The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  “Tell me something,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “About you.”

  “I already have.”

  “Something more.”

  The hand, all she could think of was that big warm hand. “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  She had seen herself in the mirror that day; she knew nothing had changed. “Liar.”

  “How dare you.” She thought he was angry until he laughed. She liked the gravel in his laugh. A film of sweat had formed between their hands: her sweat, or his, or both of theirs. Everything surged, electrically, the trees, the heavy air, the skin of her hand and everything inside it. She wanted to shout. There was nothing in the world more powerful than this, a hand, a voice, the urge to shout. Tinto kissed her, briefly, firmly, a silent question that she answered with her fingers just above his top button, brushing curls, their texture silkier than she’d imagined.

  ———

  “It’s official.” Eva pulled the newspaper taut between her hands. “The Tupamaros have declared themselves to the public.”

  Abuelo Ignazio snapped up a discarded jack. “Echh. Some news.”

  Salomé studied her poker hand. Across the living room, in the rocking chair, Abuela’s knitting needles thrummed against each other. Rain speckled the window.

  Eva did not seem rankled. “The communiqué is published, word for word. Listen to this: ‘We have placed ourselves outside the law. This is the only honest action when the law is not equal for all; when even those who have created it place themselves outside it, with impunity. Today no one can take the sacred right of rebellion away from us.’”

  Her mother, the orator. At meetings, the words had been dissected and discussed, reduced to their pedestrian essence; here, in the living room, intoned by Mamá, they renewed themselves, gleaming, virile, numinous. She wondered whether her mother’s students ever felt this way, hearing their poems echoed in Eva’s voice. If that was what happened in a poetry class; she had no idea what actually took place.

  “They should all be shot,” Abuelo said. “What’s sacred about holding up a bank?”

  Salomé fanned four queens on the table.

  “Eh! You win!” He pushed seashells toward her, chipped from decades of betting. The scent of roasting beef swelled from the kitchen. Down the hall, in his room, Roberto turned on the radio. One day, the Beatles sang, you’ll look, to see I’ve gone.

  “The motive,” Eva said. “That’s what.”

  “It wasn’t really a question.”

  “I still answered it. And besides,” Eva said, “they never hurt anyone.”

  “How do you think the bank owners feel?”

  “Like their money is going to the revolution. Which it is. What do you think, hija?”

  But tomorrow may rain so, I’ll follow the sun.

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” Salomé said.

  Eva eyed her. “Really?”

  She nodded. Heat stung her face.

  “And you?” Eva said, looking at Pajarita.

  Abuela Pajarita kept on knitting, knitting. Salomé wondered how many stitches she had made in her lifetime. Hundreds of thousands for her alone. “I think I wouldn’t want to be in the bank while they’re robbing it.”

  Eva stretched lazily. The paper crumpled in her lap. “It sounds like they’re quite polite.”

  Abuelo grimaced at his newly dealt cards (he was bluffing). “Sometimes, hija, you sound like one of them.”

  “If I were, you wouldn’t know it, would you?”

  “If you were I wouldn’t let you in the house.”

  Salomé stood, too quickly. “I’m going to check on the roast.”

  “We just started a hand,” Abuelo said.

  “The roast is fine,” Abuela said.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  In the kitchen, she forced herself to breathe. She had to be more calm, more careful. She opened the oven and imagined what her mother would say if she found out: All those lies, perhaps, or You should have asked permission, or Tesoro, my treasure, I never guessed you had such strength. Abuelo was wrong; Mamá was not a Tupamara. Salomé knew because she’d checked under her mattress, and found nothing but pages and pages of unfinished poems. There were days when Mamá left the house without making her bed at all. She was flagrant: she marched alongside unions, she read outraged poems in cafés, she published verses that made music out of words like liberación, leaflets poked unabashedly from her purse. Meanwhile—clearest of clues—she hadn’t checked her daughter’s mattress for guns. No, thought Salomé, she is not with me, I am alone. No one in this house knows the city I know, a city of doors, so many of them, tall and low, baroque and plain, bright and dark, peeled and fresh, and among those doors there are the ones that lead down passageways that lead to unseen doors only some can enter, only those who give each waking moment to their country and each sleeping moment to the guns.

  They bred down there. Strange steel rabbits. Six pistols and four rifles now. She had learned, from sheer necessity, to sleep on their hard bodies, alert and dreaming all at once. The piles still turned to mountains in the middle of her mind.

  Salomé closed the oven door and turned up the heat.

  ———

  Che Guevara died. It was the spring of ’67. The news reached them on a sweet-sky sort of day, a rare blue above that made you want to taste it. He’d been living with guerrillas in Bolivia. He was shot in the chest many times over. According to El País, he fell in the midst of fighting. According to Orlando, soldiers captured and then killed him, bolivianos trained by U.S. agents. According to Orlando they had cut off both his hands.

