“I’d have to hear your plea.”
“I don’t have one planned.”
“No matter. Spontaneous is best.” He took my hand and raised it to his lips. “Stay for a while. I’ll cook something, we’ll eat without putting on our clothes.”
I wanted to stay. I almost said yes, almost let myself sing into the notion, but then I thought of the guest, thirsty for his water, swimming in his memories, needing me, waiting, wondering when I would arrive.
“I can’t.” I pulled myself up. “I have to go.”
He stared at me, wounded.
“I’m sorry.”
“I can’t take much more of this, Perla.”
“Don’t give up on me,” I said, for the second time this week.
“You’re the one who’s leaving.” He searched my face. “Again.”
“It’s different this time. I just need to take care of something.”
“But you won’t tell me what.”
“Not yet. I’ll call you soon and I’ll explain.” I stroked his chest, slowly, lingering among the wiry curls. “I promise. I’ll call you very soon.”
When I left, he was still on the floor, watching me with bewildered eyes.
10
Open
I don’t have much time left to tell this story, judging from the pain that just rushed through me—the most incredible sensation, like being gripped in the fervent fist of God.
As I said before and cannot say enough times, this is my way of speaking to the heart of things, curving around it, in the thrall of its gravitational pull. And now we’re almost there, almost at the core.
Let me tell you about the night that cut me open.
I had gone to Uruguay with Gabriel. It was ten days before the wet man arrived. First, we went to Gabriel’s family cottage on the beach, after which we planned to spend some days in Montevideo with his parents. For a long time I had attempted to put off meeting his parents, as I knew that they had not been pleased to learn their son was dating a girl with a family like mine. But Gabriel had been talking for years about the little house in Piriápolis, on the very beach where his parents had first met, where we could relax together in a place of calm and beauty. And your parents won’t mind that you’re staying overnight with someone you’re not married to? He smiled at that. Oh Perla, he said, they’re not that kind of parents. You’ll like them, really, and they’ll like you, they’ve had plenty of time to get used to the idea of, well, of you, and once they meet you they’ll see who you are instead of just where you come from.
I finally relented. The idea appealed to my hunger for adventure, and in any case, the summer was ripe, the millennium fresh and young and spreading itself before us like a dare. Even the lie to my parents wasn’t hard; my friend Marisol was more than glad to provide an alibi, and even Mamá, who thought I had a new romantic interest in the form of Bruno, a physics student whose father was a doctor—when my imagination faltered all my invented dates were sons of doctors—accepted the story without question.
During the whole ferry ride across the wide Río de la Plata, as I watched the water rush below us, smooth and thick and silty, I thought of my parents, back at home, believing the lie. I had never crossed a border without them. I was drunk on the liquor of transgression, its hot thrill of guilt and power, the promise of standing at the helm of my own life. We landed in Montevideo and immediately boarded a bus to Piriápolis. The bus ride took us out of the city to the countryside, with its gentle hillocks and copious green. I leaned in to Gabriel as if to sleep, but could not relinquish wakefulness. The road was too open, my lust too large, the pop songs on the driver’s radio too buoyant. Mine, I thought, this road is mine, I am a grown woman on the road with my lover and all of this—these moments, this body, the rattle of the bus—all of it is mine. I could almost sink into the delicious illusion of being free, able to become any woman I wanted. I lay in Gabriel’s arms and watched Uruguayan fields ebb past, tranquil, lush, beckoning.
We arrived at the cottage and immediately began having sex on the living room floor, the kitchen counter, and finally the bed. The freedom of an entire night together, with no subway ride home, made me delirious with lust, I couldn’t stop. Dusk fell and wrapped us in hot summer darkness. I growled and screamed without concern for neighbors. At one point, Gabriel laughed at my ferocity, which made me laugh, and then neither of us could stop.
“What are you laughing at?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“Me neither.”
“Ay, Perla,” he said, still laughing. I took that opportunity to kiss his chest, stomach, the bliss of his hip bone, my hand already on his sex.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait. Maybe we should go to the beach.”
“Why?”
“It’s beautiful at night. You’ll love it.”
“Not yet. I’m not done with you.”
