The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  “No.”

  “Goddamn Tupas stole it. Right out of its grandmother’s arms.”

  Seasons turned, heavily, exhausted as soon as they arrived. At first, she hoped they’d come for her. Arrange another escape, building on their record of thirty-eight women and one baby. Or perhaps they’d hold something or someone for ransom and the president would cave this time, or even go to court for her and argue that she’d had no trial, she’d done her time, wasn’t it enough yet? and if not how much longer? and if it happened, if they saved her, she would go outside and feel the sun and see her baby while there still was baby to see.

  But the flow of women seemed to run in the opposite direction: into, not out of, the prison. The population swelled with each month. There were women everywhere, new cots in every room, nobody had a solitary cell anymore. There were young ones, like her, just coughed up from La Máquina: Salomé could tell from their low chins, their flinching shoulders, the midnight screams cut off by slaps. She saw them in their slow walk in the yard, in the weekly showers, in the kitchen and laundry duties that she was now allowed and compelled to leave her cell for. She had to know what was happening out there, in the other world, the sunworld beyond the walls, to send so many women behind bars. She found a guard willing to trade for old newspapers; his name was Raúl, he had cigarettes too, it wasn’t so bad, he might have taken it anyway but he preferred it sweet, and her body didn’t seem to mind, didn’t even flinch. The newspapers announced that the Tupamaros were weakened, then crushed, then gone. Pulled out by the roots like weeds that had infested the city. They used those words, weeds, roots, infested. The military was to be thanked for stepping in, for doing the job right, fixing what the police and president couldn’t manage. They had cleaned things up and now they ran the streets. The streets relied on them for normalcy and order. She looked for a long time at a photograph of nine generals standing in a stiff circle around the president. President Bordaberry sat below them, shoulders hunched, slouched forward, smiling the smile of a gambler caught in a bluff. The generals weren’t smiling. They stood as close together as you could without touching. The papers always came to her two weeks old; by the time she found out about the coup, she and everyone else in Uruguay already lived under a dictatorship. It was a small step, a formality, and so she couldn’t be surprised. The paper, when it came, read June 28, 1973. Yesterday, it said, the president closed Parliament, locked the building, and surrounded it with soldiers. Or the soldiers locked the building and surrounded it and the president announced that, yes, he was behind this, the soldiers were sent by him. In any case, the senators could all go home, there was nothing left for them to do. A new military junta would be formed. She studied the firm press of his lips in the photograph. Necessary, he said, as is the case elsewhere in the world. It was bloodless. It was civil. It was done.

  Salomé leaned back against the wall. The woman in the other cot slept or pretended to be asleep. She had only been here a few weeks. She was young and seemed disoriented, as if caught in a bad film she’d missed the start of. Why had they brought her here? Was she a criminal, a Tupa, a voice of dissent, or just a person in the wrong place at the wrong time? What would happen to her and to all of them now, in this new Uruguay? If only, she thought, I had the strength of ancient women who tore their hair out by the roots in mourning, wailing out with love and grief for what had died. Surely the nation deserves to have us all stripping our scalps, bleeding for it, for what has proven breakable which is everything, a nation, a woman, a collective dream. If I had the strength of the ancients, and the freedom, I’d dress in black and tear my hair and scale a mountain in my mourning, I’d scale El Cerro, our humble pretense of a mountain, and all the way up I’d howl and keen for what cannot be forgotten. But I am neither free nor ancient, and I need my howls and keens to stay inside. They are a fuel that keeps me going. Long ago when I was still a girl but thought I was a woman, and when I thought I was a warrior but didn’t know how much I was, I learned to curl my shouting thoughts into a ball and hold them deep inside where nobody could hear or touch or take them. Keens, howls, elegies. I won’t let them go.

  She sat, watching her cell mate sleep or pretend to sleep, until the guards came to take the women out. The winter rains had paused, and they would catch a glimpse of sky. She listened to the cell doors as they opened and shut. The opening sound was a low click-and-rumble, quick to dissolve, but the shutting slammed and seemed to echo, over and over, down the hall.

