“Many of us fell at the same time.”
“From where?”
“From the sky.”
“From an airplane.”
“How did you know?”
I kept my gaze over his head, at the bushes in the patio, which were perfectly still, there was no breeze. “Some stories have been told. Parts of stories.”
“About airplanes.”
“Yes.”
“And how we fell.”
“Yes.”
“Are these things still happening?”
“No. Not here.”
“In other places?”
“Who knows?”
“Do the stories scare you?”
“No. I don’t know.” The cigarette was gone, too fast, reduced to a stained filter I crushed in the ashtray and abandoned. The taste lingered bitterly in my mouth. I forced myself to look at him. He was staring at my parents’ wedding photograph on the bookshelf. His cheekbone jutted toward them like an arrow.
“Tell me about them.”
The room seemed suddenly deficient of air, a hostile place to breathe. “What about them?”
“Who are they?”
“My parents.”
He didn’t move and didn’t soften. “Yes. But who?”
“Their names?”
“Who.”
I wanted to shake him, shake the edge out of his voice, a new edge I didn’t want to understand. “They met at her cousin’s wedding. They’re both from Buenos Aires, although her family has land in the north.”
“And?”
“And … he was already an officer. She wanted to be an artist, a painter, but she had given it up by then.”
“Why?”
“Why did she give it up?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. I think her father forced her.”
“How?”
I tried to tell him the story, the version I had cobbled together from my mother’s furtive slips and sharp explosions, and he listened intently with his gaze still on the photograph. This young woman, the woman in question, this Luisa, grew up in a family that had owned cattle ranches for five generations, and in which there were two constants: rules, and money. These two entities were ubiquitous, unquestioned. From what I could gather, the father never raised his voice and never bent his will for anyone, and the mother was an elegant socialite who glittered on her good days and glowered on her bad days until, finally, when Luisa was nine, she left for Rome and never returned. Luisa grew up as a goodgirl, obediently Catholic, obediently quiet, with all her ruffles and smiles in place, though no one knew what churned and curdled under the surface. Then, when she was seventeen, she spent the summer with an uncle in Madrid, and in that summer, the summer of 1969, she found the nub of rebellion within her and made it unfurl. This was the period that fascinated and bewildered me, the brief version of my mother I could not comprehend, and longed to see. This version of my mother parted her hair in the middle, wore long peasant skirts, and in a single month discovered both marijuana and Salvador Dalí. She confessed all of this to me right before I graduated from high school, the only night she ever told the story, the two of us alone on my bed. She curled in close to me. She had had more wine than usual at dinner and I had had two glasses myself. My leg fell asleep beneath me but I did not dare stretch it out to relieve the numbness for fear that, if I did, Mamá might wake from her storytelling trance, interrupt herself, and leave to begin her nightly rituals. I did not want to move and shake the warm, fragile portal that had opened between us and through which my mother’s stories now poured. You may as well know, she said, you probably think you’re the only one who has had big dreams, that’s how it is when we’re young, we always think we’re the first to taste whatever it is we’re tasting. Well, you should have seen me, that summer in Madrid. She propped her elbow against my pillow, her legs tucked under her like a daydreaming girl, as if the intervening years had somehow fallen away in the comfort of this night and she were not a mother on her daughter’s bed, but a teenager spilling confessions to a friend. (On that night, I felt delicious hope that we’d stay like this now, mother and daughter, woman-friends, sharing secrets and delights. It seemed attainable. It was probably the wine.) In Madrid, she said, the marijuana had made her too paranoid for her liking, made her feel like a rapidly spinning steering wheel, and so she soon abandoned it. But the Dalí sank into her bones and lit them up: naked women with roses bleeding on their bellies, ants erupting from bare hands, heads peeled open like an orange—savage truths, relentless vision, the human mind turned inside out. She glutted herself on trips to the city’s museums, spending hours in front of a single work by Dalí or Picasso or Goya or Velázquez or Bosch. She was most moved by the famous paintings, the ones that drew throngs of tourists to gape and gaze and forget the time and place in which they stood. All that attention, across time, on a canvas painted by a single mortal man. One day, standing in front of The Garden of Earthly Delights, watching naked men and women fall in ceaseless anguish through the guts of a beaked monster in hell, she decided to become an artist. She would spend her life creating images on canvas, painting shapes and creatures into being that did not exist anywhere else, that would never have existed if it were not for her hands. When she returned to Buenos Aires, she had two notebooks full of sketches and a print of The Persistence of Memory, a painting she’d never seen with her own eyes since the yanquis had stolen it away from Spain long before. She bought herself paints, brushes, a palette, and a single enormous canvas. Once she had these items safely in her room, their presence irrefutable, she went to her father and said, I want to be an artist, I want to go to art school.
