tried on wares (elegant hems at Eva’s forehead as she bent to slide shoes on); the storeroom lit by two naked bulbs, with its narrow walkway lined with shelves and shelves of boxes. There was plenty to be done. There were feet to serve shoes to, and questions to answer from people attached to those feet. There were boxes to sort and rearrange, standing on the storeroom stepladder (high high up, like standing on a table, which was forbidden at home). There were floors to be swept at the end of the day, while Pietro counted cash at the desk in the back room, spreading bills beside the crooning phonograph, sipping his evening mate. “How did you like your first day?”
“It was good, Señor, thank you.”
“Call me Pietro. We’ll have fun, I think. You seem like a very special girl.” He tilted his head in the direction of the phonograph. “You like the tangos?”
She nodded.
“You know how to dance?”
She shook her head.
“I can teach you. Tomorrow after we close. Would you like that?”
Eva nodded, still sweeping, eyes on the head of the broom.
Throughout dinner that night (how was work?—good, Mamá) and breakfast the next morning (don’t forget your cardigan—no, Mamá), Eva thought about the tango, with its sharp, urgent grace. Walking to work through Parque Rodó, on Avenida San Salvador, she heard a phonograph and stopped to listen. The voice of Carlos Gardel, the king of tango, crooned a melody in one long caress, a sound she could feel on her skin. It came from a blood-red door. A brass sign on the stone wall beside it read LA DIABLITA. Eva fingered the engraved letters. She had heard of this place from Tío Artigas. It was a fashionable café where artists and the elite gathered to lounge and laugh and say smart things, to savor pasta and poetry and wine, to bask in music and clouds of pungent cigarette smoke. You seem like a very special girl. Gardel’s voice rose to a wail. The air felt cool and clear around her. She wished she could dissolve her skin and slide into the café, into the smoke, into the howling motion of the song.
Pietro kept his promise that night. He turned up the volume and danced down the aisle, arms stretched around a woman made of air. “Ready?” he said, and clasped her hand. They sailed around the room and her feet followed his smooth steps and the instruction, BA pa pa pa, of his voice; the curves of music pressed him closer, a hand caught her back, not like a little girl but like a lady, grown and gorgeous, vital, infused with borrowed grace. The song ended. They stopped, out of breath. Pietro’s shirt was dark with sweat. She pulled away.
“You have natural talent,” Pietro said.
She didn’t know what to say. The air was thick and shimmered strangely.
“Your parents. They wouldn’t approve?”
She shook her head.
“But you like it?”
She looked down at her clunky shoes, schoolgirl shoes, not a lady’s. “Yes.”
He was silent, and she thought about the trouble she’d be in, how Papá would frown while Pietro shrugged his shoulders, how Mamá would listen too and shake her head, and no more tango, no more curves, no more shimmer.
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell them.”
And he didn’t. The tango lessons came a few times each week. There were complex steps, turns to learn, dips so deep she saw the room upside down behind her. Pietro’s body signaled when a turn was coming, when a dip approached, when he planned to sweep her to the left, forward, back. When Eva danced, she became more than herself, larger than life, like the women in the posters outside movie theaters who languished in the arms of heroes. It made her ache in a way she could not define—a wide-skinned, bone-deep, rush-hot longing—it made her want to break out of her body. It was thrilling. It was terrible. She felt closer to the ladies she served, who slipped their feet into supple pumps, who turned easily toward the mirror, whose ankles looked so pretty lifted by high heels, and who did not seem to spend hours bent over the kitchen sink or sitting on a crude stool in a butcher shop.
“What did you do at work today, Eva?”
“Oh, the same. Arranged a shelf. Sold some boots. Swept.”
Mami paused, more questions in her mouth, then let them go. Papá winked at her across the dinner table. Only water filled his glass. Eva looked down at her plate and pressed her knife into the meat.
December came. Summer sandals crowded the aisles and Eva turned eleven. On her birthday there was cake and candles, song and wishes, a new green dress sewn by Mamá. On the day after her birthday, Pietro offered her a cigarette.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to try.” A lit smoke dangled between his lips, and he looked like a sailor, an aging sailor, seasoned by the seven seas. He raised his brows.
Hesitantly, she reached for the thin white column in his hand. She put it in her mouth; he leaned over his desk, lit a match, and brought the fire to its tip.
“Breathe in.”
She breathed in. Smoke filled her, thick and bitter. She coughed.
“Too much?”
She shook her head.
“You’re quite the young woman now,” Pietro said. “Aren’t you?”
