Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  One night, in the middle of 1986, as winter pummeled the streets with icy winds that pushed customers into La Piedrita for the warmth of whiskey and a smiling face, as groups huddled around the tables and the windowless room thickened with breath and human heat, Paz caught herself looking up at the door as another woman, a stranger, walked in down the steps. Is it her, is it—? The thought shocked her. That it would spring up so fast and fierce in her own mind. The woman was not her, not the one she’d been waiting for, or bracing for, or both, without knowing. Puma. Puma like a twisted piece of driftwood that could wash up on her shore. Puma, whom nobody but Paz understood. Would she ever come to a place like this? Would she find it, want to see? Would they recognize each other? Would there still be a spark? Would she remember this very basement and understand that it was the same place where—? Puma. Paz ached to know what had become of her. Whether she’d been imprisoned, escaped to exile, survived the Process years or no, and, if she’d fled abroad, whether she’d decided to come home or to stay in her new, transplanted life, as many exiles were doing, because it wasn’t so simple to return. Back then, when Puma hid in the basement, in 1974, there was no place remotely like La Piedrita, nowhere for her to see herself, find herself, or even safely show her face. Was she still the sort of woman who would seek out a place like this? It wasn’t clear she’d ever been such a woman; it wasn’t clear what kind of woman she’d been. She’d been the woman in the basement. Paz could see it better now: how broken she’d been, how hungry. She, Paz, was twenty-five years old now, older than Puma had been back then. She’d been a bold guerrilla, Puma, but she’d also been a terrified girl of twenty or so. Tortured and fleeing for her life. Had she poured that terror into loving Paz? Had she done something she’d later recall with horror or shame? Perhaps. Impossible to know. The stranger who’d just walked into La Piedrita reached the bottom of the steps and now stood underground, in the light of dim lamps, taking in the surroundings. She was not Puma but she was here, alive, needing a smile or a cigarette or a friend. Paz waited for her to look over so she could meet her gaze in greeting, thinking, what I can’t give to Puma I will give to the Pumas of the world.

  * * *

  *

  “Have you heard?” Romina said. “Ariella’s back in Uruguay.”

  La Venus didn’t look up from her painting, but her hand tensed around her brush. “I hadn’t heard, no.”

  “She has a concert next month.”

  La Venus stabbed the tip of her brush into red paint. Mixed. Hard, too hard. It was not the thought of Ariella that stung, but the thought of Mario. How tall he’d be now. She imagined him with his face leaner, his eyes the same. She couldn’t peel an orange without thinking of him, the delight on his face when the peel came away a perfect snake. She had never stopped hurting at the thought of him across town at his grandmother’s house, one long bus ride away, yet out of reach. “Good for her.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Flaca said, pouring the mate.

  “Do I have to?”

  “No. You certainly don’t.”

  They were in the living room of Paz’s house, which, in truth, they all treated like their own home. It was a Sunday night, at eleven o’clock, almost time to open the bar. It was Flaca’s turn to work, and she was enjoying one last round of mate before heading downstairs. They were all together: Romina, Malena, Paz, Flaca, La Venus, and Virginia, Flaca’s girlfriend, in a languorous mood after having enjoyed a parrilla in the little patio in the back, where, as they all knew by now, Paz and her mother had once upon a time burned books, in another world, in another life. Dirty dishes towered in the sink. The house still smelled of smoke and roasted flesh. They were warm from wine and company, loathe to disperse.

  “Are you coming down tonight, Venus?” Flaca asked.

  “I don’t know. The painting calls me.”

  “So does the dance floor,” said Paz. “We always sell more drinks when you dance.”

  “Venus, goddess of the night,” Flaca sang.

  La Venus smiled. “We’ll see.” She knew that, when she danced downstairs, she became the center of the room if not the universe, and often it thrilled her. But it also tired her. For what she wanted was to paint. To be the one who looked, and not always the looked at, a role that came too easily to her, unbidden. People lavished their stares on her. She had to protect her power to look, to create, to be the shaper and not only the shaped. For a long time, she’d only painted for herself, hanging things around the house and downstairs at La Piedrita. The galleries downtown had no use for a woman who painted naked women, so she wasn’t taken seriously until, in recent months, she’d started offering the galleries landscapes inspired by Polonio—ocean, shoreline, the lighthouse rocks—painted on urban castoff items such as bricks, planks of wood, battered kitchen pots. She meant it as a statement on the longing for nature in urban life, or maybe on the way your mind could carry oceans inside it no matter where you were. Either way, it didn’t hurt that the objects were cheaper than canvas and easy to find. This series had just had an opening at a tiny gallery in Ciudad Vieja, the only one she knew of that was owned by a woman, Doña Erminia, the rich widow of a famous painter. The installation made almost no money, of course—the economy was so bad that no one had the money to buy art—but it had been well received, with good reviews in two of the smaller newspapers that had reopened with democracy’s return.