“We can come right back.”
“I don’t want to wash you off me.”
“Who says you have to?”
“I’m not going to the beach smelling like this.”
“You smell delicious.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Want me to prove it?”
Before I could answer he sprang up, wrestled me onto my back, and pinned my arms above my head in a single gesture.
“I surrender,” I called out.
And I did.
We lost track of time. The night held us in its velvet folds.
“Now I can’t let you outside.”
“Why not?”
“You smell so good that all the men will want you.”
“Gabriel.”
“They won’t even know what hit them but what hit them is the sex and come and musky sweat all over you.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’ll have to beat them off with driftwood.”
“Oh come on.”
“Is that an order?”
I laughed.
“Well, in that case—”
“Gabo—”
It was two in the morning when we finally went outside. The Río de la Plata glimmered under a broken moon. The waves announced themselves over and over, shhh, shhh, shhhhhhh. Lovers and families strolled the shore in little clusters, murmuring, laughing, drinking mate. I saw several clusters of young Uruguayan hippies, with their uncombed hair and marijuana smiles and baskets of fresh-baked goods and trinkets they sold on the beach to fund their continued wanderings. They were my age, or younger; they seemed full of ease, too relaxed to care about their hair or future. I had never been like them, never had a friend like them, could not imagine their inner worlds. While in the past I might have mocked their clothes or lazy stances, tonight I felt a stab of envy. They seemed free. All the denizens of this little beach town seemed free. It could have been the lovemaking, still making me feel as though my bones were made of nectar, or perhaps the long day of travel, but I had the strange sensation of having entered an alternative plane, an enchanted realm of sex and calm and possibility. My family had often vacationed in Uruguay over the years, but only in Punta del Este, with its crowds of expensive bikinis and high-rises crushed up against each other. In Punta del Este, even the ocean seemed carefully groomed. Here the waves were just themselves, loose-maned, unabashed, mixing easily with the sand.
We walked. I walked arm in arm with Gabriel, cradling my weight against his body. We took off our shoes and walked toward the waves and when the water swallowed our feet like dark wet silk, I laughed.
“It’s wonderful here,” I said.
“I thought you’d like it.”
“We should come back.”
“We’ll bring our children.”
I laughed again.
“What’s so funny?”
“What children?”
“You can’t imagine it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
He splashed me with his foot. “Then what are you saying?”
He said it lightly, but I heard the edge
in his voice. We had never talked about children before, not directly, though I had often wondered—late at night, naked, drifting in and out of sleep beside Gabriel—how a little boy or girl sprung from the two of us might look, how he or she might run or shout or laugh in a home we all shared, somewhere in the city, always in the city, an apartment where the child would fall asleep each night to lullabies shot through with the constant murmur of Buenos Aires. Surely that was what I wanted for my future, even if it meant long-avoided meetings, a double life exposed, a war with my parents that could end in my being cut from them like an amputated limb. I could have a life that contained Gabriel or a life that contained my parents, but I could not imagine having both. And so the thoughts of children, like all thoughts of the further future, stayed caught in the dim borderland between sleep and consciousness, never spoken. “Nothing.”
“You don’t want to have kids with me.” He sounded genuinely hurt.
“That’s not true.”
“It’s because of your parents, isn’t it?”
I was quiet for a few steps. A low wave stroked our feet and then retreated.
“When are you going to live your own life?”
“I am living it.”
“But in their shadow.”
“Are you calling me a coward?”
“Do you feel like a coward?”
The waves, the waves, they were at my ankles, foaming and awake. “Sometimes.”
“Let me meet them.”
“No.”
“You’re about to meet my parents, but I can’t meet yours.”
“If you met them you couldn’t stand them.”
“Can you?”
I almost let it roll past me, it was such a beautiful night, but he had stopped walking and examined me with a gravity that bordered on a challenge. “Please. Try to understand. They’re my parents.”
His gaze softened and turned tender. “Maybe they’re not.”
“What?”
“Maybe they stole you.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t move.
“It’s been on my mind,” he said. “I’ve been turning it over. Haven’t you ever wondered?”
