Cantoras

by Carolina de Robertis

  Flaca saw it.

  She saw their first shared gaze and also saw Romina crossing the room with La Venus, it couldn’t be, it wasn’t possible, she was not watching a disaster begin in slow motion while Malena trailed behind her lover, smiling because she saw nothing, nothing at all.

  * * *

  *

  Two days later, they met in secret, on the Rambla. Romina had looked for Doña Erminia’s number in the phone book, as she knew Diana was staying there. Diana had not sounded surprised to hear from her. The call was brief, just enough to set a time and place. It left Romina shaking. What was she doing? She didn’t know. Since the reception, she’d spent every waking minute in a fever, lit from within. She had not felt this way in years. It had never been this way with Malena. Even in the beginning, Malena had been a solace and a salve, a warm nest of a woman, while this was something else. Combustible. She hadn’t felt this way since Flaca—an almost laughable thought, since she’d no more feel that way about Flaca now than about her own brother. But back then, it had been pure heat. Long ago in the early days. Before the Only Three. Before the coup. Before the world had shuttered. She’d thought that aspect of her had fallen forever into ash. Hadn’t known embers of sharper lust were glowing underground, for all these years, biding their time.

  They both arrived at the river’s edge exactly on time.

  “Do you drink mate?” Romina held up the gourd and thermos. It was an awkward greeting but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “What do you think? I’m Paraguayan, of course I drink mate.”

  “I’m so glad—”

  “Mate comes from the Guaraní people, you know.”

  Romina flushed. “I do know.”

  “My ancestors, they were the first.”

  She started to apologize, but then she saw the smile on Diana’s face. She poured, and handed Diana the gourd. Diana studied her intently as she took it. Their fingertips brushed and Romina felt it like an electric pulse.

  They began to walk slowly along the shore.

  Diana took her time drinking, then handed back the gourd. “You never drink tereré?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mate, but made cold, with ice.”

  “No. Never. Mate is always hot for us, even in summer.”

  “In Paraguay, the heat becomes so intense, you would long for tereré.”

  Romina thought of heat, of Diana in the intense heat, slick with sweat. “I’d like to try it sometime.”

  “I could make it for you.”

  Romina waited for her to add before I go but she did not.

  They walked in silence along the Rambla.

  Diana was the first to break the silence. “How strange, the Río de la Plata.”

  “Why?”

  “It does not look like a river. It is so wide.”

  “It’s an estuary, really, but not the ocean.”

  “I have never seen the ocean.”

  The gentle deliberation of her words. You had to go quiet inside to make space for each one of them to land in you. Spanish was not her only language; at home, as a child, she’d spoken Guaraní. Romina wondered which language Diana thought in, or whether her thoughts lived in the space between languages, like a river that belongs to neither shore.

  “I—we—my friends and I have a little house, a one-room house on a beach up the coast, on the Atlantic. We’ve been going there for years.”

  “What is the beach called?”

  “Cabo Polonio.”

  “Cabo. Polonio.” Each syllable savored. “I would like to see that place.”

  What did she mean? Was she flirting? It was impossible to tell. The signals were so different. Romina had only been with two women: young bold Flaca, and Malena. This was another universe entirely. A woman who was neither brazen nor pliant. A self-possessed woman who seemed to know herself so deeply that her sphere of knowing extended to you, who you were, what you wanted, what you didn’t know you held inside. A woman from a vastly different country, from a world of rich rainforests, bleak poverty, melodious Guaraní.

  “What other places would you like to see?”

  Diana stopped walking and turned to look at her. The river lay behind her, flung open, stabbed with light. Romina thought that her eyes had no need of anything in this world that was not Diana. “What do you wish to show me?”

  “Everything.”

  They stared at each other for long enough to dispel all the veils, dispel all doubt, and it amazed Romina that it could be so simple, so direct, that the path into the forbidden was in fact wide open right in front of you and that stepping onto it could be a kind of rightness, a vitality more powerful than fear.

  “Then do.”

