The Invisible Mountain (29 page)
“All that time,” said Ignazio.
Eva tipped ash into the ashtray.
“Your apartment looks very nice. From the outside.”
“Seems like you know that part quite well.”
“I didn’t mean to alarm you. Really.” He spread his palms. “I can’t explain it. I’d be out at night, walking, and then I’d be on your block.”
“You never thought to knock?”
“I never thought you’d open.”
She wondered whether she would have. The wine arrived, poured into glasses. They drank without toasting. The room was full of murmurs, the keen of a jazz record, someone’s too-sharp laugh, someone else’s sharp perfume.
Ignazio fingered the stem of his glass. “You never came back.” It was not a question, and she would not have had an answer if it had been. “There’s a hole in the family.”
Eva smoked. Behind him, the woman with bleached hair was gorging on her friend’s confessions, elbows on the table, patent-leather foot wagging beneath it.
“Do you hate me?” He said it to the crimson tabletop.
She swirled her wine. She sipped. It warmed her throat. “No.”
He struck another match. In its brief light he looked hopeful in an almost boyish way. Once, she thought, he had actually been a boy, somewhere in Italy and then at a steamboat’s rail, smoking cigarettes like this one, on his ride to Uruguay, alight, alone, leagues away from home. “I’m going to die,” he said.
“Papá. You’re sick?”
“No. Just old.”
“Not so very old.”
“Older than my father ever got.”
He shrugged. “I want you to forgive me.”
“For what?”
He fingered the stem of his wineglass. “For all of it. For never hearing your side of the story.”
Her cigarette was down to the filter. She stamped it out.
“I could hear it now?”
She touched the underside of the table. It was cold; it was sticky; it would soil her hands. “No.”
“Or we could leave it in the past.”
“Better.”
Ignazio stared at the ashtray as if it held a ciphered mystery. “Will you come to the house?”
She busied herself lighting a cigarette. The sharp laugh cut the air again, then stopped, caught in a spiderweb of voices. “Yes.”
“And forgive me?”
She blew out smoke, inhaled again. “Why not.”
He coughed. He marveled at her fingers, with their carefully lacquered nails. “You look very nice.
Este …
how are things with your family?”
Eva laughed. She was light, she was drunk, it was not the wine. “Oh, fine. My husband left.”
“Left where?”
“Left me.”
“What?”
Eva smiled, absurdly. The woman with bleached hair was gone; her chair held nothing but a crumpled napkin.
“Come live with us.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, a bit too quickly.
“But still. If you need anything. Food. Money. A place to stay.”
Eva thought of the sand-colored house, with its cluttered rooms, its warmth and bustle, the table heavy with plates, forsaken corners she recalled in minute detail. “Thank you.”
He shrugged again. “More wine?”
Eva rose to the fifteenth floor. Zolá opened the door. “What a surprise.”
“Are you free?”
“Absolutely.”
Eva entered. Zolá closed the door. She wore a lilac blouse and she looked lovely, a hothouse blossom, rare, hybrid, labyrinthine.
“Roberto’s left for Buenos Aires.”
“Already?”
“Without me.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. That’s not what I came for.”
“You’d like a wash?”
“Zolá.” Eva stepped closer. She wasn’t sure how to start. She touched Zolá’s face, and Zolá’s eyes widened with a response that looked like pain. The air roared, and then nothing mattered, they were already inside, they kissed and two mouths moved into each other, damp, pressing, Zolá pressing against her, Zolá’s hands in her hair, warm, firm, seeking, more hungry than she’d known, and then she did it, let her hands rove, let them loose on Zolá’s body like two beasts rooting for food.
“Can this be?” Zolá said. “Can this really be?”
“Yes,” Eva said. “Oh yes it can.”
Heaven, she thought, is not in the sky but in skin and skin and skin—
They lay next to each other in the dark, having made love in the dark, to the dark, with the dark holding them like a great cupped hand. Eva thought, I never want to leave, I want to inhabit this place suffused with the scents we have created, with the imprint of what our bodies and voices have done. I want to stay, forever, in this body blended with another body, discovering our cries and pores and lost hollows where longing furls, has furled for years, hungry to release its secret colors. “I want to stay forever,” she said.
“I mean, I’ll go. The children. But leave myself here in a film of sweat between your sheets.”
“Mm.”
“And never leave you.” “Mmm.”
“Your body, Zolá—”
“Shhh.”
“It’s a miracle.”
“Eva.”
