Perla (14 page)

The geraniums died of thirst. They turned brown and brittle and withered in their pots. You could not rest your gaze in the house without seeing the corpses of neglected geraniums unless you looked to the ceiling, steadfastly ignoring the sphere in which people move back and forth to inhabit their everyday lives. Because in that sphere, in the everyday sphere, the bright mobs of flowers had turned to dark mobs of putrefaction that crowded the vision so thickly and filled the nose with such a ripe, sharp odor that they created the illusion of also reaching other senses: your mouth could taste the decay, your skin crawled with the sensation of a hundred crumbled flowers, your ears were privy to the dying cries of potted plants that echoed through the air in fine high voices long after their demise. We were choked and crowded out by the geraniums’ deaths. We were stranded, three lone humans in the botanical graveyard our home had become—a graveyard without graves, since no one bothered to clean anything up. The pots remained in place all over the house, offering up their stems like gnarled thin fingers reaching out of dirt. In an act of denial so prodigious it bordered on a marvel, my mother swung from tending the geraniums like children to ignoring them completely, as though she could make them cease to exist by barricading her own mind. She went about her days as if the flowers were invisible to her. She left them to die. My father seemed to notice nothing; his gaze was always reaching toward something just behind the walls. At times, I
wondered whether I was insane, hallucinating dead plants that no one else seemed willing or able to see, while my parents lived God knew where, in some other house that occupied the same physical space but adhered to different rules of reality, impossible to penetrate.

After three weeks, I couldn’t stand it any longer and I finally began to clear the flowerpots myself, filling garbage bags with broken blooms, stacking empty pots and plant stands along the edge of the patio. I filled thirteen garbage bags with dirt and plant remains. I stood among them on the patio and stared and stared at the bulging black bags and pots still laced with earth. I wanted to haul the bags up the stairs and spill their contents on my parents’ bed so that dirt and broken roots seeped into their clean linens. I wanted to smash the flowerpots against the patio and use the shards as knives with which to cut my parents open, and myself as well, peeling back the skin as if the truth of who we were could be so easily laid bare.

There was so much to lay bare, so much hidden. Behind the locked door to the study, in the flowerpots, and in the stiff and bitter smile my mother wore like armor. The Hidden loomed among us, impossible to shrug off or deny. It claimed all three of us as its creatures. It thickened our nights and drained the color from our days. I could barely stand to be in a room with both my parents. Even the smallest pleasantry seemed to throb with hostile undertones. My mother never said anything disparaging to my father—at least not in front of me—but she looked at him differently now, with an expression of vexed pity, as if he had crumbled in her esteem. She had married a man with a clean uniform and clean hands, a man of righteous actions and sure footing, and now that man was in danger of becoming something else, something unacceptable, neither righteous nor sure.

On some nights, dinnertime would arrive and Mamá would not be home. She neither called nor left a note informing us of her whereabouts. On those nights, I cooked pasta and heated a jar of tomato sauce, which Papá and I would eat at the table without talking. I never found out where my mother spent that time, though I imagined her
wandering through her favorite boutiques, perhaps in search of outer manifestations of an inner wilderness, rubbing skirts between her fingers, stroking shoes, never purchasing a thing. One night she arrived home while we were still at the table. My father and I both looked up, forks in midair, at the sound of her key in the door. Her footsteps approached the dining room, stopping at the threshold. I turned to greet her but she didn’t look at me; she was staring at the back of my father’s head, which had not turned. He had resumed eating as though nothing had happened. Somehow, it seemed that anything I might say would only make the situation more awkward, so I faced my plate again. For a minute, the only sound was my father’s fork against his plate.

“Who cooked?” she asked, surprise in her voice. As if she never would have imagined that we’d eat without her.

“I did,” I said.

