The Invisible Mountain (17 page)

Months and years would stretch and turn and she always pined for this: these nights; smoky, electric, succulent, ineffable; the feel of the red table under her hand (chipped and glossy, sticky underneath) as the poets dreamed and joked and boasted; the way the air stretched and shimmered after her second glass of wine; the conversations that coiled intricately through war to recent essays to the deepest meaning of life. A light shone through those nights that Eva could not define, that vanished if she sought it too directly, that gilded everything it touched—voices, faces, wineglass, table, words—with numinous honey. She grew to rely on it, trusting its power to ward off all that must be kept away—drabness, boredom, nightmares, the rage of home, the terror inside shoe stores and of Nazis in faraway lands. She was free inside its unseen sphere, and life became more possible. Surely the other poets felt it too: Joaquín, with his meticulous verses, knotted forehead, and arsenal of freshly sharpened pencils; Carlos, who smelled of shoe polish and stole moments at his father’s law firm to scrawl odes on legal files; the Well-Known Poet, with his amiable laugh and unkempt gray hair; Pepe, with his pointy chin and fast martinis; Andrés, with his lucid voice, sharp thoughts, sharp smile; and Beatriz, the kind of girl whose laugh poured like molasses, whose poems brimmed with maudlin nubile shepherdesses yearning for their errant gaucho men. Eva could have borne her poems if she did not also sit so close to Andrés.

“We’re changing the world, right, Andrés?” Beatriz said, twirling her hair on a slow finger.

Joaquín and Carlos murmured their agreement. The Well-Known Poet nodded behind his cigarette smoke. Andrés’ words mixed with the smoke, swirling around the table, imbibed on each poet’s breath. In a world full of war. Eva felt the smoke and bulk of the
Admiral Graf Spee
within those words. It had been only a month since the German battleship had dragged its huge hard broken body into the port, seeking refuge, trailing fire and smoke and the toxic scent of battle. Uruguay was neutral. Uruguay was far from Europe. Uruguay had not been invaded the way Poland had last spring. But the
Graf Spee
came anyway, and so did the British ships that set it on fire. War’s fingers were very long and they stretched over the Atlantic and shook up her city the way a ghost’s cold fingers reach through a window and shudder you awake in your own bed. That’s how it was when Eva woke to Papá in the hall telling Tomás about the
Graf Spee: the smoke was thick like—well, like—a big black blanket, all over the port, and up on the crane we were coughing like crazy, and I saw the Nazis standing on deck rigid like fucking toothpicks, like everything was fine, like they were breathing air from the fucking Alps
. After the German captain gave up and sank his battleship to the bottom of the river, Eva dreamed of dead wet Nazis smashing her windows and crawling into her bed, cold and dripping, cutting her with shards of glass and ship and with their fingernails.

Andrés had written a sonnet called “
Graf Spee’s
Ghost” and it occurred to her that he might understand. She tapped his foot with hers. He smiled without looking at her.

“The things you say,” she told him later on their walk home. “The way you say them. Everybody listens.”

“It’s just talk.”

The heart of things, you touch it when you speak; somehow you shake and shift the flesh reality is made of. “It’s more than that.”

We are told
, Andrés wrote,
that the world is made of burlap: / Coarse, enduring—when really it is gauze, / Layer upon layer, fine, fragile, infinite, / We can see our fingers through it in the light
. And he himself was a light, a beacon, though not like the lighthouse at Punta Carretas, not that slow, predictable ray. He was feverish and erratic. His beam was a bright knife; his words and thoughts could cut open the night. She wanted to get close, be pierced, approach the wick inside him that was hidden from the world, that surely sprang from pain, that held secrets as dark and delicate (she imagined) as her own. He emboldened her. Sitting on the toilet at 5 a.m., she soared, risked, wrote, scripted line after line of words that sprang from a source at once unknown and intimate. Words about freedom; fury; her many hungers; words that gnashed their teeth and bit one another on the page.

A second year passed. Poetry leaked onto her waitress tablet, the skin of her arm, scraps of paper she found later in her socks. That spring, her brother Marco married Raquel, the girl from La Blanqueada, who, Eva had to admit, was genuine in her sweetness, and wanted to make a sister out of Eva, an enterprise she quickly crushed by neglecting to return calls.
You will never understand me
, Eva could have, but did not, say. The following year, she finally recited a poem out loud. She stood in Pepe’s living room, opulent with imported rugs and fresh-cut lilies. She should never have looked at the lilies. She lost her nerve and lost her voice.

“Go on, Eva,” Carlos urged, leaning forward in support. He had a tomato-sauce stain on his collar, and this gave her courage. Still, she couldn’t muster more than a hoarse whisper; the poets mistook this for dramatic flair, and responded with genuine applause.

“Not bad,” Pepe said reluctantly. He turned and spoke to the audience, rather than to her. “The lighthouse as metaphor for freedom during war. And a clever allusion to that
inglesa
Woolf.”

