Salomé nodded, unconvinced. Eva watched her walk back to her room, and closed the door.
Roberto looked weary. “You really don’t want to go.”
“No.”
He nodded, as if she’d spoken the obvious answer. He opened the closet and threw a pair of slacks on the bed. Reached for another.
“What are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
“Sshhhhh. The children.”
“I’m leaving.” He spoke more softly but kept his stride back and forth from the closet.
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you going?”
“Does it matter?”
“To her house.”
“What if I am?”
“Are you coming back?”
“Why should I?”
She rocked slightly. “The children.”
“I won’t forget them.”
The pile on the bed had mushroomed into a heap of wool and belts and well-pressed cotton. At this moment a different woman might plead, cajole, fall to her knees, sidle up just so, do anything to keep him here and change his mind. But—the thought shot through her like hard liquor—she didn’t want to. Of course she didn’t. She was too drunk, she wanted more, she longed to follow her intoxication wherever it led her, however steep the ledges, however far the fall.
She watched Roberto pull the suitcase from its shelf and drop it open on the bed. He worked methodically, her husband, even in the heat of high emotion. A subtle fondness moved through her at the thought. At that moment she could have kissed him (not to keep him) but the gesture seemed ill timed. Instead, she went to the balcony to breathe unfettered air. Avenida San Salvador stretched below her, wide awake. An old tango record crooned through a nearby window; couples strolled, unrushed, hands gliding through each other’s hair; on the sidewalk outside La Diablita, people clustered at small tables, braving the cold. She lit a cigarette and watched the ember crackle toward her mouth. The man in the fedora had arrived at his lamppost, coat pulled tight and hat pulled low as always. Sad. Absurd. If he was a tortured artist he should go home and make art. If he was a broken lover he should look for a new love. If he was a madman—well—couldn’t he find a better use for madness somewhere else? She was full of the strange liquor of this night. “Señor,” she called, “who are you? What the hell are you looking for?”
The man stiffened. A young couple, on their way from La Diablita, stopped in curiosity.
“Eva,” he said. “Hello.”
Eva’s cigarette almost singed her fingers. She knew that voice. The man removed his hat. His hair shone gray in the lamp glow, a shade lighter than the old stone edifice behind him. He smiled nervously. His hands chewed on the fedora. From this angle he looked small, a figurine of a father. “I … este … didn’t mean to bother you.”
Eva crushed her cigarette and tossed it into the street. She wanted to laugh, but she opened her mouth and the sound didn’t come. “That was you, all this time?”
Ignazio shrugged his admission. The young couple had stopped walking, and watched in barely veiled fascination. Ignazio glanced at them. They looked away. “Do you think we might, maybe, go somewhere? For a drink?”
“No,” Eva said. “I’m in the middle of something.” Now she did laugh, and it came easily, a madwoman’s loose laugh. Her father, at his iron lamppost, stared. “Maybe tomorrow? Five o’clock?”
“Well, then.” He replaced his hat. “See you tomorrow.”
“Adiós, Papá.”
In the bedroom, Roberto stood with two pairs of socks in hand. “That,” he said incredulously, “was your father?”
Eva thought of Roberto’s own father, who would never spend his nights combing the streets like a commoner. Not for a daughter or for anyone in the world. Only the most strange or sick or ardent men would think of such a thing. “Yes,” she said, “that’s him.”
The next morning, Eva woke alone in an empty bed. Light’s long fingers curled around the edges of the curtains. The room felt stuffy, crowded by old breaths and hovering words. Light and breath and unsaid things and she alone between the sheets, hollow, euphoric, afraid. She reached for pen and paper and began a poem. In the poem, a woman lost her legs and set out to find them, gritting her teeth, dragging herself along by the knuckles. Dust filled the woman’s mouth, and Eva stopped writing, tore off the page, and began another poem, where a woman rode a river in the middle of the night from a shore called Lies to a shore called Truth. She described Truth, its wild vines and flame-colored birds, and continued even when she heard the light feet of her children at the door; she should get up and make them breakfast, but her pen coiled and pushed across the paper and her hand had no choice but to follow. The feet were gone and then sounds from the kitchen and more steps came and then a voice was at the door, saying, “Mami.”
Salomé stared up at her, dwarfed by the tray she was holding, concentrating intensely on her balance. The tray held mate, a thermos of hot water, and a plate of toast. How had they done it by themselves? What if they had gotten burned?
“Good morning,” Salomé said, uncertainly.
Eva sat up in bed. “Ay, hija.” Salomé came closer, and Eva took the tray from her and settled it on the bed. She looked at her daughter and remembered her face the night before, trusting and infinitely fragile. A girl who sensed every shift in the wind, who felt everything keenly but was helpless to shield herself, needed someone else to be the mantle. It terrified Eva, the thought of what mothering required, the thought of failing. She felt her face start to crumble. Salomé looked worried, and Eva quickly smiled. “How nice. This is so nice.”
Salomé relaxed, a little.
“Are you hungry?”
Salomé nodded, and Eva lifted the covers to let her crawl in. Salomé burrowed against her like a snouted underground creature. How did her own body form this strange and perfect child?