  “Well,” Virginia said, “I, for one, want to see what you paint.”

  “Well, thank you, Virginia.” La Venus beamed. “And what about you? Any new poems?”

  Virginia shook her head. “Nothing that’s ready to share.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Paz. “Please. Your poems are beautiful.”

  Virginia turned and met Paz’s eyes. “And how long has it been since you’ve read us a poem?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  Paz shook her head. She wrote, sometimes, but it was scraps—her love of books never quite translated into writing of words of her own. She’d come to believe that her creative work, her truest art, was held in three things: her nights with lovers, the hut on the beach, and the bar in the basement, all of them perversions according to the world. But she couldn’t speak this. It would become laughable the second she did. “I’m not a real poet.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “I mean, you’re named for a poet!”

  “So?”

  They stared at each other, Virginia and Paz. It was a brief shared gaze, not longer than a single breath, but Romina saw it, and so did Flaca, who held her breath until Paz looked away, at the mate gourd in her hands. Never once had Paz stolen a girlfriend from Flaca. They were deep and loyal friends, nothing to fear. And yet. That look. As if they already shared a secret common tongue. Poetry. Maybe the spark was nothing more than that. Flaca was no fancy reader, she’d never even gotten through Don Quixote, not even when it was assigned at school. Virginia, on the other hand, was well read, a self-taught scholar of Latin American literature, named for Virginia Brindis de Salas, who, she’d told Flaca, was the first black woman to publish a volume of poems in the history of Uruguay and possibly in all of South America. Her parents had read Brindis de Salas’s verses to her along with nursery rhymes, dreaming, for her, a life that transcended the cramped poverty of the conventillo they lived in until the dictatorship government forced them out without warning, displacing their whole community in one fell swoop to the periphery of the city, where she lived until, a year ago, they finally returned to their old neighborhood of Barrio Sur, though most of us, Virginia had said, have not returned, they scattered us from our neighborhood without a reason, just to break our community, just to get rid of black people, and even now, tell me who’s talking about our displacement in the news, or in City Hall? She was as politically passionate as Romina, volunteering with a black community newspaper, Voz Negra, that had revived after
the dictatorship ended, and that frequently published her articles and poems. She also lit candles to Iemanjá, the African goddess of the ocean, and knew all the traditional drum rhythms of candombe by heart, could tap them out against her chest or thigh with perfect precision; and when the neighborhood drums came to beating life, thirty strong, sixty strong, she danced as if the sound had been deep in her bones since before Uruguay, before ships, before time. Flaca found Virginia’s writings to be brilliant, intimidating. Here was a woman who cleaned houses for a living and whose mind burned as fiercely as the sun. They’d met at the street fair of Tristán Narvaja, selecting zucchini from a grocer’s stall, and had conveyed all the essentials through the linger of hands on green vegetable flesh. They’d been together now for almost two years, longer than Flaca had ever spent in a relationship, and she knew that Virginia had the power to become the third woman to break her heart.

  “So,” Paz said, “some people write, the rest of us just scribble.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” Virginia said.

  Paz shrugged, trying not to smile.

  “We need all sorts of scribbles, not just poems,” Romina said, thinking of the enormous number of articles and communiqués she’d penned in recent months on behalf of the rights of exiles, of former political prisoners, of those battling against the impunity of perpetrators. The work continued, essential, unending, unpaid, thankless. She wrote opinion pieces for party leaders, men whose names graced the bylines on pieces she’d written. Doing what was best for the movement. Who wanted to read an opinion credited to her name? Sometimes, now, she attended meetings with Felipe, as he started emerging from his shell. It was good to see him doing better, and a relief, too, that her parents now had him to focus on, to shower with their worries and attention, so that there was less scrutiny on her. She reached out for Malena’s hand, but when she clasped it, Malena did not clasp back. The limp fingers alarmed her. Malena had been remote lately, in and out of foul moods, drinking more heavily than ever. They bickered more often. You don’t control me, Malena had said to her the last time they fought about the drinking. And maybe she was right. Maybe she should back off and give Malena more space. And more attention. She should devote more time to her—though just the thought of this exhausted Romina, a weight piled up on so many other weights.

  “On that note,” La Venus said, “I have news. There’s a Paraguayan painter who’s been invited by the Ministry of Education and Culture, and remember Doña Erminia, the owner of the gallery that showed my work?”

  “How could we forget Doña Erminia?” said Flaca. “I’ve never seen so many plumes on a lady’s hat.”

  “Well, she’s hosting an evening reception for the paraguaya. And I want you all to come meet her. Her name is Diana Cañeza and I’d bet you a thousand pesos she’s one of us.”

  “One of us?”

