The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  The radio warbled on about the long road of rebuilding.

  In September, when spring dried the sidewalks, Salomé left the house for the first time. She took a long walk through the city. Montevideo. Monte. Vide. Eu. City of echoes. City of worn shoes and worn faces. City of clear sun on crumbling stoops. They hurt her, all those streets, with their familiarity, their hushed alleys, their sweet cobbles, and also with their change, the peeling paint, boarded windows, shut-down stores, moldering buildings, cracks in the ground, faded street signs, hopeful bowls of flowers up on balconies, vanquished flowers shriveling on sills, the fragrance of chorizo charring, slow and rich and futile, in empty cafés. She had never seen her city so empty. The few people she passed looked like ghosts just returning from the dead. She walked through Barrio Sur, past Tía Xhana’s old home, toward the river. At the shore, the city seemed to loosen its belt and breathe. She sat on the ledge overlooking rocks and water, brown water, silty, rippling, reaching all the way to the horizon, to the end of Uruguay, where the rest of the world began. She roved it with her gaze. The breeze roved her skin. A man walked by behind her, slowed, and came to a stop a few paces away. Without turning her head she knew without a doubt that he too had met La Máquina. She could tell from his tremor, motionless, invisible, as though haunted by an earthquake that no one else had felt. She glanced over; he leaned against the ledge, staring at the water. He wore broken glasses, held together with masking tape. She wondered whether she looked that way to people, exposed, skinless, a giant nerve walking on two legs. She thought of running to him with open arms to wrap him like a small boy, oh look you’ve scraped yourself, come here, what in God’s name happened to your glasses; she thought of running the other way, escaping him, I don’t know you, you don’t know me, nothing here to say. She didn’t move. He didn’t either. They stood, the two of them, silent, apart, breathing each other’s presence, watching the river catch the broken light.

  She returned many times after that, to stand alone and stare at the river. As she stared, she tried to fathom everything she’d lost, the way she’d lost it, the sheer voracious power of water, how much can sink below the surface, never to be seen again. Even ripples disappear after some time. You start to wonder whether what was lost ever existed. You start to wonder why you’re still upright on dry ground. You marvel, above all, at that very fact—the river, and you beside it instead of under it, lungs full not of mud but of air, breathing in spite of everything, here to stare at the river one more day; the river is still and wide and reveals nothing, nothing, nothing, but it runs, it breathes, it pulses, like you it kept on pulsing all these years, and perhaps the river didn’t steal what you are looking for, perhaps you’re searching in the wrong place, the river after all survived the same years you did, pushed and pulsed, innocent, rebellious, but no, that’s not right, no one who rebelled retained their innocence, surely the only innocents are the dead.

  She always walked to the west. Only west. The shores of Parque Rodó, Palermo, Barrio Sur, La Ciudad Vieja, these could be walked freely. Eastward lay another part of city and river, and if she walked too long she could end up in Malvín, where Dan Mitrione had lived and where his protégés might live also, and beyond that, Punta Gorda, Carrasco, large houses with lawns and fences in between, with their swimming pools and beautiful china and men of impunity, completely free, able to rise in the morning and shake off whatever they had dreamed and kiss their wives and put on plainclothes now that uniforms were out of fashion, able to say, Querida, I’m going to walk the dog, or I’m going to take some air, and go walk and breathe and stretch their legs at the eastern edges of the Rambla. Breathing public air. And so she kept to the west, turning right in Punta Carretas and stalking the pressed-together parts of La Rambla, its older parts, lined with edifices older than the century itself, shameless as matriarchs in their quaint adornment, settled in themselves, unafraid to speak to the river or let a passing woman imagine that they spoke. Better not to think about the east. She had her hands full with the west and the water and herself. She was an animal, voracious, hunting for something she couldn’t name, prowling the city in silence, listening for a sign of it, following inscrutable tracks. On her good days, her hunger was enormous, primal, it had burned through her blood before she was born, had run through the blood of all her family, an ancestral hunger that had made generations sweat and have sex and survive, had urged her grandparents forward and hundreds before them, could urge her forward now. Not every day. Some days she was too fragile—I can’t get up, the day’s an empty palm, begins to close around me, and everything is too heavy, my arms, my feet, what’s in my chest, the images I can’t keep from my mind, the hot air of my first summer out, I cannot move but I must move, there are teeth to brush, they don’t always get brushed. But she kept trying. Lighter days arrived. On those days she rose to see the river and expose it to her thoughts, and the day held her gently in its palm.

