Perla

by Carolina de Robertis

  Memories exhaust him. They have wrung him like a rag. He would rather shut them out, at least for a time. He is alone; the girl has not returned; even the turtle has slunk off to the kitchen. The room is dark, lit only by dull blades of light from streetlamps through the window.

  There is only one thing he wishes to remember, and that is Gloria’s face. It hurts him, the empty oval in his mind, surrounded by dark hair. Other parts of her are vivid and exquisitely illumined—her shoulder blades, the way they jutted that last night in sleep; her ankles, thick and solid, surprisingly so for her slight frame; her shoulders tense and compact that last time he saw her, tied to a chair; her long fingers on his knee in the evening; her fingers the first time she touched him, the night they met, at 2 a.m. in the bookstore when, like an idiot, he asked her for the time, because she was beautiful, to start a conversation, and she said, I don’t know, I’m not wearing a watch. She looked amused and glowed as her friends laughed at him, but she also brushed his wrist with her fingers, saying, You’re the one with a watch, why don’t you tell me? She looked up at him undaunted, waiting, as she would do so many times from that night on, and he longs to see but cannot see her face. It tilts blankly in his memory, a blur of erased flesh. She was small without being fragile, this he knows. She was bony and the bones of her cut into his mind, he wants their cutting, wants to be scarred by her protrusions, to carry their marks on this new skin. Most of all, he wants her face back, wants to recall her nose and eyes and jaw-slope in the fog behind his eyelids. If he can just see her face, he thinks, then perhaps he’ll have her back, at least a scrap of her, no matter what’s been done to her or what she has become, and then he won’t be alone in this dark house.

  He gathers all his strength and stares at the wall. He will conjure her face along its surface. The task is slow and arduous, but he is determined. It is coming. He will have this part of her back.

  He works for a long time, in absolute silence.

  Finally he has done it. Gloria’s face is there. The forehead is hazy and there is fog where ears should be but the rest of it has been composed against the bare wall. Gloria’s face, ceiling to floor. He could soar up into it, fly right up to the face, and lose himself there, open his head and press his naked mind against her lips, that’s what he longs to do but he stays still because he doesn’t want to lose the image. And so he concentrates. He stares unmoving at the wall, keeping his mind still, his mind a jar of splinters that must not shake, must not be jostled, every fractured shard of memory in its place. The face glows. The eyes are perfect. He holds the image of her eyes and they are wide and alert, his masterpiece of recall.

  Key in the door. He hears it turning. The girl is home.

  She enters and shuts the door behind her. She stands there for a moment, looking at him without turning on the light. He feels her gaze on him as he stares, intently, at the wall. He feels his body again, under her gaze—hands damp on the rug, the drip from his chin, bent knees. The light from the streetlamps mixes with the glow from Gloria’s face. He stays still, he has to, the life of Gloria’s face depends on him. The woman in the doorway walks toward the wall. She’s in his peripheral vision now, and Gloria’s mouth is large and voluptuous and opens slightly. He lets his gaze dart at the woman who has come.

  You’re still here, she says, with no trace of surprise.

  He looks at her and her mouth is also open, slightly, in a manner that makes his head roar because it is so much like Gloria’s—so very much like Gloria’s—and then the face on the wall is gone, leaving sudden clarity in its place. The room becomes a vortex of stars that shoot fast circles around him, closer, closer, threatening to cut into his heart. He wants to make a sound that is unbridled, a sonic flood that rises but stays trapped inside his throat.

  All he can say is, You.

  He stands up for the first time, knees shaking, and reaches out to her.

  The woman looks into his eyes and then she runs to the stairs and is gone.

  TWO

  7

  A Map of Her

  All night he has stayed up like this, eyes open and fixed on the empty wall. Now the knowledge is indelible, pressed into him, hard knowledge and his mind strains to form a new shape around it. He has recognized the girl.

  He is stunned, dazed. Questions swarm him—how can this be? How did he find her? How did she arrive into this place? Should he tell her who he is, and where she comes from?

  He longs to tell her. He cannot tell her. She cannot possibly be ready for such knowledge, having grown up in this house—and considering how she ran from him last night.

