Perla (9 page)

I walked into a bar, a regular spot, and scanned the tables from the doorway. My friends weren’t there. A couple of men near the back looked up and tried to meet my eye. I didn’t look at them and didn’t sit down. I knew the bartender, who grinned at me and raised his hand in greeting—Perla, he said, smiling—but I turned and left and walked on. I would have liked to see my friends, but it was probably for the best that I failed to find them; I was always the confidante, the mature one, the shoulder to lean on when drunk or in pain, and my friends had grown so accustomed to my composure that any other face became invisible. You can lean on Perla. Talk to Perla, she’ll understand. I looked generous to people, with so much room for tending to their problems, but people rarely saw the power it gave me, the shield from scrutiny, Perla Who Has the Answers, Perla Who Can Help You, Perla Without Problems of Her Own. How I liked to see myself through the eyes of a grateful friend. How strong I seemed, floating
above the earth with all its human tangles. Not at all like a girl who feels out of place in her own home. And they appreciated me, called me kind for it, Leticia with her constant love troubles, Marisol with her hard-drinking mother, Anita with the faltering grades and the childhood rapes that continued to haunt her dreams. They needed me, and I needed to feel needed—a perfect symbiotic fit. These were the friendships I had chosen, the ties I’d formed, with girls who wanted to be listened to, grateful for a friend who demanded no attention in return. But tonight I would not be able to sustain the act; the façade would surely break and burden my relationships with more weight than they had been designed to bear. I was lost tonight, the cage lay broken, even my mother’s rules lay shattered on the ground,
always neaten your clothes before you leave the house, always think before you speak, always make sure your hair is in place
, so thoroughly drilled into me, so familiar and now so savagely abandoned, my mouth was capable of anything, my hair was surely a disaster. I could roam the city, just as I was. I had never wandered the city much as a girl; our family forays were always focused, purposeful, and in any case my parents mostly kept me in our neighborhood. They were protective. They enfolded me in great protective wings. They did everything for me, they said so, and it was true. Perla, we do everything for you. There was so much shouting in my mind, about my father, about my mother, doubts and questions I had spent these recent days struggling against with all my desperate strength. And now, with the ghost’s arrival, I could not escape the questions, and yet I still couldn’t bear to put them into words, even in silence, even inside. I was walking and walking the lambent streets and had nowhere to go. I could have swallowed all the buildings in this city, could have swallowed anything, the sky, a corpse, a lie, a truth, the sea. I was starved for something that had no name. Buenos Aires was so beautiful, full of noise, full of night. I couldn’t go home yet. I needed to hear the voice of another human being, someone who didn’t smell of river or of death and who could hear the whole of me no matter what I said. Of such people there was
only one. I hesitated for a moment, imagining him hanging up on me, but then I stopped at a public telephone and dialed. He answered after two rings.

“It’s me,” I said.

Gabriel was silent. For a moment I thought we’d lost the connection.

“Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“I just wanted to hear your voice.” Now that I’d said the words, they sounded stupid. And naked. Why had I picked up the phone?

Gabriel said nothing.

“Am I disturbing you?”

“No. No.” He sounded uncertain. “I’m just surprised.”

“I know. I mean, I can imagine. Look, if this is a bad time—”

“It’s not. It’s really not.”

“Okay,” I said.

There was a pause. “I was starting to think you’d never call.”

“You didn’t want me to?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Okay,” I said again, like an idiot.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You sound strange.”

“I am strange.”

I said it without thinking, and he laughed, hesitantly, but enough to ease the tension. “Tell me about it.”

I smiled into the phone receiver.

“Why did you call?”

I didn’t answer. The words sounded harsh. Until ten days ago, I’d never needed a reason to call him. I would simply turn to him, for company, comfort, or pleasure; to hear how he was, to be with him. But now there was a wall between us that had to be taken down. If it even could be taken down, because, having heard his voice, it seemed
possible that it was now too late. And of course I should have known, should have shielded myself and gathered my tools, but instead, in my disoriented state, I’d reached for the phone out of longing, impulsive, unprepared.