  That year, at Christmas, Roberto called. The phone was passed around the living room. Every instant was expensive.

  “Hello?”

  “Salomé?” Her brother’s voice was tinny, far, reaching through static.

  “Yes. How are you?”

  “Fine. Ay, Salomé, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Yours too.”

  “Flor’s also on the line.”

  “Hello, Salomé,” Flor said, also tinny, also far.

  “Merry Christmas,” Roberto said.

  “Thanks. You too.”

  “You are … all right?”

  “Yes.”

  The pause stung with static.

  “Would you like to say hello to Victoria?”

  “Oh,” Salomé said, trying to sound casual, “yes.”

  “Viqui,” her brother called, in the distance, “Salomé’s on the phone.” Then, further from the receiver, “Your aunt.”

  Shuffling. A girl’s voice. “Hello?”

  “Victoria?”

  “Sí. Hola, Tía Salomé.”

  Her Spanish was tenuous, lilted toward English. Her voice was not two, or three, or six years old. She was fourteen, a little sullen, but her voice was a clear thing, even in static, a sweet clear crystal that Salomé would not ever want to break.

  “Are you having a nice Christmas?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you get?”

  “A stereo.”

  “Wow!”

  “I wanted a motorcycle.”

  “Aren’t you too young for that?”

  Victoria, nonplussed, said, “Yeah.”

  In a matter of seconds, Salomé thought, she had managed to become the prudish aunt. She tried for a recovery. “Well, I hope you get everything you want. In life, I mean, not just today,” she added, feebly. She heard only static. “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah.” More static. “Thanks.”

  Salomé paused. Already, it had been so long, more than a minute. Abuelo Ignazio was waiting beside her, next in line. “Well, I know this is expensive. I’ll pass you to your great-grandfather, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you,” Salomé said, and quickly passed the phone.

  Crystal. Sullen crystal. It echoed in her for weeks.

  One day, near the end of summer, Orlando called. He’d just returned to Uruguay. It was the first time she’d ever heard his voice on the phone.

  “Salomé?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank God. It’s me—Orlando.”

  She thought of a thick beard, calm eyes, dim rooms, shit in a bucket. “Where have you been?”

  “Spain. I just got back.”

  “To Montevideo?”

  “Sí. I’m at my mother’s. Listen, I heard that you—”

  “Thanks for calling,” she interrupted, prepared to hang up.

  “Salomé. Wait. Can we meet for mate?”

  She paused for a moment. From the kitchen, she heard the radio’s muffled voice. “When?”

  “Whenever. Thursd
ay.”

  They met in Parque Rodó, on a bench by the murmuring fountain. The tiles on the ground were still the same, painted with pomegranates, dragons, dancing fish, all in blue, an old mythical world beneath their feet. He was in his forties now. His beard was tended carefully around the edges, and sprinkled with gray. His face was rugged in a manner that suggested years of sun, or labor, or labor in the sun. He’d developed a potbelly—too many barbecues, he said, on the beach at 2 a.m. Laughing as he said it.

  “So you liked Spain?”

  “I did. But I missed Uruguay. I wanted to come home.”

  Salomé passed him the mate gourd.

  “It’s good to see you, Salomé.”

  She knew she looked as old as he did, and maybe older, even though, when they met, he was a man and she was just a schoolgirl. She knew the inside years were written on her skin. She kept her mouth closed when she smiled, to hide the missing teeth.

  “Really, Salomé. I mean it. Your spirit has survived.”

  She shrugged.

  “I worried about you,” he said. “We all did.”

  The wind played with the trees’ green hair. “Who’s we?”

