He was boring and I was stupid. I felt like asking one of the truckers to run me over and leave me gutted on the road, split open like the dogs I saw occasionally lying dead on the asphalt. Some of them had been pregnant, too heavy to run fast and escape the murderous wheels, and their puppies lay agonizing around them.
When we were less than an hour from the border with Paraguay, we got our passports ready. The immigration officials were tall, dark soldiers. One of them was drunk. They let us through without paying much attention to us, though they checked out our asses and made crude comments, laughing. Their attitude was predictable and relatively respectful; they were there to instill fear, to dissuade any challenge. Juan Martín said—once we were far from the checkpoint—that we had to file a complaint.
“And just who are you going to complain to, buddy, when those guys are the government?” Natalia asked him, and I, who knew her well, heard something more than teasing in her voice; it held contempt. Then she looked at me incredulously. But none of us said anything more. Natalia, who knew her way around Asunción, got us straight to Market 4 and left the car locked two blocks away. We walked, accosted by watch and tablecloth vendors, begging children, a mother and her wheelchair-bound daughter—all under the watchful eyes of the soldiers with their greenish-brown uniforms and their enormous guns that looked ancient, out-of-date, little-used.
The heat and the smell of the market were a physical blow, and I came to a stop near an orange stand. In Paraguay they call them toronjas instead of naranjas, and the fruits have a kind of deformed belly button and a bland flavor. The fruit at the market stand was circled by those little flies that I hate, not because they disgust me but simply because I don’t know how to kill them. They were like little flying fragments of darkness because you had to have them very close to your eyes to see wings or legs or any bug-like characteristics. I didn’t buy any oranges even though the vendor lowered her price again and again: three guaraníes, two guaraníes, one guaraní. The porters ran down aisles pushing trolleys with boxes, some full of fruit, others filled with televisions and dual-cassette players, still others with clothes. Juan Martín was silent, and Natalia walked decisively ahead in her white dress and flat leather sandals. She had tied her hair back in the heat, and her ponytail swayed from side to side as if the wind blew only for her.
“This is all contraband,” Juan Martín said suddenly, loud enough for some stallholders and wandering vendors to turn and look at him. I stopped short and grabbed his arm. “Don’t talk like that,” I said into his ear.
“They’re all criminals, where have you brought me, this is your family?” The nausea mixed with the tears when I told him that we were going to talk later, that he should shut up now, that yes, there were probably some criminals there and they were going to kill us if he kept provoking them. I looked him up and down: his boat shoes, the sweat stains in his armpits, the sunglasses pushed up over his hair. I didn’t love him anymore, I didn’t desire him, and I would have handed him right over to Stroessner’s soldiers and let them do as they pleased.
I hurried to catch up with Natalia, who was already at the stand of the woman who sold ñandutí. A younger woman was weaving the cloth with vibrant colors. It was the only place in that endless and noisy market where there was something like calm. People stopped and asked about prices and the woman answered in a quiet voice, but they heard her in spite of the radios, the chamamé music, even a man who was playing the harp for the few tourists who had braved the trip into Asunción that hot morning to buy on the cheap. Natalia took her time. She debated between several tablecloths and finally chose five sets with their napkins; my favorites were the white one with details of every color around the edges and in the center—violet, blue, turquoise, green, red, orange, yellow—and another much more elegant one that used only a palette of browns, from beige to mahogany. She bought the five sets, some thirty table runners, and many details to sew onto dresses and shirts, especially on guayaberas that she bought at another stand farther on. To find it, we had to move deeper into the market. I followed her and didn’t even check to see whether Juan Martín was following me. I thought about why ñandutí was called “spiderweb” cloth. It must be because of the weaving technique, because really the end result seemed much more like a peacock’s tail: the feathers with their eyes, beautiful but disturbing. Many eyes arrayed above the animal, which walks so heavily—a beautiful animal, but one that always seems tired.
“Wouldn’t you like a guayabera for yourself, Martín?” Natalia called him Martín; she didn’t use his full name. Juan Martín was uncomfortable, but he tried to smile. I knew that expression, it was his tough guy face and it said I’m doing all I can, so that later, when everything went to hell once we got back, he could rub it in my face, smear it all over my mouth: I tried but you didn’t help at all, you never help. He bought the guayabera but didn’t want to try it on. “I have to wash it first,” he told me reproachfully, as if the shirt could be poisoned. He carried one of Natalia’s plastic bags for her—they weren’t even that heavy, it was only cloth—and he said, “Please, can we get out of this hellhole?” Since the exit wasn’t marked he had no choice but to follow us. To follow Natalia, really, and I saw the disgust and resentment in his eyes.
My cousin linked arms with me and pretended to admire a bracelet of silver and lapis lazuli that Juan Martín had given me on our honeymoon in Valparaíso.
“We all make mistakes,” she told me. “The important thing is to fix them.”
“And how does this get fixed?”
“Babe, death is the only problem without a solution.”
