The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina de Robertis

  He asked, “Why now?”

  Salomé closed her eyes. “Because she’s old enough. Because I owe it to her. Because I finally can.” They were quiet. She waited. “Are you still there?”

  “We’re here,” Flor said.

  Salomé bit her lip.

  “It’s not like we haven’t thought about this,” Flor said.

  “Ah.”

  “Only we wanted to tell her.”

  Salomé waited for her to add, because we’re her parents.

  “Give us a moment,” Roberto said.

  “Of course,” said Salomé. She heard the rustle of phones being put down. Somewhere, thousands of miles away, a married couple walked off to the kitchen or the back porch or the hall, to whisper, to deliberate, to think. The phone line crackled into her ear. Her sweat slicked the receiver. She marveled at the realities of distance, the way her brother’s voice could reach her while her brother himself stood in a house far away, in a place she couldn’t fathom but that he’d claimed as his and where he’d raised his daughter, her daughter, what a twisted family tree, spliced and splayed all over the world. She stared out, through her bedroom, through the window, at the oak tree, with its branches curving upward, just a few leaves left.

  Five minutes passed. Six. Seven. She thought of hanging up. She thought of the cost of each second of silence. Then rustle, rustle, and they both were back.

  Roberto spoke first. “Salomé?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for waiting.”

  “Yes.”

  “Look,” he said, “don’t do it in a phone call.”

  “Please,” Flor said. “The connections are horrible. You sound like you’re in an electric generator.”

  Roberto said, “We’re wondering whether you’d write her a letter. Write whatever you want in it. We’ll be there when she reads it. It’s the closest thing to telling her together.”

  Salomé leaned against the wall. It was cool against her back.

  “Salomé?” Roberto said. “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all right?”

  “Yes. It’s great. Gracias.”

  “De nada.”

  “It might take me a while. To write it.”

  “Fine,” her brother said.

  “That’s fine,” Flor said.

  The three of them listened to the static.

  “It’s late for you,” Roberto said. “Maybe you should go to bed.”

  “Okay, hermano. Good night, Flor.”

  “Good night, Salomé.”

  “Good night, Roberto.”

  “Good night.”

  The letter was much harder to write than she’d imagined. One wrong word, it seemed, could ruin the whole endeavor. The right words, however, could perhaps perform a miracle—close a circle that was torn open years ago; perhaps could even close deeper, older circles, ones she herself had barely glimpsed. She started the letter dozens of times, over and over, seeking its tone, its opening, its voice. At times she forgot who she was writing for.

  Dear Victoria, she wrote, I hope you can forgive me.

  No. That wasn’t right.

  Dear Victoria, here’s the terrible truth.

  Dear Victoria, here’s the shocking truth.

  Dear Victoria, here’s the truth.

  Dear Victoria, what is truth? And who decides what’s shocking? Some days I’m shocked to be alive. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you, so

  Dear Victoria, you must wonder who I am.

  Dear Victoria, I’m your mother, it sounds strange—let me explain.

  Dear Victoria, I love you God I love you, I know you’re going to hate me. I’ve already spent far too much time hating myself—it gets me nowhere—and it gets too heavy to carry and so, sometimes, I just put it down—I actually do it—it sounds insanely simple, but it’s not—but wait, wait, that’s not for this letter—

  Dear Victoria, your conception was not pretty but you still deserve to know.

  Dear Victoria, I’m sorry. Your conception was a distended brutal nightmare that still shakes me to the core. But you’re the best thing that ever came out of me—isn’t that a paradox? Will you know the word “paradox” in Spanish? Are you using a dictionary to read this? You’ll never read this, I won’t let you, this draft is a disaster.

  Dear Victoria, please read this whole letter, please don’t throw it away.

  Dear Victoria, I’m writing in case roots matter to you.

  Dear Victoria, roots are essential. We begin long before we’re born.

  Dear Victoria, don’t let the lies about roots get to you. People have a great deal to say on the subject, but your roots don’t define who you are. Don’t let anyone ever tell you what to think. Jesus, now there I went, telling you what to think.

  Dear Victoria, look, I stayed in prison thirteen years so I could bear you.

  Dear Victoria, your violet tree kept me alive—do you remember it? Why would you? It was perfect, marvelous, so full of colors. I dreamed and breathed and swayed inside your colors.

