The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  She won a scholarship to a private school. So did Roberto. She didn’t know about the application until Mamá showed her the acceptance letter.

  “You’re happy, aren’t you?”

  Salomé nodded. She thought of Crandon, a big white building crawling with ivy. She had seen it only through iron gates.

  “Come here, hija.”

  She let her mother hold her. Her hair smelled like sweet almonds. They both pretended she was not too big to be gathered on a lap.

  “When I was your age, I left school. Did you know?”

  She hadn’t known.

  “I worked in a store.”

  She tried to imagine this, young Mamá, selling carrots or blouses or toys while lessons went unattended.

  “But you. You can be anything.”

  Her hand traced slow arcs along Salomé’s scalp.

  On her first day at Crandon, Salomé woke to an old tango, sung in her mother’s tawny voice. She got out of bed and followed the strains. She peered into the living room and was stunned by what she saw: Mami was ironing. Meticulously. At five-thirty in the morning. She wore the same blue dress as the night before. Y un rayo misterioso, she sang, hará nido en tu pelo. She danced the iron forward, across the crisp white blouse of the new uniform. Florecerá la vida. She smoothed the collar and the cuffs and sleeves and now the narrow spaces between buttons. No existirá el dolor. Salomé sensed a deeply private conversation between woman, iron, cloth. She retreated quietly and curled back into bed. The sky outside was the color of a very old woman’s hair.

  She and Roberto rode the bus across town. Her pleated skirt scratched at her knees. Inside the iron gates, slick-haired boys and pearly girls swarmed over a perfect lawn. The classrooms had the artificial lemon-smell of a place that’s been scrubbed clean. The windows made polished boxes out of the sky. She had an English teacher now, who did not wear a sweater made of wool she’d spun and knit herself, but a tailored jacket and matching skirt. She spoke English with slow effulgence.

  “You will learn … to speak … like a citizen of … the United States. What is the United States? Class?”

  Homework piled on. There was absolutely no talking out of turn in class. The halls echoed her footsteps and the footsteps of the slick-haired boys and pearly girls.

  “Well?” Mamá asked that night. “How was it?”

  “Great,” said Roberto.

  “Fine,” said Salomé.

  “Lots of studying to do?”

  “Yes.”

  She studied a whole new language, angular new words for the same familiar things. She studied the United States, the country to the north of the north itself, memorizing its states, fifty of them, from Alabama to Wyoming, gargantuan states, many of them larger than the whole of Uruguay. She studied dollars, how to turn them into cents, their bulk compared to pesos. She learned the capitals of European nations. She learned that there were foreign companies that might hire Uruguayan girls if they were smart, tidy, and adept at typing and English. She learned biology, geometry, and all about the World Wars. At home, she learned how to iron skirt pleats, and how to speak in English for Mamá, saying please and of course and what a lovely pair of shoes, Mother. Mamá cheered and clapped each time.

  “I thought you wouldn’t like English,” Salomé said.

  “Why on earth not?”

  “It’s the language of the yanquis.”

  “So?”

  “It’s against revolutions.”

  “That’s silly,” Mamá said quickly. “A language can’t be against anything.”

  They stood still, looking at each other. It was late afternoon; glyphs of light hung low along the walls.

  “Anyway, you have to understand. It’s the language of opportunity.”

  Roberto made a friend, Edgar, a freckled boy obsessed with chemistry. He came home sometimes for dinner, cleared his plate no matter how many times Abuela filled it, and politely answered all of Abuelo’s questions. Yes, my father’s a lawyer; no, we live in Malvín; I guess I’m okay at soccer; of course Peñarol is my team. Salomé wondered what it might be like to bring a friend home. Most of the girls at school were nothing like her. Their hair was perfectly in place; they had swimming pools in their backyards; they wore a different gold necklace each day; their giggles were delicately calibrated. To her relief, they tended to ignore her. They also ignored Leona Volkova. Leona always sat with her knees together, but not crossed. She never smiled in class. She was the only Jewish girl, soft-spoken and courteous—until the day she shot up to say that Trotsky had not been a madman.

