“You two study so much!” Abuelo said. “Roberto, don’t you ever want to go play soccer? Stir up some trouble?”
Roberto looked ruffled.
“Papá,” Mamá said sharply.
“I’m just saying, Eva, that he could have a little fun.”
“He does have fun.”
“He needs a man, Eva, to show him—”
“That’s enough,” Mamá said. Quiet stretched over the table, covering the serving bowls, the plates, the forks going about their business, clink, clink. Mamá put her knife down, slowly.
“Roberto,” Abuela Pajarita said, “do you like to study?”
“Yes.”
“And you, Salomé?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Mamá looked gratefully at her mother. “Their grades are perfect. They’re going to go to university, and become whatever they want. Both of them.”
Abuelo Ignazio stared into his wineglass. “Of course.”
Salomé swirled spaghetti on her fork. University. It was years and years away but still it loomed like a castle on the horizon. She would enter it one day and become something, whatever she wanted, and surely there were great things to become.
One day, Mamá came home sad because her boss had cut her hours at work. He had done it because it was a difficult time, he said, there was less money in everybody’s pockets, and Salomé imagined coats and pants and shirt fronts from which coins and paper bills mysteriously disappeared, throughout the city, and people shook their heads, bewildered: where did all the pesos go?
A week later, when Salomé and Roberto came home from school, she was waiting for them in the kitchen.
“Before you start your homework, we need to talk.”
They sat down.
“You know that swamp you go to?”
They nodded.
“You can’t ever go back.”
Roberto looked devastated. “Why not?”
“Because it’s dangerous.”
Salomé thought of vicious ducks, mud turned extra-slippery.
“Dangerous, how?” Roberto said.
“It’s become a cantegril.”
A new word for Salomé, cantegril. Cante, like cantar, to sing: a place, perhaps, with too much singing. “What’s that?”
Mamá hesitated. She wore a white shirt with pearly buttons down the front. The sewing basket had three such buttons, dreamy spinsters all in love with Big Velour. “It’s a new kind of place. Where people live. But not … a good place.”
“So why do they live there?”
“Because they have nowhere else to go.”
Roberto puzzled over this. “But—”
“Roberto. No more questions.” She folded her arms across her chest. “No more swamp.”
That night in bed, Salomé tried to imagine a cantegril. Not a Good Place to Live. She saw men crying on doorsteps, families sulking over their churrasco, children losing soccer balls on the street, women hanging laundry as they sang maudlin songs. She looked out the window at a stubborn slice of moon. It peered between the branches of the oak. Surely it saw everything, that moon: her mother’s tears, the cantegril, the streets, the river hungry to reflect the light. She wanted to see everything. She wanted to understand. It was bad to break a rule, but if she didn’t she would never see or know. She couldn’t sleep. She turned back and forth, back and forth, until the sky framed by her window turned to sapphire blue. As she turned, her quilt rustled softly against her body. The quilt was made of triangles of blue and green cloth, and it crinkled, as if someone—Abuelita Pajarita, she was the one who’d sewn it—had been cooking and spilled spices between the seams. She imagined the accident, her abuela in the kitchen, trying to cook and sew at the same time, ladle in one hand, needle in the other, spices tipping into cloth from one of her glass jars, seeds and roots and crumbled leaves, and now she felt them raining on her, forming a long blanket, and she finally slept.
Two days later, she took the bus, alone, toward the swamp. The bus emptied as it approached the city’s edge. It was a clear day, and Montevideo looked so pretty with its cobbled streets, its flat-roofed houses topped with laundry lines, its grocers with their wooden crates of fruit. By the time the bus approached her stop, she was the only passenger left, and the bus driver stared at her in his rearview mirror, a seven-year-old girl sitting alone.
“Che, chica, where do you think you’re going?”
“To the next stop.”
“I’m not letting you off there.”
“Why not?”
“It’s dangerous.”
“But people live there.”
“Exactly. Does your mother know you’re here?”