She sighed. It was a protracted sigh, almost melodic, almost ennobled. I thought she’d walk away then, but she didn’t. My appetite was gone, so I rose and took my plate to the kitchen. When I returned, she was still there, staring at my father’s back with an indecipherable expression on her face. I wanted to slap her. I wanted to shake him. The scene seemed at once tense and ridiculous. But whatever it actually was, I was not part of it; I left the room and they remained immobile, as though my exit were entirely inconsequential.

I started to wonder whether my parents were headed toward divorce. Part of me wished they were, if divorce could ease this freighted atmosphere. I was seven months away from starting at the university and I tried to imagine what my life would be like when classes began, whether I would still live in this house, and if so with which parent. It would be a new life, more fully mine, or so I dared to hope. Wherever I lived, and whatever became of my parents’ marriage, I would have something of my own, a course of study that would take me down paths they could not enter. And what path would I take? The plan, not devised by me, had always been to study medicine.

But now I felt no interest in it, even chafed at the thought, as if it were a drab coat tailored for a very different body. I wanted to be excited by my studies; I wanted them to make the world more real to me, or make me more real to the world. The practical approach, which many of my peers took, involved making decisions based on sensible, orderly long-term plans. I could not see so many years ahead with the months in front of me so hazy and uncertain. Later, the professional trappings would come into focus, but when I first decided, I could think only of what studying the mind could open for me, a direct route into everything that dwelled inside me, and around me, unspoken, unspeakable.

I didn’t tell my parents about this plan, knowing they would disapprove, and they were too distracted to ask. I tried to imagine living alone with my mother or my father. I could not imagine living without Papá, knowing that he was alone, especially if he lost the house and no longer had his study into which to disappear. All those long nights alone in his study. I wondered how many hours he was spending in there, what thoughts went through his mind, whether he turned on all the lights or kept the room dim, whether he paced back and forth or lay on the floor or sat in his chair with his eyes closed.

One night, I dreamed my father and I were in an airplane over the sea, and the hatch opened and he turned to me and said
Shall we?
and then he smiled and pointed at a naked man on his hands and knees at the hatch, grabbed his hair and pulled his head back but the man had no face, it was an empty face. The sky whipped in and I could hear the distant sound of bleating donkeys. My father pushed the head back down and pulled it up with a face now, a girl’s face, my face, with donkey teeth and donkey ears and my own terrified eyes, and the girl looked up at me as wisps of hair escaped my father’s fist and writhed in the wind and she bleated and bleated and said
go on, push
, and Papá said
Perla, hurry up, the pilot has lost his way home
.

I woke in the dark and lay still for an hour, feeling the warm blankets, the pace of my breath, the air that hung still because it was not
(was not) at the open hatch of a moving plane. I saw myself packing a hasty bag and running away into the night, leaving home and father and future university studies for the life of a vagrant, starved, vulnerable, free of conscience. I saw myself going to school tomorrow and denouncing my father to my class, my friends, reporters, Amelia’s parents,
I am so sorry, I was just a baby, please forgive
, tears and rage and a family torn apart. I saw myself going downstairs to look for my father in his study, in search of truth, in search of understanding, in search of the man whose heart was full of things to show his daughter: love for her, suffering, perhaps even remorse.

I could not bear to do any of those things, that night. But the following night I got out of bed, went to the study, and put my ear to the closed door. I heard only silence. I did this every night for four nights, then slunk away and went to bed and tried to sleep. On the fifth night, I knocked.

“Papá?”

Silence. Then steps. To my surprise, the door opened.

I entered the wood-paneled room. It was lit by a single desk lamp, which illuminated a small sphere around it. My father had already sat back down in his chair behind the desk. His jaw was sternly set. I stood in the middle of the room for a while, searching for something to say. Nothing came out. I was not sure what I had come for, whether I aimed to reassure him or confront him or somehow push unspoken burdens off my shoulders, out of my body, into his hands. Whether to magically absolve or to accuse. I settled down on the floor, not too close to him, not facing him, not wanting him to balk at too much proximity. I heard him pour, lift his glass, drink, set it back down. Enough time went by that I thought he’d forgotten my presence. I almost started to drift to sleep, and then he said, as if picking up the thread of an ongoing conversation, “It was war. It was a just war.”