  “Me, and Tinto, Anna, Leona.”

  Salomé’s throat shut as if a string had pulled around it. “You’re in touch with them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Mexico City. Since ’73.”

  “Ah.” It rose in her, against her will: the thought of Tinto’s hair, chest, hands, which had grown more than perfect in her mind. Between her feet, the dragon in the tile seemed to be smiling. “You think they might come back now?”

  “I don’t think so. They seem settled.” He poured hot water into the gourd.

  “Oh.”

  “Salomé,” Orlando said gently, “Tinto and Anna are married.”

  She waited for him to say but not to each other.

  “They have three children.”

  The tile dragon sneered; she stepped on it.

  “And Leona teaches at a university.”

  She should be happy for Leona, happy for everyone, all these people who had kept their sun and teeth and time and babies, who likely looked the age they really were, who’d seen other countries, married, studied, taught, gone to parties on the beach. Anna was so severe, too much for Tinto, like a knife that woman, surely her touch had sliced him into pieces. Unless she’d changed. Unless everyone and everything had changed.

  “Salomé?”

  “What?”

  Orlando extended the mate. Salomé took it. She stared at it for a moment before she drank.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “I guess you found a way.”

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Maybe I did.”

  They sat in silence again. The wind was still playful, still rustling the leaves, with their superficial flecks of sun. The fountain wept copiously.

  “Let’s keep doing this,” Orlando said.

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t need pity.”

  “Good. I wasn’t planning on any.”

  She looked at him. He was turning the cap of his thermos back and forth. “I’ve been gone a long time. My wife stayed in Barcelona; she’s not my wife anymore. I could use an old friend.”

  They drank mate together twice a week. They sat in silence for long minutes at a time. Orlando was easy to be silent with. He leaned fully into quiet, the kind of quiet that holds your thoughts up like buoys in water. He never pried. His smile was genuine and seemed to belong to a much older man. Sometimes they sat in the park, and other times they walked La Rambla, watching the sun bend its orange head toward the water and the rocks. When winter came, they met at cafés or at each other’s houses. His mother was a kind, square widow whose apron was always smeared with flour. At Salomé’s house, Orlando listened generously to Abuelo Ignazio’s meanderings, and discussed plants with Abuela Pajarita, who had never met a man with so much botanical knowledge. He shrugged modestly, I gardened a bit in Spain, I don’t know much, what do you use this bark for? Salomé had always kept him so separate from her home life, part of her clandestine second world, that it was strange now to have him in the open, laughing and sniffing jars with her grandmother, but then again, in this new Uruguay, anything could happen—things could touch and mix that never could before. He discussed politics with Eva, over afternoon mate in the living room, the state of the new democracy: The president has increased exports, did you hear his speech, Oh yes, so proud of the dip in unemployment rates, but that dip didn’t come because of more export in goods, but from export of people, uruguayos emigrating in search of work, Yes, yes, you’re right, And exiles failing to return—one fifth of the population is still flung across the world. Eva nodded raptly. Why don’t they come back like you did? Come back to what? I was lucky—my mother’s still here—but look at our country. Knots of children begging on boulevards. Oh, yes, I know—I’ve seen those run-down horse carts prowling the city at dusk, picking through garbage to take back to the cantegril. Everybody’s seen them, it’s a disgrace. You’re right, it is, and so is all the grown men out on the street selling old clothes and lottery tickets, pretending they aren’t doctors or lawyers or engineers now desperate for a peso. I’ve seen them too. We all have, yes? No matter how the president tries to pull the wool over our eyes. Eva filled the gourd for him. You’re right, sí, you’re right. What is going to happen to this country? She was mournful, elegiac, riveted. Salomé had not managed to talk about politics with her mother since returning home. The topic was too close to untold portions of the past. Orlando’s presence opened a new ease between them, a neutral state of dialogue where beggars and pesos and presidents could be themselves without toppling the conversation into cells that no one wanted to return to.