  * * *

  *

  It was only after they checked into a room that Romina realized she’d been to this hotel before, years ago, before the coup, as an eighteen-year-old seeking privacy with Flaca. Now here she was again, suspended in her own desire as if desire didn’t live inside you at all but instead it was you who lived inside your desire, as if a woman’s wanting could be oceanic, vast enough to be swum, to be submerged in. Dimly, she recalled a way of thinking in which it was wrong to be here with a woman who was not Malena, but that way of thinking seemed old, decrepit, entirely unclasped from reality, and its signal was drowned out by Diana’s passion, which unfurled with an intensity that took Romina by surprise. She surrendered. She dissolved. She was everywhere and nowhere, naked and relentlessly alive.

  Afterward, they lay in a slash of light that stole through the closed blinds.

  “You could stay,” she said. “Here, in Uruguay.”

  Diana was silent for a long time. “Is it possible?”

  “I don’t know. We could find out. I have contacts who’ve helped exiles return from abroad. Maybe they could help you as well.” She hesitated. “Would you want to live here?”

  Diana looked at her for a long time, a stretch of time in which Romina lost herself and found herself again. “You have no dictatorship. You are back in the light. While we, we have suffered under Stroessner for over thirty years and how do we know what else awaits us?” She stroked Romina’s arm. “And yet, my family is in Paraguay. My mother, my brothers and sisters, my nieces and nephews. And I know what my oldest brother would say: he’d accuse me of abandoning our land for a nation that tried to destroy us.”

  “What?”

  “The war.”

  World War Two? Romina thought. But it couldn’t be. The Korean War? Uruguay had sold wool to the United States for soldiers’ uniforms, but what did that have to do with Paraguay?

  “The war of the Triple Alliance. It is very much alive for us. We have never healed.”

  You mean the Paraguayan War, Romina thought, and then she was bathed in shame. She taught this war to her students, of course, but as distant history, a war that ended over a century ago, in 1870, Uruguay had joined forces with Argentina and Brazil to invade Paraguay, and yes, there was devastation, the history books acknowledged this with generalized sentences, but still. That it would be very much alive. That Uruguay would still be seen through its prism. Paraguay was a much poorer country than Uruguay; did the people of Paraguay blame the war for this? And if so, were they right?

  “Of course, he’s a conservative one, my brother. Always over the top.”

  “Ah.”

  “And then, there is you.”

  Romina held her breath.

  “Delicious you.”

  “I am delicious?”

  “Yes.” Her tone had lifted now. “But fruit does not stay sweet forever.”

  “I’m going to rot?”

  “No. That is not what I mean. You might tire of me. And then? I have left my country, my family, and so?”

  “I could never tire of you.”
r />   “You have a woman now.”

  She looked away, embarrassed. “Yes.”

  “You’ve tired of her.”

  “That’s different. It was never like this, with her.” She stroked Diana’s thigh. “We started together a long time ago, I was young and in pain, more so than I knew. I was only taken for three nights—” Her throat closed up.

  Diana looked at her for a long while. “Nights, years. It does not matter. They can break us in an instant.” She put her hand on Romina. “But you survived.”

  Her phrasing was so careful, delicate in its simplicity, as if the indigenous Guaraní language flowed under the surface of all her words, all her thoughts. Hers was a different Spanish, a living Spanish of earth and river and ancient bones. It soothed Romina, and dazzled her, all at the same time, like a river the first time it surrounds you. “My brother was tortured for months. Imprisoned for twelve years. Everybody else suffered more than me.”

  “Suffering has no measure. There are no scales to weigh it. There is only sorrow after sorrow.”

  It was the first time anyone had done this for her pain, removed it from comparison, given it scope and space. Romina felt a burning ache inside her and thought she might dissolve into tears, but instead there was something else, a rising up, a verdant stalk of possibility. She saw her future anew, as a series of potential paths, and only one of those paths seemed lit by happiness. “Stay with me,” she said very quietly. “Please. Forever.”