  Dear Victoria, I have something to say, I don’t know how to say it.

  Dear Victoria, please believe me, I’m not writing this to wreck your life—I’ve done enough wrecking and I’m ready to do something else—I really am—like build, hope, make things, listen, wander, wonder, see—above all, see.

  Dear Victoria, what’s your favorite color? Did you ever get that mo -torcycle?

  Dear Victoria, I’m sorry I’ve let so much time pass. Deeply sorry.

  Dear Victoria, I want to get to know you, I’m not sure how to do that. I wonder what it means to know another person. I wonder what it means to know yourself. Here I am, approaching forty, with no idea what it means to know yourself, something you’d think would be so simple, Socrates was concise about it long ago, yet here we are, modern humans, circling like lost dogs, unable to find what’s inside us. Maybe not you. Maybe you know yourself, and I want to know you, Victoria, more than anything.

  Dear Victoria, I wish I’d known you as a child.

  Dear Victoria, couldn’t you be five years old again? Just for a day?

  Dear Victoria, what is happening to me with these letters? What are you doing to me, for me? I find words I didn’t know I’d written. I find pages between my sheets in the mornings, crumpled by my sleep. When I write, I get tangled in thoughts of you. There are so many of them, thoughts, thoughts, they all cry out and rush toward the page, a mob that roars with every sound you can imagine, stampeding all at once. I fear that you won’t hear them clearly. I fear that you won’t understand.

  Dear Victoria, at your age I was sleeping on rifles. I hope you’re not.

  Dear Victoria, I wouldn’t blame you for burning this letter. I hope you don’t.

  Dear Victoria,

  Dear Victoria,

  Dear Victoria.

  Through winter, through spring, all the way to hot December, the pages filled box after box.

  That spring, Tío Artigas died in Havana. Xhana sent a letter with a photo of a mound of earth and a headstone engraved with a drum. He had lived, she wrote, to the formidable age of ninety-four. On receiving this news, Pajarita loosened her mooring to the world. She stopped tending her plants; they withered in their pots; counter space appeared for the first time in sixty years. She would not rise from her rocking chair, not for meals, not for the door; the family brought her lunch and dinner on trays, and ate nearby on the sofa, taking turns feeding her, bite by bite. She was not sad, or sick, exactly; just absent, ambivalent, open to the drifts beyond the world. She barely spoke. Eva entreated her to eat, just one bite more, just one. Ignazio sat near her in a panic, staring, muttering in Italian, shaking her arm.

  “Papá, don’t shake her. Let her rest.”

  “Rest? She’s just staring out of the window.”

  “Then let her do it.”

  Ignazio shook his wife, who neither resisted nor broke her gaze.

  “Papá.”

 
; “All right. All right.”

  Salomé watched her grandmother stare across the street, at the prison. The oaks cast shadows on its ivory walls. She had grown up across from it, as had Mamá, and it was hard to believe that it would change, that construction would begin in as little as a year. That it would be a shopping mall, the largest in Uruguay, modeled after yanqui malls, with shiny imported products in shiny stores. The outer wall around the courtyard, with its attractive fortress trim, would be retained. Shoppers would walk through the same gates that had held prisoners. But the edifice beyond those gates, the prison itself, would be demolished and yield to a new building, whose conditioned air and hidden pipes would supposedly hold no imprint of the past, no haunting trace, nothing but the clean gleam of the future. She had been editing scathing commentaries, a new kind of prison for a new era; this is madness; what we should really do is, the fault lies with. It is painful to remember but more painful to forget. Abuela Pajarita seemed to do neither anymore, or else she had blended both into a single mental gesture. She watched the prison wall as though everything else were superfluous, as though it held the whole story, told in the idioms of sun and shadow.

  When the doctor came, Pajarita moved politely for his stethoscope. Her pulse was faint, he said. She should be careful, she was quite old, but she seemed generally in good health. He prescribed some pills and rest.