  He wants something he can never have. A map of her. All the inner routes and shores and glaciers. He wants to know her better than he ever knew himself. She has been so many girls—she was a thousand days old once, and then a thousand and one—and the girl she was each day can’t live again, can’t re-happen, for all that he would scour the world to find them. He pictures all the versions of her he can never know: girl too small to lift up her own head, girl the size to lift up to his shoulders, girl hide-and-seeking in a kitchen cupboard, girl the size of hopscotch and of ribbons in the pigtails and the wind in pigtails and the pigtails in the wind, the shine of sun on pigtails never to happen again, secret girl discovering storms in her body, clenched girl finding reasons to fight, sharp girl with her weapons, growing girl alone, growing girl accompanied for better or for worse. Then woman. Somewhere, somehow, woman, with thousands of girls inside her. You can’t go in there. It’s in the past. You can’t repeat the past even though he longs to, he longs to push at the river of time, force the current to run in the opposite direction, pushing upstream toward the girls that she has been. He could shout, he could explode out of his strange damp skin with his desire to see her childhood, to touch her delicate newborn limbs, to hold her when she was too small to walk, to brush her hair when she was too small for school, to send her off to school, to be there for her first step and first word and the first time she ever spelled out her own name. To recognize her name as something he himself had given, the gift of syllables in his mouth, in hers, in the mouths of the world, may this name become your home. Such intimacies, such ordinary joys, the only ones that mattered. He tries to plumb toward them with his mind, tries to seek the past and thrust his way toward it, it was stolen and he rages to have it back, but he cannot find his way, he has no map and time is cruel and does not care about his losses, not the loss of his body or his senses or his eyes or days or life or this, the loss of time with a girl before she became the woman who has stood before him, large and young, as large and young as he was when he disappeared.

  How beautiful she is. How very much she carries in her skin. How much of her there is to get to know; he has so much catching up to do, it seems a task that he’ll never fully accomplish. But he must try. There is no boundary left for him between knowing the girl and knowing himself. She is the road to his own heart, to what remains of it, to what survived undrowned. He wants to believe that the link between them has remained, indelible, coded in her blood as it whispered through her body, as it kept her vital and alive, spilling occasionally with the scrape of a knee or the seal of a childish promise best friends forever, I swear, she never guessing that her true origins lay ciphered in each drop. She learning how to climb a tree and fall and how to make promises and break them, and he not there to catch her, to believe her, to clean the wounds carefully with both hands. Ten minutes, he thinks, I want the whole of life with her but all I ask is to be transported to her childhood for ten minutes. He knows just how he would spend them: alone together at a riverbank, where he could watch her fingers dive into the dirt, memorize the contours of her face, listen to her words or laugh or silence.

  He closes his eyes and strains; it does not happen. He cannot return.

  He looks at all his losses—everything the water swallowed—and this is the least bearable. Time that can’t be spent with the small girl.

  But he should not be ungratef
ul. Because now he is with her, she is here in this home and he has a chance to get to know her as she is. He cannot let grief subsume him. He must wake up. The little girl is gone but he has precious moments now with the grown woman. He does not know what star or god or crook of fate he has to thank for his collision with her world, for this time they have together, but he rapidly thanks it. Whatever it is he came to do, he must still do it, for himself, for the girl, and for Gloria.

  Gloria. She came out of you, she lived, how did it happen? Did you survive as well? Where are you? Whether you lived or died she was taken from you, brought to this house. How you must have keened for her. But Gloria, she’s alive, I must tell you that she’s utterly alive, and also beautiful, more than I could ever have imagined. A creature with a mouth like yours.

  A mouth like yours, God help her.

  It is morning, swords of sun in him, he is ravenous.

  Because the morning that loomed over me appeared so harsh with light and breadth, and because the guest’s terrible You from the night before still burned at the center of my chest, I could not get out of bed for a long time. I thought of many things. I thought of the attic, hidden just above the innocuous ceiling. Once, when I was eight or nine years old, I went upstairs into the attic to look for costumes for a school play in the trunk that always stood against the wall, old and heavy like a pirate’s chest. I had seen that trunk up there before but never looked inside, and always pictured it full of pretty silks and pearls and gold medallions. I climbed the ladder to the attic alone for the first time. Dust idled in the single beam of sunlight from the window. The trunk was locked. I pulled at the ornate metal lip but it stayed locked. It was hot and stuffy and I shouldn’t be there, I hadn’t asked permission, I could get into trouble. My body flushed at the thought of trouble. Behind the trunk loomed the painting, the only one my mother had ever made, when she was seventeen: an enormous garish canvas gathering dust, its furious billows of black paint roiling over crushed mounds of dark purple and maroon. The billows seemed about to seethe from the huge canvas and drown me. I feared the painting, but I also longed to leap into it to search for Mamá, the inner storm of her that almost never broke her smooth exterior but had escaped her brush when she was young, and that still waited in the dark curls of the painting, potent, brooding, formless. The painting stood still and could not be plumbed and revealed no secrets. I thought of that Alice girl, the one who fell down the rabbit hole and tussled with a Queen of Hearts who wanted to cut off her head. How blind Alice must have felt while she was falling in, spinning, exhilarated, lost. And then, when she arrived: sight. Too much sight. Danger. There are worlds you long to enter and worlds you should not touch, and some worlds were both of these at once. Even so I stood in front of the painting for a long, long time. In fact, even now, as a grown woman, I couldn’t recall how I left the attic, how I ever broke the painting’s spell.