  They were silent, all eight of them, in a cement grotto under the floorboards of a restaurant. The air was scarce and smelled of overused grease. Salomé closed her eyes and saw two enormous severed hands, pressed together as if in prayer, saw herself clambering up them, toward heaven, blood sticking to her heels. She opened her eyes. Tinto was crying, without moving, without making a sound. Leona’s eyes were shut. Anna looked stern, as usual.

  Orlando coughed. “The best way to honor Che is to keep on.” He looked much younger without his beard. He was working undercover at the police station, where employees were required to shave. “We always knew the risks.”

  And this was true, she’d known the risks, she was too smart not to be conscious of the risks; she knew about the chance of death, arrest, La Máquina with its rumored electric hell; the leap she’d taken could end in flight or fall or territories she could not or would not imagine. All of this was already true when Che was still alive, hopeful, grinning, hands attached. She shouldn’t be shocked, nor should she be afraid, but she couldn’t help it—it reared up in her, a wave of fear, and she hoped no one could smell its brackish presence.

  Orlando leaned forward. She couldn’t picture him at a police station. She couldn’t picture him anywhere except in dark and airless rooms. “We cannot be distracted from our purpose. It’s up to us to keep Che alive.”

  “Hasta la victoria siempre,” Anna said.

  Salomé repeated the words, along with everyone.

  Spring expanded. Daisies raised delicate heads in Parque Rodó. In the dark, she couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there, facing the black sky while she and Tinto murmured, drank mate, pressed together. She learned the curve of his neck, the hollow of his collar, hard bone along his jaw, back down to his collar, catching curls of chest hair on her tongue. She traced that path many times, up and down, back up again, hungry, hungry, never filled, while his hand ate her body, hair, neck, breast, waist, hip, breast. She hushed him when he tried to talk. She didn’t want to hear his words, his thoughts, promises he could or could not keep. Words are an extravagance, you cannot eat a poem, she was not an ordinary girl who could sustain herself on sweets; give me the root-food of your skin, mouth, palms, nourishment I carry through the
rigor of my days. During classes and exams and family dinners she pulled out morsels—his hand on her blouse, the taste of his tongue, the desperate restraint of his breath—and let herself taste them again. Good girl. Guerrilla girl. She had to steel herself to play both parts. Lust and fear and pleasure had to stay beneath the surface, stirring, gnawing, silent.

  Even when the letter of acceptance arrived from the university and her mother shrieked with pleasure, jumping up and down like a drunk child, Salomé guarded her joy.

  “History,” Mamá said.

  “Yes.”

  “You still want to be a historian?”

  “Yes.” She felt the pull of it, books piled in decadent mounds, halls littered with leaflets, forays into the struggles of the past, and herself, years down the line, a new kind of scholar for a new Uruguay.

  “Mija, that’s wonderful. At your age, I was already waiting tables. I don’t want that for you.” She wiped her eyes and held the letter of acceptance close so that it crinkled against her breasts. “Come, sit down, mi amor.”

  They sat down on the sofa and Mamá put her arm around Salomé and began to speak, I worked at a shoe store, at first, but it wasn’t a good place, and things were better once I escaped to La Diablita, I was thirteen and those were golden days, the days when I found other poets, found the poet within me, and then I went to Argentina, I wanted to change the world, I wanted to see everything, taste everything, write everything, and certainly I’ve had my life but if I’d gone to university I could have—

  Her words continued to roll, and Salomé half listened but she was preoccupied with something her mother had said at the beginning. Finally, her mother paused in the midst of retelling the story about the young man beaten to a pulp by the Buenos Aires police, and Salomé said, “What do you mean by ‘escape’?”

  “What escape?”

  “You said you escaped to La Diablita.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you have to—”

  “It wasn’t an escape,” she said tightly. “It was just a new job.”

  They were silent. The evening sun lengthened the shadows.

  “In any case,” Mamá said, “we’ll celebrate tonight. I’ll go out for some Champagne.” She rose and picked up her purse, and the aperture between them was gone. Salomé watched her mother leave, and then she was alone on the couch with her letter of acceptance. She picked it up and examined its fresh creases, its formal words, the gathering dark that seemed to make the paper hum. She held it parallel to the ground, and imagined herself shrinking to a size where she could sit on the page and ride it, a magic carpet, into untried realms. She could almost pretend that it was possible—she felt that buoyant, that easy to hold aloft.

  The feeling lasted a week, until, one evening, in the back room of an abandoned factory, Orlando said, “Salomé. You have an assignment.”

  Salomé sat up quickly. She was not used to being an agenda item. She felt the burn of eyes on her.

  “There’s a job open at the U.S. Embassy. They need a secretarial assistant: one who can type, translate documents, and speak excellent English. The employee will have access to many files. It’s a full-time deployment.” Orlando opened his palms. “We think you could get it.”

  She wanted to ask who the we was, what faceless men had declared along with Orlando that she could get, should get, would get this job. It was a deeply inappropriate question. She could have slapped herself for thinking it.

