That spring, Victoria, the niece, the roller skater, turned ten years old, saying please and wish and birthday cake and mother my mother is in a faraway language, in a faraway place.
The guards were under orders to remove the paint from windows, and replace it with green acrylic screens. There was no scratching them away. In the cell, the women’s faces were bathed in a dim green glow. They looked diseased, or like creatures from another planet, interlopers in the heavy atmosphere of earth.
News trickled in. More hairline cracks in the fortress. An exiled politician had returned. A protest—a true and actual protest—had occurred on the street. One night, at eight o’clock, the homes of Montevideo had turned off their lights, and at eight-fifteen the kitchen pots had banged and banged, throughout the city, in the dark. The word elections made its way into rumors, buzzed in the air, in the laundry room, across the yard, through the walls of cells. Salomé thought of the junta, aging generals around a table, in their beds, on the beach in Punta del Este, vexed by the hassle of ruling a country, vexed by signs of their own fragility, dreaming of rest and cash and cadres of topless dancers, dreaming of laying their burdens down, of an end to the bother of ruling an ungrateful people in a world that did not like you. And if they did allow elections. Then. Then.
She stored up for the visits from Mamá—stored questions, stored the flicker of herself. On some visits, they spoke so greedily that their voices overlapped with each other, quick, hushed, both listening, both talking, too hungry to slow down. On other visits they sat quietly, for minutes on end, hands close to the glass, close to touching, each looking at her own point in space. But even in the silence she was there. Her mother, in the flesh, breathing and alive, proof of the continued existence of another world.
If, thought Salomé, lying in her cell. If, in fact, it could be true that her whole life would not drag out here in this prison, that she would not die between these thick gray walls, that the regime could change and she could walk the streets again—then what? Here she was in her dark box of a room, the heavy breaths of women around her, here on this pallet where she not so much slept as collapsed, each night, let her pieces fall away from one another in quiet crashes, muscles free to twitch in any direction at all, mind purging itself, over and over, of dull hours pierced by intermittent spines; she was alive still, this she knew, she breathed, she walked, she counted the hours until visits from Mamá, she followed the instructions of the guards, she imagined her own hands tying yellow ribbons into brown hair, or plunging her knife into hot rare steak, or holding a book in her old living room, she could feel the ribbons, the knife, the book, she was alive, but how much, that was the question; the hours and years had rubbed off on her, she herself had dulled, she was absent from her body most of the day, a small speck, floating elsewhere, it was only here, late at night, in the dark, when her pieces freely fell and she could feel herself, the pit inside, dark, seething, half of herself had fallen in, she’d changed in these slow years, what had she become? Who would she be if she stepped outside the fence? What awaited her out there? Freedom would mean fencelessness and sun and hot fresh food and people she once knew for whom time had also passed and scores of small decisions, thrust back into her hands. She wondered how she’d bear it. She wondered what it tasted like out there.
———
The next year, 1984, was different. It stretched like the long body of a cat shaking off sleep. A year stretching and rising, looking around itself, waking in chaos, arching its back. Elections were set for November, the first ones in thirteen years.
It came. November came.
The junta lost; the winner’s name was Sanguinetti. He smiled for many cameras, said the word democracy, shook hands with men in uniform. It was bloodless. It was civil. It was done. It was hard to believe, she didn’t want to believe it and start to hope and then regret it; hope is dangerous, it lifts you and gives you farther to fall, anything could happen, they could change their minds and kill him and his family so don’t hope, and yet she couldn’t help it—everything was different, the soup was hotter, the cornmeal porridge thicker, the women’s steps louder on concrete, guards slouched more wantonly, Mamá glistened across the glass from Salomé as if to say without speaking, He will, he’ll let you out, you’ll see we’ll get you out of here, and she wanted to believe it, everyone around her seemed to believe it, the women in gray dresses with their higher-held-than-ever heads, she herself was not the same, a keen electric rush moved through her body, images of freedom rushed in uninvited, streets that could be walked, sky that could be tasted, bread that could be eaten in large bites. They haunted her. They wouldn’t let her sleep.
Sanguinetti took his oath in March, still real and unassassinated. A week later, two guards came to unlock cells in the morning, too early for the yard.
“You. You. You four. You.”
Salomé and the majority of her neighbors formed their customary line down the hall. They waited. Salomé stared at Paz’ back.
The guard coughed. “The president signed a law yesterday.”
Nobody made a sound.
“It grants amnesty to all political prisoners.”
Paz’ shoulders flinched.
“You’ll be released in half an hour.”
Paz heaved. A woman near the back moaned. She was not told to shut up.