“Where’s your brother?”
Salomé shrugged.
Eva called for him, once, twice, and Roberto arrived, half-eaten toast in hand, looking wary and hopeful in his Donald Duck pajamas. They would rise together, make a new life, the three of them a newly fashioned trinity, and who cared how the world shook its head and pursed its lips, it was her life, not the world’s.
“Come in, come in,” she said.
She broke toast into uneven pieces, and they pressed into her side of the bed, all three of them, close, quiet, feet entangled, eating torn toast, reckless with the crumbs.
That afternoon, Eva entered La Diablita for the first time in ten years. Memories flooded her, from red chairs and bright music and dark walls. She saw herself, thirteen years old, arriving out of breath on tottering heels, that hinge of a day when she’d last spoken to this man, her father, now at her side.
They sat down close to the piano. The waitress who took their order had hair like raven wings, folded in close to the body. Ignazio looked around him. His face had creases she’d never seen. “This is where you worked?”
Eva nodded. She took out a cigarette; Ignazio lit it for her, then lit his own. Their smoke made slow swirls in the air between them. She waited for him to speak, but he just sat there, smoking and tapping fingertips against his thumb. Behind him, a woman with bleached hair bent greedily toward her friend. Tell me the secret, her eyes said.
“All that time,” said Ignazio.
Eva tipped ash into the ashtray.
“Your apartment looks very nice. From the outside.”
“Seems like you know that part quite well.”
“I didn’t mean to alarm you. Really.” He spread his palms. “I can’t explain it. I’d be out at night, walking, and then I’d be on your block.”
“You never thought to knock?”
“I never thought you’d open.”
She wondered whether she would have. The wine arrived, poured into glasses. They drank without toasting. The room was full of murmurs, the keen of a jazz record, someone’s too-shar
p laugh, someone else’s sharp perfume.
Ignazio fingered the stem of his glass. “You never came back.” It was not a question, and she would not have had an answer if it had been. “There’s a hole in the family.”
Eva smoked. Behind him, the woman with bleached hair was gorging on her friend’s confessions, elbows on the table, patent-leather foot wagging beneath it.
“Do you hate me?” He said it to the crimson tabletop.
She swirled her wine. She sipped. It warmed her throat. “No.”
He struck another match. In its brief light he looked hopeful in an almost boyish way. Once, she thought, he had actually been a boy, somewhere in Italy and then at a steamboat’s rail, smoking cigarettes like this one, on his ride to Uruguay, alight, alone, leagues away from home. “I’m going to die,” he said.
“Papá. You’re sick?”
“No. Just old.”
“Not so very old.”
“Older than my father ever got.”
The mention of his father shocked her. She knew absolutely nothing about him. “Old and dead are two different things.”
He shrugged. “I want you to forgive me.”
“For what?”
He fingered the stem of his wineglass. “For all of it. For never hearing your side of the story.”
Her cigarette was down to the filter. She stamped it out.
“I could hear it now?”
She touched the underside of the table. It was cold; it was sticky; it would soil her hands. “No.”
“Or we could leave it in the past.”
“Better.”
Ignazio stared at the ashtray as if it held a ciphered mystery. “Will you come to the house?”
She busied herself lighting a cigarette. The sharp laugh cut the air again, then stopped, caught in a spiderweb of voices. “Yes.”
“And forgive me?”
She blew out smoke, inhaled again. “Why not.”
He coughed. He marveled at her fingers, with their carefully lacquered nails. “You look very nice. Este … how are things with your family?”
Eva laughed. She was light, she was drunk, it was not the wine. “Oh, fine. My husband left.”
“Left where?”
“Left me.”
“What?”
Eva smiled, absurdly. The woman with bleached hair was gone; her chair held nothing but a crumpled napkin.
“Come live with us.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, a bit too quickly.
“But still. If you need anything. Food. Money. A place to stay.”
Eva thought of the sand-colored house, with its cluttered rooms, its warmth and bustle, the table heavy with plates, forsaken corners she recalled in minute detail. “Thank you.”
He shrugged again. “More wine?”
———
Eva rose to the fifteenth floor. Zolá opened the door. “What a surprise.”
“Are you free?”
“Absolutely.”
Eva entered. Zolá closed the door. She wore a lilac blouse and she looked lovely, a hothouse blossom, rare, hybrid, labyrinthine.
“Roberto’s left for Buenos Aires.”
“Already?”
“Without me.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. That’s not what I came for.”
“You’d like a wash?”
“Zolá.” Eva stepped closer. She wasn’t sure how to start. She touched Zolá’s face, and Zolá’s eyes widened with a response that looked like pain. The air roared, and then nothing mattered, they were already inside, they kissed and two mouths moved into each other, damp, pressing, Zolá pressing against her, Zolá’s hands in her hair, warm, firm, seeking, more hungry than she’d known, and then she did it, let her hands rove, let them loose on Zolá’s body like two beasts rooting for food.
“Can this be?” Zolá said. “Can this really be?”
“Yes,” Eva said. “Oh yes it can.”