He was silent for a long time. I didn’t move.

“So it brings bad memories. Show me the war that doesn’t bring bad memories. Hah? Just try it, you can’t, there isn’t one. That’s war
for you. Look,
hija
, even the church said it was just. God’s work, they said. Separating wheat from chaff. The subversives, you know, they didn’t believe in God.”

He went silent, as if waiting for a response, but I said nothing.

“Want a drink?”

I shook my head.

He poured himself another glass. When he spoke again, he sounded more at ease. He was quite drunk. “We were the ones restoring order. For years and years this country had no order. You have no idea what a shithole this country was before. It needed to be saved, and people knew it, they even asked for it. Now they criticize. Well, you know what—fuck them. They talk about the suffering of the prisoners, but what about our suffering? What about our sacrifice? Fucking bastards, the lot of them.”

He leaned back in his chair, away from the low sphere of light, his back approaching the wall of plaques behind him. I stayed very still, just like when I was a little girl and he would come into my bedroom late at night to stroke my hair and turn a bar song into a lullaby, with a voice as gentle and meandering as lazy waves on a warm day, his hand like raw cotton along my scalp, and I always feared that if I moved too much he’d go away and I’d be in the dark without his songs. Somewhere in the far folds of the cosmos, there might be a script that held the right responses to his words, the way a father confessor intimates the next lines in a penitent’s dialogue with God. But I had no access to this. I was not a confessor and in any case my father had expressed no penitence. My voice seemed to have vanished from my throat.

“I just did my job,” my father said. “I carried out orders, like anybody else.”

Then he wept.

At first, I did not recognize the sound, hoarse and stifled as it was. The sobs did not come freely; they pushed under the surface of short, heavy breaths. He sounded like a man with a fresh bullet wound, desperate to keep quiet, battling to contain the pain. I did not look over
at him. I did not move. I could not have moved even if I’d wanted to: my legs had frozen in their curl beneath my body and there was no hope of running, not toward him, and not away. I did not cry. I felt as though I’d never be able to cry again, as though my father’s and Scilingo’s tears had robbed me of my own.

After a long time, the sounds abated. He blew his nose, once, twice. We sat in silence.

“Ay, Perlita,” he finally said. “Then there’s you. It was all worthwhile, because I have you.”

I strained to understand how these words connected to the rest of them. These words like tiny foreign bombs. Looking back, I should have known right then, except that something shut in me and left those words out in the cold.

He rose from his chair, abruptly, and turned off the light. I watched him walk past me, toward the door.

“Go to sleep,” he said, and then he was gone.

I stared into the blackness all around me, thick and dark like the inside of a great mouth, ready to gulp you into oblivion. The floor heaved like a bottom jaw. I sat for a long time, in the swirl of air and dark and whispers that were not to be deciphered, trying not to think too much, unable to stop thinking, my ears ringing with the sound of my father’s tears, and also with sounds that were absent from the room, the soft
whooosh
of naked bodies falling and falling and falling. I felt sick. I almost fell asleep there, on the floor, but I feared what I might dream if I stayed. When I finally went to bed, I dreamed, mercifully, of nothing.

The next day, he found me in the backyard. I was standing in front of the flowerpots, restacking them in higher towers, for no good reason.

“Perla,” he said, and was silent until I turned toward him. His face had changed from the night before, closed up, a storefront that’s been boarded and abandoned. “I want to make something clear.”

I waited.

“There are elements in this country that are not to be trusted. You’ve got to be careful. Especially now that you’ll be at the university soon, exposed to more kinds of people.”

I looked into his eyes and he looked away from me, at the rosebushes at the edge of the patio, the tall stacks of mosaic flowerpots, the plant stands that held nothing but air. He looked exhausted, his skin lined in that manner that seems to etch the story of a life without revealing any secrets.