The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  Pride settled on Papá, a cloak that grew stiffer with wear. They glided past each other as though pretending to ignore a ghost. They spoke to everyone in the room except each other.

  “Marco, pass the salsa golf.”

  “Ask Papi—it’s right in front of him.”

  She scowled at her brother. “Marco.”

  “This is ridiculous! Papá, your daughter wants the salsa golf.”

  “I have no daughter.” Ignazio skewered a boiled potato on his fork. “No puta is a daughter of mine.”

  She didn’t care. She didn’t. He could think what he liked; she was free.

  She told her mother she was a waitress, and not, in fact, a mujer de la calle, despite the makeup, the late nights, a new blouse cut lower than ever before.

  “It’s a restaurant in La Ciudad Vieja. Good pay.” Eva spread a wad of pesos on the counter, as if presenting a winning poker hand. “Here, take it.”

  Pajarita kept wiping the kitchen sink. She didn’t look at the cash. “What happened with your father?”

  “Nothing.”

  Mamá turned that gaze on her, the one that made Eva feel transparent. “Hija. You don’t have to do this. Other things are possible.”

  She absorbed her mother’s face, her smell, her hands perched on the counter. She saw gray for the first time, just a strand or two invading the long slide of her hair. Rage flashed through Eva. It breached all decency that those braids could change, that any thread of that solid black should fade, that her mother—that any woman—could go gray without ever once in her life having worn a silk dress.

  “Like what?”

  “You could come to the carnicería. I could teach you.”

  The morning sun was ruthlessly egalitarian: it lit the pesos and the dishrags, the rosemary and sage leaves and the chipped rims of their pots. Outside, the milkman jingled his bell and reined his horse. Eva heard it neigh in gentle resignation. She knew there was another Uruguay, outside this city and under it and even in her house: a Uruguay where women grew up sleeping on cow skins and sitting on skulls and where they never learned to read, learned instead to make bitter teas for dowdy women who gossiped in butcher shops. But Eva could read—and she had read that story about the girl who fell down the rabbit hole and discovered vibrant things; she could be that girl, she had found that place, in an old stone building filled with candles, rubies, poets, imported cigarettes, red wine. The milkman’s horse clopped away down the cobblestones. And anyway, it wasn’t as if Mami really needed her. She had Mirna now, and if Marco married that stupid, sap-sweet girl from La Blanqueada there’d be more than enough daughters to go around, daughters much nicer and cleaner than she was.

  “No. I’m keeping this job.”

  “Where is the place?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  Her mother studied her. “You’re safe there?”

  “Very safe. The waitresses are nice. They help me learn.”

  Eva’s fellow waitresses taught her the mysterious arts of serving liquor, rouging cheeks, and smoking as a means of seduction. “Mira,” Graciela purred. “You purse your lips like this.” Smoke emerged from her red mouth: svelte, white, undulating. “Try it.” Eva tried. Her smoke puffed out in random clumps and made Graciela laugh. She would get it. She knew she would. How could she not, with these chicas as big sisters and she so eager for corruption? She listened to their jovial analyses of La Diablita’s customers. That eminent writer at the corner table was lying to all his girlfriends. These opulent patrons sipping Chardonnay fancied themselves art benefactors but gave stingy tips. The bohemian students discussing Batlle, Bolívar, and Marx would each give his right arm for a date with Eva. “Watch how their eyes trail you, nena. It’s obvious.” But Eva was most drawn to a circle of poets that gathered every weekend in the back room, behind the beaded curtain. Eight of them tonight, all young except the Well-Known Poet, who presided over them and spoke slowly so the joven with the little blue notebook could write down what he said. These were poets—real live ones. She could tell by the lyrical way they waved their cigarettes. She approached the table and placed glasses before them, one by one, listening for snippets to jot down on her covert papers.

  A lanky man was talking. “If only Hitler could hear your ‘Ode to Struggle.’ ” That voice. She looked closer at his wiry face and it was him, Andrés Descalzo, talking with poets as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He seemed to feel her stare on his skin, and before she could say his name he turned away. “Especially that line about washing the enemy’s feet. What an incisive image.”