Heat rushed through her. “Please, Señor, if you could stop? I’ll just look through the window.”
The driver’s eyebrows, thick as black thumbs, pressed together. He pulled up to the stop without opening the door. Salomé looked out.
She had imagined people crying at doorsteps but there were no doorsteps to cry at, no houses built, no cobbled streets on which to lose your soccer ball. The swamp was still raw and unrazed; shacks stood on top of it. The walls were made of cardboard and corrugated metal (I’ll huff and I’ll puff, she thought). They were everywhere. Between the shacks, reeds hung their heads in pools of pee and caca. The smell reared up at her through a crack in the window. People swarmed: a girl with bare feet and a tattered skirt piled newspapers for a fire, a naked baby crawled over a pile of rotting rinds, a shirtless man fed straw to a scruffy horse and stared hard at the bus. At her. She looked away, but she had already seen his ribs, and the horse’s too. She felt the heave of vomit in her throat. The low moan of the engine rose to a growl, and they drove away.
Back at home, Salomé could not concentrate on her homework. The numbers on the page kept turning into people—emaciated 7, barefoot 4, a whole family crushed into a cardboard 3. She was restless. She was voracious. She had broken a rule, and perhaps the sky would fall, but to her amazement it hadn’t fallen yet, and her world was different for the breaking. She felt a thrill of heat and shame and victory. She wanted to cry for the people she had seen. She wanted to lay bare the secrets in her reach.
Mamá was out getting her hair done; she had a little time.
She slipped into her mother’s room, and went to the closet. She stood on a chair. The unmarked box was high and heavy, but she took her time, inching it forward, little by little, until the bulk of its weight was in her arms. It was too heavy for her to carry to the floor without crashing. She pushed it, incrementally, back into place.
She was not strong enough. Not yet.
The news from Cuba came on New Year’s Day, 1959. Cuba, a small, dense word, full of energy, tight coil shooting into flight, exploding from the radio, Cuba, Cuba, darting from drunk people’s mouths. Salomé didn’t know what the word meant, but she heard pure power in the radio voices, the crackling declarations from a city called Havana, the crowd in Tía Xhana’s kitchen. After almost all the guests had left, and even Xhana and César had gone to bed, Mamá and Tío Artigas stayed up listening to the radio. Morning light filled the apartment. Salomé was supposed to be asleep in Tío Artigas’ bed, but she woke to a sharp laugh from the kitchen, her mother’s laugh. She rose, cracked open the bedroom door, knelt down, and strained for voices from the kitchen.
“I still can’t believe it.”
“Believe it, Eva.” Tío Artigas sounded like a man on a high ledge. “This is the first of many revolutions.”
“You think so?”
“You’ll see.” A liquid poured into glasses. “It’ll sweep the continent. Just think about it. Why are wages falling? Why are unions striking?”
“The economy.”
“What shapes the economy?”
Salomé shifted her weight from the ball of one foot to the other, quietly, curling low against her knees.
“The market.”
“The yanquis.”
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��Oh, I don’t know—”
“Come on. Of course it’s true. They turn down our wool, and—¡páfate!—farmers are out of work. They lend us money and what happens? They tell our government what it can and can’t do for its people. You think Eisenhower cares about cantegriles?”
“Things aren’t as desperate here as in Cuba. We haven’t had a dictator in almost sixty years. There’s no comparison.”
“Of course there is. You just can’t see it because you still believe the dream of batllismo.”
“Ay, Tío, that’s not fair.”
A man shouted on the radio, but Salomé could not make out his words, only the fierce, bright static that surrounded them.
“He sounds like an argentino.”
“He is. Ernesto Guevara is his real name.”
Mamá laughed. “Are you joking?”
“No.”
“I met him once. When Salomé was born.”
Salomé felt her hands grow hot.
“Che left to be of use. Same as I’m doing now.”
“What?”
“I’m leaving.”
“Where to?”
“Cuba.”