  In December, Pajarita abandoned the rocking chair and window and stayed in bed. The days grew long and humid. Salomé sponged the sweat from her fragile body. She cleaned her slowly, gently, wiping the damp furrows between flesh, Abuela, Abuela, so this is your body, here are your private folds, your aging stores of darkness. Abuela kept her eyes closed. Her body ceded gently to the motion of her granddaughter’s hands. Her skin felt like paper, the very thin kind, through which one sees the shadow of one’s hand. Salomé wondered whether she would live to see her own skin grow so loose and soft and delicate. She wanted to. She realized this while soaping her grandmother’s hips: I want to stay here in this world until my hips are brittle and sore and covered in wrinkles and even smell of urine until someone cleans me, even so, I don’t care, I want to be alive.

  By the third week, extended family poured into the house, day after day, all of Salomé’s tíos (Bruno, Marco, Tomás) and tías (Mirna, Raquel, Carlota) and her cousins (Elena, Raúl, Javier, Félix, all the ones who hadn’t left) and their spouses and their children, worried, crowding the hall, wanting to see her, wanting to help, and Salomé ran back and forth to keep up with the flowers needing vases, the dishes stacking up. On Christmas Eve there were so many people to pass the phone to that she didn’t greet Roberto, Flor, or Victoria, which was all right in any case, she wasn’t ready. Pajarita lay on a throne of pillows, staring at the throng around her, closing her eyes for long stretches of time. When her eyes closed, voices fell to whispers, so she could sleep.

  Three days after Christmas, Javier’s daughter Clara brought Pajarita her last meal. It was a single beef empanada. She had made it herself, the way Pajarita had taught her, with the small innovation of a pinch of cinnamon, a trick she’d learned from her Lebanese great-grandmother, María Chamoun. Clara cut a piece with very little crust, and pierced it onto a fork. Pajarita took the bite. She chewed very slowly. The room hushed. From the threshold, Salomé watched her gaze, clear-eyed, around the room at each member of the great sprawl of her family, at Mamá, at Abuelo Ignazio with his jaw slack like an abandoned puppy, at Mamá again, at Salomé herself with an expression of unsettling intensity in which Salomé could have sworn she saw not only Pajarita the old woman but Pajarita the young woman and Pajarita the girl and even Pajarita the strange and legendary baby, all awake in those dark brown eyes, staring around the room in astonishment.

  “Ah,” Pajarita said, and closed her eyes.

  Her heart stopped beating in her sleep.

  Ignazio insisted on a gondola. For a real Venetian funeral, he said. His sons tried to dissuade him with every reason they could think of: it was impractical, there were no gondolas around, there was nowhere for a boat to take a coffin, his wife wasn’t from Venice anyway. Ignazio had an answer for each reason. She wasn’t Venetian but he owed her a bit of Venice. It didn’t have to take her anywhere; they could put it on the beach, gather around it, talk, cry, then carry her coffin to the cemetery. They didn’t need to buy a gondola, he had one in his mind; they would build it; he’d tell them how.

  It was insane, everyone knew it, and they would have pressed the point but he was red-eyed, stricken, a fragile old man with who knew how many days left on the earth. When days are scarce, what better way to spend them than in a bout of madness? And anyway, Salomé thought, grief needs a place to pour to. The grief in her was rising in a cold, enormous sea-salt wave, expanding and expanding, larger than her, than the house, than the city, wet and ancient, rushing around her, submerging her completely, a cleansing force that seemed capable of washing the whole world, and she would not drown if she could move her hands, make something, hammer, carry, saw. She couldn’t stop. The gondola took shape in Tío Bruno’s garage. It took three days and three nights. There were planks to gather, meals to serve, nails to hammer, tears to wipe, wood to cut, wood to sand, wood to carve, instructions to absorb from Ignazio, on his rocking chair, arthritic hands poised in his lap. Sawdust entered everything: Salomé’s clothes, her breath, her fingernails, the scent of all her cousins as they worked. Mamá prepared a lining of fine yellow silk, and as she sewed she did not weep but seemed transported, transfixed, a woman stitching the fabric of sorrow or passion or time. The boat’s inner anatomy unfolded, and then its body, long and sinuous.

  “There has to be an oar,” Ignazio said.

  “Why?”

  “Let’s not.”

  “We won’t be rowing.”

  Ignazio scowled. “It’s not a gondola without an oar.”

  They made an oar. They carved the sides of the gondola with images: leaves, crosses, curling vines, fish, moons, knives, rough-hewn angels, even rougher sylphs (at Abuelo’s insistence) engaged in coitus, V’s with their arms extended like birds in flight.

