The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  “They look just like you, Pajarita,” Coco said from the counter. She had recovered from her shock, and examined Eva with subtle suspicion. “Look at you. Fresh from Buenos Aires.” She emphasized the last two words in a tone tinged with awe, or perhaps distaste. “I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

  Eva smiled, uncertainly. She felt like a child, caught playing dress-up in an aunt’s fancy clothes. It was stifling now, this butcher shop with its blood-iron smell, its memories, its proprietress with folded arms. Coco, for all her warmth, did not easily drop a grudge, and Eva was a suspect in the crimes of escaping with her son and causing her best friend pain. Eva imagined Coco and Mamá in the upstairs parlor, over the years, drinking tea steeped with the taste of each other’s grief.

  “Where is your husband?” Coco asked.

  “At work.”

  “At work! On his holiday?”

  “We’re not here for a holiday.” Eva watched her son wander toward a case of beef. “We’re here to stay.”

  Pajarita faced her, or tried to, her head still bent toward Salomé’s fist. “To stay?”

  “Yes. We,” had to leave, in the dark, on a boat with hooded men, “decided suddenly. That’s why I didn’t write.”

  Roberto’s nose was pressed against the glass. He was sure to leave a smudge.

  “I see.” Pajarita stared at her. “When will you come for dinner?”

  It was the question Eva dreaded. She would not have, could not allow, the welcome-home party crammed with family, endless empanadas, the noise of two dozen voices, the crawl of nephews everywhere, wine, bizcochos, Papá. “Oh, who knows,” she answered, too lightly. “The evenings are so full.” A shameful excuse. “But I’ll come back here and see you.”

  Pajarita’s eyes were gentle but did not bend. “What should I tell your father?”

  Eva shifted from her left foot to her right, then back to left again. Roberto tapped the glass two times, tak, tak. Naturally Mamá would reach for her, as if the family were a loom and Eva a wayward thread; as if she thought her hands could weave and knot her daughter into place, and the cloth would form a whole, and the whole could drape together, soft, contented, as if there were no goddamn scissors in the world. “I don’t know.”

  Pajarita raised her head, which had been freed from Salomé’s grip. “I see.”

  There was silence. Coco coughed. Roberto tapped the glass case with his fingernails: tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak—

  “Stop, querido.” Eva pulled him away from the glass and up to her hip. He was getting so big. It took all her strength to hold him. “I should take him home for a siesta.”

  “Come back soon,” her mother said.

  Eva nodded. “Tomorrow.”

  Coco grasped Eva’s arm on her way out. “Look. About Andrés. There must be something, anything, you can tell me.”

  Eva studied Coco’s liver-spotted hand. “We left together. He was with me in Buenos Aires for about four months. Then he disappeared, and I haven’t heard from him since.”

  Coco’s eyes narrowed. “Did he leave you in trouble?”

  “No. He was chivalrous. He didn’t … we didn’t.”

  Coco looked doubtful. The smell of raw beef thickened in the air.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Just to know he’s still alive.”

  Eva imagined Andrés, bleeding to death in a San Telmo alley, or succumbing alone to pneumonia, or wandering Paris and laughing at them both. “Of course.”

  “You’re different, you know. It’s not just the clothes.”

  So many layers to returning, she thought that night, smoking on the balcony. It’s a plunge into the past, simple, myriad, impossible. A plunge into the darkness. The air tonight was thick and damp; stars hid behind low clouds. Down the street, the red door to La Diablita opened, and a girl strutted in. Waitress? Aspiring poet? Eva would not go over there. There had already been enough homecomings. She put her cigarette out on the balcony rail. A man in a long black coat lingered on the street below. A low fedora hid his face. She had the distinct sense that he was waiting for something; someone to arrive, or some quest to be fulfilled. She lit another cigarette and waited for the quest, the harlot, the secret deal. The cigarette burned slowly to its end. Nothing happened.