Perla, she said the night she recounted the tale, you have no idea how my hands shook as I was speaking.
Luisa’s father laughed, and then, when it was clear that she was serious, spat into a nearby rosebush. He walked away and the subject never arose again. Luisa went to her room and stared at the canvas, the paints, the notebooks full of summer sketches, evidence of the girl she had discovered oceans away from Argentina. She refused to eat for three days, but her father didn’t seem to notice. On the fourth day, she locked herself in her room, blended all her oils in chaotic swirls, and created the only painting of her life, an abstract monstrosity of black and brown and maroon rage, piled thick in sweeping strokes that loomed and protruded from the canvas, hideous and heavy as a storm. She burned her notebooks, gave away her brushes and palette, and slept under the shadow of her huge painting because there was nowhere else to put it. She vowed to escape her father’s house as soon as possible, and succeeded two years later, when she found a young Navy officer called Héctor who wished to marry her. By that time, the girl who had prowled the Museo del Prado was gone, her only vestige caught inside an awful painting that moved into the attic of their new house.
“He didn’t force her,” the guest said.
“What?”
“Your grandfather. All he did was spit.”
“But he forbade her.”
“Did he cut off her hands?”
I was startled by the question. No, I wanted to say, he didn’t cut off her hands because he didn’t have to, he had cut them off long before, with years of keeping all authority in his own palms, all the rules and all the power and all the answers emanating from him and no one else. And if you don’t understand that, if you’ve never been in such a family, then you can’t know the way the mind shackles itself and amputates its own limbs so adeptly that you never think to miss them, never think that you had anything so obscene as choice. But how could I say this to someone who perhaps had seen the cutting, the real cutting, of real hands or toes, and felt shackles of real metal against real skin? How did a rich girl’s thwarted desire to paint look through the eyes of a person like that? “No. He didn’t cut off her hands.”
“Then she could paint, she was free.”
“But she didn’t know she was free. She couldn’t possibly see that. Doesn’t that make her c
hained?”
He shrugged, unconvinced, and a veil seemed to fall over his face to make his expression indecipherable. I felt a need—and this surprised me—to defend my mother, to convince the guest that she had been the victim of a subtle yet brutal psychic force, that she was a complex woman with wounds and flaws and a tenacious will that could be bent toward good things, like the protection and enfolding of a little girl. I said none of this, held it close inside, suspecting that the guest would not want to hear it, or would not receive it in the manner it was meant. I myself was not sure how I meant it, or what I actually believed. My head hurt. He, too, seemed taxed by the conversation: his skin was dripping copiously, as if he’d just risen from a plunge.
“And he?” he asked, eyes on the photograph again, on the man beside the bride. His voice was low and throaty. “Who is he?”
I should have known the question was coming. “A confusion.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
I waited for the guest to recoil from me, as I’d already said before that my father was an officer and surely that is more than enough information for repulsion; I had seen that look before, in Gabriel’s face, in Romina for years at school and in so many other faces that I knew exactly how to shield myself, make the surface impenetrable, the face composed, the subject of conversation changed and the stain of wordless crimes buried and hidden. Though no matter what I did, I still felt my inner reaction keenly. Shame was ready at the base of me, would rise to choke me any moment at the slightest flinch of his body or mind. But he did not flinch or falter. He only looked at me with an open face and something in his eyes that I’d be tempted to call tenderness if it weren’t so ferocious and if tenderness, in this exchange, weren’t so absurd and impossible. Outside, it was raining; I hadn’t noticed until now. The window caught the weeping shivers of the sky. We stared at each other and listened to the sound of the rain.
“And you?” he said, very softly.
“Me?”
“Who are you?”
“About that, I don’t know anything at all.”
He tilted his head and held my gaze, and I had no way to comprehend it, no theory to encompass or articulate this hunger, this need to be with him, to lose or find myself in his dark, fathomless eyes.
