After eating, sensation began a slow return into her body. Against her will she became, again, a brittle receptor of cold and pain. She lay awake that night, taking stock of the aches in her body. Body. I have one still, and if this body is to live I need to feed it, close its eyes for sleep, squat to let the piss out, lie it down and stand it up, I don’t want to, I’m exhausted just thinking about it. She could not recall a reason to stay living, could not find one in the searches of her mind. The world outside, with all its streets and doors and voices, seemed unreal to her, irrelevant, unreachable. The past was hazy, shattered, a train demolished in the fog. And yet, if she were ready to die, if she really wanted to let go, why couldn’t she let the rat eat? Where did it come from, the will to crush its body with her naked soles? Cold, my hands are cold, my feet. The coarse sheet gave no warmth. She bent her knees so she could press her hands to the warm flesh and thaw their frost. The will to live, she thought, is a strange thing, a beast itself, with its own teeth and mysteries, living inside us with such grace and quiet that we don’t even notice it until it flees, goes, leaves you an empty hull, or so you think until you find its footprints somewhere inside you where you least expected them, indentations on your soul, I longed to live once, it was here, right here, the longing, this was where it nested, until dontsayit drove it away, but didn’t I see its teeth glint today, couldn’t it be roaming somewhere close, or even far, but not so far that it could not return?
She slept. In her sleep, large men stood over her, pressed in, too many.
Five days came and went in which she managed to eat, squat, open her eyes and close them. On the sixth day, guards came to take the women to the yard. The women formed a line in the hall. A woman in front of her started to walk too soon.
“Stop,” a guard said, unnecessarily since the broad side of his rifle had already swung against her.
The woman moaned strangely and returned to the line.
“Now walk. Heads down.”
Salomé kept her head down, but she was an expert at looking while seeming not to look, and as she walked she glimpsed other women’s bunks in the corners of her vision, cells for two, cells for four, even for six.
They reached the outside. The ground was wet with recent rain, the sky gray and thick with rain to come. Still, to be outside, to feel the weight of sunlight, however distant and filtered through clouds—sun, you still exist, you’re on my skin again, my skin was parched for you and I didn’t even know it, greedy skin, it was too much and she squinted, whether from the glare of light, or to keep from weeping, she couldn’t tell. Scores of women’s bodies walked slowly in a circle, heads bent down, as directed. Those who walked too fast or slow were beaten with a rifle, but there was very little beating, really, they were experts at the pace, the speed, the collective shuffle. In their hour of exercise they became one body, one great ring of flesh, each woman just a muscle in the whole, see, move like this, pace yourselves, there you go, step in time, if we do it perfectly the guards won’t care about a slight raise of the glance, a furtive gaze at the gray dresses and gray faces, look at the faces, women, women, faces shut, revealing nothing, closely holding whatever is inside, that’s the trick, there you go, hold it in, that one too, and that one my God I know her, across the circle, Anna’s face, Anna Volkova, tall and gaunt, jaw tense with dignity, and the outside world blasted into Salomé before she had a chance to steel herself against it—memories rose, images exploded in and she saw oil lamps, cramped rooms, Tinto’s chest, the sweat at his temples, the growl of cars, closed doors, open windows, plates of food, a rocking chair, her mother’s eyes. She looked down again, at the gray hem in front of her. The hem was not a prisoner’s hem; it was her mother’s hem, Mamá in front of her, in slow motion, in arm’s reach, back turned to her. No. Stop. Gray hem, prison hem, Mamá would never wear that; it was not her dress, not her spurning back. But Anna, that was Anna—she hadn’t imagined it, she was not alone in this place.
After the yard came showers, in groups of four, no heat, no soap. The water woke her skin and made it sing in silence. The guards watched.