—
Juan Martín didn’t like the trip from the market to the bay; he thought the city looked dirty and poor. He didn’t like the presidential palace and later, at the beach along the river, he started practically shouting at us: how could we be so anesthetized, didn’t we see the potbellied kids eating watermelon under the beating sun, and right in front of the house of government, please, what a shitty country. We didn’t want to argue with him. The city was poor, and in the heat it smelled like garbage. But he wasn’t disgusted with Asunción, he was mad at us. I didn’t even feel like crying anymore. To placate him we looked for a restaurant around there, where the ministries were, the private schools, the embassies and hotels: Paraguay’s rich. We quickly came to the Munich, on Calle Presidente Franco. “Is it named after Franco, the dictator?” asked Juan Martín, but it was a rhetorical question. On the restaurant patio there was an enormous effigy of Saint Rita and the tables were empty, except the one in the middle, where three soldiers sat. We chose a table far from them so they wouldn’t overhear Juan Martín, and also because it is always preferable to sit far away from soldiers in Asunción. The walls were colonial, the square of sky above us was totally clear, but there was shade on the patio in spite of the heat. We ordered Paraguayan corn bread, and Juan Martín, a sandwich. The soldiers, drunk on beer—there were several empty bottles on the table and under their chairs—first told the waitress she was beautiful, and then one of them touched her ass, and it was like a movie in poor taste, a bad joke: the man with his uniform jacket unbuttoned over his distended belly, a toothpick between his teeth, the grotesque laughter, and the girl who tried to brush them off by asking, “Can I get you anything else?” But she didn’t dare insult them because they had their guns at their waists, and others were leaning against the flower bed behind them.
Juan Martín got up and I could just imagine what was going to happen next. He was going to yell at them to leave her alone; he was going to play the hero, and then they would arrest all three of us. They would rape Natalia and me in the dictator’s dungeons, day and night, and they would torture me with electric shocks on my pubic hair that was as blond as the hair on my head, and they would drool while they said fucking little gringa, fucking Argentine, and maybe they would kill Natalia quickly, for being dark, for being a witch, for being insolent. And all because he needed to be a hero and prove God onl
y knows what. Anyway, he would have it easy because they killed men with a bullet through the back of the skull, and done. They weren’t fags, the Paraguayan soldiers, of course they weren’t.
Natalia stopped him.
“But don’t you see what they’re doing? They’re going to rape her.”
“I see everything,” said Natalia, “but we can’t do anything. We’re leaving now.” Natalia left money on the table and dragged Juan Martín toward the car. The soldiers didn’t even notice us, they were so focused on tormenting the girl. In the car, Juan Martín told us everything he thought about our cowardice and how sick and ashamed we made him. It was six in the afternoon. We had spent many hours shopping at the market and trying to sightsee on the oceanfront and downtown, putting up with my husband’s whining. Natalia wanted to get back early so we could have dinner in Corrientes, so she started the car and we headed out of Asunción as the sun was turning red and the fruit vendors were sitting down to drink something cool under their umbrellas.
—
The car stalled on the way back, somewhere in Formosa. It started bucking like a rebellious horse and then it stopped; when Natalia tried to start it again, I recognized the impotent sound of the motor, suffocated and exhausted. If it was going to turn over at all, it would be a while. The darkness was complete; along that stretch of the road there was no illumination. But the worst thing was the silence, barely cut by some nocturnal bird, by slidings through the plants—it was jungle there, thick vegetation—or by the occasional truck that sounded very far away, and that wasn’t going to come and save us.
“Why don’t you take a look under the hood?” I said to my husband. I’d already been fairly annoyed when he hadn’t offered to drive on the way back; he hadn’t even asked my cousin if she was tired. I didn’t know how to drive. Why was I so useless? Had I been so spoiled by my dead mother? Had it occurred to no one that I would ever have to solve problems by myself? Had I married this imbecile because I didn’t know what to do or how to work? In the darkness, in among the barely visible vegetation, the fireflies shone. I hate when people call them lightning bugs; firefly is a beautiful word. Once, I caught a bunch of them in an empty mayonnaise jar, and I realized how ugly they really are, like cockroaches with wings. But they’ve been blessed with the purest possible justice. Still and grounded, they look like a pest, but when they fly and light up, they are the closest thing to magic, a portent of beauty and goodness.
Juan Martín asked for a flashlight and went outside without griping. Looking at his face in the car’s weak interior light, before he got out, I realized that he was scared. He opened the hood and we turned off the light so as not to waste the battery. We couldn’t see what he was doing, but suddenly we heard him slam the hood down and run to get back into the car, sweat streaming down his neck.
“A snake went over my foot!” he shouted, and his voice broke as if he had phlegm in his throat. Natalia didn’t feel like pretending anymore and she laughed at him, pounding the steering wheel with her fists.
“You’re a real idiot,” she told him, and she dried the tears from her laughter.
“An idiot!” shouted Juan Martín. “What if it had bit me, and it was poisonous, what would we do then, huh? We’re in the middle of nowhere!”
“Nothing’s going to bite you, take it easy.”
“What do you know?”
“More than you.”