“No,” I said, and it was true. I hadn’t. Or, more accurately, I had, but the wondering barely left an imprint on my conscious memory, it had been as rapid as a blink, shut-open-shut, fading into oblivion every time.
“Why not?”
“Why would I?”
“Well,” he said, and I could have slaughtered him for the pedantic tone, “most of the abducted children were taken in by members of the regime. And from what you’ve told me about your father—”
“Shut up. I haven’t told you anything about him.”
Very gently, he said, “That’s exactly my point.”
I didn’t answer.
“You could find out, you know, at Las Abuelas’ office.”
I didn’t know what to say. I listened to the hostile whisper of the waves. Las Abuelas—the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo—were a group within the Madres who wore the same white headscarves but who searched not only for their disappeared children but for their grandchildren as well. Fighting, they claimed, for the return of stolen babies. Who now, in 2001, were not babies anymore, but young adults with their own lives and destinies.
Old women with grim faces that had nothing, nothing to do with me.
“How long have you been thinking this?”
He shrugged. “A while.”
“Have you talked to anyone about it?”
“No,” he said, then slowly added, “not really.”
“Who?”
“My mother. Just my mother, honestly.”
I walked away from him, into the water, cold around my calves. The night bellowed with stars. I wanted to climb into the sky and hurl myself into the black void between the constellations, where there was no air, no life, no mother in Montevideo preparing a dinner for a girl she thought was stolen, unbearable offerings heaped on the plates.
Gabriel was behind me now, hands on my shoulders. “Listen, Las Abuelas, they do blood tests. They can see whether your DNA matches any of the disappeared. You don’t have to think it’s true. It’s for anyone who’s unsure of their identity.”
“I’m not unsure,” I said, too loudly.
“There’s nothing to lose.”
“Stop it.”
“I could go with you.”
I whipped around to face him. “Are you listening?”
He stared at me. A wave wrapped its supple body around our calves, then ebbed away. I walked out of the water, picked up my shoes, and started back toward the cottage. He caught up with me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. Let’s just forget this.”
He put his arm around me, and I stiffened, but stopped walking. I could have hit and scratched and clawed him, but my body burned to lean against him so I did, against his subtle swells and hollows that still smelled of sex and in whose supple warmth I longed to lose myself.
“Let’s walk some more,” he said.
We traversed the boundary between dry and wet sand. The night sky vaulted above us, stung with stars, lulling me to forget my new dread of meeting Gabriel’s mother, the fantasies of escaping the dinner she was preparing at which I now felt I would be less of an honored guest and more of a hunted animal, that one, she’s a fake, the conversation a field of pleasantries riddled with hidden traps. And other images rose into my mind, that I fought to push away, like the memory of my first brush with Las Abuelas, walking with my mother past an exhibit in a shop window. She sped our pace, but still I glimpsed children’s drawings of shattered hearts and wailing mouths, and a banner reading IDENTITY IS A RIGHT, WE WANT THEM BACK WITH LIFE. Those old bags, my mother said, have nothing better to do than try to destroy other people’s families. Of course at that time her scorn and hurried gait did not make me suspect anything, why would it, when everything to do with the disappeared was subject to such treatment, this was no different and it meant nothing, did it, that look in my mother’s eyes as she looked back at the shop window. The look that Lot’s wife might have had just before salt replaced her flesh. Nothing, it meant nothing, damn Gabriel and his ideas, twisting everything, tangling the skeins of my mind when all I wanted was to enjoy a summer night on the beach. He held me gently as we walked; I wanted to tear his clothes off and shut him up with my mouth everywhere and then we could forget this, everything was fine, we were walking on a smooth shore, two lovers on a night walk, an ordinary idyll after all. Our feet moved in time. The ocean carried the moon in a thousand splinters. The rhythmic water soothed me, and I began to feel the first specks of calm.
Then he said, “I should tell you one more thing.”
A wave rushed up around our toes and ebbed away.
“I called them for you.”
“What? Who?”
“Las Abuelas. Perla, I worry about you.”
“Did you tell them my name?”
“Look, Perla, if your parents are really your parents, then there’s no ha—”
“Did you tell them my name?”