“When?”
“Very soon.”
Mami’s silence bloomed like an angry flower.
“Eva. Think about it. No one needs me here.”
“Xhana—”
“Loves me, but doesn’t need me. And I’ve been waiting for this for many years.” His voice grew teasing. “You could come.”
Salomé saw a ship, and herself on it, with Tío and Mamá, sailing toward a far-off destination. It was a white ship, freshly painted, solid against the seas.
Mamá was terse. “I’m needed here.”
“Of course. I know. The children.” A teasing edge, again. “Or your hairdresser.”
“Tío—”
“Yes?”
Silence in the kitchen.
“Eva, I don’t judge you. Really.”
More silence. Salomé’s legs grew sore, but she didn’t move.
“What do you plan to do there?”
“Whatever they need. Build, work. I’ll go south into the island if they want. I’ve survived in the jungle before.”
“That was ages ago. You’re sixty-three.”
“Well, then, a perfect age to retire in the Caribbean. Come on, Eva, don’t be sad.”
Mami sighed. Salomé felt that sigh as if her lungs had made it. “I’ll miss you terribly. You’d better write to us.”
It happened quickly. Tío Artí took one night to pack, and two days to find a ship that would carry him to Cuba. The night he left, Salomé stood in a throng of family at the Montevideo port, waving a handkerchief at Tío Artí on the deck. He got smaller and smaller as he waved back. It was a humid summer night, and sweat glistened on everybody’s forehead. Later, the thick heat wouldn’t let her sleep. She lay in bed and thought of the stories Tía Xhana had always told, of brave people who had stood up for their country, people Salomé had always imagined standing in a big circle around her, ghostly, shimmering, watching, standing up, sitting down, standing up again, over and over, for their country, to make history, in a slow and soundless dance. They rose up, now, from the dark. She saw them clearly, saw them reach out glowing hands. Where will you go? they said, and she said, Cuba. They grasped her hands and whisked her, whisked her through the air until she landed in a forest. Che was there, smiling, covered in sweat and mud. I’ve been waiting for you, he said, since you were born. He handed her a gourd of mate. She drank. The forest was wet and rich and dark. Tío Artigas emerged from the foliage, also muddy, a rifle slung over his shoulder. He saw her and said, Salomé, are you ready to rise up? She nodded. He handed her the gun. She hung it from her shoulder and suddenly she too was covered in mud, perfectly radiant, perfectly fearless, perfectly strong. Then Che grinned, bent to kiss her forehead like a father, and said, Let’s go.
That summer, Mamá took them to the beach. Salomé and Roberto packed towels and books and the three strolled down La Rambla, all the way to the stone steps that led to the shore. The descent was the best part: when all the supple crush of sand spread out before you, waiting for the baring of your feet, urging you to slide your sandals off, sink toes into the grains, fine, pale, hot from summer sun, stretching all the way to sparkling foam. They read quietly on towels until heat forced them all into the water, where they splashed one another in small, chaotic wars.
Cuba sent ripples through the city: whispers, loud praise, discussions on the radio, Cuban flags and LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION banners pasted into windows. Mamá was different too. She wrote fiercely. Poems poured out of her, carpeting the floor, pages and pages of fresh verse.
“What on earth are you writing about?” Abuelo Ignazio said.
“Everything. Politics, change, the way things could be.”
“What for?”
“For?”
“Why write it down?”
“Writing is essential.”
“Hmmph. You can’t eat a poem.”
School began. Salomé learned to read whole lines of text. She learned to split oranges into halves and thirds that could be added and subtracted from one another. One day in June, Tía Xhana swept in from the cold. She peeled off her coat and scarf and hat. Through the window, Salomé saw the oaks slash their branches against the prison walls.
“He wrote.” Xhana held up an envelope. She looked bright, freshly polished. “Papá wrote.”
