Perla (26 page)

Her skin tasted of salt and summer heat. Her body on the kitchen table, legs wrapping around him, legs that could have crushed him as he slid into her body, which now evidenced new power, and this is a vivid memory, her body is damp and passionate, exuding fierce ecstatic joy at being entered, at breeding life, at being lit up from within by another being, at being whole and alive in a world that has not yet disappeared her from it, not yet revealed what is done to people in the unseen basements of the world. The sex ties them and unties them, binds the three of them into a burning knot and dissolves the boundaries between them, all at once. It is Gloria he is making love to but he can’t help speaking also to the new one, the glow, the embryo, he pushes and pushes toward its nesting place and he is scared of disturbing it or revealing something children and babies should never see, he is scared that it is wrong to be together like this, the three of them rocking and whirling in a single bowl of heat, and yet an unknown instinct makes him do it anyway, makes him greet the new one, feel its presence, reach for its glow with the same part of his body that sent the seeds out hungry to create it, he reaches over and over, Gloria’s thighs are warm and wide as gates but he will never arrive into her center so he greets it from a distance, forms the word
hello
and sends it searing through his sex into the dark mysterious mazes inside Gloria.

That was just the beginning. Six weeks became seven and eight and ten and twenty, twenty-eight, each week a new revelation. Gloria’s shape became a living testament to the miracle (and was it not, he thought, a miracle, for all that it had happened a trillion times in
this world, and for all the carnal truths that caused this maculate conception?). He caught Gloria stroking her belly in the shower, and in the morning as she dressed, and at the stove as she stirred onions in the pan. She not only stroked, she also murmured, divulging secrets or promises to the one inside. Private trysts not even he could enter. Gloria abounded with names, what about this one, or, if not, perhaps this for a boy and that for a girl, how could a single word ever sing the full resonance of this baby’s identity to the world? She was a changed woman, the sharp edges of her temperament rounded into a voluptuous, almost complacent capacity for pleasure. She basked in the attention of strangers, who approached her on the street or in the market and placed their hands on her belly,
oh how lovely
, they rubbed her body without asking permission or so much as saying hello,
it’s a girl, I can feel it
, or
it must be a boy
, and it enraged him that so many people had the nerve to touch his wife in public without even knowing her name. At first he tried to stop them, but Gloria intervened,
let them, it doesn’t matter
, and then he saw that she not only didn’t mind: she beamed at their touch, shone like a lantern, did not experience the touch of strangers as an invasion but rather as a form of benediction, even worship, the world offering its awe and blessings with many hands. It was her turn to walk the road of the madonna, and she savored it, every bit of it, even the great miracles of swollen ankles and indigestion, which she complained about with all the thrall of revelation. It’s just incredible, she would say, I can barely bend to put on my own shoes. She took unparalleled pleasure in being pregnant. See how she stood before the mirror, caressing her round belly when she thought no one was looking. She did this naked sometimes so her touch could reach closer to the child-to-come. See how she prowled the apartment at night, awakened by kicks, foraging for chocolate
alfajores
. See how she wept for no reason or for all the reasons of the world, gazing out the window at secret messages only she could read in the skies. And all that time, it was you in there, bulging her waist and slowing her steps and flushing her cheeks with euphoria. It was
your glow that she borrowed on the exalted days, your flush on her face. You were perfect then as you are perfect now. And just as you were in her then she is now in you, in your eyes and ears and ankles, the soft beneath your fingernails, the blood racing through your veins toward the muscle of your heart. The shape of her, it held your shape and gave it a place to begin, and there, right there inside her, you became yourself, the Who of you that you still are and that will always have its roots in the pure Who of Gloria: while you live and while cells hold their twisting secrets in your body, you are never fully lost and she is not entirely gone.