  Things were scarce—food, water, warmth, space, air, light. She was lucky, she had Raúl, he brought her extra water when he was in a good mood, and she shared it with the other women in her cell. Three of them now. There was barely room to move. Salomé slept on a thin pallet on the concrete floor. Their names were Paz and Olga and Marisol. Olga and Marisol rarely spoke. Paz was a reporter’s wife, arrested for the crime of being married to a reporter. She was in her forties, and was not afraid to look guards in the eye. She learned to place her urine on the floor, in a thin arm of sun that reached through a metal grating. She moved it as the sun moved, until the salts settled and it became a drink that could be swallowed.

  “Try it, Salomé. It’s not so bad.”

  Salomé shook her head.

  “Then try your own. It’s easier with your own.”

  A week later, she admitted that Paz was right.

  It took months for the women’s stories to leak out, slow and hushed, in the circle on the yard, in the laundry room, in the showers, in whispers across the cell, in the taps that had become nightly percussion on the walls: they were union members, university students, university professors, socialists, communists, batllistas, artists, journalists, or they were the sisters or daughters or mothers or girlfriends or wives or friends of the same. They’d been pulled from the street, from their beds, from the doors of cafés. In the new Uruguay, every citizen was under surveillance. Every citizen was classified according to his or her level of threat to social order. A or B or C. Only A’s were safe from losing jobs, family, the outside world. The regime had its hands full. Many, the women whispered, had fled the country.

  With some people fleeing and so many behind bars, what was left in the city? Salomé tried to imagine it. Surely life went on, it had to, there were still some people after all, and buildings and asphalt and cobblestones, and the river pressing up against its edge, a living breathing city with its ordinary moments. Surely no military junta could empty the whole river or remove all the ordinary moments from the world. It carried on, it must, it had to be better out there than in here; somewhere Abuela was still boiling roots and frying pastries, cars hummed and honked, the church bells rang, Coco was cutting meat (red, bloody, delicious) in a room with repaired floorboards, Mamá was smoking a cigarette as a poem took shape in her mind, Abuelo playing poker with his ghosts, Tinto sanding wood into smooth curves and maybe missing her, maybe, maybe, Roberto staring through his microscope at God knows what he sees and talking on the phone with their father how are you and all is well and let me tell you about our last experiment, Xhana rocking to her César’s drums and César’s hands moving like rapid birds, Leona doing whatever she would do without a revolution on its way, girls and boys studying out of new gutted history books, babies shrieking and clapping and learning to walk and say Mamá (and learning whom to look at as they said it), and thousands of men making their mate in the morning, under surveillance but still waking up and rising for each day; surely there were still microscopes and cigarettes and church bells and drums, and even if the taste of fear now tainted the morning mate it was still there, still passed from hand to hand. Unless they’d gone into exile. Leona, Tinto, Orlando, Anna might have fled. And her family, they might have stayed, she wanted to think of them as safe and sound in Punta Carretas, but she could not be sure they all had A status. Perhaps their blood relation to a Tupamara placed them in danger; or, perhaps it helped in bureaucratic halls that their daughter-sister-niece-granddaughter was long broken. Perhaps they d
idn’t know their status, and were afraid, and hated her for endangering them, Salomé the family traitor.

  Some nights, she dreamed of babies, floating on the water, she was in the water, swimming, swimming, looking for just one.

  On other nights, lying on her pallet, unable to sleep, she conjured up her childhood quilt, the one made by Abuela Pajarita’s hands. She evoked each triangle, each little patch of green and blue and flower and stripe, until she felt it with precision and was warmed by its heft, its supple body, its grainy hint of leaf and seed and shredded stem. Then she raised it with her mind’s fist and hurled it through the wall, toward the city, a quilt spreading its wings in the night air, a dark bird, hovering, testing the wind for its way home.

  Raúl was gone. There were new guards in her quarters, she was nobody’s favorite, nobody wanted her for himself. They shared. They broke the skin. There were no newspapers.

  Years sped by.

  Years moved slowly, slowly, time was a snail, inching forward, there was a surfeit of it, other things were scarce but she had time. Constant, endless, unrelenting. Shuffling forward, past gray cloth, around and around the yard.

  She had been in prison now for eight years, in which time stretched and pushed like air in an accordion, endless and contracted all at once. You learn to live like that, a speck trapped in a current shaped by forces you cannot see, expecting nothing, surprised by nothing, riding the dark unmapped trajectories of each day, shrinking in the face of pressure, barely affected, a speck after all, too small to bear scars or sink or stand in anyone’s way, no bother to anyone, no threat to anyone, suspended alone in the shiver of the hour. You attract no attention and the world forgets you’re there. You yourself forget it. You shock yourself with moments of existence.