After a long silence, he said, “You’re so quiet.”

“So are you.”

“But you’re the one who called me.”

“I know, I know.”

“And so? Why did you call?”

Because a phantom of the disappeared is in my living room, and he won’t go away, and the things he’s tearing open only you would understand
. “It’s complicated.”

“What isn’t?”

“Nothing. You’re right. Everything is complicated.”

“But still,” he said, exasperated, “some things are simple, Perla. It’s simple to say,
because I miss you
. Or to say,
I’m sorry
.”

The hurt and anger in his voice were palpable. What a huge mistake, I thought, to make this call. “You know—” I said, then stopped.

“ ‘You know’ what?”

“Never mind.”

“Perla?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“How can you say that?”

“That’s not what I mean. I didn’t mean us.
We
do matter.”

“Is there still a
we
?”

How easily he could cut me, even when that wasn’t his intention. “You think there isn’t?”

“I don’t know what to think. If there were a
we
, you would have called.”

“You didn’t call either.”

“But you,” he said, “are the one who ran away.”

I could have said
because you made me
, but we would only have descended further into a hole that seemed to have no bottom and for
which I had no words, no verbal tethers that could pull us back to the surface. “Listen, Gabo, this isn’t a good time. I’m at a pay phone.” I closed my eyes. My forehead ached. “And for other reasons too.”

“Such as?”

“I can’t tell you.”

His voice softened. “Are you really sure you’re all right?”

“Yes. No. I will be. I have some things to deal with, and then I’ll call again.”

“And how long will that take?”

“I have no idea.”

“But you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

“No. That’s not possible.” There was no language for it, after all, no place to begin. “But please don’t give up on me.”

He was silent.

“Gabriel?”

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Just say, ‘Of course I won’t give up on you.’ ”

“Perlita. Listen to yourself.”

“I’d rather not.”

He laughed. I wanted to live inside the gauzy folds of his laugh. They could lilt up on the wind and I would float there, suspended, surrounded, at home.

Before his laughter could abate and deposit us back on hard earth, I quickly hung up the phone.

I took the subway to Puerto Madero and walked along the promenade, flanked by glossy restaurants and clubs to my right, and the water to my left. Through the doorways came the scent of freshly grilled
churrascos
, the thrum of techno music, bursts of people dressed for the night. It always amazed me that the old, abandoned docks of Buenos Aires had been changed into such a fashionable destination for tourists and well-heeled locals, with its long brick warehouses refurbished to hold upscale businesses and lofts. You never know what a city can become. I was the only person by myself, and I felt out of
place, unkempt, though in fact I probably blended in just fine, judging from the way I was ignored. There was no reason for someone looking at me to suspect that anything was wrong, any oddness at home, any drenched interlopers to contend with, any nightmares rearing up and demanding to be seen, and this was good; this was how it worked, wasn’t it? You don’t walk in the truth, you walk in the reality you want to inhabit, you walk in the reality you can stand. This is how realities are made.

The sky spread above me, black and cloudless, robbed by the city of its stars. I was separated from the water by a metal rail, which a couple leaned against to kiss, while an older, well-groomed couple glanced at them with a mix of amusement and envy. Behind the rail, the water glimmered darkly, holding the bellies of yachts and a weak reflection of the Hilton Hotel on the other side. Just a ribbon of water, really, though I knew it came from the river, which, I suddenly realized, was why I’d come here: to see some piece of the Río de la Plata, which was not a river really but an estuary, a big wide-open mouth that swallowed the sea, gulped it in toward the land. Such wide water that the other side, the shore of Uruguay, was too far to see. The river made a long seam with the horizon, stitching the world closed in a great sphere of water and sky, a vast ethereal cloth hemmed around Argentina. As a child, I had imagined that the city did not end at the shore but rather continued underwater, down in the depths, in the great low cradle between two countries. I would stare at the water and picture streets, castles, and houses flooded with brackish water, fish lacing through windows, waving coral, the high distorted songs of mermaids, sailors drowned in long-forgotten vortices of time. I tried to imagine the secret laws of such a place. I imagined hieroglyphs that painted shimmering tales in the water and vanished with the shifting of the tide.

