Perla (20 page)

The doorbell rang and startled me out of the long gauzy tumult of my thoughts. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and there was no one I would open the door to, no one I wanted to see or was willing to let into this world. I decided to ignore it, pretend I wasn’t home, let the person go away of his own accord. The bell rang again. The guest cocked his head and looked at me with wide eyes.

I heard a key turn in the front door.

It was Thursday. Carolina came on Thursdays, to clean the house.
She always rang first but she had a key. I ran to the foyer. Carolina had begun to crack the door open, and already her face was crunching with confusion at the smell.

“
Hola
, Carolina.”

“Perla, what—”

“I’m sorry, I can’t let you in.”

She looked offended. She was my elder. She had been coming into this house for years. “What?”

“It’s not a good time.”

“But I promised your parents—”

“I know, not today. Not until they come back.”

She sniffed the air, as if to corroborate her first reaction. “Perla, what’s going on?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“It smells like something’s rotten.”

“Exactly. It’s my problem, for me to clean up.”

“I could help.”

“No.”

“Did you spill something? Take home a beached whale?”

Something in between
. I said nothing.

Carolina stared at me as though I’d grown into a strange beast, feral, roaming past the edges of acceptable behavior. She tried another tactic. “Your parents have already paid me.”

“They don’t have to know. I’ll never tell them.”

She folded her arms and stared at me.

“Just take the day off.”

She didn’t move, but she was listening.

“Please.”

“And what shall I tell your parents when they come back?”

That’s when I finally realized, with the alarm of a person waking from a reverie who finally sees the obvious, that they were returning in three days. “Nothing.”

Carolina pursed her lips.

“Everything will be back to normal,” I said, with a confidence I did not remotely feel.

Carolina sighed in surrender, and walked back to the door. I was about to close it when she turned around to face me. “Perlita, what has happened to you?”

I smiled weakly and closed the door.

As I stood listening to her steps down the stone path, the question rang on in my head.

9
El Grito Sagrado

I
awoke on the sofa, in the pale early morning. I had fallen asleep downstairs again, but I had not brought down a blanket or pillow because I’d told myself that I was just resting my eyes, that any moment I’d go upstairs to bed, that I was not camping in the living room out of a deep urge to stay close to the guest. Lying to myself, as always. How very many lies.

Darkness pushed up against the bottom of my mind, rising from my rib cage, threatening to expand and consume me. My whole body thrashed and railed against what I knew, what I fought to deny.

You can’t win this
.

I can’t let it in.

You have to
.

It’ll destroy me.

So will the lies
.

A dog barked, outside on the street, a pained and plaintive sound. Outside, the rain had abated, though the sky was still a delicate gray, as if wrapped in thin and somber silk. The rosebushes in the yard glittered in the glory of their dampness, all leaf and thorn, devoid of blossoms. The guest lay in the pool with his eyes closed. He looked peaceful, almost childlike, in his sleep.

I knew then that I couldn’t hide anymore. Not because I didn’t want to, but because there was no room left, no corner dry enough in this house.

I stood up, and to my own surprise my feet were firm and steady. In that moment, I began to say goodbye.