That night, she lay in bed with her eyes open. It was dark, but dim light crept in from a bulb somewhere down the hall. She wondered where Anna was sleeping, and what other Tupamaras were here too. Tupas. I am a Tupa, now, still, here on the inside, I must think of my sisters, my brothers, the others who have given what I gave, lost what I lost, been where I was. Not alone. The thought roused and scared her. Leona. Tinto. Guillermo. Orlando. She didn’t want to know, she had to know. She had to find Leona, if she was here, and talk to Anna also, somewhere, somehow. To link back up, to hear any news, perhaps even to find a way out. Impossible. But hadn’t Tupas done many things that seemed impossible? Hadn’t they arranged a jailbreak from this very prison? She remembered, she’d helped make the plans. But that was a long time ago, when the police were only amateurs, torturing haphazardly, unschooled, ambivalent. She couldn’t know what was outside now, but things seemed different. Nine months. Things had changed, Uruguay had changed, who knew what kind of nation was out there now. She couldn’t fathom what lay beyond the concrete walls, and didn’t want to, couldn’t let in the existence of a certain sand-colored house where too much was known and where the doors and windows might be closed, closed, closed. Instead she thought of Leona, obstinate, rich-haired, a serious child behind her glasses; God what if they took your glasses, Leona, I’ve got to find you.
She found her on the seventh trip to the yard. She was five gray dresses ahead. Neither of them raised her eyes, but Salomé knew they’d seen each other, greeted with the same keen silence they had shared at school. She looked thin, numb, as if she’d gathered all her spirit into some hidden net. She had glasses and she was alive.
Two friends nearby. It gave her the courage to wake up further. That day, she noticed things she hadn’t before. The guards, for example: that they were men, just men, full of shouts and beatings but men regardless, with their restless moments and distractions, the urge to be lazy, to chat with fellow guards, since they were, after all, just human beings, trying to do their duty and bring pesos home at night. They seemed to grow weary of their own thick skin. So if you played your part and walked your pace and kept your head down, you could not only obey but also coax them to relax, lean back, don’t worry, the bitches are behaving, did you watch the game? The yard was the best place for it; guards also feel the sun. If given enough impetus, and if in the right mood, they turned away and let the ring of women be. Then it was possible to adjust the shuffle subtly, more sluggish, more clipped, just a little difference, but enough to move toward a particular woman, and the other women would make way and hide your different pace with the sway of their dresses, because you did it for them too, because every time the rain and guards let up there was someone shuffling quietly toward someone else.
Salomé reached Leona’s side when the walk was almost over. She didn’t speak so much as shape her breath around a word. “Amiga.”
Leona heard it. “Amiga.”
“You all right?”
It was a stupid question. Leona took three incremental steps. “Yes. You?”
“Alive.”
They walked a few more paces. The guards stood upright, reluctantly; it was time to go in. The next day, Salomé approached Leona again, and they inched in silence. After that it rained for five weeks, there was no yard, there was only the inside, and on the inside, deep in the night, Salomé heard her body speak what she least wanted to hear.
When the ground dried and they were out again, Leona reached her early in the walk.
“We have news.” Leona slowed down for a gray dress trying to overtake her. “Tinto is alive.”
Salomé breathed a gulp of the white sky. There was so much inside her, clamoring to be said, to be carried, to be named, but if she started she feared she’d never stop.
“I’m four cells over,” Leona whispered. “Listen for me.”
Salomé listened, every night, a
nd on the third night she heard the taps against the wall. It was not the rats; the taps had a pattern. They came in groupings, taps, pause, taps, pause, and when she counted them the code became clear. It was simple, one tap for each letter of the alphabet. Twelve taps spells L. Five taps spells E. Fifteen spells O. L-E-O-F-O-R-S-A-L-O-M-E
Y-E-S-I-T-S-M-E, she tapped back, and waited while the woman in the cell next door moved to the other wall, to relay Y-E-S-I-T-S-M-E. Her neighbor was a woman whose face spoke of hard liquor, who never failed to groan at night. Salomé thanked her silently, in her mind, along with the two other women beyond her, faceless, tapping patiently, sending her message down the row.