  One day, in 1978, a miracle was smuggled in along with her cigarettes. The pack was dropped into her apron pocket, in the laundry room, as usual. Steam pushed from the machines, filling the air, and her forehead dripped with sweat. The guards, equally hot, had stepped into the hall for reprieve. She opened the case and saw a piece of paper folded and tucked between the cigarettes. She pulled it out immediately.

  It was a drawing. It was a tree. The trunk was dutifully brown, but the froth of leaves was gold and crimson and violet, all meshed together in the looping strokes of a child’s hand. At the bottom of the page there was an autograph: VICTORIA.

  Salomé traced the V with her fingers, traced the tree’s thick trunk, ran her fingertip along the loops of color. She was wide awake. She could have crawled into the picture, climbed into the leaves, curled there like some mangy forest animal; she felt the press and warmth of all its colors around her body; she longed to eat the picture, sleep in it, trace it back to where it came from, to the hand that—existing somewhere out there in the world—had chosen this crayon, that one, that one too.

  She crawled in, climbed up, curled there every night.

  Two years later, the guards removed the metal gratings from the windows, under orders, and painted the panes to keep the sun from entering. Cells darkened. At night, Salomé lifted Paz onto her shoulders, so she could scratch the black paint with her fingernails. Ktchh, ktchh, a hole formed, and the next day light leaked in, pale, sweet, contraband.

  In that thin light, the loops of foliage kept their colors: violet was violet, crimson still crimson, gold a fading but discernible streak of gold. Each slash of color gave her sustenance, fed her every time she looked. There was no more potent antidote to the world’s poisons than a curve of crayon. She could drink it, dream it, rock in it. Think about the hand itself, the one that drew, envision its shape and softness.

  A new decade had begun: an empty slate of time. Outside there was a city, still, and a wide world beyond it. The first news from outside Uruguay leaked through the nation’s borders and the prison’s stubborn walls. Far away, in other countries, the sun still rose, and Uruguayan exiles had been speaking. Human rights groups had paid attention. They had done studies. Uruguay had broken a world record: more political prisoners per capita than any other nation. This record was not reported within the country, of course, but outside, across borders and seas, where a sad record-breaker from a tiny country did not reach the headlines but managed, at least, to occupy a bottom corner of some international pages. It was enough to make the junta nervous. They drafted a new constitution, one that would allow night raids on civilian homes, give the military more formal power, and eradicate unions, strikes, and certain political parties. The prison walls tapped and pulsed and whispered. At night, in code, in long percussive dispatches, she learned that they were putting it to a vote.

  Why? she asked the stone.

  Why allow a vote?

  Conjecture drummed into the night.

  Because it worked for Pinochet in Chile.

  Because of the scrutiny.

  To seem legitimate.

  To show the world that people backed them.

  Because the people are too intimidated, classified, cleansed of dissenters to defeat it.

  But they were wrong. The vote came and went and two weeks later the walls rang euphoric. V-O-T-E-W-A-S-N-O.

  Salomé pictured montevideanos, walking haunted streets, crouching in their homes, hearing the collective no they’d cast a vote for but not discussed with neighbors or coworkers or family or anyone at all, now trying to understand their world with this new no in it, not just their own but made of many voices, surreptitious, unidentified, shocked at their own resonance.

  A crack in the fortress. It gave her hope. Slippery hope that you could glide or skid on.

  She turned thirty, in utter privacy. She planned her celebration for weeks. She saved a bowl of water and a dozen smuggled matches. On the night of her birthday, she waited until her cell mates were asleep. The bowl was cold and smooth in her hands. She placed it gently on the cot in front of her. No drop spilled. She lit a match and bent over the bowl. In the flare of light, she saw the surface of the water, a black circle bearing her reflection. She stared at the woman in the water, who stared back, eyes unflinching in their sunken caves of flesh. The match went out; she lit another. The woman in the water was still there. She looked at the gaunt cheeks, thin hair, mouth pursed tightly out of habit, eyes, eyes, eyes. She wanted to know the woman, or at least to see her clearly, this face she never looked at but looked out of all the time, that held the stories in but also told them with its lines. Her face. Thirty, she thought, and it didn’t feel possible, didn’t feel like a number so much as a presence, a thing that hung around her like a scent. Salomé, she mouthed at the water, and the mouth in the water said it back. The match went out, and with the next one and the next she held the gaze of water-eyes, watched the mouth move in silence, searched and searched for eyes and mouth inside the water, saying and not saying Salomé, Salomé.

