The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  The thread between them—thin and sticky like a spider’s—was too much. “All right,” she said sharply, “no more talking.”

  His prediction proved right. Pacheco declared that he would not negotiate with terrorists, and no criminals would be released from prison. Soldiers pounded the streets, Montevideo was a drum, shaking with the rhythms of their boots, marching, percussive, continuous, kicking down the doors of people’s homes, suspected Tupamaros dragged out of bed, we will crush the terrorists, and in a major coup they even captured the founder, long in hiding, Raúl Sendic, imprisoned to great fanfare and a flurry of photos in El País. Salomé couldn’t sleep, because if she did she’d surely wake to the barrels of a dozen guns pointing through the dark at her full-of-steel bed, and—worse—be dragged out in plain sight of Abuelo and Abuela and Roberto and Mamá, who would hover in the hall in their helpless pajamas, and she would not be able to bear, above all, the looks on their four faces.

  The curfew tightened to six o’clock. Their cell met at dawn. They huddled in a supply closet, where mops and tubs of cleaning fluid stood around them like stern sentinels.

  “It’s time to vote.” Anna looked haggard, but her makeup was crisp and perfect, ready for work. “Remember, this is not a sentimental choice. It never was for him. Think politically.” She scanned them. “Well?”

  Héctor, a new member, a soldier in full uniform, spoke first. “If we execute, the press will talk about his children, his poor wife. How violent and cruel we are. It gives them an excuse to come after us.”

  “But if we do nothing?” Leona asked. “It sends the message that we can’t follow through on our word.” She looked so poised, Salomé thought, no trace of child. “The whole world is looking at us.”

  “That’s true,” Carla, a schoolteacher, said. “If we look weak, that could cripple movements globally.”

  “Either way, they’ll use this to try and crush us.”

  “Which they’re trying to do anyway.”

  “So how do we decide?”

  The debate kept on. Words lost their meanings in Salomé’s ears, they slipped and slid in melted aural eddies. She tried to focus but something clamped her lungs, a tightening fist; she couldn’t breathe; perhaps it was the air, the lack of oxygen, sleepless nights and dawns that stank of bleach; a mouth, her own, preparing for a simple yes or no; she felt light-headed, her mind spun, the debate was a sea of sound from which there rose, in her mind’s eye, a stubbled chin, a drooling chin, heaving and enormous, like a whale.

  “Salomé?” Tinto’s voice cut through the rest. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. The room came back into focus.

  “Your turn,” Anna said tersely. Time was scarce. “Yes or no?”

  She wanted to say no.

  Anna frowned. “Salomé.”

  She looked around the room. Twelve faces turned to her in the paltry light. Moments from now, they would leave this cave and start their proper isolated days, each carrying, inside, a shard of the dream.

  “Yes,” she said.

  She was stirring tomato sauce for dinner—she would never forget its lush, sweet-basil steam—when the phone rang. She raced to pick it up.

  “¿Hola?”

  “Salomé.”

  She didn’t recognize the voice. “Yes.”

  “Cold today, wasn’t it?”

  Her knees her legs she couldn’t feel them. Stop it, she thought, you know better.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have to wear my warmest coat.”

  “Good idea.”

  She listened to the hollow line.

  “Bueno. Adiós.”

  “Adiós,” she said, and hung up. The hall smelled of simmering tomatoes. She longed to taste one final spoonful, but there was no time. She thought quickly: her grandparents were napping, Roberto in his room, Mamá in the living room right by the front door. Perhaps she could run past her? No. Her purse was there, she might need it, she’d have to get it, she’d have to say good-bye.

  She packed a small hasty bag of clothes, with files on top, and entered the living room. Mamá sat on the sofa, reading Don Quixote yet again. Gardel crooned from the record player, some old song about Buenos Aires. Behind her mother, in the window, an oak reached bare branches into black sky.

  “Mamá,” she said, marching toward her purse, “I brought the wrong files home. I’m going to the office to exchange them.”

  Mamá put her hand over the purse. “What?”