She waited against the wall, hands resting on her belly. The taps began. P-L-A-N-N-I-N-G-E-S-C-A-P-E
She tapped back. H-O-W
She waited. Her fingers itched to tap and tap. The answer came. T-H-R-O-U-G-H-S-E-W-E-R
Salomé thought of her body pushing through an airless tunnel, swimming through shit, attempting to slither on her belly, the way her belly would be weeks from now. C-A-N-T-G-O
W-H-Y-N-O-T
Salomé tapped out what clamored to be said. I-M-P-R-E-G-N—her meaning was clear now, she could have stopped, but her fingers kept tapping until she’d fully said it, even though her neighbor had perhaps already left to relay through the other wall.
The silence lasted so long that Salomé wondered whether Leona, or someone between them, had fallen asleep. Then the taps returned. W-A-N-T-A-K-N-I-T-T-I-N-G-N-E-E-D-L-E
She knew what knitting needles did, how they could reach inside and puncture out a pregnancy, how women could survive it if they found a way to stop the flow of blood. She touched her belly. She could do it and should do it, perhaps, except the thing inside her already had an insect strength, scraping her with tiny appendages, humming with hunger for the sun. N-O
The taps went down the row, then returned. O-K
She would live. She had to live. She was not an empty hull.
In fact, just the opposite: she was fuller than she’d ever been in her life, fuller even than her early days as a Tupa when she almost let her secret burst out fresh and raw on the bus. Now she had a secret that made her cling to life, made her eat every drop of the sad soups, made her greedy for food, motion, rest, cushions, more food, and perhaps the hungers weren’t hers but rather came from something deeper; in any case the source didn’t matter, not the source of the hunger nor the horrifying source of the child. She turned her mind from sources, over and over. What mattered was that she was hungry and that made her more alive, she wanted real flesh on her bones again, she could have killed a man for a bowl of ice cream, dismembered him for a plate of milanesas, fresh from the pan, still sizzling, oil and beef and crushed-up bread she needed it, she wanted it, and even though she couldn’t have it there was power—fierce, unfettered—in the sheer appetite. The other Tupamaras were on their way to freedom, making plans, guiding those outside as they dug a tunnel from the sewer. She would not be with them. Her future held unknowable unshaped things she couldn’t see and didn’t want to see. She didn’t look at it, looked only at the brimming-over present. In the yard, Leona seemed sorrowful, pitying almost, Salomé the trapped, Salomé the burdened, and if they could have sat down together under their eucalyptus tree, she’d have said, Leona, stop it, I am full. Full of fullness. It made no sense, she made no sense, she was a crazy woman all the more insane for being willing to succumb to her own madness. She let her mind roam free. It roamed to her mother. Mamá, I want to see you, I’m so fucking sorry, I put myself at risk but never meant for this to happen and least of all to do this to you, whatever it is my absence is now doing, and now the most obvious fact in the world strikes me like a slap, that you carried me inside you, long ago in Argentina, and you felt things and I was born and you held my head up when I couldn’t and I wonder what you thought when you were doing it. Whether you thought about your own mother and what she thought and felt when she carried you inside and then gave birth and held your head up for the first time in that very house we all lived in together. It’s strange to think of the woman who carried you inside her when you yourself are carrying a child, a child-almost, a child-becoming. No words to explain—not in this language, we’d need expanded language—the feeling of stark air, the sudden consciousness of womb not surrounding you, the exposure and aloneness you’ve been living with since birth. The warmth, gone. The warmth, remembered. Remembered or reinvented by history repeating itself inside.
Winter approached. Even the rat shit froze. The walks grew less frequent with the rain. Salomé grew bigger. When her belly showed through her loose dress, the guards avoided it with their rifle butts and with their roving hands. There was one baby in the prison, as far as she knew. It lived in its mother’s cell for two months, and cried when its mother was beaten. It died in the growing cold.
She wanted what she couldn’t have—to surround her child forever. Starkness would come all too soon.
Salomé tapped: L-E-O-L-A-T-E-R-C-O-M-E-F-O-R-B-A-B-Y
O-K
T-A-K-E-F-A-R-A-W-A-Y
O-K
Y-O-U-S-W-E-A-R
I-S-W-E-A-R
They escaped at the end of July. She lay awake all night, in the dark, following the women with her mind, through sewer tunnels, sludge and slips and sloshing, urging them on, go, go, soon there will be oxygen, don’t stop, don’t give up, just think of what you’ll have on the other end. She saw Leona and Anna and thirty-six other Tupamaras, covered in feces, crawling through the fetid river. Without her. The child-almost inside her kicked and clawed.
