The Invisible Mountain (2 page)
Tía Tita stayed with them, and Artigas was glad; his aunt was like an ombú tree, thick-trunked, alive with silence. He curled into the shade of her. He slept against the warm bark of her body. The seasons churned from cold to heat and back to cold. Miguel grew hard, like beef in smoke. He didn’t touch the baby. One night—as the winter wind swept through the cracks in the walls, and outside the treetops arched and swung against clear sky in which the moon looked big enough to spill a calf out of its belly—the baby girl cried in Tita’s arms.
“Shut her up, Tita,” Miguel said.
“It’s the wind. And her teeth are coming in.”
“Then kill the little whore!”
Artigas crouched into the shadows. His nameless sister gazed at her father with large eyes.
Tita said, “Miguel.”
“Shut up.”
“Miguel. Calm down.”
“I’m calm. I said kill her.”
Tía Tita tightened her arms around the baby and stared at her brother, who stared at the baby, who did not look away. Artigas felt the need to defecate; he couldn’t stand the expression on his father’s face, a look that could have slashed a man to pieces. The fire ebbed and crackled and his father turned and pushed through the leather curtain at the door. Artigas imagined him standing outside, alone, under a bowl of stars, and heard him slide onto horseback and ride out over flat earth.
The next morning, the baby was gone. Though they all slept on the same hides, the Torres family hadn’t felt her leave. A thorough search of land around them yielded absolutely nothing: no crawl-marks, no clues, no miniature corpse. A week after her disappearance, the gossips of Tacuarembó proclaimed her dead—or, as the devout Doña Rosa put it, carried off by angels into heaven. She had died of starvation. She had died of abandonment. She had died under an owl’s claws, unnamed, unwanted. Miguel said nothing to this, neither agreed nor disagreed, neither wept nor smiled.
She took Artigas on some of her quests. One of them changed him indelibly (and he wondered, years later, as an old man toting rifles through the jungle, whether without that day he might have aged uneventfully in Tacuarembó). It happened on a Sunday that began with mass at the town church, a place Artigas hated for reminding him of the last time he’d seen his mother, enshrouded in black cloth and wildflowers. The priest spoke with a passion that edged his mouth with spittle and Artigas’ knees got sore. On the way home, his aunt pulled the bridle and changed the course of their ride without warning or explanation. Artigas gazed around him at the grass, the tall eucalyptus, the distant sheep. No sign of his sister. They rode in silence, the sun’s hot liquid all around them.
An hour passed. Artigas grew restless. “Tía,” he asked, “how much longer will we look?”
She neither answered nor slowed down. Her skirts sang
swish, swish
against the horse’s skin. The detour might be for a special sprout or crooked leaf or bitter root for one of her healing teas or balms. She was always gathering and gathering. In town she was notorious for hitching her skirt up to her thighs so she could carry weeds she’d ripped out of someone else’s ground. The Gardel boys teased him about it, I saw your tía’s legs covered in mud, your tía’s crazy to chase dead babies. Artigas had come home scraped and bleeding and victorious.
When Tía Tita finally stopped, she slid off the horse and didn’t move. He slunk down behind her.
They stood in an unfamiliar field. There were no cows, no sheep or people, no baby girls falling out of the sky, nothing at all except grass
and a couple of ombús. Empty. Empty. Sisters can’t be found in empty space. Little girls do not survive the wild. Even if they found her she would be mangled, all white bone and gnawed flesh, like the carcass of an abandoned sheep. Artigas sat down and stared at Tía Tita’s back, with that long, dark braid running down its center like a seam. She stood impossibly still. He waited. Nothing happened. The sun bore down. He was hot and he wanted to slap something. This bare, dumb field. This heavy sun. That strange, unmoving back of Tita’s. He leaped up. “Tía, what are we doing here?”
“We’re listening. To birds.”