“No,” he said. “No, no. You do.”
No one, on meeting my mother, Luisa, would imagine she had once been that earnest and ardent young woman, bent on becoming a painter, prowling the museums of Madrid. Even I, growing up in her presence, could not have imagined it. My mother the mystery, my mother the masked woman.
Once, only once, I saw my mother’s naked face. It was an accident, a slip, the result of a grave mistake. I was about to turn eight, and it was time for bed, but my heart was full of brightwarm colors because, the following day, Mamá was going to take me to the zoo for my birthday, and I would see the giraffes again with their slim legs and fluid jaws and serene eyes. Everybody thought the necks were what made giraffes special, but no, it was the eyes, I knew this because the last time I had met the gaze of my favorite giraffe our souls had spoken to each other for a long instant before the animal had turned back to her leaves. Eyes so far apart they seemed prepared to catch the whole world in their vision. Eyes that gave me the sense of floating high high above the ground. And now I was going to see them again and, since it was my birthday, perhaps Mamá would let me stay with the giraffes extra long. Ice cream cone first, then the giraffes—that, I realized as I brushed my teeth, was the best way to do it. And once I was finished with brushing my teeth and hair, eager to share my plan, I barreled to my mother’s bedroom door and opened it with so much haste that I forgot the strict rule of knocking first.
Mamá was removing her makeup. This was a solemn, private nightly routine, conducted on a cushioned seat in front of a table and mirror surrounded by eight little bulbs of light. I had glimpsed moments of it in the past, though in general the ritual took place behind closed doors, and bore a shroud of mystic secrecy. A mound of dirty cotton balls lay on the table, between the jewelry boxes and vials of perfume. Mamá was half-finished: one of her eyes wore a perfect mask of black lines and blue shadow, while the other was naked and sunken, bereft of paint, staring wearily at its own reflection.
“Mamá,” I said.
My mother did not move or blink, but the eye grew strangely hard. It continued to look at itself. I waited, wishing suddenly that I could erase my actions, unmake my entry, wait until the morning light to talk about the zoo. After a long moment, Mamá’s reflection stared at me without smiling.
“What do you want from me?”
She said this in a voice I had never heard before, the voice someone might use toward a stranger who is not to be trusted. The mirror reflected a single naked eye, cold, aggrieved, and utterly foreign.
“I should have knocked,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Stupid girl. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
I hovered. I could not imagine what else my mother might be talking about. I tried to think of what else I’d done wrong that day, aside from the transgression of bursting through this door, but nothing came to mind. It had been an ordinary Friday. I had done all my homework and helped set the table for dinner. It must be something else, I thought, something much larger, a failing that transcends time and defies correction. Defining it seemed like a Herculean task—big and impossible and essential to survival; I could not face it. I felt so small.
I heard her sigh, long and slow. I stayed, frozen, until finally, to my relief, Mamá spoke again. “You know what?”
“What?” I said.
“I wasn’t made to be a mother.” She said this in a tone at once resigned and vaguely ennobled by her own sorrow. “I often think you shouldn’t have come.” The naked eye gazed at the reflection of itself, intently, as if searching for something hidden. All I could think of was the painting in the attic, the thick strokes of black and violet, threatening to leap into the room.
Then she looked at me, through the mirror, and her gaze was so raw I wished I could look away. “Perla. Let’s forget this.” She spoke very quietly. “Go to bed and let’s pretend this never happened.”
I retreated to my room without a word.
That night, I dreamed of doors and doors and doors.
The next morning, I felt afraid to see my mother, but when I came downstairs for breakfast I found her with her mask whole again, immaculately applied: powder, lipstick, bright smile. She served me toast and milk and glanced at her watch. “Ready?”
I nodded.
“Well then, let’s get going,” she said. Her face was warm and steady, so much so that I briefly wondered whether I’d invented the encounter of the previous night. I might have come to believe this if it had not been for the way her gaze lingered on me, searching for confirmation of a pact that would never be spoken. A pact that encircled me in that moment and that I knew I would not betray. She would wear her mask and I would wear mine and as long as neither of us let them drop, everything would be all right, she needed this from me so I had to help her, and I needed it too, didn’t I? It lasted only a few seconds, the lingering gaze, and then she nodded in what seemed like satisfaction. “Eat your toast, Perlita.”