He returns to the room, looks up at her. She has lit another cigarette, and faces the wall. He told too much at once. Her first night hearing about her mother, and he talks about sex. He is an idiot. He has lost touch with the etiquette of the living, the terrains that are not meant to be discussed and that fathers are certainly not supposed to share with their children; from where he sits he has forgotten to see lust as a hushed secret rather than a radiant life force. He thinks, I’m a fool, I’ve lost her now, she’s going to close back up, but then she faces him again and there is naked emotion in her face.

Was it really like that?

All that and more.

She stares at him. What’s your name?

I don’t have one.

How can that be?

The waters took it.

What was your name before the water?

He strains his mind, but it is no use. I don’t know. It’s gone.

That’s all right, she says gently. That’s all right. She becomes quiet and they sit, together, in that room, in a long silence that is not like any other they have shared. It is an amniotic silence that holds them together more than it keeps them apart. He could hover in it with her
forever. Time stretches. Time slows and speeds and does not
tic tac tic
with any artificial calibrations; it melts; it pours. She is on the floor beside him, so close he smells her cigarettes and the sweet exhalations of her hair, and she is awake to him, she has unfurled herself, there are no veils left in her eyes. And this is more than just a night: it is a home carved into wasteland, a candle in black sky, salt on the tongue of the dying, defying the demands of oblivion.

He starts to hum. The sound rises from him without thinking. He has not sung since long before he died, and his voice is coarse at first, thick and wet at the back of his throat, but then it loosens and falls across the melody like a stream along stones. What is the song? It is old; he did not make it. His mother sang it to him as a boy and all the nights were crisp and safe and tinged with God, yes, now he knows, it is a lullaby. He hummed it into Gloria’s belly in the darkness, under bedsheets, when the belly was wide and full and beckoned the admiring hands of strangers. In bed, at night, no one could touch Gloria but him, and he would touch and touch and sometimes hum and wonder,
Can you hear me?
How he wanted to be heard. To be remembered more than all the others. To hum his way into the tiny heart of the almost-child.

He hums, and his daughter sits beside the red pool and listens. Her gaze is on the wall, on the painting of the ship, but her head cocks toward the sound. The melody meanders and does not break the good silence between them, but rather feeds it, strengthens it, pours fluid into fluid into fluid.

The sound of his voice surrounded me and I wanted to crawl into it, wrap myself in the lullaby, its great white cloth of sound. I wished I could live inside this night, not just now, but always, so that from this moment forward, no matter where I went or what I saw, this night would cover and surround me, be a filter for the rest of the world. I was enveloped. I was carried. I longed to be carried this way for
the rest of my life. I longed to have been carried this way when I was small, by this man, his voice, his company. There was a woman I could have been if I had lived all my life within the reach of this man’s voice, if this man had stayed in the world to hold me from the beginning. That woman would never exist. I could not be rewritten. And yet, in those moments, in the delicate warmth of that night, that woman seemed more real than me, more rightful than the Perla who inhabited my skin. I wanted to reach out to her, wherever she was, somewhere in the torn corners of the cosmos where our might-have-beens skulk through the twilight, and I wanted to touch her, understand her, at the very least look her in the eyes. This alternative self. This woman never broken at the root. This Perla from whose mouth I longed to hear the words
LOVE
and
TRUTH
and
FAMILY
, to know how she’d pronounce them, whether she’d cast them out in easy sparks or the long slow syllables of song. Because I, the false twin, the Perla who had been allowed to exist, no longer knew how to hold those words. I closed my eyes. My new father, my first father, sang on. The melody sank into me, gentle, phosphorescent. He longed for me, despite everything the world had done. I wanted to absorb his stories, make them mine. I wanted to believe that there were threads between us all—between me, him, and Gloria—that had shuddered but not broken, that could stretch under the surface of reality, part of a secret webbing that glistens in the realms beyond time. Those threads felt like the only things I had left in the world.