  The air in the classroom tightened like a bridle. All eyes turned to Leona, who stood with her hands clasped in front of her.

  Miss Magariños looked like she’d just been given a suppository. “Excuse me?”

  “He wasn’t a madman,” Leona repeated.

  “Young lady, you weren’t called on.”

  “Yes, Miss Magariños. But still. Thanks to him my family got out of Russia alive.” She stared at her teacher, who stared at the wall. She sat down clumsily.

  Miss Magariños coughed and resumed her lesson. Students bent back over their notebooks. The air stayed taut and heavy until the bell rang.

  After class, Salomé fell into step beside Leona in the hall.

  “That was brave.”

  Leona didn’t look at her. Her dark curls seemed about to burst from the rubber band at the nape of her neck. “You think so?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s nothing. Not compared to other people.”

  “Like Trotsky?”

  “Yes. Like Leon Trotsky.”

  They walked out to the lawn, freshly mowed and fragrant. Leon. Leona. “Were you named after him?”

  The sun reflected in Leona’s glasses, obfuscating her expression. “How did you know?”

  Salomé shrugged. She adjusted her books in the cradle of her arms. “My middle name is Ernestina. My mother says she gave it to me after Che.”

  “How can that be?”

  “She says she met him in Buenos Aires, in ’51, when I was born.”

  Leona laughed. She looked different when she laughed, almost pretty (and years later, fearing for her life, Salomé would remember Leona this way, a grinning child with sun caught in her glasses).

  “Do you believe your mother?”

  “On some days. Do you believe yours?”

  “Yes.” She was serious again. She lowered her voice. “You know Che’s coming to speak at the university.”

  “Of course.”

  “My sister, Anna, studies there. We’re going to see him speak.”

  Leona’s eyes were wide, her stance was straight, she smelled of tangerines and toothpaste. Standing there, at the lawn’s edge, in a starched and pleated uniform under the heavy sun, Salomé could think of no better fate than friendship with this girl.

  Leona glanced around her at the flock of white blouses. “Do you want to come?”

  “Of course.” The blouses headed down toward the lawn, where they glared in the high-noon light. “But I’ll have to ask.”

  When Salomé asked, her mother’s comb sliced hard against her scalp.

  “Of course you can’t.”

  Her hands took half of Salomé’s hair, divided it in three, and braided briskly.

  “But, Mami, why not? We’ve gone to lectures—”

  “This is not an ordinary lecture. It’s controversial.”

  “So?”

  “So!” Her fingers tugged the braid tight. They were quick; they were nimble; they knew this weave so well. “There will be police, and a lot of—feeling.” A rubber band closed over the braid. Mamá dropped it and started on the left side.

  Salomé wanted to shake the two hands out of her hair. “Are you going?”

  “No. It’s Tía Carlota’s card night.”

  The final rubber band tightened its noose.

  On the night of Che’s lecture, they ate dinner without Mamá. Abuelo told them stories over
the meal, old, familiar stories, embroidered in new places. A man gambles his way into a carnival magic act. A girl reappears from death at the top of a tree. It seemed unreal, absurd, larger than life. But then, Salomé thought, what is gained from smallness? Surely resonance—or the yearning for it, the pull to shout your soul in all its voluble explosions—was no crime. And perhaps Abuelo’s tales weren’t larger than life at all. Perhaps, during the century, the world itself had changed, its scope diminished, its proportions shrunk, its fantastic edges pulled in at the horizon.

  She was clearing the table when Tía Carlota called.

  “Where’s your mami, Salomé?”

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  She hesitated. “Playing cards.”

  “What? With who? Who serves better picadillos at their game nights?”