  Salomé met her eyes, reluctantly. Mamá was still beautiful, sharp-featured, elegant, with her black hair and red lips. She glowed, gently, a tapered candle in the dark. “The translation is due by morning.”

  “But the curfew.” Mamá waved her hand toward the city past the window. “The troops. The madness. You can’t.”

  Salomé glanced down at the purse. Mamá’s fingers dug into it like claws. She pictured the two of them wrestling over it, thrashing on the floor. “I have to.”

  “Salomé. Anything could happen on a night like this.”

  “But it’s for work.”

  “Who cares?” Mamá sprang to her feet. “Your safety is more important.”

  She stared at Salomé, and Salomé loved the long black lashes, angry eyes, mouth through which so many words (balms, sparks, razors) could emerge. For an instant she thought she might crumble into pieces and stay, after all, a pile of rubble at her mother’s feet. But the purse was unattended; it was her chance. She lunged and grabbed it and raced to the door. “I’ll be fine,” she lied as it swung open.

  Mamá clasped her wrist. “Stay!”

  Salomé turned; their faces were just centimeters apart. She smelled the sweet-almond essence of Mamá’s hair. Mamá probed her eyes, plumbed them, seeking an answer to a not-yet-spoken question, diving in search of secrets that could make the puzzle fit, yes, piece with broken piece.

  “Hija—”

  Salomé wrenched away. “Watch the stove for me,” she said, and began to run.

  She ran directly to the ratonera where she and Tinto had first made love. Through the trapdoor, down the ladder, down the tunnel, into the cave. Tinto was there, and Leona, and Héctor the soldier. They nodded to one another. No one spoke. She curled up next to Tinto; he wrapped her in his arms. She was shaking, his arms made her aware of it. He gripped her fiercely, crushed her into him and she crushed back. The bucket reeked already but she burrowed close until she caught his musk.

  They slept fitfully on the floor.

  The next morning, an unknown Tupamara brought them bread, cheese, cigarettes, water, and news: Mitrione’s body had been found by the police. Civilians had been urged to stay at home, the banks were closed, the schools were closed, countless homes had been turned on their heads. A national day of mourning had been declared for Mitrione. Anna had been taken, and many others. They had to stay in hiding. The Tupa exchanged the full bucket for an empty one, and rushed away. Their leader, Anna, hung in the thick air like a ghost. Leona looked like a statue of herself. Salomé broke the loaf of bread into pieces. “Leona,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

  Leona’s eyebrows rose, a little, to show that she had heard. Salomé handed her bread and cheese. Leona shook her head.

  “You have to eat,” Salomé said. “We all do.”

  Leona ate. They all ate, in silence, in their dim circle lit by a single flashlight. Salomé tried not to think about her house, the boots of soldiers, her guilty mattress, broken lamps, her family, her family, her family. The silence was as cloying as the smell.

  “Che, Leona,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Tell us a story.”

  “About what?”

  “About your family. Russia. Anything.”

  Leona looked incredulous. She adjusted her glasses. She looked at Tinto, who nodded, and at Héctor, who shrugged. She began to speak. She told the story of Irina, her great-grandmother, who’d been known throughout Pereyaslav for the inimitable sound of her voice. When she sang, lovers ended
quarrels, the ill found health, and dry brown plants returned to life. She could melt snow with a one-hour ballad. Then, one year, her husband and six of her eight children were killed in a pogrom. She stopped singing. Crops faltered; elders died. Townspeople left baskets of fruit at her door and begged her to sing again; she never did. But her daughter grew up with the gift, and spent her life crooning and wailing in the village square, and she and her children had enough to eat even in the longest winters. She was Leona’s grandmother. In Leona’s earliest memories, she curled in her arms, listening to old songs.

