Perla (30 page)

In those first days, even dying seemed a fine price to pay. After all, we’d had only one night on which all barriers were removed. There were so many conversations left for us to have, blank lifetimes to fill, spaces we had never shared that begged for us to come to them, to hurl ourselves into them, as if the stolen past were a great blank canvas still waiting for us to give it color.

But I could not die; there was no guarantee that death would help me find him, and in any case, when I imagined it, our nebulous reunion in a floating sphere of light, I could not see him welcoming me with open arms. Instead I saw him pushing me away,
You can’t come in
, and I’d say But I came all this way to find you, and he’d close the sphere,
You’re the one who’s supposed to live
, and I could hear myself ask, Why, and could even hear his only possible answer,
Because you can
.

All this I saw in the perfect blackness of the ceiling as I lay awake beside Gabriel. On those long nights I felt the world sprawl out around me in all directions, huge, uncharted, and I was a tiny boat whose anchor had ripped away. How I faltered. How I spun with pain. How I feared that I might capsize at any moment. I have nothing, I told the blackness around me, but no, I thought, that’s not true, make
a list and hold it close: I have my body, my mind, my truth, my words. I have this bed with a warm man inside it, a turtle with a broken jaw, a stack of textbooks waiting on the balcony. And I have time. I have many years of time, if fate allows, and I have to find a way to live those years. I have to live. Not only that—I want to live. I found that wanting in myself and gripped it with both hands.

On good nights, in the blackness, I thought I saw the dance of tiny spirals, the twists of DNA, keepers of the most hallowed secrets. They magnified and whipped their tails and meandered through the dark.

Of course, I thought constantly about my other parents. The ones who raised me, who didn’t have Gabriel’s address but surely had other means to track me down. As far as I knew, they did not do so. I kept half-expecting my father to appear in the middle of the night, knocking and demanding I come home. I’d lie in bed and see him and Luisa burst through the door and run toward me through the dark, arms waving and outstretched to either slap me or pull me back to their house, or maybe both. Before arriving at my bed, they always dissolved into the blackness. I tried not to think about them. I failed. I often wondered how their homecoming had gone. I imagined the scene many times, watched their faces undergo endless variations as they discovered the deluge in their home. If the midnight raid was slightly far-fetched, it did seem plausible that they might hunt me down at the university if they wanted to find me, since it was a public building, perfectly easy to find, and nothing could stop them from invading its halls if they chose to.

But they didn’t do it. This fact both filled me with victory and gutted me with grief. I wondered whether they ever would—specifically, whether Héctor might ever appear in the corridor outside one of my classes and accost me in front of all my peers. I could not tell whether this was my worst nightmare or my secret, feared desire. I held my breath every time I exited a lecture, and did not exhale until I’d made it outside without incident. He haunted those halls, a dim translucent figure, stalking me with his absence. At times I saw a person from afar
on the street and thought it was Héctor or Luisa, and my body would go tight with heat until the stranger came closer and broke the spell. It was not them. It was never them. I was glad about this, and said so very clearly, in my own mind and to Gabriel.

“I never want to speak to them again.”

I thought that he would smile with reassurance and approval, but instead he studied me. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Not even once?”

“Why would I?”

He shrugged. “To answer your questions. They owe you that.”

It was hard to imagine this, at first. They were gone from my life and I wanted them gone. I did not want to hear their insufficient explanations, their voices, even the sound of their steps coming my way. But as I lay in blackness, in the deep recesses of night, unable to quiet the clamor of my mind, I glimpsed a distant future in which I might have the brazen strength to open contact. It would be many years later, if it ever happened, and even when it did the reunion could not take place at their house (which I always imagined perpetually soaked and destroyed, like a shipwreck). It would have to occur in the city. I imagined myself, older, a woman who had gathered confidence over the years in some mysterious harvest I could not yet fathom, walking into a café to find the man called Héctor waiting for her at a small round table. The confident woman would insist on paying for the coffee and croissants, and would look the man directly in the face even when he looked away. All her questions would be gathered carefully in her hands like a fan of playing cards that could easily rattle into chaos as soon as they began to talk, as soon as she said
If I ask you questions, will you answer?
and he nodded and obliged and exposed the stark terrain between them. Then the confident woman would have to find a way to take the urgent holes of understanding she was carrying and find a way to wrestle them into words, into pedestrian phrases such as
why did you
or
why didn’t you
or
what have you been dreaming in your bed all these years
, questions that would flatten the enormity
of what she was trying to bring to him cradled with both hands, but it’s the best that we can do, isn’t it? Words are incomplete and yet we need them. They are the cups that give our memories shape, and keep them from trickling away. And so she’d listen to the things he’d say. And she would take them in and drink her coffee and stash his answers somewhere in her sturdy mind where they could not hurt her, and where they would never be lost.

With luck, he would also listen to her, and then she would voice her own story, which, if she could be sufficiently brave and lucid, would contain him, contain the bustling café, perhaps contain the whole of Argentina.

Five weeks after my escape, I went to Montevideo with Gabriel, to visit his family. Their house was cluttered and warm, with photographs in every corner.

A sepia picture hung in the center of the living room, of an older man with thick hair and a startling number of gold chains, who, Gabriel’s mother told me, was her grandfather. He had come to Uruguay from Spain, and had once owned a traveling carnival that he named Calaquita, Little Skull, in honor of his own birthday, which was the Day of the Dead.
Calaca
, of course, was a Mexican word, strange to both Spaniards and Uruguayans—almost as strange as the Mexican custom of celebrating the Day of the Dead with music, cheerful flowers, and skeletons dancing in the street. He had grown up forced to spend his birthday in the village cemetery every year with his mother and aunts, who wept morosely, all dressed in black. And so, while he liked to tell of his carnival’s name as a great joke, Talia saw it as equal parts humor and exorcism. She had grown up listening to his stories of roaming the countryside with his collection of brightly painted wagons, and of the motley cluster of performers who were his closest friends.