The three of us were silent. I listened to Juan Martín’s breathing and I silently swore that I was never going to have sex with him again, not even if he held a gun to my head. Natalia got out of the car and told us to keep the windows rolled up if we didn’t want bugs to get in. “You’ll die of heat, but it’s one thing or the other.” Juan Martín grabbed his head and told me, “Never again, we’re never coming here again, you understand me?” Natalia was walking on the empty road and I shined the flashlight on her from inside the car. She was smoking and thinking; I knew her. Juan Martín tried to start the car again, but it sounded more labored and slow than before. “I’m sure your cousin forgot to put water in it,” he told me. “No,” I replied, “because the car isn’t overheated, didn’t you see that when you looked at the motor? What did you see, huh? You don’t know anything, Juan Martín.” And I stretched out in the backseat, took off my shirt, and lay there in only my bra.
Once, we had made this same trip with my uncle Carlos and my mom. I don’t remember why they needed to go to Asunción. They’d sung songs the whole way there, I remembered that for sure: local songs of legend, love, and loss like “El Puente Pexoa,” “El Pájaro Chogui,” and “El Cosechero.” On the way I had to pee, and I couldn’t bring myself to pull down my shorts behind a tree. We pulled into a service station, my uncle asked the attendant for the key, and I went into the little bathroom on the side of the building, the one the truckers used. That little bathroom still haunts my dreams. The smell was brutal. There were fingerprints of shit on the sky-blue tiles; with no toilet paper in sight, many people had used their hands to wipe. How could they do such a thing? The black lid of the toilet was full of bugs. Locusts, mostly, and crickets. They made a terrible noise, a buzzing that sounded like the motor of a refrigerator. I ran out crying, and I pulled down my shorts and peed beside the service station. I didn’t say a word about it to my uncle or my mother. I never told them about the stagnant shit in the toilet, the handle dirty with brown fingerprints, the green locusts that almost completely covered the single bulb hanging from the ceiling with no shade over it. After the bathroom I don’t remember anything about that trip. My mother talked about how we’d stopped at a beautiful colonial hotel, but how at night you could see rats running around in the yard. I have absolutely no memory of that hotel, or of the rain and hail that had burst over us afterward and delayed our return. That trip, for me, ended in the locust-filled bathroom.
Juan Martín was saying he could walk down the road to who knows what place he had seen lit up, and I didn’t answer. If he was afraid of snakes, how was he ever going to make it there? The creatures were constantly going back and forth across the road. Natalia had finished her cigarette—at least, you could no longer see its tip burning in the darkness like one more firefly—but she didn’t get back into the car. She wanted to wait outside in case a car passed, sure. Someone who would take her to a phone so she could call the automobile club, for example. Plus, she couldn’t have felt much like being in the car with the two of us, and who could blame her after she’d tolerated a whole day of Juan Martín, not to mention me and my passivity.
The lights of the truck lit up the road and the wheels raised a cloud of dust. It was strange because up there in the north, in spite of the heat, there was almost never dry dust in the air because it rained a lot, if not every day. It was always humid and the dirt stuck fast to the ground. But that was how it pulled up: as if borne along on a sandstorm. Natalia had set out the beacon, a triangle that shone phosphorescent in the night, but you could tell she didn’t have faith in it because she opened the door, grabbed the flashlight from the driver’s seat, and started to wave her arms and shout “Hey, hey, help, help!” I didn’t see the driver’s face: it was a trailer truck and Natalia had to climb up to talk to him when he stopped, without turning off the motor. Two minutes later, she grabbed her purse and cigarettes and said the guy was going to take her to the service station to call for help. He’d also told her we were close to Clorinda, and that he couldn’t bring all three of us because there wasn’t enough room. The truck disappeared along the dark road as suddenly as it had arrived, and I realized all the things I hadn’t asked Natalia: how long would it take, was the service station nearby, why didn’t they go to Clorinda if it was close, did the trucker seem trustworthy, what should we do if another truck or even a car came by—should we stop it?
“We forgot to ask her to get water,” said Juan Martín, and it was the first sensible thing he’d said since morning.
My heart started to beat faster: What if we got dehydrated? I rolled
down the windows without giving a thought to the bugs. What could they be, other than moths, beetles, crickets? Maybe a bat. Juan Martín said, “Your cousin is irresponsible. She brings us all the way out here where no cars ever pass without even making sure this wreck could run.”
“How do you know whether she took the car in?” I asked him, furious, and I thought it would be easy to kill him right there; I could get a screwdriver from the trunk and stab it into his neck. I knew he didn’t want to kill me, he just wanted to treat me badly and break me so I’d hate my life and wouldn’t even have the guts left to change it. He started to turn on the radio and I almost told him to stop, we had to conserve the battery, but then I let him do it. I was enjoying his ignorance; how I was going to relish it when the tow truck came and he had to explain that he’d used up the battery looking for who knows what on the radio. What could be on the radio around there at night? Chamamé and more chamamé, and some lonely people who called in and cried and remembered their children who had died in the Malvinas.
Things We Lost in the Fire Page 9