  In the spring, Orlando started writing for a leftist newspaper. By December he’d gotten Salomé to work there. The office was in the attic of a former Tupa’s house, with a desk, a chair, a great deal of shelving, and a broken sofa. It was a small job, part-time and for no pay, but it was good work for her, fact-checking, copy editing, translating from foreign sources. There were investigative articles, interviews, opinions, analyses, requiems for the revolution. The most heat surged around the topic of human rights, on the swells of new confessions, new evidence, disappearances of uruguayos in Argentina, where a commission documented all the crimes, but no commission here, not in Uruguay, no call to justice, no call even to memory; the president called for amnesty for military men, urged the people to press forward from the past, but he was pushing against the public tide, which swirled with emotion and debate. Salomé could not have brought herself to write about these things. She lacked the stridency. But she could correct the grammar, could pare down exclamation points, could add commas and periods where the authors had dropped them in the fierce push of their pens. It soothed her to bring order to brash text.

  The day after Christmas, after another awkward call with Roberto and Flor and Victoria, Salomé received an envelope from Mexico City. The return address said LA FAMILIA CASSELLA Y VOLKOVA. It was thick enough to hold a letter, perhaps a photograph or two. She left it on her dresser, unopened, for a week. Each morning she woke up enraged at its existence, at the fact that she would see it when she opened her eyes. She hated herself for her own rage. She battled. She opened her eyes facing the wall, the door, the ceiling, shredded by her own thoughts by the time she was out of bed. Finally, at New Year’s, she threw the letter away.

  But perhaps she wouldn’t stay this way. The thought unfolded slowly, carefully, a shocking missive written on torn paper. Perhaps there was another way to open her eyes in bed. The seasons turned. Her sleep grew calmer after two years of brown teas brewed by Abuela Pajarita’s creased old hands. She woke in sweats but did not scream, and this was good, although she missed (she’d never say this) her mother’s secret visits, her shhh, shhhh, her perfumed body in t
he dark. There were things to wake for; the world held more than pain. She told herself this, at first, to trick her way out of her covers: there is more out there than pain, wake up, wake up, at least live long enough to brush your teeth. She had some teeth left, after all—she saw this in the bathroom mirror as she brushed, and since she wasn’t dead or toothless what excuse did she have not to sink them into something? Sink them into the soft flesh of days: afternoons of cards and mate with Abuelo and Mamá; mornings in the kitchen with Abuela, trimming plants, braiding her hair, the radio chattering between them, Abuela with her tender forceful silence, her radiant unspoken stores of memory. Abuela still sank teeth into her life. And look at Mamá—she did too, leaving for card games that surely were not card games, writing poems while the onions fried and occasionally burned.

  “Salomé,” she said one night, scraping blackened remains from a pan, “it’s never too late to start over.”

  “Yes,” she said, too quickly. “Don’t worry, I’ll chop.”

  “I really mean it.”

  She turned away, to the cutting board. “I know.”

  Three days a week, she climbed the stairs to an attic office and sat beside Orlando, fixing text, on a sagging sofa that tilted them both toward the middle. They traveled to different neighborhoods together, gathering signatures for a referendum against the new law of impunity, knocking on bruised doors, looking into the faces of Uruguay: Hello, good sir, we are here to ask, I stayed alive today so I could meet you. Some evenings, Orlando persuaded her to stay out.

  “Just for a drink,” he’d say.

  She knew as well as he did that Just a Drink, in Uruguayan, means as long as you please, means at 3 a.m. the night is young, however short life seems to be the nights will still be young.

  “Just one,” she’d say, and stay.

  They went to bars with round tables and many candles. La Diablita was her favorite, thanks to its piano that sounded like it hadn’t been tuned in her lifetime, but still did its best. They met with Orlando’s friends—our friends, he said—who were old communists and socialists and Tupas, no longer different camps, now part of one broad and ostensibly united left. Some had been in exile, some in prison, some in both, all adherents to an old defeated dream, disciples after the crucifixion, toasting to the days when suppers had not seen their last. They talked and smoked and drank too much wine, just enough wine to let the past fall on the table like so many poker chips.