  Two months later, a visitor was authorized to see her. She was escorted to the room in hood and handcuffs. When her eyes were bared again, there was Mamá, beyond a glass wall, phone to her ear, gray-haired all of a sudden, though of course it was not sudden, it had been more than a decade. The hair was shorter than before, falling in delicate layers around her face. She looked tired and alert. She wore red lipstick, today as always. Salomé looked for blame or hate in her mother’s face and could not find it.

  She picked up the phone on her side. “Mamá.”

  Mamá touched the glass. “Hija—”

  “Keep your hands on your side.”

  Mamá pulled back. “Sí, Señor, of course.” An automatic response to authority, without arguing that the rule was ridiculous, a woman could not reach through a glass wall. Responding, Salomé thought, like a prisoner. Mamá stared at her face, hair, neck, ears, eyes, as if looking for her daughter in what she saw. Her mouth twisted. Salomé looked down.

  “It’s been so long,” Mamá said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been trying to come. It took time.”

  “Thank you.” She wanted to say I’m sorry you have to see m
e this way, but there was no other way Mamá could see her. “I’m sorry.”

  Mamá brushed the words away. “You’re all right?”

  “Yes.”

  Mamá looked relieved, even though the lie was obvious. “We’re all right.”

  “Abuela?”

  “She is well.”

  “Abuelo?”

  “Well.”

  “Roberto?”

  “Very well. He’s in the United States.”

  Salomé stared. She hadn’t thought he’d need to flee.

  “He got a job in California, back in ’71.”

  “I see.”

  “He’s a professor. Flor is well, too, and so’s their daughter.”

  “They have a daughter?”

  Mamá nodded, and said, slowly, “Their daughter draws trees.”

  The room was hot, unventilated, Salomé was breaking into sweat. “With green leaves?”

  Mamá glanced at the guard, who looked apathetic. “No. With red, purple, yellow, all sorts of colors.”

  Salomé could not breathe.

  “Your niece seems happy.”

  Salomé could not breathe.

  “She has everything she needs.”

  “Oh.”

  Mamá stared through the glass, lips open, hands on the metal desk in front of her. Her eyelashes were striking, and Salomé found this intensely comforting: that no matter how the world rent and warped, or how age took them both, her mother still painted her lashes in the morning, still made them dark and long so she could look and blink with force.

  “One more minute,” the guard said.

  Mamá’s hands shut into fists. She turned to the guard, then to Salomé. “I’ll return. I’m authorized for once a month.”

  She did return, each month, for precious minutes in the visitors’ room. Salomé stored up a trove of questions between visits—about the streets out there, the way things tasted, how people were, the where and what and how of California. There was never enough time, and of course there was always a guard or two, keeping watch, and so the answers came in fragments, indirect, cryptic, gradual. She learned that Abuelo and Abuela had reached their eighties in astonishingly good health. That Tía Xhana and Tío César had left, to live, in Mamá’s words, where Xhana’s father is. That Abuela Pajarita had been giving remedies from her kitchen, covertly, since Coco’s death, while Abuelo spent long hours by the window, looking out at the prison and the oaks. That they always had enough to eat, thanks, in part, to envelopes that came from the United States. That the city in the U.S. was San Francisco, a city with a bridge that was called golden though in fact it was red. That the school was called Stanford, the research on the topic of eclosion, the thing, Mamá explained, that moths did to get out of their cocoons, which involved unique secretions, sharpened wings, and lots of thrashing. The house was blue and pretty and had two telephones, which were used once a year to call Uruguay for Christmas. The girl was an only child, a lively child, with crayons and roller skates and more dolls than she could count. Mamá brought a picture that the guards let her hold up, on her side of the transparent wall: a girl, brown-haired, brown-eyed, well fed, painfully pretty, two yellow bows in her hair, grinning in the arms of a gargantuan Mickey Mouse. A blue fairy-tale castle loomed behind them.