  Eva filled a wineglass. She understood. In this room, he was not—had never been—the Little Butcher. His ironed ivory shirt was plain compared to his comrades’ clothes but finer than anything his family wore. She slipped back through the beaded curtain.

  She watched the poets’ table with new boldness. Andrés’ presence was an infiltration and it gave her hope that she too might find a way in. She pretended not to know him. She smiled brightly as she served wine. The Well-Known Poet began to smile back.

  “A dance, please.”

  “¿Perdón?” she said, thinking that, in the din, she’d misheard the name of a drink.

  “I’d like to order a dance. Or, perhaps ‘humbly beg for’ would be better?”

  They were all looking at her. He was not attractive, not to her, with that graying hair, that rolling laugh, those knuckly hands that were so much like Pietro’s. But his eyes were kind.

  “Yes.”

  He lit up with complacence.

  “ ‘Humbly beg’ is much better.”

  The Poet flushed. He ignored the snickers. “Well, by all means, then, let me beg.”

  There was no dance floor. They went to the corner by the piano. Eva had not danced since the storeroom lessons. The music rose; she held her breath; she pressed her cheek against the Poet’s. Her body snapped into the angles of the tango, still there, still beating. Jaimecito, the pianist, enthused, let his voice rise to a wail: Como ríe la vida—Si tus ojos negros me quieren mirar—she remembered this, could move this way, could spin and dip and careen with precision. The Well-Known Poet led clumsily, but it didn’t matter; the grace was in the bone-beat, in the blood, in the song as it waxed warm—y un rayo misterioso—and urgent—hará nido en tu pelo—and hands began to clap in time, and mouths whistled, and the Well-Known Poet actually found his stride; their bodies both said Turn at the same time, then said Swoop down, and Jaimecito sought an ambitious climax beyond his vocal range: florecerá la vida, No existirá el dolor. The song ended with a boisterous ripple of the keys and applause. She was giddy. She was shy. Graciela yelled from the kitchen door. The Poet glittered. “¡Qué cosa! Will you come sit with us?”

  “I have to work—”

  “Surely you could take a moment?”

  “I’m on shift until midnight.”

  “Aha! Join us after that. I insist.”

  At midnight Eva crossed the beaded curtain, not to serve, but to sit. The Well-Known Poet introduced her to the others: Joaquín, the eager college student with the faithful notebook; Pepe, a literature student with a crisp collar (surely ironed by his maid); Carlos, a kind young lawyer with enormous ears; Andrés; and Beatriz, a glowing muchacha with unlikely red hair.

  “We were just discussing Moradetti’s new volume,” the Well-Known Poet told her. “Have you read him?”

  “Por favor.” Pepe straightened his cuffs. “Don’t torment our poor waitress. She is paid to wait tables, not to analyze trends in poetry.”

  “Now, now—”

  “No, he’s right.” Eva formed a fist under the table. “Poets don’t pay me to read them. They don’t have to. I read Moradetti entirely for free.” She smiled. “Why? Did he pay you?”

  Pepe coughed. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Of course not,” Eva said.

  The next three hours were a gilded blur. The poets talked; they argued; they bantered and drank and talked some m
ore. Moradetti turned to Mussolini, Mussolini to the purpose of art, art’s purpose to modernism (controversial) to the charms of French desserts. Glasses emptied. Ashtrays filled. Eva leaned forward to listen, leaned back to think. She was awake, alive, full of ideas like branches in a greenhouse, growing thick and rife against the glass.

  On her way home, she felt more than saw Andrés walking in the same direction, on the other side of the street. He crossed the darkness to join her. They didn’t speak. They walked out of La Ciudad Vieja, down the house-lined streets of Parque Rodó. An old, wiry woman smoked a cigar on a yellow stoop. Through green curtains, Eva saw a silhouetted couple slow-dancing to a phonograph. The song was muffled and mournful. Eva’s and Andrés’ steps rang out on the sidewalk, her sharp little heels and his heavier, deep-toned shoes.

  “Where do they think you live?” she asked.