They stood for a moment, smoking together, smoke rising from two bright orange tips, forming a flimsy pattern in the air. Me, she thought, I am doing it. I can smoke. A new song began on the phonograph: “Caminito,” full of long, ardent chords. Pietro turned it up, stubbed out his cigarette, and took and stubbed out hers. Caminito que el tiempo ha borrado / Que juntos un día nos viste pasar—he grasped her wrist with one hand, her waist with the other, and they slid across the room. He pressed her tight, he wheeled her through the narrow room pressed up against his body—una sombra ya pronto serás—the room was hot, flanked in boxes, reeling all around her—una sombra lo mismo que yo—the dance was large now, larger than her, caught as she was in a crooning voice and rhythmic curves and sharp cologne and sweat, his sweat, bitter and damp, and all around the room the song came beating beating, rising t
oward its climax as his fingers dug into her and he stopped, they stopped, his hands pulled her in—yo a tu lado quisiera caer—into a hard thing—y que el tiempo nos mate a los dos—the song ended; his grip was strong; she tried to writhe away and he moaned, strangely, pressed even closer, again, again, then let her go. She stepped back. She did not look at him. His breath was ragged. A tango started up and drowned him out. She heard him step toward his desk and light a cigarette.
“You’ve become quite a dancer.”
Shoes. She stared at her shoes.
“Go home.”
Eva walked past the boxes, through the door, out into the balmy summer air. Twilight, with its softening edges, had just begun. An electric tram rumbled somewhere on a street out of sight. A boy careened past on a bicycle, almost grazing her side. She smelled the slow roast of an asado on a balcony above her head, the muscular red smell of flesh. She felt sick in the pit of her stomach. Before she turned the corner she looked back at the outside of the shoe store, with its clear sheen and brass bell; then she looked at the top of the building, where stone cherubs waved their trumpets among pigeons. Some cherubs grinned; others rolled their eyes heavenward in supplication. One cherub wailed in stone despair. She saw herself soaring up to him, and farther, out of sight.
“Children,” Artigas sighed, “are always growing up. Who can stop it?”
Eva took his hand and swung it in time with their steps. Her shoes sang against the warm bricks of La Rambla. She was flanked by family, Artigas on one side, Xhana on the other, the rest of them—Mami, Papi, Brunomarcotomás, and Bruno’s new girlfriend—some meters up ahead. To their left, the Río de la Plata lay still and wide. A thousand tiny splinters of light winked on the water, as if, for New Year’s Day, the river itself had donned a sequined gown.
“Still,” Artí added, “he does look happy.”
He was talking about Bruno. There he walked with his arm around Mirna, a honey-and-almonds girl with a mad mane of hair. They leaned their heads toward each other as if listening to a fairy (or flea) between them. Bruno had graduated from high school. He was formally courting. He was a man. Beside him, Papá slid his arm around Mamá. Her body relaxed into the slope of him. Up ahead, Marco and Tomás walked with the kinds of strides they took when arguing over soccer: brisk, emphatic, purposeful. Marco poured mate water from a thermos and passed the gourd with a dismissive toss of his head. Other families swarmed around them: a cluster of children ran down asphalt steps to the sand; a widow leaned into her son while listening raptly to another woman’s gossip; a couple on a bench unwrapped empanadas under the bright sweep of the sun. Montevideo had lifted and tipped and rolled the people to its edge, and the people, it seemed, had rolled gladly.
Artigas was in one of his expansive, musing moods. “The New Year makes me think of your mother. You know, she was a miracle child.”
Xhana rolled her eyes for Eva’s benefit.
“Thank you, mija, for your filial respect.”
Xhana giggled, caught in the act.
“As I was saying.”
Eva shared a mocking squeeze-of-hand with her cousin, but she was grateful for Tío’s story, with its familiar pulse (La Roja was our mother, it started when she died), like the slow sturdy push of waves. She felt more peaceful on this walk than she had in weeks. The tango lessons had stopped after her birthday. When she thought of that last dance, a hot black tar poured through her, from her heels up to her neck (then she disappeared in the middle of the night). Up ahead, Papi turned his head to say something, and Mami laughed. Her back stretched into an arc as she laughed, and her braids dipped and brushed the bottom of her hips. They had been taking this walk, these two, since that odd, unnerving time before Eva herself was born. The city had changed since then. The Rambla had paved over jagged rocks, and buildings had shot up against the north side of the road. She had never known the shore without paving and houses. But the water—surely it had stayed the same, old, calm, constant, able to clean things, even kill things, like the year that had just ended, drowning in the riverflood of time; she saw the old year like a carcass on the water (some say she flew, some say she fell); time itself was being cleaned by all these waves, drowned, washed, eroded, and perhaps the forceful waters would dissolve her sins like corpses, consume them, and make them disappear.
In January she tried to be the perfect worker. Every shoe in place on its wooden rack. Every customer pampered. At closing time, the kettle boiled right when Pietro started to want his mate. No dancing. For a time, it seemed to work. Pietro did not turn up the tangos, he sold shoes, he smiled, he hummed as he rolled cigarettes at his desk. February came. The streets filled with the sounds of Carnaval: murgas, with their clownish face paint and bright clothes, belting ballads to exult and mock the country’s politicians; comparsas pounding beats on sixty drums at once; tangueros, in their first summer since Carlos Gardel’s death, staging homages to showcase their extravagant grief. Music shook and pierced the city.