There was almost nothing to pack. Salomé had her body and the dress she wore and a single faded drawing of a tree. She slipped it into her panties and stood against the wall of her cell, trying to see it, actually see it, now that she was in a dream in which the cell was about to become a memory. Olga was crying, Marisol was watching, Paz was holding their hands and talking in a buoyant tone Salomé had never heard her use. She herself felt light, as if she might float out of her body and through the bars and into the sky where she would rise into the blue and higher still until she fell and fell and fell back to the city and landed on something green, or white, or any other color but not gray. Anything but gray. The guards came back and led them down the hall in a line that came apart into rebellious clumps of women, they didn’t care about being punished and they weren’t anyway because there was no point anymore, down more halls with rows of bars and long blank concrete walls, to a drab gray lobby Salomé had never seen. The horde of women filled it and signed papers, pressed together, quiet, whispering, then talking louder, eyeing the door, walking to it, pausing in a frozen group, then pushing, out, out, out into the sunshine. The light stabbed Salomé’s skin. The day was crisp; it was autumn, it was fall, and it was falling, the sun, over Montevideo, from a vast unyielding sky.
She walked toward the prison gate. A throng pressed at it from the street, bodies and faces and open arms. She looked and looked until she saw them, standing, waiting, jostled, mate in hand: Abuela and Mamá.
Nueve
——————
SOFT TONGUES BY THE MILLIONS
Monte. Vide. Eu. I see a mountain, some man said, eons ago, and so a city started to invent itself. Now the city had to invent itself again: rising, clearing its throat, rubbing nightmares from its eyes. Salomé sat at the window in the living room, staring at a small slice of the city: oak trees, women on church steps, cars slowing for the stubborn cobbles, their radios blaring some English singer’s heartbreak, he had guilty feet and would not dance again. The women on the church steps were gray-haired and mournful and glared at the rock-and-roll cars. The leaves rustled, high up in their oaks.
She spent long days at the window. She didn’t leave the house. She could do so if she wanted, she was free, but free was too large a space for her to occupy. The great unfettered air filled her with terror, she couldn’t breathe in so much open air, and anyway, there was no need to go out, there was more than enough for her inside. It took weeks to grow accustomed to doorknobs and light switches—oh, remember, that’s how it’s done, anytime you want to you just turn it, flip it, change the light, change the room, almost too much. Memories surged from the walls, strea
ming around her, some her own and some much older, some real, some reimagined. They pulsed from every piece of furniture, every corner with its cradle of dust. The memories clothed her. Every object—fork and photo, mirror and tray—spun stories. A spoon sang of entering countless mouths of relatives. I stood watch, the mahogany table said, when your mother was born. I know, crooned the lamp shade, precisely what was whispered every time this room was dim. Remember, said the corner, you were five once, and then, and then. She sat for hours, quiet, rocking, surrounded by the murmurs of the room, which gave her solace from the murmurs within her, the shut up of a guard, the nightwail of a woman, the voice inside that said you don’t belong here in this city, not anymore, you’re like that man in the legend who fell asleep under a tree and woke up years later to a world that had changed without him, leaving him lost in his own skin. But I’m not lost, she told herself, over and over. I know this place, it knows me, I’m home.
“Don’t worry about money,” Mamá insisted. “Take some time. We’re doing fine.”
They were doing fine. They had enough. There were Roberto’s envelopes, Mamá’s tips from two weekly shifts at the café, and, also, the neighborly invasions. Pajarita had tried to put away her basket seven years ago, when Coco died of cancer, but the women came rapping on her door, skirting curfews, sneaking past the soldiers in the shadows, looking for her, requesting cures, presenting pains, creaking joints, lost memory, sharp memory, strange aches below the hip, heartache for children who’d disappeared or flown away, yearning for the husband in prison, fear of prison, stiff hands, strange twitches, bitten lips, misplaced keys or grievances, night sweats, dark lusts, blind panics, rages where the husband had to dodge the kitchen pots. Abuela Pajarita did not turn anyone away. She brought them to her kitchen, listened quietly, then reached for her glass jars. Her citizen status fell from A to B, due to these illicit visits, or perhaps due to her granddaughter’s sedition, or her daughter’s written words. She didn’t mind. That’s what she said. She was eighty-six years old. Her fingers shook but did not err. Eva helped her in order to alleviate the toll, becoming her mother’s hands. Salomé watched them sometimes, mother and daughter, both gray-haired, tending to a tear-faced or stone-faced woman. But most of the time she hid from these guests, in her bedroom, or in the living room, with Abuelo Ignazio, who occupied the sofa like a throne. He was ninety-one, wizened, surprisingly strong; his mind shifted from agile to foggy to sharp again, in the span of a single conversation. He rambled for hours about yellow scarves, the heft of them, their texture and brightness, his wife’s insistence on hiding them from view. He thought that Salomé had been away in the mountains. Eva had warned her of this on the bus ride home from prison. “At first,” she’d said, “he wouldn’t talk about you. Don’t be upset. I have to tell you. He’d skirt over your name as if he hadn’t heard it. Then, in ’81, I think that’s when it was, he started talking about some mountain. How tall it was, how steep, full of clean snow. How Salomé must like it there, since she still hadn’t come back. I don’t know whether he believes it, or just wants to. Mamá, which is it?”
Pajarita looked down into her lap, where her hand clasped Salomé’s hand, two sets of lean fingers shaking with the movement of the bus. “Both.”