It had been so easy, as a little girl, to believe in such a city. As a grown woman, of course, I knew better than to believe in an underwater world, except that now, on this night, with no compass to tell me
who I was, I had no idea what I could believe. And so I had wanted to come here, to the old port, that was now the ultramodern port, to lay eyes on a strip of water.

Its surface shone with electric light, and revealed nothing.

I slowed to light a cigarette and leaned against the rail to smoke it. Dark, quiet water licked the bodies of the yachts. Nearby, a group of young women shrieked with laughter and spoke to each other in a rapid foreign tongue. I thought of Gabriel, his delectable laugh, and how he must have felt when I cut off the call without giving him a chance to say good-bye. He must have said
Hello? hello?
into the receiver, dismayed, affronted, then stared at it and perhaps decided in that moment that he was tired of this, tired of me, ready to find a woman who was less of a headache and fit better into his life. Sadness engulfed me at the thought.

I looked out over the water in search of reprieve. Light from electric streetlamps fell and broke against it, glimmering shrapnel, caught in the ripped cloth of the river.

That night in Uruguay, when I last saw Gabriel, sand had filled the gaps between my toes, wet and dark. I couldn’t see it but after he spoke I looked down anyway, at the dark water tearing open at my ankles, thinking, there are grains of sand down there, millions of them, burying my toes, burying themselves, as if they knew that some things can never be exposed. As if hiding were a matter of survival.

I walked on. I reached the construction zone for the Women’s Bridge, which was well under way. A sleek white walkway with a great fin rising at an angle, spearing the heavens, or so it seemed through the scaffolding. A bridge like nothing you’ve ever seen, one columnist had said. I stopped at its edge and stared at the bridge, thinking of things that were like nothing I had ever seen. I stood for a long time. Water beckoned from below. I gazed down and imagined myself plunging, swimming, in search of unthinkable places that could not and yet seemed to exist.

5
Failed Geraniums

I
have to tell you more about Gabriel, and about who I was when I met him. I can’t fully paint my world without those strokes—and I need you to take in the whole picture, which is made of words instead of colors because it’s the best way I know to give you this story, here, tonight, six years after the stranger came, sitting at this window, torn by pain and ecstasy in alternating waves. As though the world itself were surging through my body and my body had to stretch to give it space. That’s how it feels. But I can’t stop. There is no place to stop this story, which, in being voiced, has taken on a life of its own, as stories inevitably do. Now I myself am whirling in its orbit, suspended in it, unable to do anything but ride. It’s the only way I can think to do the telling: careening around the center, circling and circling, in a spiraling path, whirling gradually closer to the source. Though you may not understand, though it may sound strange, this is the best way in. Linear routes seem faster, but they lack dimensions, they lack flesh, they are dead—and this is not a dead story, it’s a living story, it breathes and palpitates. Keep following me. This is the best way I know to show you who I really am—and it’s urgent for me to do so, here, now, while there is time.

From the start, it was dangerous to pursue Gabriel, like walking calmly into a burning house. I knew this, of course, and some part of me sought him out for just that reason: to be scorched, to catch fire, to search for myself in the flames of danger.

I met him at a party in his honor, invited by a friend of a friend.
He was celebrating his new job as assistant editor at
Voz
, an amazing feat, my friend explained, for a twenty-five-year-old man. Her eyes lit with admiration as she told me about it. I had never read
Voz
, but I knew what my father thought of it: that pack of lies, not good enough to wipe my ass with. He said that but he feared it. He only bothered, after all, to insult the things he feared. And there were few things that he feared more than reporters. Which, naturally, made me extremely curious to meet Gabriel.