I had no appetite, but I ate anyway, and even managed a false smile.
At the zoo, I received my ice cream cone and my hour with the giraffes and I licked the cold vanilla slowly and most carefully as I gazed and gazed in silence at the beasts before me, with their famous necks and graceful jaws, but no matter what I did, no matter how long I stood there, no matter how I shouted with my mind, this time I could not make them meet my eyes.
It rains. Small drops torn from the body of a cloud announce their fall in wails and moans. He hears their trajectories through the air outside, gray, blue, violet, streaking the inner lining of time’s cloak. They are pure color, pure substance, pure sound. Only rain is pure in this strange world, collapsing towa
rd the thirsty chaos of the earth.
She is in the kitchen, making lunch. She will bring him more water soon. He is hungry for it, ready to grind it wetly between his teeth, to feel it enter him and give him substance, fortify his presence and veracity with its whisper through his insides, you belong here, wshhhh, this world is yours as well—but he won’t ask for it, she’s coming, he knows she’s thinking of it. It is easier every hour to sense the rhythms of her mind. Her mind is a wary forest creature, a deer perhaps, elegant, light-footed, expert at disappearing into dark folds of foliage at the slightest rustle of alarm. Not a simple creature to approach, let alone touch. If he is to touch her mind, he must be patient. He must circle and circle and also be immensely still. Above all, he must not let her see what rises up in him when he thinks of the two in the photograph, the other denizens of this house—the sour flood that makes him want to howl. He will not shake, he will not howl, he does not want to scare her and in any case he needs to bear the truths that have filled this house and taken possession of the girl. Because he hungers for the truth, however poisonous the draught of it. Without the truth he cannot truly know the girl. And you, Gloria, I do this for you: if I should ever find you, if I can hope against all hope that you might come here again, one day, one night, appear as I appeared with seaweed in your hair, or earthworms or bullets or flames—if I should find you in the curved road of the future that surely arches back into the past, and if we are unbroken enough to speak to each other or to meld as I did in the water, I know that you would reach into me for each follicle of knowledge of the girl, and I would give you everything, the nectar with the venom, the stars with the abyss, all the sights and scents and sounds of her that will quiver and break you, all the truth that I could gather, all the truth I could bear to imbibe.
And I would want to know your truths as well, the story of what happened to you after I disappeared. There are still so many questions.
He looks for Gloria’s face in the room, but this time cannot find it, cannot re-create it in its entirety against the backdrop of the wall. The room is too alive now, noisy with the breath of shelves, the hum of books, the howl of rain, the constant sound of clouded light careening through the air. And there is the pool he now inhabits, that holds his fluids warm around him; this also sings; his mind is full of the slosh and buzz and glitter of his own little sea that came from him and now sustains him, surrounds him, holds him in its malleable embrace. It pains him—Gloria, the lack of Gloria. He gathers his mind by force and tries to focus. She comes in glimpses. He can see her if he lets go of the need for a coherent whole. Fractured Gloria, scattered shards, bits of Gloria protruding from the objects in the room. Gloria’s eye, lashes and all, blinking on the tip of a pencil in a jar. Gloria’s hair draped over the back of a chair, a pinewood slatted back that holds the tresses up like hallowed things. Her nose protruding from the spine of a novel. Her neck arched in the minuscule motions of the curtain, lithe and supple, ready for a kiss. Gloria’s breath in the slow darkening of the day. Her thigh, without knee or hip to join to, thrown against the sofa in seduction, only there is no body to seduce him toward, no whole woman to laugh or arch or pull the skirt up and say come. Her sex appears only at night, in the shadows of the far corners, in many of them at once, the floor the sill the ceiling opening in the darkness to become her, Gloria, Gloria, damp and rich and potent. You are here, Gloria, and I accept each piece of you, I revel, I drink the sight, every single hair and toe a benediction. The eye watches, the neck turns, the hair quivers, the thigh awaits touch. He wants to tell the girl about Gloria’s presence, tell her how Gloria’s fragments haunt the room, but, as with everything, he battles vainly for the words. And anyway, the girl—though he loves her, though he hungers every moment for proximity—is not like him. She is alive. And the living may not understand; they may not find beauty in a broken woman flung across the house like shrapnel.
Perla Page 14