  “Salomé.” Orlando bent forward. His face was gentle in the oil lamp’s glow. “The Movement has enough students.”

  In the corner of her vision she saw Anna, razor-thin, watching for a telling twitch or tightness.

  “Of course,” Salomé said.

  Two weeks later, she had the job. The process involved a typing test, an English test, and a brief interview with Viviana, the head secretary, a woman in horn-rimmed glasses who had not yet mastered the English th. She was two weeks from graduating high school. Might they wait? Yes, certainly, Miss Santos. We’ll be glad to wait.

  She graduated, dutifully, a shell of a girl smiling for cameras and Champagne toasts and teary mothers and grandmothers. The next morning, she lay in bed with her eyes open until Mamá knocked and entered, bearing a tray with toast and mate and a single yellow rose, craning its thin neck out of a vase.

  “For my new graduate!”

  Salomé sat up.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I have some news.” She felt small in the bed, a child who played with buttons and didn’t braid her own hair. She put her feet on the floor. “I got a job.”

  Mamá looked at her blankly.

  Salomé took the tray from her, placed it on the bed, tried to sound bright. “It’s a great job. As a secretary. At the U.S. Embassy.”

  Her mother hovered in the middle of the room. Her purple bathrobe was inside out; the seams were splayed and tattered. She spoke slowly, as if her thoughts were laborious to gather. “What about the university?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “But you want to study!”

  Salomé stared at the red lamp shade on the bedside table. It was old and worn and should have been replaced years ago. “Not really.”

  “Since when?”

  “Besides, we need the money.”

  “You can’t quit school for the family!”

  Salomé stood. “So I should go to school for family? For you?”

  Mami’s mouth hung open; she stared at her daughter; she let out a sound that was almost a bark. “All those years of perfect grades.” She swayed. “What about your future?”

  But Salomé couldn’t speak about the future, couldn’t tell her mother about the handful of the future she was carrying, the rifles in her mattress, the blueprint in her mind, the action she took daily, hotly, secretly, for the future, for the people, at the negligible cost of one girl’s selfish urge to study, for surely they were right and it was negligible once you factored in the revolution and factored out her longing to run out of here in her pajamas and not stop until she reached the university and broke into its library and barricaded herself in with books that she would read and make a bed out of and wield against anyone who came for her. “Look, Mamá, it’s an excellent job. Why aren’t you proud of me?”

  Eva bared her teeth like a cougar; for the first time in Salomé’s life, she feared her mother’s attack. “How can you say I’m not proud?”

  “Not of this job.”

  “You’re not taking this job.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re sixteen, Salomé. I’m your mother, and I say you’re going to school.”

  Salomé panicked, imagining herself dragged to class by the hair, Mamá stalking outside lecture halls, the job at the embassy lost, her reputation ruined in the eyes of Tinto, Leona, Orlando, Anna, faceless Tupamaros, the ghost of Che. “You’re just mad because you never studied.”

  She instantly regretted saying it, or at least regretted having to see the thing that happened to Mamá, the stiffening, the draining out of any trace of cougar, trace of heat, leaving a shocked and empty woman in a bathrobe with all the seams exposed. Eva did not sway. She did not blink. She did not look at Salomé. The silence was so thick it left no room for breathing until her mother left.

  Eva stayed in bed for three days. Salomé avoided her. Once, and only once, Abuela Pajarita broached the topic. “This job. It’s what you want?”

  “Sí,” Salomé said, scrubbing the counter.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sí.”

  “Because you know you could study. We’d manage.”

  Salomé wrung the dishrag fiercely. “Why doesn’t anyone trust me?”

  “You’re changing the subject,” Pajarita said sadly. Salomé said nothing and Abuela Pajarita watched her hang up the rag and leave the room.

  On her first day, Salomé rose at 5 a.m. to perfect her bun, her blouse, her panty hose. The embassy was a maze of wide, glossy halls. Mr. Frank Richards,
her new boss, offered her a crushing handshake. He had long sideburns and a rapid smile; a triangular sign above his desk read BOSTON RED SOX.

  “So, you’re Salomé.” He led her to a bare desk and motioned for her to sit. “You Uruguayans finish high school so early. I never woulda known what to do at sixteen.” He took out a cigarette and a silver lighter. “Not that I know now.” His eyes squinted as he laughed.

  She smiled pleasantly. This wouldn’t be too hard.

  Mr. Richards brought her files to organize, files to translate, files to type into clean copies (Here you are, Salomé, she imagined him saying, get that to the rebels at once). There were banal letters full of pleasantries and promises, requests for help from U.S. nationals, official declarations with little to say. On Salomé’s seventh day, President Gestido died and left Vice President Pacheco in power. Memos from Pacheco’s aides poured into the embassy. She snooped in Viviana’s files to read them. Pacheco vowed to be amenable to the United States’ concerns. Their friendship would be strengthened. Lyndon Johnson need not worry: the plague of socialism would be thoroughly addressed.