  “No one, Tía, I’m su—”

  “That’s right, pues nadie. You really don’t know where she is?”

  “No idea,” Salomé lied.

  “Well, tell her to call me.”

  “Claro.”

  She hung up and stood in the corridor with the long-moaning telephone pressed against her ear. She had gone. She must have gone. This moment, her mother was in a vaulted room with Che, while Salomé heard only the drone of this empty line. She listened to the drone until it began to sound aggressive. She went to the kitchen. Abuela Pajarita was washing a cast-iron pan. Her silver-and-raven braid swung ever so slightly, as if its tip were brushing her waist clean. Salomé dried plates, drawing moisture from their curves, clinking them into the cupboard. It seemed so easy: wash, then dry, then stack into place. No trace of what’s been done.

  When she was finished, she crept into her mother’s room and closed the door. She did not turn on the light. The moon reached through the window with silver arms. She was tall enough now, and strong enough, and she was not afraid of transgression—or if she was, she would not let that fear command her. All she needed was a chair, like this, dragged up to the closet, to the box that was still there, so she could move it forward, patiently, on tiptoes. It was still heavy; it filled her arms; she brought it to the floor. She smelled eucalyptus when she opened the first flap. Another flap, another, and there they were, exposed in the pale moonlight. Shoes. Children’s shoes. Her strappy school shoes and Roberto’s oxfords, the ones they had outgrown last year. Each stratum held smaller shoes than the last, until, at the bottom, tiny baby shoes emerged, some with flowered designs, some boyish and plain, and every shoe of every size contained three eucalyptus leaves—no more, no less. She wanted to dive into the shoes, swim through their darkness for a clue to Mamá’s mind, for a clue to eucalyptus, or for a clue to anything at all. She brought a leaf to her nose and smelled it, then rubbed it between her fingers as though it were the first leaf she’d ever really felt, as though there were a secret code in the fine veins of its surface, but she pressed too hard, it broke in half, and she recoiled from her own act of destruction. She put the leaf back in its shoe and put the shoes back in their places, the flaps back with one another and the box back on its shelf, the chair against the wall again, no one saw this, no one did this, no one knows.

  That night, as she fell asleep, she thought of boxes, doors, lecture halls, the mouths of shoes, and of how much—how very much—she longed to know.

  Che’s lecture ended in violence. They heard it on the radio at breakfast the next morning. Someone fired a shot, a riot erupted, dozens were wounded by the end of the night. Abuelo complained about socialists becoming too unruly, stirring trouble. Mamá drank her mate without looking up.

  Leona didn’t come to school for two days. Salomé pictured her with broken bones, lacerated skin, welts, bruises. But when she came, she was in one piece, and even smiling. She passed Salomé a note in English class: Let’s talk. At lunch, they sequestered themselves beneath a eucalyptus tree at the corner of the lawn. Salomé was so greedy for the story that she couldn’t eat her sandwich.

  “It was incredible.” Leona took off her glasses and cleaned them with the edge of her skirt. Her eyes were bright and naked. “He said so many things. That the struggle in Cuba is all of our struggle, that it’s something spiritual, beyond borders, that will spread wherever people are hungry. He was wearing a black beret, and his arms danced the whole time he was speaking, and even from far away you could tell he’s more handsome in real life.” Leona paused as three older girls walked by, hands cupped over their mouths in mid-gossip. “He said we shouldn’t hate the imperialists, because then we become like them, and instead we can stay strong, he said, and keep our eyes on victory—¡Victoria! Like that he said it: ¡Hasta la Victoria! And when he said that, the whole auditorium broke into applause.”

  Salomé longed for that applause—to be inside it, carried by it. “So when was the fighting?”

  “Soon after that, but listen, the newspapers lied. Che didn’t cause it. We were on our feet, cheering, and then we heard a shot, a bullet flew toward Che. The crowd panicked, the police came in, as if breaking up a fight—but nobody was fighting except them. They beat people who were trying to get out. They broke my sister’s arm. I only got a few bruises.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed Salomé a round, sallow, half-purple mark. “A small price to pay.”