The next morning, she woke to the roaring of the guards. They found one empty bed after another. Hair on pillows did not lead to women; it had been cut off with smuggled knives. As they pulled the sheets back, they found nothing but hair, laid out like amputated limbs.
“La puta madre,”one guard said, down the hall. “The director’s going to want our balls.”
Another guard grunted agreement. “He’s going to string them up like fucking Christmas lights.”
“I’m in no rush to announce this.”
“Mierda. Let’s have a mate.”
The first guard laughed.
“No, I mean it. Here, drink, collect yourself.”
She listened to them drink and talk with shakier voices than she’d ever heard them use. She felt proud and victorious and immensely alone without Leona and the others, but how could she think that, she was not alone, inside she was constantly accompanied by a hungry little creature who was stronger ever day, whose feet and elbows danced to jagged music Salomé couldn’t hear, wet music, womb music, a song free of gravity.
In September, when the men escaped, the guards were still so unsettled that they discussed the details right in the hall, and Salomé stayed quiet so she could hear them: it’s amazing, absurd, the whole city is aflame with it, one hundred and six men got out through the sewers of Punta Carretas. There were distractions for the police last night: a flood of emergency calls, a knife fight on the other side of town. The symphony in the church beside the prison played abnormally loud. The tunnel surfaced at the floorboards of a butcher shop across the street—and this news made Salomé laugh, before she could stop herself, and the guard called out Shut up in there, but only halfheartedly; she was the crazy pregnant woman after all. There was only one butcher shop across from that prison. Its worn old sign glowed in her mind, vivid, peeling, nailed up by hand. She could see just how it happened: Coco and Gregorio, gray-haired, stooped, in matching bathrobes, shuffled downstairs to gape at the floor as it cracked open. Every tile on that floor was familiar, was scuffed from Mamá’s childhood games, from Abuela’s stool, from the shoes of women seeking verdant cures. She could smell the floor perfectly, as if she were there, the smell of meat and knives and the cycles of animal life, except of course it must have smelled quite different that night, when the tiles burst upward and the sewer burst too and the Tupamaros, Tinto among them, there you are my Tinto,
rose from underground, spurting up, one after another, one hundred and six of them, filling that room of flanks and meat hooks, rising under the gaze of an old couple, returning to the map of the living, covered in shit, surging toward light.
Five days later, during birth, that same image returned to her: the bursting floor, the surge from filth, the surge toward light.
The baby was a girl: Victoria. She was too light and too fragile and cried all the time. There was not enough heat. There was not enough milk. There was cloth for diapers but she had to trade for it, in front of the baby, and more was always needed.
Still, those were her best three weeks in prison. Different from being pregnant—now she could hold and see and touch and smell and hear the girl, and every sensation amazed her. Victoria’s skin was nectar against her body. Her voice the music before music. Her every scent incredible and perfect, even the sour ones, especially the sour ones, because they were so strong. Be strong. For the first time in years, she sang: softly, under her breath, wandering tunes, Viqui, little one, dearest treasure, live, live, live. The baby was so frail, so delicate, her fingers splayed, her eyes squeezed shut, her eyes would forget this place, forget this woman making a cradle out of her arms. No. No. Yes, for the best. Salomé memorized each moment, each toenail, each clumsy-perfect gesture, praying for Leona to keep her promise, for Leona to forget her, for her to succeed, for her to fail.
When Victoria was three weeks old, a guard came for her. He was an older man, and not unkind. He’d never touched her.
“The baby is going on a little trip,” he said. “For a proper baptism.”
Salomé tightened her arms around her daughter, instinctively, but the door opened, hands reached in, and she loosened her hold.
“Her name’s Victoria,” she called as the bars slammed shut.
The next morning, she woke to the sound of two guards’ conversation down the hall.
“You hear about the baby?”
The Invisible Mountain Page 34