  She stood and walked into her bedroom. Roberto snored softly on his back, jaw slack. He had found a job so easily; the hospitals had vied for him, asked nothing about his reasons for the move. In the dark, she glanced at her neck in the mirror above her dresser. The bruises seemed gone. She leaned in closer, turned to catch the streetlight’s beam. Yes, gone. And the silence between her and Roberto was giving way to pleasantries, a Good Morning and a Let Me Take Your Coat at the top and bottom of each day. But it was just a brittle surface. Neither of them had forgiven the other, or, perhaps, themselves, not for mimeographs or exile or moments spent not breathing against the wall.

  Eva picked up a notebook and pen. She wrote. In the dark, her letters fell swaying and unruly on the page, but it didn’t matter. She wrote nakedly, rapidly, tearing off pages as she filled them, until she had wrung herself free of all saturation. Then she opened a drawer, gathered the pages, and pressed them into a morass of unfinished poems.

  Three years passed. Quiet years. On some days, Eva missed the noise and scope of Buenos Aires, but Montevideo, to her surprise, unfolded in new ways, offering its own quotidian lyricism. In the butcher shop, for example, on days when it grew thick with women’s sweat and sweet oils and confessions. The same women still came to buy meat and trade gossip, though now they embroidered their talk with boasts about grandchildren. Even La Viuda still came. She had to be older than God. Sometimes she claimed a stool by the door and accosted all who entered with her apocalyptic advice. The women chatted with Eva, wanting to know all about the intervening years, about Perón, there were so many Argentinian exiles here, more each year, they said, and was Perón really as repressive as they said in the leftist papers? Eva answered and the women clucked their tongues: what kind of populist does that to his own people, nothing like our Batlle, may he rest in peace. Small crowds built up in patient wait for Pajarita’s services. Some crossed the burlap curtain stoic and came back weeping; a few went in weeping and emerged beatific. Eva watched the children, wrapped meat, wiped a counter here or there. She let her mind dip its toe into her mother’s world.

  Occasionally, she stole her mother to La Rambla, where they strolled and watched the afternoon sun spark on the river. A loose-limbed quiet accompanied them. Difficult things could be said across that quiet.

  “Mami?”

  “Mmm.”

  “I hope you’re not angry that, you know, I don’t come home.”

  Eva listened to the wet push of the waves. Her mother looked out to the thumb of land where the lighthouse stood. When their house was built, she’d once told Eva, that lighthouse’s beams came through the windows, clear in from the shore.

  “You haven’t changed your mind?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t change it?”

  “No.”

  They kept walking. Mamá looked sad. Her profile moved against the backdrop of clear sky. “Better to have a bit of you than none of you at all.”

  She saw the rest of her family in piecemeal: Tomás and Carlota visited her at the butcher shop. Bruno and Mirna invited her to dinner, needling her for tales of Argentina over buñuelos and boiled potatoes, the children pushing wooden trains across the floor. Marco, now a pharmacist in Buceo, took mate breaks to share a park bench with his sister and nag about their father. “You should see him,” he’d urge. “You’re both too stubborn.” Eva would smile and watch the breeze make mischief with his curls.

  Xhana’s kitchen was her refuge. Xhana lived in Barrio Sur, with her husband and father, a block from César’s parents, two blocks from the river, surrounded by Montevideo’s small black community. In the kitchen, the square table wore its gingham like a dress. Plates and forks and cups appeared for everyon
e who came. Their living room often filled with drummers and their music. Eva brought thick packages of Coco’s meat—to wrap in empanadas, to fry as milanesas, to season for churrasco. She watched Xhana rule her kitchen, laugh heartily, cook like a generous demon, explicate the nuances of a new law or a factory strike to friends. She could see Xhana the girl, still there, the one who had gutted fish and devoured Marx without fear. When they had the kitchen to themselves, talking late into the night, girlhood lurked so close that Eva looked at her own hands to reassure herself that they were woman-size.

  “It’s good to have you back.” Xhana poured another glass of wine. “You were gone too long.”

  Eva exhaled smoke. “Good thing I got exiled.”

  “Not just Argentina, prima. You were gone a long time before that.”

  Eva fingered the ashtray, with its mound of felled cigarettes. “I know.”

  “You were my only sister. I missed you.”