“Eva.” Pietro was behind her at the window. “Do you like these?”
He held a pair of red heels in his hand. They were high, sleek, the most expensive in the store. Last week, a lady had bought three pairs: two for herself, one for her daughter.
“Yes.”
He held them out.
“Oh, no—”
“Take them. For your hard work.”
She shook her head.
He sighed, a patient man addressing others’ ignorance. “You can’t keep wearing those schoolgirl shoes. It’s bad for business. You have to model our wares.” He smiled. “You do want to do your job, don’t you?”
She nodded. He held the red shoes out. She reached for them, slowly.
“That’s better.” He looked genuinely pleased, a child who’s won a prize. “Now put them on.”
She put them on.
“Walk around for me.”
She walked back and forth, wobbling at an unfamiliar height. The pumps felt steep and supple. Outside, she heard a cluster of men strike up a mournful murga.
Pietro leaned back into a chair and lit a cigarette. His eyes grew hard and bright and fell toward her ankles. “Keep walking.”
Eva walked. Her legs trembled but she did not fall.
“Good.” He said it softly. “Good. Practice every day. You’ll walk like a real lady in no time.”
Weeks passed. Eva’s feet ached. Something else ached too, nebulous and nameless, when Pietro looked at her and also much later, when she was alone in bed, too restive, still sticky with the film of his gaze. Heat and fear and hunger and revulsion. She couldn’t understand it and it made her want to leave, to disappear, to slide away into a pair of Nice Shoes and be lost. That was it, slide away, curl up against a sole where nobody could find her. Tall shoes were the safest, the kind that hid the ankle or calf in leather tunnels, strong and thick and cured to last forever. Months passed. She worked. She slip-slid out of sight. She followed the soles of customers into the dark shells of shoes they tried on, she crawled into dark leather caves—take me down into the shoe, grind me deep into the heel where I cannot be seen, invisible, unfindable, the magically shrinking girl, curling up where sweat meshes with the hide.
How was work today, Eva?—It was fine, Mamá.
In May, the winter boots arrived—long bodies on the storeroom floor like gunned-down birds. Eva kneeled, arranging them by style. Pietro came in and ran his hand along her neck. Eva had been imagining herself inside a brown ladies’ boot.
“Come here.”
“Wait. I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Too bad,” he said, and the voice belonged to a stranger, some harsh man she’d never met before. He pushed her onto the pile of boots, hand at her hem and under it, crawling clammy up her thigh; she struggled and he pressed her, held her down by the hair while his other hand shoved past her panties into her body—sharp and burning breaking into many jagged pieces—“Shut up, puta,” the stranger’s voice, a hand covered her mouth, and leather caves
ripped open as she fell and fell.
She squirmed and then he bucked and then she tore out from under him and crawled, quickly, rose to her feet and ran, to the storeroom door and past it, away from the voice that called her back, out and down the street like girls should never run, kicking off the high heels and running in bare feet, past horses and glossy cars and alarmed stares over endless cobblestones until she broke through the door of her house and landed, out-of-breath barefoot and burning between her legs, in front of Mamá, who lifted her eyebrows and spatula in shock and came toward her. She leaned into her mother’s body and left her own.
She was in bed. She felt her mother’s hands braiding her hair. She felt nothing from the waist down. Her father stood in the doorway, looking strange, there and not there, as though he were suspended by invisible strings and expected a wind to blow him away at any moment. He looked at Eva. He was pale as ice. “What have you done?”
She would have answered, she meant to answer, but her mouth was empty.
“Ignazio,” Mami said, “give us some time.”
He hesitated.
“Some time, Ignazio. Alone.”
He left.
“Mijita.” Mamá looked worn. Eva searched for anger in her face and could not find it. “Tell me what happened.”
“Have—have you talked to Pietro?”
“Your papi did.”
“What did he say?”
“That you flirted with his customers and stole a pair of shoes.”
“That’s not true!”
“Bueno. What happened?”
Eva stared at her mother’s face: slender, solid, framed by two thick braids. She couldn’t see any more than the top of them, but she knew they were there, falling dark and long down her back. Of all the things Eva knew in the world, none were more certain than these two black braids. She could not risk losing them. She longed to tell the truth and could not possibly. The truth was worse than Pietro’s version: it was tangos danced at closing time, full of close, forbidden moves; a cigarette, accepted, smoked; the way she’d made him press and moan; two red heels, accepted, worn around the store each day; the horrifying heat in her own body. She imagined saying these things out loud. A devastating story had opened in her life and she was the villain, the travesty, the disgusting girl, her crime had no bounds, it was endlessly evil and hiding it was the only way to keep her mother leaning close with braids and face and glow. Losing Mami would be worse than losing God.
The Invisible Mountain Page 11