“I keep his picture up,” she said, looking at it with some bemusement, “because he was the most eccentric person in my family.”

This comment, more than anything else, made me feel at ease. I had been bracing myself, not sure what to expect, anxious above all about Gabriel’s mother. On the drive home from the ferry station, she had struck me as overly kind, too quick to laugh at my jokes, and I thought that she was doing so out of pity. But now, in her house, I saw her awkwardness as a sign of how fervently she hoped to make me comfortable. As she walked me through the photographs in the living room, her arm slinked through mine, an effortless, almost thoughtless touch.

“Call me Talia,” she insisted. “And please drop that
usted
, and address me with
tú
. You’ll make me feel like an old lady, or even worse, like you’re not at home.”

The family set to preparing the
asado
, a collective process so familiar that the roles seemed automatic: Gabriel’s father stoked embers at the grill with scientific precision, Gabriel and his sister Carla disappeared into the kitchen to prepare the meat, and I was hustled outside with the younger sister, Penélope, to talk over a glass of wine. She was clearly the quietest member of the family, but I drew her out by asking her about her studies. She was so passionate about chemistry that I could have listened to her for hours. I didn’t understand much of what she said, but it sounded fascinating, this talk of molecules and ions and electron clouds, which made me think of the charts we had to draw in high school that connected one atom to another with little lines and headless arrows, which, when you thought about it, was an ingenious way to order the universe, even though the aspect of the universe being mapped was too small to be seen with the naked eye. The world has been written in a microscopic script that the naked eye can’t begin to imagine, I thought to myself, as Penélope refilled my glass of red wine and kept on talking.

Carla’s boyfriend joined us for the meal, and we crammed around the table on the patio, with its checkered tablecloth embroidered by hand. Everybody talked at once. They bickered, laughed. They seemed to agree on nothing, or, at least, to pick at their differences with relish. No one pressured me to speak, or brought up my parents,
or uttered the word
disappeared
. My wine glass was always full, no matter how much I drank from it. Gabriel looked like a boy unwrapping a long-awaited gift.

That evening, at dusk, the whole family took a stroll to La Rambla, the walkway by the shore of the river. Many people had emerged to walk along the water with their
mate
gourds, the way they do in Uruguay, pouring hot water from their thermos into the gourds right out there in the open, on a bench, on the steps leading down to the sand, or even in mid-stride, instead of keeping to the kitchen as is the custom in Argentina. We walked in a gently amoebic cluster, Gabriel’s arm around me, and I thought about the last time we’d walked together on a Uruguayan shore, before, before. Of course, that had been in Piriápolis, not Montevideo; but still, and this long dark sweep before us was the Río de la Plata, the same river I had known throughout my childhood, now seen from the other side. How wide it was. How strange, to walk on one side and imagine the existence of the other.

Talia made her way toward me with the gourd. In this family, she was the unquestioned
cebadora
, server of
mate
, and it was my turn. I took the gourd from her and drank.

“Perla,” she said in a low voice. “If you ever want, I don’t know, you know. To talk.”

The brew was perfect, bitter and fresh. The gourd gurgled as I drained it.

“She’s fine, Mamá,” Gabriel said.

“I just want her to know—”

“Don’t crowd her.”

“I’m not,” she said. “Am I, Perla?”

I passed the gourd back to her, and shook my head.

“Look, I know we just met. But I want you to know I’m here. After all, a girl can’t have enough mothers.”

An axe to the chest. The night, swiftly shattered, lay in pieces all around me.

“Mamá.”

“Oh, God. I said the wrong thing.” Talia sighed. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I say the wrong thing.”

I meant to respond, but too much raged inside, I didn’t dare open my mouth. I wished I hadn’t drunk so much wine.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and ebbed away.

After a few more minutes, the family stopped together at a jetty of rocks overlooking the water, all of a mind, all of a goddamn mind, this family with its lifetime of goddamn rituals. Gabriel moved us toward a rock where we could sit in private.

“Are you all right?”

I leaned in to him and listened to the roar inside myself, through which there threaded a slim whisper, It’s not her fault, it’s not her fault, the axe was there already and you keep falling on it when you least expect it but one day you’ll have new skin and be a woman who can walk beside a river without mere words cutting you apart. I didn’t quite believe the whisper, but I grasped it like rope.

“She can be clumsy, my mother. But she means well. She wants to be your friend.”

“Gabo.”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t talk.”

“All right.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“All right.”

“I just want to look at the water. Will you look at the water with me?”

He nodded. We looked out in silence, and when his family got up to move on we stayed, for hours, the two of us together before the vast river, gliding across it with our gaze, tracing infinite trajectories in the darkness.

What I could not have guessed, at that time, was that Gabriel’s mother would in time become one of my best friends. Tonight, six years later, as I sit here at this window, I can assure you that Talia is one of the most generous people you will meet in this world. When I graduated from the university, she arrived with a bouquet so large I could barely see her as she carried it toward me, and she wept as if she’d been waiting for that moment for years. And when, a year later, I married her son, it was her wedding dress I wore, tucked in here and let out there, adjusted for a new bride but the same white dress with its blend of classic lace and 1960s flair. And by that time, when she said, “You are just like a daughter, my third daughter,” I could take the words in the way she meant them, with joy and love and almost without pain.