  From the living room, Eva heard Tío Artigas crooning an old gaucho ballad. She remembered it from childhood. César’s repique fed a candombe rhythm below it, slow and supple. Eva put her cigarette out and lit another. She waited for the question that she didn’t want to answer. It didn’t come. “I’m here now,” she said.

  After visiting Xhana, Eva often stayed up through sunrise and wrote. Poems came for their own sake: copious, private, raw. Her secret stash filled three drawers, words caught in musty dark, each word a tiny prism that refracted some small beam of Eva’s world. Hunger. Dawn. A city on the shore. Two miraculous children who insisted, despite all maternal longing, on growing and running and becoming little people of their own. The funeral Salomé and Xhana gave a dead swallow in Parque Rodó (so sensitive, her Salomé: she wept as if she’d loved that bird for years). The joy of curling her body around Roberto’s on a rainy night (the young one, not the old, Roberto the young and grave and clever). She wrote about Montevideo’s sleepy beauties and its daily return into her skin, about the way a small thing—El Río de la Plata’s curving motion, a woman weeping against a balcony rail, the red aroma of beef roasting a las brazas at the corner bar—could blow right through her so she shook in sudden winds that woke her to the world and her tenuous place within it. And she wrote and did not write about the haunted nights, when demons seemed to push her through her dreams until she woke up, clammy, gulping air, alone in a haunted city beside a doctor deep in sleep. She did not write about the doctor, the stranger in her bed, the film of pleasantry that shielded them from each other. She didn’t know, any longer, where these words were going, why she wrote them, what they meant. It was enough to let her pen rove the paper, chasing its edge, giving shape to the unshapable. Chasing home.

  “Roberto must miss home,” Señora Caribe said, over tea. “I know we do.”

  Eva sipped from a dainty cup. It had been days since Roberto had arrived before midnight. “Yes, he does.”

  Señora Caribe looked at her ceiling, where a stained-glass fan stirred heavy air. “Sometimes the papers give me hope Perón won’t last. He’s gotten reckless. A fourteen-year-old girl? What kind of president makes a mistress of a fourteen-year-old girl?”

  Eva shook her head, lips pressed in disapproval. Evita must be turning in her grave, she thought, except, of course, she didn’t have one. Turning in her tart embalming fluids.

  “Most of all, I want to see my sister before she dies. I just hope her health can outlast Perón. Sometimes I dream she’s dead and shouting for me across the river. I can hear her but I can’t shout back. I wake up sweating—it must sound crazy.”

  “No. Not at all.”

  Señora Caribe smiled gratefully. “Do you ever have bad dreams?”

  Eva crossed her legs, uncrossed them. “Yes.”

  “Ah. Do I have a cure for you.” She looked over her shoulder, as if the china cabinet might hold spies. “Who washes your hair?”

  It was not what Eva had expected. “I do.”

  “Who else?”

  “My hairdresser.”

  “Namely?”

  “A gentleman in Pocitos.”

  “Bah! You’ve got to go to mine. She’s the best in the city. She washes hair like that sweet soap of hers could clean away your cares.”

  Eva smiled at her hostess.

  “I’m telling you, it’s true. I sleep better afterward. And look how well she cuts.” She stroked her gray curls. “I’ll give you her number.”

  That night, after putting her children to bed and washing the dinner dishes, Eva stood on the balcony and opened Señora Caribe’s note. She strained to decipher the writing in the lamplight. Zolá Zapateada, 35-53-99.

  He was here, again, on the street: the man in the dark fedora. Hat pushed low, swathed in his long coat, as if it weren’t the humid height of summer. As if the street held something that he’d lost. What drove a man to haunt a street for three years running? He could be a tortured artist; a lover with a broken heart; a criminal on the prowl; a madman with no other place to go. Or just a drifter in a world that sends souls drifting, that unmoors the soul without warning or reason or so much as a match to light the darkness. She returned to her bedroom, with its bare, husbandless bed. She slid under the covers and closed her eyes. Zolá Zapateada, she fell asleep thinking, what kind of name is that?