He hesitated, and I pulled away. He looked stunned, dazed. His voice was so quiet that it almost got lost in the waves.
“I did.”
Down the shore, a pile of black seaweed glistened just beyond the reach of the waves. It probably turned green in the daylight, but now it was impenetrably dark, slick, something that the sea had coughed up from bowels where humans can’t survive and shouldn’t ever go, the inner organs of a monster, exposed on the sand. I felt far from my legs, they were not mine, they could buckle and betray me. I saw my family broken, police at our door, our house suddenly crowded with old women in white headscarves reaching for me and railing aloud and tearing apart the furniture but why would I think this if I did not have doubts Perla I thought Perla I shouted with my silent aching mind could it be that you have doubts?
I walked away.
“Perla—”
I k
ept walking. He followed, chased me, threw his arms out to stop me.
“Leave me alone.”
“Please don’t shout.”
“Fuck you, Gabo.”
“Look, if you don’t want—”
“I don’t want you! What I don’t want is you, you fucking prick, not your babies or phone calls or arrogant fucking speeches!”
We stared at each other, both breathing hard. An older couple slowed to stare at us.
“We can fix this,” he said.
I broke into a run.
I didn’t know that I was running until I heard him call my name, once, and then a second time, already farther away. I ran to the cottage and picked up my purse and suitcase with whatever was still in it, left the rest behind and ran to the street, past homes where Uruguayans drank beer or mate on their patios, looking comfortable and happy and incapable of understanding why on earth a young woman would rush down the street on a lovely night like this with her suitcase buckles only half-secured, back out to the main road where the bus from the capital had let us off. I stood at the drop-off spot, next to a family that was waiting for the bus, and I was grateful that they didn’t try to talk to me. I stared down the bare two-lane highway, surrounded by low fields. Such calm, temperate land. Nothing to worry about, nothing to hide, the Uruguayan fields seemed to say. In that instant, I hated them for their serenity. I imagined Gabriel running up to find me here, grabbing my shoulders with both hands, don’t go, we can fix this, redolent of sex, my sex, trying to draw me to the cottage. And part of me even then longed for him to make it to my side before the bus arrived so he could persuade me back to the little beach house, back in time, to the sumptuous innocence of who we were when we arrived here just eight hours ago, and after we’d made the sun rise again with the sheer force of our pleasure he’d say I’m sorry, you’re right, it was all a big mistake, and we’d laugh at the absurd theories he and his mother had concocted, she’s a good woman, my mother, but she’s watched The Official Story one too many times. Theories that the morning sun would dispel like phantom shadows. But the bus came and Gabriel did not and some returns are impossible. Through a scratched and dirty window pane I watched the dark hills pass and gradually turn into the outskirts of the city, of Montevideo, with its flat-roofed houses that told nothing of the dreams being dreamed inside their walls. A city I had seen only through moving windows. Three hours from Buenos Aires, right across the river, and yet a mystery. Somewhere in the city was the house where Gabriel had grown up, where he would arrive alone in a few days with who knew what excuse for my absence, Sorry, Mamá, she ran away in the middle of the night, embarrassed and abandoned, his mother serving him more bread in quiet triumph, Just as well, forget about her, you’ll find a better girl. I stared out at Montevideo and marveled at how little I knew of the world beyond my home, for all my dutiful studies of classroom history. Even as close as here, in Uruguay, in this capital across the water, songs surely lurked at every corner—ballads, arias, dirges, tangos, chants, laments—and rippled through the unknown streets. Uruguay also had its secret wounds and stains. I wondered how they haunted the city. I wondered how my skin might feel if I remained here, pretending I could trade one set of wounds for another. I would disembark from the bus and simply wander without stopping until I lost my sense of direction, my foothold, my memories, my name. A blank slate of a woman, roaming the Montevideo streets, she lost her shoes, she lost herself, have you seen her, the wild hair, the look on her face? Will she ever stumble on her lost self again? And if she does, will she wear it or deem it torn beyond repair? But I did not disembark. Instead, I caught the 6:56 a.m. ferry home across the Río de la Plata. Wan light stroked the water the whole way.
Perla Page 18