The memory that comes to him begins with beauty, it was a beautiful day: blue skies, loud streets, a victory for Argentina. The World Cup had come to Buenos Aires, it was 1978, the whole world had turned its eyes to them, and they had won. He felt an electric flush of vindication, he couldn’t help himself; he certainly had his skepticism of nationalistic fervor, but still—the world was watching, they stood at the zenith of the world, and even if he balked inside at patriotism in these turbid times he could not deny, could never deny, his great passion for soccer. He had watched the game with his whole body taut, leaning forward from the chair, his legs thrilling with each flex and run and glorious kick. His head felt the thump of the ball, the shouts of the crowd, the hair slick with sweat and wind and motion, as though he himself were on that field writing his nation’s name into the books of history. He cheered and groaned and tensed along with all his fellow countrymen in the stands and also home in front of television sets, like him, separated by walls of plaster and ideas but united, for today, in the throbbing nexus of the game, and when they won his fists shot up, his body leaped, his lungs were bellows pressing out the orgiastic
GOOOOL
that shook his body and the city and the world, the whole damn amazed circumference of the world, and now, an hour later, the television still roared. The street outside his open window roared as well, rife with sunshine and throngs and blue and white flags, honking cars, radios, chanting,
ganaa-mos, ganaa-mos, we won, we won, we won
. On the television, more crowds, even thicker crowds, and you could see the wide mouths and the fists high in the air, and General Videla among uniforms, shaking hands with Henry Kissinger, who came thousands of miles to witness the event and salute the Argentinean nation; he was in the stands to see their strength and victory, a not-so-tacit approval of the coup, of course, the U.S.A. all smiles with the generals but by the glow of the World Cup even this fails to disgust him. The cheers from the street erupt in polyphonic splendor and he feels them in this body, he wants to
descend, to join them, to merge with these streets that are his streets after all, the people’s streets, streets that can be danced across despite the rumors of these times, he is only waiting for Gloria to arrive, any moment she’ll be home and they will plunge into their fomented city.

Gloria arrives late, her coat flung open, the buttons have long stopped closing around her pregnant belly. She bursts in with coat and hair and eyes loose and wild and she glares at the television as though it were the worst kind of perversion and says, Turn that shit off.

He stares at her from his perch at the small balcony.

Turn it off!

He comes in, turns it off, and tries to calm her with his hands along her shoulders, but she will not be calmed. She wrests from him and paces, a caged animal.

My brother’s gone.

Gone?

He disappeared. Yesterday. He went to work and never came home.

He reaches for something to say, but can find nothing. Outside, the elated voices,
We won, we won, we won
.

My mother hasn’t stopped weeping, I tried but I could not make her stop.

She looks up. The blankness in her face terrifies him more than her words.

Gloria.

I don’t know what to do.

Could he have been a Montonero?

It is the wrong thing to say; she turns away from him. Should that permit them to do whatever they want with a man?

I didn’t say that.

I don’t know what he was, what he wasn’t.

I’m sorry.

Mamá’s taken out her kerchief, she’s joining the Madres.

He thought of Gloria’s mother out on the Plaza de Mayo, carrying a photograph of Marco. That’s dangerous, he said.

She doesn’t care. She says we should be careful.

Us?

She nods.

We haven’t done anything.

She flares up, bares her teeth. What does that matter? Can you tell me what Marco did?

Of course not.

Can you? Can you?

Gloria, calm down.

She says nothing. A wave of trumpets rises through the window, buoyed by the sound of honking cars, the opening lines of the national anthem played on brass and sung along to by the exultant mob,
Oid, mortales, el grito sagrado, libertad, libertad, libertad
. Listen, mortals, the sacred cry, freedom, freedom, freedom. He should be thinking of her brother, her
hermanito
as she still called him even though he towered over her, with his eager lean and stubborn streak and shaggy hair and au courant mustache that belied his age, but he can only think of Gloria’s belly, the baby inside, only three months from bursting out into the world, and his task as protector that has already begun, he must defend the baby (wild creature who kicked against my palm last night) from all dangers, including the danger of a womb receiving panic from the woman it inhabits, the chemical reactions of despair, he wants to calm them, smooth them out, surely all will return to balance if only Gloria will be calm.

Perhaps they’ll release him soon.

God, you’re such an idiot. You still don’t get it.

He can’t stand the distance between them, longs to close it. He says, I’m sorry.

Mamá thinks we should leave.

The country?

Yes.

Is she leaving?

No.

What do you think we should do?

I don’t know. I don’t know. She rubs her wide belly and weeps without making a sound.