Heaven, she thought, is not in the sky but in skin and skin and skin—
They lay next to each other in the dark, having made love in the dark, to the dark, with the dark holding them like a great cupped hand. Eva thought, I never want to leave, I want to inhabit this place suffused with the scents we have created, with the imprint of what our bodies and voices have done. I want to stay, forever, in this body blended with another body, discovering our cries and pores and lost hollows where longing furls, has furled for years, hungry to release its secret colors. “I want to stay forever,” she said.
“Then stay.”
“I mean, I’ll go. The children. But leave myself here in a film of sweat between your sheets.”
“Mm.”
“And never leave you.” “Mmm.”
“Your body, Zolá—”
“Shhh.”
“It’s a miracle.”
“Eva.”
“It is.”
“Eva.”
“Never leave me.”
“Never.”
“Are you crying?”
“Never. Never.”
She launched a new life, gently, from the catapult of her own hands. She found a job in a café three blocks from home. The pay was low but her fellow waitresses had mouths full of laughter, and her boss, a generous septuagenarian, sent her home each day with paper boxes of croissants or guava tarts or empanadas for the children. They ate these little gifts for breakfast or lunch or dinner, sometimes right from the box, its white walls stained with spheres of oil. The three of them sat around the kitchen table and ate the pastries with their fingers. Roberto always took his apart methodically, as if he needed to investigate the contents before tasting. Salomé closed her eyes before she bit, as though tasting the filling might require an act of faith. They often ate in silence. They had become taciturn since their father left. At first, Roberto asked daily where his father was, and the answers—still in Buenos Aires; no, not coming back; it would be the three of them now—were not sufficient to keep the questions from returning. But soon the repetition seemed to bore him, and the questions fell away, leaving the quiet sounds of teeth and spoons.
They did not always eat at home. She began to take them to her parents’ house in Punta Carretas. The first time they went, she stood in the living room while her father embraced her children, thinking, I am not nineteen, not eleven, not a child at war, not running away in the middle of the night. Her children’s bodies fit so easily against their Abuelo Ignazio, as if they had been basking in his affection all their lives. Five minutes and he was already making them laugh, already promising magic tricks after dinner. As long as you eat all your carrots, he said, winking. Roberto nodded earnestly, Salomé shone. At the dinner table, Eva watched her children eat their vegetables first, a phenomenon she’d never seen before. Afterward, she helped her mother in the kitchen while Ignazio and the children retired to the living room for the show.
“They love him,” Eva said, trying to sound neutral.
Pajarita smiled. “He’s ten times more excited than they are.”
They washed the dishes, Pajarita scrubbing, Eva drying and putting things away. The cups and forks and pots still inhabited the same shelves of the same cupboards as always; they were home, they had a place, they belonged. The counters were still crowded with potted plants and jars of dried leaves and roots and barks that could make a housewife sigh with relief or a daughter find her legs. Eva didn’t know what to say to her mother, but it didn’t seem to matter; a gentle silence hung between them, interwoven with the sound of running water, clinking plates, and young laughter rising down the hall.
On other nights, they went to Xhana’s house, where Artigas and César played with the children. They wrote songs that cast Salomé and Roberto as the heroes, a princess saved by gauchos from tall towers, a prince saving villages from kings. If they didn’t like the story, they could change it, but it meant they had to sing. The children glowed in the warmth of Xhana’s home, the noise of it, the beat of drums and swell
of voices. The family crammed around the gingham table for dinner, arms touching, while Tía Xhana cut Salomé’s meat and told stories that chronicled the history of Uruguay: a revolution fought by indios and freed slaves, a president who built schools for everybody, factories where people stopped working because they were not happy, brave people who, as she told it, had stood up for their country, for Uruguay, and made it so that they could have this table and food and nice family.
“Let them eat, querida,” César said.
“They can hear a little history while they eat. Right, chicos?”
Roberto peered into his mashed potatoes. Eva nudged him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes,” Salomé said. She looked rapt, swept up by Xhana’s stories. Eva was swept up too; she thought of Argentina, with its long succession of dictators; in comparison, Uruguay had a unique story, a remarkable story, one that proved that a robust democracy—with literacy, labor rights, health care—could exist in Latin America, could be created again in other countries. She said this once, and drew skepticism from the table.
“I wish you were right, prima,” Xhana said, “but it’s not that simple. All that could become a thing of the past.”
“If it hasn’t already,” Artigas said.
Eva put her fork down. “How can that be?”
“Look what’s happened since the end of the Korean War. The United States no longer needs our wool to clothe their soldiers, our beef to feed them.”
“Right.”
“And so today we have inflation, the fall of salaries, the rising costs. We can’t export anything, but we’re still forced to import.”
“We never should have based our economy on war,” César said, so passionately that even Roberto looked up from his plate.
“Sí, querido, but what choice did we have? A small nation like ours? How could we survive without selling to the giants?”
“That’s exactly the question to ask now,” Artigas said. “We have to find a better way than this. Look at all the unrest this year, the strikes, the arrest of union leaders. The government is not on the workers’ side, not anymore.”
“They can’t be; they’re too fractured.”
“They’re corrupt.”
The Invisible Mountain Page 23