  “Pocitos.”

  “Ah.”

  They turned a corner.

  “Have they asked about your family?”

  “My father imports French jewelry. My grandmother’s a clingy pain. That’s how I keep them from holding readings at my house.”

  “I see. And poetry?”

  “¿Qué?”

  “Do you write poetry?”

  Andrés slowed his steps, and she felt him thinking, a crackle and hum in the air between them. “I don’t know whether I write poetry, or poetry writes me. Sometimes I feel like all of it—the world, my body, each move I make—is turning into a poem. It’s excruciating. I can’t breathe until I write.” His head was bent toward the ground, dark curls against his cheek. “It must sound crazy.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “Is it that way for you?”

  He touched her shoulder. His hand was full of heat that stung her body. She thought back to the one thing she’d written, before, before everything. “Perhaps.”

  They kept walking. The houses grew plainer: flat-roofed boxes pressed up side by side. “Remember,” she said, “when we were children?”

  “Of course.”

  “We were pirates—”

  “Yes—”

  “Finding treasures in the floor!”

  Andrés laughed edgily. “Treasures in a butcher shop. There’s a feat of imagination.”

  In the silver wash of moonlight, he looked ethereal, otherworldly, a man (a boy) who felt the world turn into poems, a butcher’s son, born to inherit cleavers, bloody aprons, meat hooks and their meat. She listened to the mingled sounds of their footsteps.

  A few doors before Eva’s, Andrés kissed her on the cheek. His skin felt like clean linen. “Good night. Keep coming. Don’t let snotty Pepe scare you off.”

  Eva crept through the slumbering house to her bedroom, where she pulled pen and paper from her sock drawer, careful not to wake Tomás in his adjacent bed. She took them to the bathroom and gazed at herself in the mirror. She’d forgotten to remove her makeup before coming home: she looked womanly, mature; she had danced in a roomful of strangers, she had drunk wine at the poets’ table, she could maybe, maybe open her life to poetry, whatever that was—she hoped it was something pure, unfathomable, a force her world and body could turn into, a force that perhaps would write her as she wrote and that could never ever wound her or twist her out of shape. Her cheek still tingled from Andrés’ kiss. “I am a poet,” she whispered into the mirror. She sat down on the toilet, grasped her pen, and began to write.

  Months and years would stretch and turn and she always pined for this: these nights; smoky, electric, succulent, ineffable; the feel of the red table under her hand (chipped and glossy, sticky underneath) as the poets dreamed and joked and boasted; the way the air stretched and shimmered after her second glass of wine; the conversations that coiled intricately through war to recent essays to the deepest meaning of life. A light shone through those nights that Eva could not define, that vanished if she sought it too directly, that gilded everything it touched—voices, faces, wineglass, table, words—with numinous honey. She grew to rely on it, trusting its power to ward off all that must be kept away—drabness, boredom, nightmares, the rage of home, the terror inside shoe stores and of Nazis in faraway lands. She was free inside its unseen sphere, and life became more possible. Surely the other poets felt it too: Joaquín, with his meticulous verses, knotted forehead, and arsenal of freshly sharpened pencils; Carlos, who smelled of shoe polish and stole moments at his father’s law firm to scrawl odes on legal files; the Well-Known Poet, with his amiable laugh and unkempt gray hair; Pepe, with his pointy chin and fast martinis; Andrés, with his lucid voice, sharp thoughts, sharp smile; and Beatriz, the kind of girl whose laugh poured like molasses, whose poems brimmed with maudlin nubile shepherdesses yearning for their errant gaucho men. Eva could have borne her poems if she did not also sit so close to Andrés.

  “We’re changing the world, right, Andrés?” Beatriz said, twirling her hair on a slow finger.

  “Poetry alone won’t change the world,” Andrés said. “But without it, where would we be? Stripped of mystery, passion, everything that urges us to stay awake despite the shit and pain of living. In a world full of war, we need it more than ever.”