  On New Year’s Day, 1990, the family hauled the gondola and the coffin to the shore. They went at dawn, for privacy, twenty-six of them, all in black. The early sun was pale on the stairs down to the sand. Behind them, the city was still dancing or asleep, dreaming at the lip of a new decade.

  The gondola landed at the edge of the water. Salomé helped her uncles place the coffin in its hull. The crowd circled around it. They stood still. Someone coughed.

  “Bueno,”said Abuelo. “Who wants to start?”

  Tío Marco told the first story about his mother, her strong will, her wrath the time her little sons were taken to a bar. Tía Mirna spoke of Pajarita’s patience. She explained things with such grace, such a calm presence, she taught me how to be a mother. Clara told the story of the Final Empanada, which everybody knew, having been there, but savored anyway. Eva read a poem she had written years ago, in Argentina, a poem about a woman who has a vision of her mother in an ethereal tree, and the woman is sick, and the vision saves her life. Salomé stopped listening. The words became sounds that blended together and told her as much as words themselves. She looked past the black-clad bodies, at the water. It had been another sleepless night and soon she would lie down again, but for now her exhaustion was a sword, a sharp lucidity, cutting through the air to peel away the layers of time, so that she saw beyond her own longing and pain into the whole of it, the huge span of the river, and she could swear the long brown water surged with people—they were all here, they rode the waves: the young man in his boat from Italy; the poet-girl escaping a bright city; Artigas; Pajarita; the dead and the past spectres of the living, sighing on the surface of the water, listening to voices from the land, shifting, floating, staring, sparking, dimming, reaching, pressing toward the shore—and it seemed as though they’d always pressed the water, as though the water would not be itself without them, as thoug
h they would press on past time and death and sadness, without ever arriving, some dark exquisite secret in the pressing. Finally the speeches trailed to silence. The mourners shifted awkwardly. The breeze tickled their necks.

  Ignazio surveyed them. He looked like a paper version of himself. “I need a moment with her. Alone.”

  They hesitated.

  “Go all the way back to the stairs, so you can’t hear us.”

  Reluctantly, they walked away, a cloud of black cloth moving across the sand. They gathered at the steps. Tío Bruno pulled out his mate. Salomé sat down on the steps and closed her eyes. Behind her lids she still saw the crowded river, and saw herself at the shore, a stone’s throw from the spectres. We are still here, their faces said, and she said back without speaking, So am I. She met their eyes and they stared back at her, faces awash with blue-green light.

  She opened her eyes to the sound of her uncles shouting. She could not understand their words, but then she saw them, her uncles, running toward the water, flapping their arms like clumsy ravens. The gondola was gone—no, not gone: it had pushed out onto the river, it was moving away, and Abuelo was in it with the coffin, his back turned toward the shore. He was rowing, fiercely, with shocking strength, bent into motion, ninety-five years old, intent on getting away with his stolen goods, a pirate with his coffin-treasure, his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren yelling at the water’s edge, plunging into the water fully clothed, swimming in pursuit, but who knew where that old man was getting his strength, what a bastard, what a madman, there was no one like him in the world, he just rowed farther and farther, into the river, he would row to Argentina, he would row to the Atlantic, he would row on back to Venice for all she knew, or he would drown with his arms around a coffin; and Salomé ran to the edge of the water, kicked her shoes off and ran in. The water was cold and soothing, it soaked her skirt, white foam gathered in a wreath around her knees, wsshhh, white tongues of foam and rush of current underneath, soft tongues but by the millions they could carve a shoreline into rock. The black cloth of her skirt rose around her, wet and floating, and she shouted along with the others but inside she shouted Row, for Ignazio, for his madness, for the woman in the coffin, for the apparitions on the river, for all of them left living on the shore, for the city itself, her city, Montevideo, the flattest city that ever dared to take the name of a mountain. The water was alive with morning sun. Its glitter hurt her eyes. Ignazio was becoming a black spot on the water. Her toes were in wet sand, her eyes on the horizon. She was ravenous—but before she ate today, before she slept, before her skirt had had a chance to dry, she’d pick up pen and paper and compose a letter, because she finally had the opening words. Victoria, she would write, my dearest treasure, it’s been so long.