Perla (24 page)

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 kept 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.

He is still with Gloria, has been with her for an eternity, a swath of liquid moments that spill over any boundaries of time, she has been laboring and laboring and now the guards have come with a bed on wheels and a blindfold and chains,
no please not chains
but no one hears him, they tie her down and mask her eyes and roll her down a hall of gloomy doors that look the same and have no names or numbers to identify them or what lurks behind them, he follows them into an elevator that sinks down to the basement floor and down a hall into a bare room where two female nurses wait, the guards deposit their cargo and depart. Gloria is transfigured by the journey, she is naked and restrained and cannot see, the strong tongues of her hands cannot run across her body, and he cannot touch her either in the sour light of this room, he is pushed against the wall and cannot reach her, he is helpless to do anything but watch, Gloria is pinned and open, her belly huge as a pale whale, she is heaving like a beached whale, she sweats, her mouth is wrenched into a moan but he can’t hear it and perhaps the moan is its own whale song, a sound that could travel for miles under the sea and be understood, recognized, an underwater music that speaks everything that never can be spoken and yet must be, must be, hurls out of her wideflung throat just as something else hurls out elsewhere, hurls slowly slowly through the tunnel of her flesh, her legs are spread wide open to the air and to the nurses who won’t speak to her, they’ve been instructed not to do so, they know
nothing about this woman exposed on the table except what they can guess, and they try not to guess, they are in a basement with no windows and it’s dark and the first nurse would like some fresh air and a cigarette, the second nurse would like to bury her face in her man’s chest and feel his hands rip off her dress and make her forget this place, this woman, stripped of name and clothes and sight but isn’t she lucky she’s allowed to scream although they cannot understand the sound as they aren’t underwater, never have been, their touch is cool and professional, they don’t remind her to push, they don’t say
you can do this
, push, Gloria, push, Gloria, you can do this look you’re doing it, he forms the words he never had the chance to say but Gloria cannot hear them and she also does not need them, she is not just pushing, she is bursting, breaking, growling, swelling, crashing, he has never seen her face like this, she looks like she could tear the world to pieces, her sex is large and throbbing and it splits open like a fruit that cannot bear its own ripeness, it widens until he glimpses flesh inside that is not hers, smooth, hairy, glistening, just a tiny teardrop patch of flesh at first and then more as Gloria’s sex opens even further, becoming larger, the second nurse wraps gloved fingers around the head as it slips out, there is a face, there are cries, he cannot hear them but he sees the tiny fishmouth pop open and the eyes crunch (and there she is, the girl, you won’t recall this place or this moment or your very first cries but they are yours and perhaps this moment will stay with you as you grow up, forming a silent nest inside your body, in your chest or nape or hips or spine), and Gloria’s face changes again, falls open in wonder, she arches back as far as the chains will let her and the little body abandons her like a moth flying from its broken chrysalis. The nurses examine the baby, hold her upside down and smack her buttocks as if to ensure that she is made of materials solid enough to withstand the pressures of this world. Gloria breathes with her whole body, and when the afterbirth has come and gone and the nurses sponge her down and dry her off and the baby’s cries seem to have settled into whimpers, she tells them
thank you
, the water is
warm and the hands gentle but when she says
boy or girl? boy or girl?
the nurses, well-trained and afraid, wheel her from the room without an answer.

On my way back from Gabriel’s apartment, before returning to the house with its wet guest, I stopped at a neighborhood grocery store, where all the cans and cuts of meat stood in a fog. I could barely see the aisles because of what had happened to the air inside my mind, how unspeakably clear it had become. On the outside I was placing items in my basket like an ordinary woman in an ordinary world, but inside the world had cracked wide open and out swirled its stories in an unrelenting mesh of obvious truths, from genesis to denouement.

Once there was a boy whose name was Héctor. He was little and his father hit him and broke the jaw of the turtle that he loved, but he was a good boy who grew up to work hard and be proud of his pressed uniform and the strength he swore to use to serve his country. He would be the kind of man whose chest would glint with medals and whose presence stirred the perfect mix of awe and fear. He would hide his tender places and reserve them for his future child—only for her—to see. He married a girl called Luisa who had found her heart in the galleries of Madrid and then dashed it against a black and maroon canvas, leaving a sour cavity in its place, but who still mustered enough emotion to make vows to him in the most expensive wedding dress her family could find, a dress that should only portend great fruitfulness and multiplying of their goodness as the holy word had deemed for them at the very start of time.

They longed for a child, but no child came in the first years, a fact that brought surprise and a slim thread of gossip to their circles—and then the country changed and their dream came true, thanks to the intercession of God and to the natural order of things. They had a girl, or rather, they could not have her so they stole her from
people whose existence was being erased as though they’d only lived in pencil. Surely, in their minds, it was not so much a stealing as a saving, an act of grace that followed an inevitable erasure and that, wrapped in silence, would itself disappear in the forgotten folds of time. The stolen girl or saved girl grew up without knowledge of the bitter glue that made her family, and she loved with her whole heart the man with the pressed uniform and wounded turtle, a man who sat beside her singing lullabies in the dark, smelling of scotch, and when he asked her in the dark
Do you love your dad?
she said
Yes
, and when he said
And will you always? no matter what?
she said, again,
Yes, yes
, and meant it with every cell of her body, even when, much later, she learned about the bodies he had treated like pencil strokes intruding on the canvas of the world, even then she said the
Yes
that surely made her monstrous—a monster-girl, deformed by love—but that could not be helped, because this too, this loving of one’s father, is the natural order of things.