  Joaquín and Carlos murmured their agreement. The Well-Known Poet nodded behind his cigarette smoke. Andrés’ words mixed with the smoke, swirling around the table, imbibed on each poet’s breath. In a world full of war. Eva felt the smoke and bulk of the Admiral Graf Spee within those words. It had been only a month since the German battleship had dragged its huge hard broken body into the port, seeking refuge, trailing fire and smoke and the toxic scent of battle. Uruguay was neutral. Uruguay was far from Europe. Uruguay had not been invaded the way Poland had last spring. But the Graf Spee came anyway, and so did the British ships that set it on fire. War’s fingers were very long and they stretched over the Atlantic and shook up her city the way a ghost’s cold fingers reach through a window and shudder you awake in your own bed. That’s how it was when Eva woke to Papá in the hall telling Tomás about the Graf Spee: the smoke was thick like—well, like—a big black blanket, all over the port, and up on the crane we were coughing like crazy, and I saw the Nazis standing on deck rigid like fucking toothpicks, like everything was fine, like they were breathing air from the fucking Alps. After the German captain gave up and sank his battleship to the bottom of the river, Eva dreamed of dead wet Nazis smashing her windows and crawling into her bed, cold and dripping, cutting her with shards of glass and ship and with their fingernails.

  Andrés had written a sonnet called “Graf Spee’s Ghost” and it occurred to her that he might understand. She tapped his foot with hers. He smiled without looking at her.

  “The things you say,” she told him later on their walk home. “The way you say them. Everybody listens.”

  “It’s just talk.”

  The heart of things, you touch it when you speak; somehow you shake and shift the flesh reality is made of. “It’s more than that.”

  They walked home together every night, but never all the way to the door. They did not want to be discovered. Eva came to dread buying the family meat, because of the way Coco pinned her with doleful eyes. “What happened to that son of mine? You, Eva, tell me! He barely even lives here anymore.”

  We are told, Andrés wrote, that the world is made of burlap: / Coarse, enduring—when really it is gauze, / Layer upon layer, fine, fragile, infinite, / We can see our fingers through it in the light. And he himself was a light, a beacon, though not like the lighthouse at Punta Carretas, not that slow, predictable ray. He was feverish and erratic. His beam was a bright knife; his words and thoughts could cut open the night. She wanted to get close, be pierced, approach the wick inside him that was hidden from the world, that surely sprang from pain, that held secrets as dark and delicate (she imagined) as her own. He emboldened her. Sitting on the toilet at 5 a.m., she soared, risked, wrote, scripted line after line of words that sprang from a source at once unknown and intimate. Words about freedom; fury; her many hungers; w
ords that gnashed their teeth and bit one another on the page.

  A second year passed. Poetry leaked onto her waitress tablet, the skin of her arm, scraps of paper she found later in her socks. That spring, her brother Marco married Raquel, the girl from La Blanqueada, who, Eva had to admit, was genuine in her sweetness, and wanted to make a sister out of Eva, an enterprise she quickly crushed by neglecting to return calls. You will never understand me, Eva could have, but did not, say. The following year, she finally recited a poem out loud. She stood in Pepe’s living room, opulent with imported rugs and fresh-cut lilies. She should never have looked at the lilies. She lost her nerve and lost her voice.

  “Go on, Eva,” Carlos urged, leaning forward in support. He had a tomato-sauce stain on his collar, and this gave her courage. Still, she couldn’t muster more than a hoarse whisper; the poets mistook this for dramatic flair, and responded with genuine applause.

  “Not bad,” Pepe said reluctantly. He turned and spoke to the audience, rather than to her. “The lighthouse as metaphor for freedom during war. And a clever allusion to that inglesa Woolf.”

  Eva had not thought of the war when writing that poem (although she should have—the United States had joined the fray, Jews in Europe wore yellow stars, droves and droves were dying) and she’d forgotten all about Virginia Woolf. “Yes, thank you.”

  “This would be great for the next edition of Expresión,” Joaquín said. He frowned earnestly; Joaquín had recently become a communist, a good place for him, thought Eva, considering all his years of dutiful notes. From what she’d gathered, it seemed that communists wrote a lot of declarations, read a lot of books, and discussed the global proletariat over cold beers. “You should submit.”