  She made an appointment for the following week. Zolá lived in a stylish high-rise, where the elevator operator’s uniform gleamed with freshly polished buttons. She stepped off on the fifteenth floor and knocked on door 1555.

  “Just a minute,” a creamy voice called from the other side.

  A tall, sleek woman opened the door. “Buenas—” She froze.

  “Zolá?”

  “Yes. Do come in.”

  Eva entered and scanned the room, the marble counters, ivory walls, a crystal vase alive with flowers. Zolá wore pearls and violet silk and dark red lipstick. She was staring at Eva with an intensity bordering on rudeness.

  “What a nice apartment.”

  “Eva. Don’t you remember me?”

  “Remember?”

  There was something familiar about her features. Sharp, pleasing. She could not place it. She searched her memory, searched the face, hair, eyes. Eyes. Her throat cinched closed; she couldn’t speak. They stared at each other.

  A long moment passed. Not possible. Eva’s face and hands grew hot. Her hostess was the first to look away.

  “Shall I make some mate?”

  Eva didn’t move.

  “Please, make yourself at home.”

  Eva sat on the crushed-velvet sofa while Zolá disappeared to boil water in the kitchen. The room was large and airy, with floor-to-ceiling windows, gold-framed paintings, exuberant potted plants. To her right, the hairdresser’s chair faced an oval mirror; to her left, the view stretched over the tops of buildings to the river. She pictured herself falling, out of the window, out of her reality, all the way down to a twisted underwater world. Zolá entered, bearing a tray of bizcochos and mate.

  Eva wanted to laugh, to weep, to shout. “I can’t believe this.”

  Zolá offered her the tray without looking at her.

  Eva took a pastry and stared at it. It looked perfectly normal. “How long have you been cutting hair?”

  “Seven years. I studied in Buenos Aires, after the Change. It’s competitive there, so I came back.” She handed Eva the mate. “I’m one of the best in Uruguay.”

  Eva drank from the gourd. The bitter liquid filled her mouth. “And this is what you left me for?”

  “Cutting hair?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m sorry. I do. I entered the hospital soon after we parted. I didn’t want to leave you, but nobody could know.”

  “What did they—I mean—”

  Zolá smoothed his (her his her his) skirt. “There’s an operation. It was all very new. In Berlin there was a painter who was the first to have it done. That was back in ’31. I heard about it from the boys at La Diablita. You can imagine they weren�
��t singing its praises. But it told me that it could be done, so I went to Argentina. You know Buenos Aires. Always trying to be on the cutting edge.”

  Eva nodded. The next question caught in her throat.

  “Go ahead. Whatever it is.”

  “Why do such a thing?”

  Zolá said nothing, and Eva feared she’d offended her. She searched for something she could say to fill the silence. Everything she thought of seemed unsayable.

  “To be true.”

  Light poured copiously, in this high home, glinting on crystal vases, shaking the dust off memories, rearranging the known world. She passed the gourd back to Zolá. She watched her (her!) pour water into the leaves, and place red lips where Eva’s had just been.

  “And all this time I thought you’d run off with another woman.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. I found a tube of lipstick under your dresser.”

  “Whose do you think that was?”

  Eva stared.

  “I worked in a cabaret. Remember?”

  “Oh.”

  “But it’s a sleazy business. I’m better suited to this profession.”

  Eva thought of the first walk they’d taken home from La Diablita, how ethereal Andrés had looked to her in the moonlight, like a creature from another world, ill matched to the butcher’s block. “You have no idea how much I’ve missed you.”

  “Clearly,” Zolá said, “the converse is also true.”

  They looked each other in the eye. The gaze was intensely foreign and familiar.

  “You look good.”

  “So do you.”

  Eva looked away. “Are you afraid of being recognized?”

  Zolá smiled, a little proudly. “You didn’t recognize me, did you? But I stay out of Punta Carretas. Most people I knew in Montevideo don’t come to hairdressers like me. My clients are mostly—well—”

  “Like me?”

  “Yes, Señora Santos.” She added ironic emphasis to the name. “Like you. So tell me. Who have you become?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have no clue.”