Artigas opened his mouth to protest this absurdity but nothing could come out because in the time it took to draw his next breath it had occurred, it was too late, the sound of the field flooded his body, birds sang in the sky and in the leaves, his bones were bursting open, there were birds in his bones, singing, small and loud and delicate, hidden in flesh, hidden in foliage, saying the unsayable in keens and croons and cries, almost unbearable; the field, the fierce little throats, the open world, beyond his understanding, and the sound shimmered open and spilled a secret music that could steal him and never bring him back. He filled with terror and something else and had to pee or cry but couldn’t, and so he buried his face in musky grass and listened to birds.
They found no baby that day. In fact, on New Year’s, it was neither Tía Tita nor Artigas but young Carlita Robles who galloped to the plaza with the news. Artigas saw her walnut braids flying behind her with the exact same hue and gleam as her horse, as if they had been soaked in the same dye. Her timing was perfect. The century was nine hours old. The plaza’s cobbles sizzled from the stare of morning sun. Stragglers still clung to the site of the party: snoring drunks, young lovers, stray dogs, Artigas with his worn guitar (with which he strained, against all reason, to enter the hidden lairs of sound). The devout Doña Rosa still hadn’t emerged from church. She’d been there since midnight. She’d been fasting since Christmas so that God would not make their miracle a bad one, like a massacre or cholera or a flood of infidelities (though nobody took her campaign too seriously, as three years earlier, when her son had disappeared with Aparicio Saravia’s rebel forces, she’d become obsessed with fasts and prayer and if her husband couldn’t find her he simply rode
to church, where he’d invariably catch his kneeling wife and bring her home to cook his dinner. Such a patient man, people said. Not an easy lot, to be cuckolded by God).
“I found it—the miracle!” Carlita called. “There’s a baby in a tree!”
Artigas stopped strumming, the couples stopped kissing, and Alfonso the shopkeeper lifted his groggy head from the bench.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“Let’s go see.”
They went to the chapel first, to tell Doña Rosa. Stained light eased over their heads and sidled to the pews, down the aisle, over Doña Rosa’s pious back. Carlita dipped into holy water and made a rushed sign of the cross. Artigas followed suit for her sake (she was so pretty).
“Doña Rosa,” Carlita whispered. “The miracle. There’s a baby in a ceibo!”
Doña Rosa looked up from her rosary. “A baby?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.” She frowned. “What a blessing.”
They rode the dirt path toward the eastern edge of Tacuarembó. Artigas settled into the hot equine muscle beneath his legs. The sleepless night had left a veneer of alert exhaustion and he didn’t want to rest. He would ride his horse to the edge of town; he would ride his horse to the edge of the world; it was a new century, he would ride and ride, and a baby could be, no it couldn’t, impossible, but if it was. How bright the colors were around him, the green and gold of summer grass, the hot blue of morning sky, the dark-wood brown of the
ranchitos
out of which more people came to join their travels. Kerchiefed women craned their heads through curtained doorways for the news, then left embers glowing alone in cooking pots. Men drinking
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in the sun untied their horses and scooped their children into saddles.
The group doubled, and doubled again, growing the way armies do as they sweep through towns. By the time they arrived at the ceibo tree, the sun had brushed its zenith and begun to slide. The tree towered over the eastern well, and at the very top, thirty meters from solid earth, grasping a slim branch, there perched a girl.
She was not quite a year old. Her skin was two shades lighter than hot
chocolate and she had high cheekbones and chaotic hair that spilled to her naked waist. Her eyes were round and moist like birthday cakes. She looked neither afraid nor eager to descend.
Artigas threw his head back. He burned to catch her eye.
Mírame
, he thought.
“She’s a witch!” one woman said.
“A
bruja
sent us a
brujita
!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Doña Rosa. “She’s an angel. She’s here to bless Tacuarembó.”
“With what? A rain of baby caca?”
“That’s no angel, it’s just a child.”
“A dirty one.”
“Maybe she’s one of the Garibaldi kids. They’re always climbing trees.”
“Only the Garibaldi
boys
climb trees.”
“And they only climb ombús.”
“That’s true. How could anyone get up this trunk?”