Eva had not thought of the war when writing that poem (although she should have—the United States had joined the fray, Jews in Europe wore yellow stars, droves and droves were dying) and she’d forgotten all about Virginia Woolf. “Yes, thank you.”

When her poem came out in
Expresión
, a journal published in a poet’s basement, Eva clipped two copies: one to keep under her pillow, and one for the dark place between her breasts. It grew damp with sweat each day. By winter the paper had smudged and thinned. She carried it anyway, tucked into place like a little weapon.

In Eva’s fifth year at La Diablita, her youngest brother became a man by marrying María Chamoun’s daughter, the bright-as-a-flame Carlota. Tomás stood by the altar, dwarfed by his own stiff suit, gaping at the cloud of tulle and silk on its way toward him. In the pews, Eva sat with Bruno, Marco, and Mamá. The bride reached the altar. Padre Robles made the sign of the cross (his fingers were still fat) and leaped into his script. Carlota beamed through her veil. Tomás grinned like a comicbook character. The wooden pew was hard, and Eva crossed and recrossed her legs, picturing herself spitting on the giant crucifix behind the altar.

At the reception—half the neighborhood cramped into the Chamouns’ living room—Eva served plates with her sister-in-law Mirna.

“So, Eva.” Mirna cocked her head slyly. “When will we do this for you?”

She didn’t answer. She looked around for some reprieve. Across the room, Xhana leaned her head toward the boy who had been courting her. César. They had met at the university, where they were both studying to become schoolteachers. César had the kind of eyes an angel might: fresh, wide, midnight-black, lit up by something Xhana was now saying. Eva still hadn’t met him; she avoided family gatherings by reflex, to avoid awkward moments with Papá. But she missed her cousin. They were almost strangers. Maybe she could go over there, smile, say hello like a normal girl.

“Wonderful. Wonderful.”

Mirna handed Eva a plate. She almost dropped it.

“Your daughter works there?”

“
Sí
.”

“I hope she gives you less trouble than mine did.”

Pietro laughed amiably. “
Ay
, Gondola,” he said. Eva gripped the knife from the
pascualina
platter. It was long and flecked with spinach—she could raise it right now, slash both of their throats, stop their laughing. Heat rushed through her at the thought. She swung the blade against the platter once, twice, three times, and on the third it tipped and spilled the rest of the pie onto the floor.

Mirna stared.

“I need air,” Eva said, loping out.

That night she dreamed she was a bride walking down an aisle.
I never thought this could happen to me
. She held dozens of carnations. She had to crane her neck above them to see where she was going.
Who’s the groom?
The dim air crashed with organ music. As she got closer to the altar she heard a terrible cackle, getting louder and louder. She dropped the flowers. In front of her, a giant slice of
pascualina
pie stood on stick legs, a bow tie slapped onto its pastry shell. It was laughing. It smelled like rotting eggs. She screamed, and it laughed louder. She screamed and screamed and woke up sweating. Dawn light seeped through the curtains. She sat up and pulled them back. The sky looked ashen. She wanted to fly out of the window, become a bird, a buoyant speck of grime, anything that might lift off and disappear into the night. The little house felt like a trap, tight, dark, inescapable, cluttered with unsaid words. Her body too. She was eighteen. At her age her mother had been married for two years, and not that she wanted her mother’s life or even cared, but who would marry her? And who would she want to live so close to in one corner of the raucous world? Only one person. She didn’t deserve him, she never would, but perhaps she had to try.

She would not drop her tray, with all its dirty dishes, though it was heavy, too heavy, an impossible load. She bolted to the kitchen and disappeared behind its door.

Eva turned nineteen without a hint of marriage. She watched Andrés and Beatriz sit close together, and it turned her stomach, the proprietary way she stroked his neck. She tried to ignore them but they imprinted themselves on her vision as if she had glanced at the sun.

In her last year at La Diablita, Eva worked as many hours as she could and stashed extra cash beneath her mattress, just in case the world ever opened an escape hatch and she had to sling together her own raft.

The World War ended and turned Montevideo into an early Carnaval. Eva woke to the roar of drum and song and shouting from the street. The neighbor’s radio blared ecstatically through the wall: “Peace at last—Germany’s surrender—no more war …” She dressed quickly and ran to the kitchen, where her mother stood still as a hawk, wet rag suspended in her hand, staring at the wall as if boring through its surface to reveal a hidden fissure. Eva felt, against her will, the wide and fickle arms of hope. The world could change. It was changing: this kitchen was not just a kitchen, but a box at the edge of a human river, streaming past their door, celebrating the eruption of peace. She approached her mother and hugged her from behind.

“Mamá.”

Pajarita leaned into her daughter. A single wet trail ran down her cheek, as if a snail or tear had crept there. It was not a wetness Eva wanted to see, not an embrace she could withstand. She stepped away, toward the door. Mamá looked at her in a manner that sealed her mission to escape.

“I’m going out.”