  When Leona finished, they kept going. Stories spun, one after the other, from each of them in turn. The stories wove into a mantle that could cloak them from their now-just-past and their soon-to-be, enfolding them in something larger and brighter than anything they could see from where they sat, crouched, fidgeting. Tinto told about his grandparents’ magic show, his parents’ bakery encounters, his great-great-grandmother from Paysandú whose empanadas were so good that argentinos used to swim across the Río Uruguay to taste them—sixteen horses had been drowned in their masters’ quest for pastries, it was true, even today in Paysandú it was known to be true. And in any case, where they now sat, veracity was irrelevant; all that mattered was the texture of the story. Salomé told of the gauchos her abuela Pajarita was born from, and the ceibo tree she was reborn from soon thereafter; how it was said that she, Salomé herself, was the bastard great-great-great-granddaughter of José Gervasio Artigas; how her mother pursued poetry during the Second World War, and afterward, across the river, to peronismo and the mimeograph that sent her into exile; how her father, the eminent scientist, brought his patient out of a wheelchair and fell in love with her, all at once, defying his family to marry an immigrant poet (and she felt a raw, sudden affection for him as she told); Tío Artigas’ adventures across the continent, Brazil, the Andes, Cuba. Another day went by, and a second, and a third; they filled them with their stories, with their mantle of stories, softening that hole full of their shit; sweat; breaths. Héctor, the soldier, finally joined in: he told them that his mother was the daughter of a wealthy estanciero who owned hundreds of acres of land. When she was very young, she fell in love with a cowhand and got pregnant with his bastard child. Her family disowned her, so she fled south through Argentina with her beloved. She gave birth at the edge of a Patagonian glacier after ten days without food, and fainted from the exertion; when she awoke, a muscular puma was licking her newborn baby. She screamed; the puma lifted its sleek head to look into her eyes. She later told her son that, right then, she felt a strange and sudden kinship with this creature and knew it was an angel of God. In the days and months that followed, the puma hunted for them, helping them survive the stark terrain. Autumn approached. The puma led them north, back toward Uruguay. They followed, back through the villages and pampas and forests and hills, until they reached the Río Uruguay, where their nation of origin began. At that lush and gurgling shore, the puma stopped. The young soldier’s mother wept and begged her friend to stay, to cross with them, but the creature’s silhouette was already disappearing among the trees.

  Such tales. They wrapped them, held them, kept them sane and even safe—until, on the fourth evening, as the sun sank in a faraway sky, they were found by soldiers with heavy boots.

  Ocho

  ——————

  KEENS, HOWLS, HUNGER

  FOR THE SUN

  The days bled together. Her blood bled together. She could no longer tell which body parts had leaked which stains on the cement floor. She could no longer tell whether it was day or night, hell or death, blood or spit wetting her blindfold, three men or thirty in the room, the same man shouting or another, the same man crooning or another, whether the next thing would be blows or long long rapes or a journey to the room with the wet mattress, with peelyourskin electric shocks, the room with the full palette of imported arts, top of the line, state of the art, the art of state, oh my country, oh my country, you are not so backwoods after all, look what you bought, look what you have, just look at how you wield it. How seamless you are. You stop at nothing.

  At first she wouldn’t speak, I won’t tell you anything, I will hold on and hold on, but time dragged on without the shaping force of days, she couldn’t think, she was too cold, she was too wet, she was hungry and naked except for the hood, and sleep belonged to that other, distant world where the sun still rose and set; this can’t be, can’t be happening, not again, not again, and finally she knew her mouth was opening to beg; she was disgusting, filthy, bare, begging, she had so little she could tell them, really, almost nothing, and betrayal came and went without satisfying them. With nothing left to hide in the soft casing of her body, she broke freely. More breaking than she’d ever thought a person could survive. Sometimes she could hate them with a white-hot hate that burned her like La Máquina itself; could hate Salomé; could hate something else too, something that controlled the men around her like marionettes on strings—wasn’t it there? wasn’t it true?—a something the size of fifty buildings, so much larger than any single human being, looming over them all, drooling slime, teeth like spears, greedy for the writhe of breaker against broken, for the blood of the captive and the soul of the captor. But those were only moments, sharp and fleeting. Time was endless and her body had no edges, it was opened, opened, opened. Can’t be happening. She prayed for death. She almost died one day, or perhaps it was one night, no way to know, in any case that time she felt it hovering, death, death so sweet, she almost grasped its wings except the words surged forward: Mamá’s words: a line of poetry, of all fucking things, cutting through the voices and the low electric hum. You, my fire, are all I have. Naked I still come to you. The line arose and thickened and became a rope of words: you my fire; you my fire you my fire my fire my fire my fire my fire my fire you my a rope of words to hold, to grasp, to coil around the body, to chant inside the ghost towns of the mind.