The necks of fifty
tacuaremboenses
craned up at the girl. The tree looked impossible to scale. If it had been a native ombú, with its low, inviting branches, there would have been no miracle or legend or ninety years of carrying the story. But here was the tallest ceibo known to Tacuarembó, its lowest branch many meters from the ground. No one could imagine an adult shimmying up with a baby in her arms, let alone a baby’s lonely climb.
“Very well. Doña Rosa, you’ve got your miracle.”
“Our miracle.”
“Miracles are miracles, what more can we say?”
“Only thanks be to God.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. I certainly do.”
“I meant no harm.”
“Hmm.”
“Look, everybody, let’s not quarrel.”
“We’ve got to find a way to get her down.”
“A ladder!”
“There’s no ladder big enough—I know, I made them all.”
“I could climb the tree—”
“You can barely climb onto your horse,
hombre
!”
“We should wait for a sign—”
“And what? Leave her up there for another century?”
The infant sat high above the din, impassive, barely moving. Artigas thought:
Mírame
. She turned her head, this way, that way, and their eyes met. You. You. Their gaze had flesh, their gaze had strength, their gaze was a branch between them, invisible, unbreakable, bound to last forever, or so it seemed.
“I know her,” he shouted. “She’s my sister.”
Fifty faces turned toward the boy.
“Your sister?”
“What sister?”
“Ay … he means …”
“Poor thing.”
“Look, Artigas.” Carlita Robles knelt beside him. “This can’t be her.”
“Why not?”
“She’s been gone too long.”
“She couldn’t have survived.”
“Little girls can’t survive alone.”
“But she did,” Artigas said.
Carlita and Doña Rosa exchanged a glance.
“Besides,” he added, “if it’s not her, where did this girl come from?”
Doña Rosa opened her mouth, then closed it. No one spoke. Artigas looked up again at the infant in the treetop. She stared back. She was far away, close close to heaven, yet he could swear he saw the texture of her eyes: dark pools, wide awake, red veins in the whites. He imagined himself soaring up to meet her.
“Wait for me,” he called into the foliage.
He mounted his horse and galloped down the hill.
He found Tía Tita outside their hut, plucking a chicken. He dismounted in a rush and told her everything about the morning plaza, the crowd around the ceibo, the child up on the branch. She listened. She
tilted her face to the sun. Her lips moved without making any sound. She wiped her wide hands on her apron and untied it. “Let’s go.”
By the time they arrived at the ceibo, most of the town had formed a ring around it. Women had brought their children, children had brought their great-grandparents, men had brought wives, the stray dogs from the plaza had brought one another. Horses grazed. Doña Rosa had sacrificed the front of her dress to kneel on the ground and pray intensely with her rosary that had been blessed sixteen years earlier by the pope. The shopkeeper’s son brandished a wooden flute. Dogs barked and brayed. Several
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gourds and baskets of empanadas circulated from hand to hand. Arguments rose and broke and rose again, about the girl, about the pastries, about who drank how much and did what with whom last night in the plaza. The infant stared at them from the high foliage, which held her like an adoptive guardian’s arms.
Tía Tita and Artigas slid from their shared saddle. The crowd grew quiet. Tía Tita was not tall, but she was large somehow, hard-jawed, commanding. “Leave us alone,” she said, looking at the baby but speaking to the throng. No one wanted to miss the story, break up the party, let someone else fix the problem. But Tía Tita—odd, unfathomable, needed for the cure of old men’s creaks and the froth on soldiers’ mouths—could not be easily denied. Slowly, grudgingly, the crowd dispersed.
“You too, Artigas.”
He did as he was told. Horseflesh moved damply below his thighs. The air was hot and thick and heavy. He joined a cluster that had formed in the shade of an ombú, and turned to watch from his saddle: Tita and that high speck of a girl, still and dark against a ruthless sky. Tita raised her arms and seemed to wait, and then the treetop shook and rushed with leaves and sudden-downward-streaking and her arms closed around a thing that thudded against her chest. Artigas watched his aunt walk from the tree, away from town, returning home on foot. By the time the moon had risen, all of Tacuarembó knew the story of the fall that turned to flight or flight that turned to fall.
They called her Pajarita. Little Bird.
———