  “No!”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “How can you know?”

  “I’ve seen two of her paintings—”

  “Let me guess: she paints like she’s licking pussy?”

  “Let her finish!”

  “Thank you, as I was saying: she doesn’t have a husband. And the way she paints women’s bodies—there’s something luxurious about it. I don’t know how to put it.”

  “You want her. You saw her paintings and you want her!”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Ha, as if you have to.”

  “The thing is, Venus, you say everybody’s a cantora.”

  “Probably because she could make any woman want to sing!”

  “Ha—”

  “Now, that’s not fair,” La Venus said. “Not everybody. For example, I’ve never said it about Doña Erminia.”

  “Now, that would be interesting!”

  “Oh god, I don’t want to think about that.”

  “Why not? We’re all going to be old one day. Don’t you want someone to love your naked wrinkled body and—”

  “Ay, that’s enough!”

  “No, it’s not, I want to hear exactly what happens to her naked wrinkled body.”

  “So do I.”

  “It should be whatever the old lady wants.”

  “Do her bidding, that’s what I always say.”

  “No one here doubts that about you, Flaca.”

  “Well, as for me, when I’m old and wrinkled, I’m going to have plenty of chucu-chucu.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “We have to believe in ourselves!”

  “Maybe by then we’ll be able to kiss in broad daylight without fearing for our lives.”

  “Ha! You must be drunk!”

  “I haven’t had a drop.”

  “So, what, we’ll be having orgasms in the plaza too?”

  “Apparently.”

  “The last thing I want is the men of Montevideo watching me do the deed.”

  “I’m with you. I’d rather be a criminal pervert forever.”

  “A criminal pervert octogenarian?”

  “Why not? That’s more than our foremothers could have dreamed.”

  “¡Epa!”

  * * *

  *

  The reception for Diana Cañeza was an elegant affair, in Doña Erminia’s gallery downtown. Flaca searched the crowd for the mysterious Paraguayan. The paintings were voluptuous, large canvases full of warm colors, some of them stylized images of animals bursting from cosmic, life-giving stars, others realistic portraits of women drinking coffee, lying naked in a boat on a river, looking out of a window at a brick wall. The women were haunting, and Flaca could see why La Venus had been captivated by this artist; they seemed to share an obsession with their female subjects, with trying to bring their inner worlds to life on canvas. Or maybe she was just projecting. She knew nothing about art. It was a sacrifice to come to this reception; why did appreciating art have to involve wearing a dress? She felt costumed, false, even though the dress she wore was deeply plain, the same one she’d worn to the opera with La Venus that disastrous night years ago. Her one dress. Given to her by her sister from her arsenal of dresses. She chafed at the feeling of no cloth between her legs—the things I do for art, she thought, though in truth she was doing it for her friend.

  And to see the mysterious Paraguayan. If La Venus tried to flirt with her, and the flirting was returned, she wanted to be there for the show, didn’t want to miss a thing.

  But it was Romina who saw the Paraguayan first.

  She hadn’t been looking for her. Hadn’t been looking for her life to change.

  She’d been standing in a corner with Malena, each of them lost in her own thoughts, Malena taking deep sips of her cocktail, Romina’s mind roaming to the campaign speech she was writing for a mayoral candidate, a man with excellent leftist politics and an outsize self-regard. She had to get his voice just right to hide his arrogance, to help him connect with the people. The room was noisy, too crowded; maybe they’d leave soon. She didn’t want to meet this painter, even though the paintings took her breath away, perhaps because they took her breath away; she was tired of brilliant people and their egos. She’d been teaching all day and still had her unpaid work, the unfinished speech, waiting for her at home. She wanted nothing more than to get those pages done and go to bed.

  And then she saw her.

  Diana, the painter. Smiling at a man who was expounding to her about God knew what. As if she could feel attention on her from across the room, she turned and looked directly at Romina.

  Romina could not breathe.

  The world collapsed into this moment, the meeting of this woman’s eyes. This woman with a gaze that took in everything. Calm yet utterly solid. She was older than Romina, in her late thirties perhaps, in a green dress, commanding in a manner that belied her size, a small woman with an enormous presence and lus
h black hair loose around her shoulders that made Romina think of the rainforests of neighboring countries that she’d heard about but never seen, full of wild things, hidden labyrinths, damp relentless life.

  She thought, with a panic, that the painter might come over and speak to her—and then what would she say? what would she do? But she did not come. Romina decided not to leave the gathering after all, and for the next hour, she was keenly aware of Diana’s movements, where she was and who ringed her, as if a thread stretched between them, a spider’s thread, glimmering and inexhaustibly strong.

  By the time La Venus found her in the crowd to introduce her to the guest of honor, it felt almost as if they were sharing a secret, that they were past introductions, that the category of strangers was for them a kind of farce.