Dawn came. It came slowly, reluctantly, as if the sun itself hated to impinge on the sounds and silence of this night, but it still arrived, and found us sitting together in the living room, close and quiet and awake. In the pale light, I put out another cigarette and left it on the pile of crushed carcasses in the ashtray. Then I moved to empty water from the pool. Cup to bucket, cup to bucket. He hummed again as I poured water, this time an aimless, wandering tune. I stared at the bucket full of his water. I didn’t want to pour it down the drains in the house anymore—not the bathtub, nor the shower, nor the sinks. I
wanted to spill it in the sun. I took the bucket outside, to the yard, to the old oak that always spoke to me of childhood climbs, reading in the shade, dextrous ants I watched on long hot summer days, wondering, where are they all going? where are they from? what is happening in their minuscule ant minds? I poured the water at the base of the tree. It left black streaks in the dirt that would be gone by the middle of the morning. Some of the water might evaporate in the sun, but the rest of it would sink deep into the earth and offer itself to the tree’s roots. And the roots, I thought, would surely consume every drop.

12
Empty Hands, Clear Water

H
ow
, the book asked,
can a disappeared child form a true identity?
I held the pages open in the morning light. The guest had finally closed his eyes; he had gone to sleep, or to whatever place he went to when he rested. I hadn’t slept at all. I knew that I should, the night had been long and wakeful and my eyes burned with fatigue, but I could not do it. My mind was too crowded, as was this room, which palpitated with a thousand memories, thronging from the corridors of the past, demanding to be shaken open and seen anew. I saw my child-self eating ice cream from a crystal dish and also eating candy that had spent the day in Scilingo’s trouser pocket while my father (could I still call him that?) and his friend Scilingo drank martinis and talked close by. I saw my mother (could I still call her that?) gently stroking the blooms of geraniums in those first days when they still received water and nurturance and were not yet left to die. I saw myself curled up with library books on the sofa beside Mamá while she read a magazine, our bodies close enough so that her delicate scent was in my lungs. I saw myself playing a card game with my father,
Don’t let me win, Papá
, and the way his eyebrows rose in exaggerated alarm,
Of course not, Perlita, that victory was all yours
, and I also saw myself alone, the night Papá found out about my story in the newspaper and said
Oh yeah and who are you
and left me standing still as a pillar beside the sofa, unable to sit, unable to make a sound.

Hordes of memories, too many of them. I could not stand to look at them, but I also could not sleep surrounded by their clamor,
so instead I turned to the library book I had brought home the day before. A book for children of the disappeared, written by Las Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo, decades into their search, addressing the grand-children they still longed to find. I looked over at the wet man, resting in his pool. His mother could be one of them. She could still be searching. I tried to picture her, a time-worn woman living just a handful of miles away, separated from her son (and granddaughter) by immense gulfs of reality, carrying the son’s photo through the streets at marches, raised high above her head.

I leafed back to a photograph in the book of an Abuela with a white kerchief around her face and eyes like mournful wells. She gazed at me so intently that I could almost have believed that I was the still image and she the breathing presence. I wondered whether she might be the one.

But she was one of many. There were five hundred stolen infants, so it was believed, and only sixty so far had had their identities restored.
Restored
, the book said; as if the identity I had before birth were simply waiting for me, a folded piece of clothing, ready to slip back into, a perfect fit. As though I could simply become the woman who would have blossomed with her true parents if the nation had not fallen prey to the Process.
Restored
, like an old painting, the cracks and faded regions returned to their original state, to make it seem as though the intervening years had never occurred. I recoiled from the notion. I did not want to erase the person that I’d been all these years when I did not know where I came from. However false my identity might be, it was the only one I had. Without it I was nothing.

I wondered whether Las Abuelas, if I went to them, would want me to do this, to disown the person I had been. The thought made something ache below my rib cage.

I read on. These disappeared children, some were taken as babies, others while in their mothers’ wombs. I looked at pictures of infants, from before they were lost, and I searched their wide primordial eyes for tales they could not tell. I did not want to read about the mothers,
but I did it anyway. The book told me about things that were done to those women, pregnant women, in the same straits as the rest of the disappeared, enduring the same nightmares, except for the shackled hours of birth after which they might or might not see the baby before it disappeared from them, one disappearance inside of another, layers and layers of vanishing.