  * * *

  *

  She told Malena in the plaza on her lunch break, where they sometimes met for empanadas while Romina was on summer break from teaching. It was how they’d first met, eating empanadas in the plaza, how many years ago was it, ten, almost ten, though it seemed much longer, more than a lifetime ago. The sun was bright, the bench bereft of shade. She didn’t look Malena in the eyes.

  When she was done, Malena stared at the pigeons and said nothing for a long time.

  When she finally spoke, it was the last thing Romina had expected to hear.

  “You never asked me what I did for the Prow.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “The extra money I brought in, so we could buy the house. Remember? Where do you think it came from?”

  Romina felt thrown by the sudden swerve into the past. She’d expected tears, hurt, perhaps pleas or shouting, but this she had not prepared for. “I have no idea, but listen—”

  “No, you listen. You don’t have any idea, because you never asked in all these years.” Malena’s face was shut tight, and she’d drawn back, a hunted animal, primed to attack or flee. “You’ve never wanted to know me.”

  This is Malena, Romina told herself, not a stranger, what on earth is she talking about—and yet nausea rose up in her, a kind of vertigo, and to steady herself she gripped the seat of the bench with both hands. “That’s not fair.”

  Malena made a sharp, barking sound. “Fair!”

  “Please don’t shout.”

  “Stay away from me,” Malena said, and she strode off before Romina could think how to answer.

  * * *

  *

  “No. Romina, no,” Flaca said, too loudly, forgetting for a moment that she’d called Romina from the butcher shop and a customer could walk in at any moment.

  “What else am I supposed to do?”

  “Stand by our friend, that’s what you could do.”

  “I’m trying to. That’s why I told her.”

  “You don’t know how fragile she’s been.”

  “You don’t have to tell me she’s fragile. I know, believe me.”

  “And you don’t give a shit?”

  “Flaca! What was I supposed to do?”

  “Not fuck another woman?” Flaca said, regretting the words as soon as they’d left her mouth. She couldn’t push Romina away, not if she wanted to be the bridge between her friends and help put things right again. She, Paz, and La Venus were all worried about Malena. She stayed locked in her room, even on the nights when it was La Venus’s turn to use it—and this was deeply unlike her, to disregard an agreement she’d made with a friend—and she only emerged to go to work or to the bathroom. She’d stopped bathing, stopped eating, only drank. Whiskey bottles multiplied on the floor. It had to stop, but Flaca didn’t know what to do.

  “How dare you? How many times have you cheated on a woman? And taken forever to come clean!”

  “We’re not talking about me. And it’s not the same.”

  “Of course it’s not—you get your own special rules.”

  “Calm down, Ro—”

  “You’ve never been with anyone as long as I’ve been with Malena, so what do you know?”

  “I don’t cheat anymore.”

  “Who cares? You’ve done it before, and I haven’t.”

  “Fine. But this is different.”

  “Because?”

  “You’re everything to her. And she’s really struggling.”

  “So what am I supposed to do? Deny my truth? Hurt myself to keep from hurting her?”

  “No, but—I don’t know.” Flaca stared at the glass cases full of meat, red and tidy piles, cut by her own expert hands. Her head throbbed. Romina’s news tore at something deep inside her, the circle of friends that was, aside from this cluttered little shop, her most important life work. They were each other’s refuge. Each other’s everything. It seemed a deep betrayal—not the sex, but this abandoning of Malena in a time of need, Malena, who was theirs, who was part of the pact they’d made years ago, around a fire, under the lighthouse beam. “We’ve always put our friendships first. Before anything else. We’re each other’s family, remember?”

  “Malena would be the first to tell you that we don’t owe our families our lives. Not even our blood families. She’s always said that family doesn’t own us, we get to be free.”

  She had to try another approach. She made her voice as gentle as she could. Romina didn’t know, after all; she hadn’t seen Malena in this state. It had to be explained to her somehow. “Ro, querida, listen—”

  “No, wait, Pilota, you listen.”

  On hearing Pilota, her old nickname from the early days, Flaca’s voice caught in her throat.