They gathered around the kitchen table. Abuela Pajarita pulled empanadas from the oven. Abuelo had been reading El País at the table. Beside him, Roberto pored over algebra. Abuelita stood still, holding an empty baking sheet. Xhana read aloud.
Dear Familia,
Hello hello I miss you so much you can’t imagine. When I landed here I was in one piece and I still am. I sweat a lot and do not sleep and I am happy. There is so much work to do. Mostly I’ve been helping turn casinos into schools, private companies into national factories. What belonged to the rich now belongs to the people. The U.S.A. is not happy—we will see how long they buy our sugar. They want their companies back. Nothing is certain, it all depends on hope. And work, of course, always that. I am studying the music of Havana. Such music. African rhythms, similar and different to our candombe. Everything is different and similar.
Everybody please take care of everybody—
Kisses and more,
Artigas
“Thank God,” said Abuela. “The man has finally learned to write home.” She brought empanadas to the table. Hands attacked the platter from all sides.
“Sounds like he’s doing well,” Mamá said.
“Well?” Abuelo said. “He’s going to break his back. And what for?”
“To build a better country,” Mamá snapped.
Abuelo drew himself up, but Xhana raised a hand to stop him. “First of all, Pajarita, the empanadas are delicious.” There were murmurs of agreement. “So that’s unanimous. Tío, think of it this way. Think of Uruguay. How much have pensions been cut?”
“Too much.”
“Not much left for the elderly.”
“No.”
“A bag of potatoes, perhaps.”
Abuelo ceded the point with a nod.
“Why do you think that’s happened?”
Abuelo reached for another empanada. Beside him, Roberto resumed his equations. “Times are hard. Our industries are struggling.”
“And what else?”
Ignazio shrugged.
“Debt to the yanquis, Tío.”
“That’s right.” Mamá leaned forward, casting a shadow over Roberto’s page. He put his pencil down, too hard. “We’re taking from our own people to give to those who have the most.”
“Debts should be paid off,” Abuelo said.
“Not at the expense of workers,” said Mamá.
“Hmmph.”
“What do you mean, ‘hmmph’?”
“That’s just what communists say.”
Mamá tightened.
“Of course,” Xhana said. “I’m a communist.”
Abuelo Ignazio looked at Eva. “Are you, hija?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Abuelo sighed. “Whatever happened to old-fashioned batllismo?”
“Our leaders sold it,” Xhana said, “to the highest bidder.”
Abuelo Ignazio turned to his wife. “Pajarita, did you know your niece was a communist?”
“Of course.”
“What do you think of that?”
“I hope she stays for dinner.”
“And what about your own daughter?”
“I hope she stays for dinner too.”
Mami laughed. Abuelo Ignazio slunk his shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of defeat.
“I’d love to,” Xhana said.
She was eleven years old, a good girl, a plain girl, with two braids that hung limp and thin against her collar, despite Mamá’s attempts to enrich her hair, the salves, washes, fragrant shampoos, olive oil soaks that left her smelling like a salad. Nothing worked; she stayed plain. The years that lay in wait mystified and terrified and thrilled her. She wanted to shoot up into new skin, the way Roberto had, fourteen now, separate from her, almost a man, taking a blade to his face in the mornings. They did not cleave to each other anymore. She was alone. She wasn’t good at making friends, though there were girls at school who asked her over when they needed help with homework, and in their homes she saw their mothers, aprons tied around broad waists, hair pulled back brusquely as if they didn’t care, as if they had more important things to think about than hairstyles. They baked and cleaned and waited for their husbands and did not write poems or seem to have secrets tucked in their closets or clothes or morning errands. She didn’t go often. She read constantly. In some stories, very old ones, there were girls who weren’t really girls but sprites belonging to the forest, at home inside a tree trunk or reed or river, and she looked, sometimes, on city streets, in her city that was growing a ring of cantegriles—far from where she was, but she had seen one, knew its sad, crowded shacks, kept seeing them in dreams—for fairies or ghosts or witches who might open sudden doors in the thin air.
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