“It’s best to go along with it,” said Eva.
Salomé had gone along, which wasn’t hard. Abuelo Ignazio had risen when she walked into the house. She was struck by how briskly he rose.
“Salomé. You’re back!”
She nodded and smiled for him.
“How did you like the Alps?”
She wasn’t sure how to answer. She embraced him, awkwardly. He smelled of soap and vinegar and just a little sweat.
“Was it cold there?”
“Yes.”
“Lots of snow?”
“Yes.”
“Very pretty?”
Salomé felt his hand stroke her back, up, down, up, down. The house smelled of roast beef and oven heat and herbs she could not distinguish, a meal prepared for her arrival home, the smell of heaven, better even, heaven with the best of carnal life mixed in. “I’ll tell you the truth, Abuelo.” She heard her mother clinking plates, already, in the kitchen. “I like it better here.”
Abuelo seemed suspicious. Salomé felt exhaustion fall on her shoulders in chunks of lead.
They were too good to her, really, all of them, Abuela, Abuelo, and Mamá. Too kind, too careful. They laid out meals before she knew she was hungry. They chased her from the kitchen when she tried to clean. They straightened out the quilt on her bed when she wasn’t looking. They never woke her, no matter how late she slept, or how her naps stretched on, unless it was the middle of the night and she was screaming. Then she would wake from the sound of herself or maybe from the touch of Mamá, her hands in the dark, arms cradling her head, perfume exuding from her breasts, and all she would say was shhh, shhhhhh, gently, rocking, cradling, as though Salomé were four, not thirty-four, humiliating, horrible, all the more so because of how she craved it. She pretended to be asleep, pretended not to remember in the morning. In the daylight, she and Mamá spent a lot of time not looking at each other. They smoked together, sat together, read at each other’s side. They spoke only about the now of things: the heat or wind or drizzle, the marinating meat, the water boiling for mate, the customer knocking at the door. There were teas for her, of course, deep bitter things prepared three times a day, and Salomé drank them without a word. It was a relief that no one made her talk. She had little to say, except what gathered in her throat, unsaid, unsayable. Her mother was a labyrinth, winding, folded, indecipherable, a sixty-year-old woman who still left the house with sudden, vague excuses, going somewhere secret, hers alone. In prison, secrecy developed like second skin. Salomé wondered how the dictatorship had felt, here on the outside, the nation itself perhaps a kind of jail, Mamá perhaps adapting the way others adapted behind bars. She won dered whether Mamá had ever thought to leave, perhaps to follow her son to the north of the north, and if so, what had kept her in Uruguay. Or who. Surely her family, her mother, father, brothers, daughter behind bars, and perhaps there was more, a further, hidden reason to stay. She reached for her mother, in private, in the pages of a book: The Widest River in the World, by Eva Firielli Santos. There were a few poems in there, erotic poems, that Salomé did not think could be inspired by her father. I was born to touch you, my life for this, my hand along your skin. She devoured verse after verse. She entered them. She wanted to do more than read: she wanted to shrink and crawl into its words, move between its letters, dig for secrets in the attic of an A, climb a Y into its branches and listen to its dreams, slide along an S toward its hot and hidden source, enter an O and taste the mad brightness or bright madness at its core, touch her mother’s essence—as it breathed when Salomé was still a child, small, open, and kept breathing somewhere in the white between black letters.
Winter came. Rain cloaked Montevideo. She still did not go out, and it made sense, didn’t it, it was so wet and cold. She helped Abuela Pajarita make soup and puchero and bread. As they cooked, they listened to the radio, to newly imported rock songs and optimistic news, about rebuilding, exiles’ impending return, new jobs to come, unemployment, tortures revealed, whispered, wailed, still uncounted, speeches about moving into the future. Salomé thought of generals and guards and troops she didn’t want to think about. She thought of airplanes coming back into the country, carrying, perhaps, Leona, Tinto, the others, Tinto, Tinto. Years had passed. Fifteen of them. Surely, wherever he was, he’d grown a life of his own, and there was no reason to think, now, of his face, his smell, his muscular hands, his huge body with her in the dark. But he reared into her mind and she was with him, frozen in time, reaching for his young body with young hands, supple, reckless, able to trust and bend and open out of joy. She could not be that girl again, even if he walked in today and miraculously hadn’t aged a bit. And yet the thought persisted. She couldn’t stop. While she was cooking with Paj
arita, in the calm aura of her presence, thoughts surged like a stubborn spring escaping pressure underground. She also thought incessantly of the phone in the next room, of the call she wasn’t making, the call that would cost a fortune, was worth a fortune, to a blue and pretty house in California. Victoria’s voice, enclosed in static, Victoria, Victoria, far girl, lost girl, grown-insanely-fast girl, what is the sound of you, I dream it but it slips away and shifts into new timbres, I dread and also long for the sound of your real voice. But first there would be Roberto and Flor and what the hell to say to them? Better to wait. They’ll call at Christmas. Wait.
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