  She had admitted, it seemed, to a list of crimes. The hood was removed so she could sign the confession. The light cut into her eyes, and she winced, but hands dragged her back over the table. The document was many pages long, but she saw only the last page, where her hand was guided to the empty line that waited for her name. She glimpsed the date below it. Nine months had passed.

  She was moved into the Women’s Prison, an edifice on the outskirts of the city. She had heard about it in cell meetings, but whether it looked anything like the men’s facility in Punta Carretas, she couldn’t say, as she saw nothing until she was deep inside. When the hood came off, she was in a cell: three gray walls, one wall of bars, the room just large enough for its single bed. She was wearing a rough cotton dress that reached to her calves. She was not wearing underwear. Her feet were bare on the cement floor. The guard closed the iron door, bars slamming against bars. The limp hood swung in his hand. “No talking,” he said, mechanically. There were sounds down the hallway, women’s sounds, murmurs and steps and one shrill, aborted laugh.

  She had eyes again. She could see, though day brought only the suggestion of light, a charcoal creep from somewhere down the hall. The cell was icy cold. It was May already, winter was fast approaching. May, she thought, it is now May, I missed the rest of it, October breezes, hot January, heavy February, gentle March. There was no gentle where I was, wherever I was, except the gentle that was worse than the rest of it. The underworld. The not-world. And aren’t I still there? Now I can see, and I have some things, today at least—a dress, a bowl, a pillow. It seemed shocking, almost profane, that there should be a pillow in the underworld.

  She could sit or stand or lie down, whatever she felt like doing. The freedom was overwhelming. She sat on the bed. The mattress was thin and sharp with springs. She didn’t move. She couldn’t think. Her first meal came, cornmeal porridge in a bowl. She began to reach for the bowl on her floor, thinking the food would be transferred there.

  “Want to eat out of your shit-bowl, do you?”

  She pulled he
r hand back.

  “You’re disgusting.”

  She sat alone with the bowl in her lap. She didn’t want to eat. She couldn’t feel her body and was grateful for it. Hunger can’t touch me, nothing can touch me, not this minute and maybe not the next one. The cornmeal looked thin and pale, but still, there was something shocking about the yellow. Strange, to see your food before you eat it. You start the eating with your eyes. I am almost full, almost sick from looking. She put the bowl down on the floor. Down the hall, she heard a woman raise her voice, saying, Álvaro, Álvaro. Salomé didn’t want to think about Álvaro, whoever he was, or about anybody else who had a name and lived outside these walls, had lived the spring and summer in rhythms she’d missed, slow normal rhythms that belonged to the other world, the sunworld, and who now had thoughts about her, who knew what thoughts, no, she couldn’t let them in, not any of them, stay out there, I am alone, I want to be alone. I can’t exist for you. Don’t want to exist, perhaps I’ll die in here, just stop eating, just fade off, I’m halfway there already and wouldn’t that be better? Like pulling the scab all the way from the skin. Better, better. Let the skin be smooth without it.

  A rat entered through the bars and scurried to the cornmeal. It sniffed the food and began to eat.

  “No,” said Salomé, before she could stop herself.

  The rat looked up. Its eyes were bright and alert.

  “Hijo de puta.”

  She took the bowl from the floor. The rat, unafraid, followed her toward the bed. “No,” she said again, and suddenly she felt that she could kill the rat with her bare hands or feet to keep what was hers. She kicked at the rat, hard, so hard that it should have bitten back, but instead it backed away and left as if it simply wasn’t worth it, the food not good enough or too much of a bother.

  She looked down into the cornmeal. She’d fought for it, now she had to eat it. It was tepid and tasteless, but she ate it all, slowly, dutifully, thinking, mine, little bastard, mine.