  “What’s the point of living the way we have all these years, breaking everything, the rules, our parents’ hearts, our place in society, like it’s all so much crockery, only to slouch back now into some old idea of duty? Of how horrible it is to be a home-wrecker, or betray a marriage, or some bullshit like that? I don’t even have a marriage! There was never a contract to sign.” Romina took an audible, gulping breath and barreled on. “You used to call marriage contracts a duping of women, designed to keep them down. Remember that? You said all kinds of shit about how only women like us could be free. Yes, I know you were drunk as a sailor when you said it, but you still said it, Flaca. So if not even women like us can follow our hearts, if even cantoras have to chain themselves down, and if even people who’ve spent their whole lives sacrificing everything for the resistance can’t have a fucking taste of happiness when it finally comes their way, then what the hell kind of planet is this?”

  A pause.

  Flaca’s turn. Her mind raced. There were infinite possible responses to Romina’s words, enough to overload her mind. “I’m not asking you to be chained,” she finally said. “I’m just asking you to be Malena’s friend.”

  “I tried to be her friend.”

  “Keep trying. Please. You’re the one who knows her best, the one with the best chance of reaching her.”

  “Ha! Give me a break. She’s refusing to talk to me.”

  “That’s because you’re still with the Paraguayan.”

  “Fuck you, Flaca.”

  “Please calm down—”

  “You’re such a hypocrite.”

&nbs
p; “I know, I know, I’m a big slut. But Malena is family. And she needs us to stand with her—she needs—” What did she need? How to say it? What would pull Malena out of this hole? They’d been trying, she and Paz and La Venus, but nothing broke through.

  “I need to stand with me, Flaca. Don’t I ever have that right?”

  “Of course you do, it’s just—”

  “Then don’t ask me to give up Diana, ever again.”

  In the tense silence that followed, Flaca saw that the fight had been futile all along.

  * * *

  *

  Two weeks later—once Romina had begun working on Diana’s paperwork and making plans to find them an apartment, because she was finally doing it, finally moving out of her parents’ house, to be with her new love—Paz called to say, in a shaking voice, that Malena was gone. She had disappeared from their house, leaving most but not all of her clothes and books, her bed made as neatly as ever, and nobody, not her boss, not her friends, not her neighbors, had any idea where she was.

  8

  Broken Water

  IN HER LAST DAYS IN MONTEVIDEO, Malena couldn’t stop thinking of herself at fourteen—how she split in two, what split her, the wholeness before that—so ferociously that it seemed as if time itself had collapsed and dropped her into its rubble. Fourteen. A fiery girl, Malena on fire, that’s what she’d been at first, caught up in the spectacular illusion that the world lay open before her. So long ago now. Centuries ago, or so it felt. It was a lie that time healed all wounds. A vicious lie. Some cuts never seal right, and the best you can do is layer things over them—noise, days, love like a false skin—and turn your attention anywhere and everywhere else.

  She’d tried to escape it all these years. The pain, but also the brightness before it, which was even more cutting because it gave measure to the loss.

  How possible the world had felt. How clear. Fourteen, and before that, since the beginning of memory. At four years old she’d run on the beach and the wind had loved her hair; at eight, she’d sat on a park bench eating an ice cream cone and feeling alive in the most delicious animal way, marveling at the pigeons and the way she could kick her legs while the statue of some fancy man could not: he was large and male and important, everything she wasn’t, but she was the one who was alive and she would kick and kick because of it. At eleven she’d been shaken to tears by a sad book whose title she no longer recalled, only that there was a sick girl in it with big dreams and a tragic future. For days, she wept, remembering the book, and after that her own dreams came into focus: she’d become a doctor one day and discover the cure for cancer. Why not? She was good at math and ravenous for life. Her parents always seemed a bit afraid of her, of her wildness, which did not fit into their strict ideas of how a girl should be, but they approved of her goal of becoming a doctor, as long as she also became a goodwife. So she was happy, she was normal, she was whole.