  Salomé nodded, turning Che’s words in her mind, committing them to memory, cryptic, immediate, oracular. The fading bruise seemed to glow like a medallion.

  Leona and Salomé spent long hours beneath that tree. They ate their lunch, watching students cluster on the lawn, or set up camp to study after school. Sometimes they closed their textbooks and discussed books they’d been reading, not the ones assigned in class, but the ones Leona borrowed from Anna’s shelf. Anna had Marx’s Das Capital, Trotsky’s My Life, various histories of Latin America, books and essays by Bolívar, Artigas, Batlle, Bakunin, Lenin, Castro, Che. Salomé wrapped the books in paper from the butcher shop, so teachers would not see their titles and intervene. The texts were dense; she was grateful for Anna’s ink marks, which indicated where the words were so important they should be underlined, or starred, or—strongest of all—underlined and starred with “¡Sí!” scrawled in the margin. At first, she tried to bring Mamá’s poetry, but Leona read it only out of politeness.

  “Poetry,” she finally said, “isn’t utilitarian.”

  Salomé fingered her mother’s book (hearing Abuelo’s voice, you cannot eat a poem) and returned it to her satchel. She met with more success when she brought Tío Artigas’ letters: every time a new one arrived, Leona pressed Salomé about its contents, until finally she took to copying the letters, word for word, when the family wasn’t looking. Such letters. You could almost smell the sweat and shorn-down sugarcane, the muscle and the hunger of his days. After thirty-three years a widower, Tío Artí had found love again, with Constanza, an octogenarian from Matanzas who could make pans and saucers move with her mind. The first time they kissed, he claimed, the kitchen table veered toward them and pinned their bodies to a bright yellow wall. They agreed to spend the rest of their lives together. He spent some days in Havana, others out on the land, always wielding something—schoolbooks, machetes, rifles, medical gauze. The government was strict, he said, but there were reasons for it. Leona read each word voraciously. Salomé loved her for her hunger. This was friendship, true and sparkling, able to meet her longing with full force, to sense where it bent in concave hollows, where it swelled in search of meaning, how it pressed and scratched and burned against the inside of her skin. Leona’s longings bent and swelled and scratched right along with her. Words were not necessary to know this. She knew this as they sat, quiet, shoulder to shoulder, watching the branches’ shadows creep along the grass.

  Salomé turned thirteen. Uruguay was changing: jobs were lost, factories closed, pensions slashed. Montevideo opened its arms to an onslaught of strikes. Butchers, farmers, cobblers, phone workers, oil workers, wool workers clogged the streets. Salomé did not see them, but she saw the photos in El Paí
s, crowds with shouting mouths and high-held banners. The government set curfews, censored the press, beat strikers, opened fire, made arrests. On the radio, President Giannattasio called his actions Prompt Security Measures. Flyers littered the university in support of the strikes. Roberto, newly enrolled there, complained at the dinner table.

  “They’re everywhere. On the floor, on desks, taped to the wall. It’s a nuisance.”

  “But the strikes are for good reason,” Mamá said. “The Measures steal our civil rights.”

  “Isn’t that what Castro’s doing too?”

  “It’s different there.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s for the Revolution.”

  Roberto said nothing; he heaped more rice onto his plate.

  “The boy is right.” Abuelo Ignazio lifted his fork as though it were a scepter. “The university should only be for studies.”

  Mamá frowned. Her hair was swept into a stylish beehive, which Salomé, with her own drab strands, could not imagine carrying on her head. It was strange that Mamá indulged in fancy hairstyles when money was so tight. It seemed rather bourgeois of her. She’d tried to ask once, but Mamá shot back, I get a discount, she’s an old friend, and dropped the subject. “Perhaps the current world is worthy of study too.”