  Another time I went to a forbidden place: once, at Gabriel’s house, I took down his copy of Nunca más. He was in the shower, and I did it before I could stop myself or ask myself why. It was a thick red book, impossible to miss on any shelf. Of course I knew about it—everybody knew about Nunca más—but I’d never actually held it in my hands. I traced the cover’s worn edge with my fingers. NUNCA MÁS, it said, THE REPORT FROM THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON THE DISAPPEARED. The commission had been created by the president in 1983, when democracy returned, to find out what had happened to the missing. They gathered thousands of testimonies. This was their summary. When Romina and I were still friends, she referred to it as the Terrible Book, the one everyone had to read but no one could finish. Needless to say, Nunca más could not be found in my house.

  I opened Gabriel’s copy. I read until I heard the water turn off in the bathroom, roughly five minutes, after which I put the book back on the shelf, as if it had never been moved. I closed my eyes. I listened to Gabriel shuffle around behind the closed door, electric toothbrush, comb, cologne. In the pinkdark behind my eyelids I saw hooded bodies naked in a cell, a steel rod, spread legs, toes clenched against a bloody floor, an empty kitchen with the chairs overturned and then my father’s hands on our polished dining table and his feet marching into an office and his silhouette at my bedroom door at night, broad and strong and black, blocking out the light from the hall.

  Gabriel emerged from the bathroom, and I smelled the sweet peach of his soap and the sting of his cologne as he came up behind me and kissed me on the exposed nape of my neck and, when I leaned into him, his hands reached around to my breasts, easily, greedily, he was not, at that moment, thinking of hoods and rods and planes, though of course he knew all about these planes and rods and hoods, they ricocheted between us all the time and kept us adrift from each other, pushed by the storm, unable to find a common harbor. I meant to stop his caresses so as not to mix the place to which my mind had fallen with his touch, but my body had other plans: it wailed for him; it demanded force, demanded nipples to be twisted until they bled (though he would not go that far) and the fucking to be hard (though he still said and said my love) as though only this could exorcise the flesh-and-metal sounds that had erupted from the book. Once climax had swept over us, I clung to him and would not unwrap my limbs and would not tell him why.

  He never brought up the incident, for which I was deeply grateful. But on another night, not long after that, he said, “I wish I could leave you.”

  We were in bed, almost naked, and he said it with the tenderness of a love song.

  “Then you should.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, but sometimes I hate it.”

  “And other times?”

  “Other times I don’t care. All I want to do is be with you.”

  I burrowed close to his chest. It had been a hot day and he smelled of sweat and sun and cigarettes, his smell many times more palpable than his words.

  “In any case, I’ll wait for you.”

  “Wait? For what?” I stiffened defensively but did not rise, did not attempt to look into his face. Gabriel stroked my hair and failed to answer.

  I finally sat up. It was already eleven o’clock. I’d have to skip my shower if I was going to make it to class. And what a strange ritual that was, preparing to go out, the way emerging into the world and doing things that can be termed productive involves such small intimate rituals as the plucking of your eyebrows and the soaping of your thighs, the styling of your hair before the mirror, these rituals of looking at yourself without looking at yourself. This morning I was more likely to slip up, and look at my face as more than canvas for makeup and linger too long examining its slopes and features. I didn’t want to see my eyes, nor did I want to see the arc of cheekbones or the way my chin came to a surprising whittled point. Where did this all come from, how did it get shaped, this thing I have called mine? My face. Was it really mine? Only gods spring fully formed from foam or godly foreheads. My face had sources and on this day I didn’t dare to think about them. When I was growing up people would say You have your father’s face. They never said I looked like my mother—my mother with the blue eyes and light brown hair; it was my father’s dark weight I resembled, his coarse black Andalusian hair and thick eyebrows on a steep ledge above large and doleful eyes that, according to my uncle Joaquín, drew a lot of ladies in his day. Everything else was hard-set as for a good military man, but the eyes held the weight of a formless lament, a vulnerable layer beyond reach.

  And what about the way my father sang? Drunk, in the dark, off-key and full of resonance, turning ballads from the bars into lullabies? For me. He sang for me. With naked emotion, which he rarely if ever exposed to anyone else. As if he loved his daughter so very much that he saved up his vulnerable layers all his life until he finally revealed them to her, and only to her, his light, his prize. As if he always knew that, when his pain became unbearable, the girl would be there, to hear him, to hold him, even to love him, because what human being
was not beautiful when seen at such close hand? When seen through the eyes of a daughter? And that even in the face of the worst horrors she would never let him go. Because she was good, because she was his, because there was nowhere else that she could possibly belong.

  As I rose and changed my clothes, I couldn’t stop thinking about him, Héctor, the man whom I had always called Papá, his stern face and gentle hands and scotch-scented breath and the sound of him singing in the dark.