He wakes. There is no national anthem and no Gloria, only the pool and the room and the girl, who kneels on the floor with a cup of ready water. Her hair is wet, she has bathed, and there is a strange expression on her face, something he hasn’t seen before and can’t identify. She offers him the water, and he leans forward to the cup, eats from it, chews the incandescent liquid and feels it suffuse him, augment him, give him strength. He watches the girl bring the bucket and begin to empty his pool and thinks,
Once again you give me life
. The thought makes him want to weep, how can this be, that she should give him life, the young to the old or the child to the father or the living to the dead rather than the other way around, it seems to have no logic and yet it’s right and true. He accepts it though his mind could crack under the weight of his gratitude. She is so magnificent, every microscopic hair a revelation, how did all this emerge from Gloria and the seed of him? And also good, she is so good, her kindness with a being as strange as what he has become and the sudden intrusive chaos he has surely created in her life—her kindness has no reason, no sense.
Don’t ever succumb to sense
, he thinks to her.

I have to go out, she says.

He nods.

I’m not sure what time I’ll be back.

He holds her gaze and he could swear that there is something she longs to say, a kind of pursing at her mouth that suggests words striving to escape before the mind will let them, and her eyes, they are awake, alive, familiar—he has seen them years before—they are just like his own eyes, he remembers them, their stare in the mirror, eyes of intensity, eyes full of night.

Where are you going?

Various places, she says, and before he can gather his thoughts for something else to say, she rises from the floor and is gone.

The memory offers up a melodious coda: on the night that Argentina won the World Cup, Gloria fell asleep to the sounds of a drunken city. He lay awake beside her, wide-eyed, restive, his wife’s pregnant belly bulging beside him like the corporeal voice of fate. She was so big now, vulnerable for all her fierceness, she had wept a flood of tears over her brother and collapsed into sleep exhausted by her own helpless rage. She wanted to leave the country. She did not want to leave the country. No matter what he answered, he was wrong and she was right and she fought him like a panther. How to protect a woman who tried to claw you to shreds each time you approached? And yet he had to protect her, it was his duty, the most solemn vow he’d ever taken in his life. Other men might mock him for taking marital vows so much to heart, to have and to hold, God you’re so earnest, how very quaint, and perhaps it was indeed quaint and earnest—they were well into the 1970s, after all. But he didn’t care, that was how he felt. The promise to protect her was the most serious one he’d ever made at an altar. He had never dreamed it would come to feel so difficult.

If only they could be as they had been, two years before, in the simpler era of their engagement, when marriage sweetened the horizon before them like a nectar they had yet to taste. When he thought of that period of their lives together, he always returned to the day they came home from a visit to Azul, driving through the golden wheat fields of the pampas. He had just proposed to her in the plaza of the town where she grew up, on his knee the way he’d seen it done in films from Hollywood, and she had blushed at the ogling passersby, smiled at their applause when she said yes. Now, hours later, they were quiet together in the car, listening to the poignant songs of Sui Generis at the highest volume their old cassette player could muster, and as he watched the stalks and stalks of wheat pour past the windows, the land
and music seemed to blend together, Argentinean rock music, Argentinean land, and he thought, I am part of this, part of the dirt that makes these stalks grow and part of the muse that fuels these songs; the hurtling stream that is this nation contains me too: and surely there are still good things in this nation even in these insane times, despite the kidnappings by the extreme right and by the extreme left, despite the death of President Perón, despite the wife he left to take his place, Isabel Perón, she has no idea what she’s doing, how overwhelmed she is, how corrupt it all is, what a mess we are in, exasperating, perilous, who knows where it’s all going, but here on this road I can see the best of Argentina and thank God it’s still here, the wheat fields, the rock stars, and Gloria, yes, her too, the woman at the steering wheel, the pinnacle of what this country can produce, and I am going to marry her, I may not till our soil or sell any records but I am going to marry the most beautiful woman in the nation, she has said yes, and surely that is something, makes me part of the greater fabric of land and song and meaning, we will be inordinately happy and she will bear us many children who will carry on the Argentinean story, whatever shape it takes, our children’s children’s children will know our names. The blessing almost seemed too great to bear. Before he could stop himself, he asked her why she had accepted.