“It is.”
“Eva.”
“Never leave me.”
“Never.”
“Are you crying?”
“Never. Never.”
She launched a new life, gently, from the catapult of her own hands. She found a job in a café three blocks from home. The pay was low but her fellow waitresses had mouths full of laughter, and her boss, a generous septuagenarian, sent her home each day with paper boxes of croissants or guava tarts or empanadas for the children. They ate these little gifts for breakfast or lunch or dinner, sometimes right from the box, its white walls stained with spheres of oil. The three of them sat around the kitchen table and ate the pastries with their fingers. Roberto always took his apart methodically, as if he needed to investigate the contents before tasting. Salomé closed her eyes before she bit, as though tasting the filling might require an act of faith. They often ate in silence. They had become taciturn since their father left. At first, Roberto asked daily where his father was, and the answers—still in Buenos Aires; no, not coming back; it would be the three of them now—were not sufficient to keep the questions from returning. But soon the repetition seemed to bore him, and the questions fell away, leaving the quiet sounds of teeth and spoons.
“They love him,” Eva said, trying to sound neutral.
Pajarita smiled. “He’s ten times more excited than they are.”
They washed the dishes, Pajarita scrubbing, Eva drying and putting things away. The cups and forks and pots still inhabited the same shelves of the same cupboards as always; they were home, they had a place, they belonged. The counters were still crowded with potted plants and jars of dried leaves and roots and barks that could make a housewife sigh with relief or a daughter find her legs. Eva didn’t know what to say to her mother, but it didn’t seem to matter; a gentle silence hung between them, interwoven with the sound of running water, clinking plates, and young laughter rising down the hall.
On other nights, they went to Xhana’s house, where Artigas and César played with the children. They wrote songs that cast Salomé and Roberto as the heroes, a princess saved by gauchos from tall towers, a prince saving villages from kings. If they didn’t like the story, they could change it, but it meant they had to sing. The children glowed in the warmth of Xhana’s home, the noise of it, the beat of drums and swell of voices. The family crammed around the gingham table for dinner, arms touching, while Tía Xhana cut Salomé’s meat and told stories that chronicled the history of Uruguay: a revolution fought by
indios
and freed slaves, a president who built schools for everybody, factories where people stopped working because they were not happy, brave people who, as she told it, had stood up for their country, for Uruguay, and made it so that they could have this table and food and nice family.
“Let them eat,
querida,
” César said.
“They can hear a little history while they eat. Right,
chicos?
”
Roberto peered into his mashed potatoes. Eva nudged him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes,” Salomé said. She looked rapt, swept up by Xhana’s stories. Eva was swept up too; she thought of Argentina, with its long succession of dictators; in comparison, Uruguay had a unique story, a remarkable story, one that proved that a robust democracy—with literacy, labor rights, health care—could exist in Latin America, could be created again in other countries. She said this once, and drew skepticism from the table.
“I wish you were right,
prima,
” Xhana said, “but it’s not that simple. All that could become a thing of the past.”
“If it hasn’t already,” Artigas said.
Eva put her fork down. “How can that be?”
“Look what’s happened since the end of the Korean War. The United States no longer needs our wool to clothe their soldiers, our beef to feed them.”
“Right.”
“And so today we have inflation, the fall of salaries, the rising costs. We can’t export anything, but we’re still forced to import.”
“We never should have based our economy on war,” César said, so passionately that even Roberto looked up from his plate.
“
Sí, querido
, but what choice did we have? A small nation like ours? How could we survive without selling to the giants?”
“That’s exactly the question to ask now,” Artigas said. “We have to find a better way than this. Look at all the unrest this year, the strikes, the arrest of union leaders. The government is not on the workers’ side, not anymore.”
“They can’t be; they’re too fractured.”
“They’re corrupt.”
“It has to change.”
“It won’t.”
“Then the people will,” said Xhana.
Salomé was listening so intently that the meat had fallen off her fork; she held it absently, spearing the empty air. Eva felt a dual urge to plunge
into the conversation—to say this couldn’t be, Uruguay was not so fragile, hard times had come and gone before and would surely pass again—and to move it in a wholly new direction, away from anything that could sound to young ears like danger, like a cause for leaving home, as they had done once before. She admired Xhana, with her communist committee meetings, her flyers for labor strikes, her unrelenting analysis of social issues, but she was torn between the instinct to join in and the instinct to protect her family. It was just her now with the children, and they had so much less than before, and yes, true, no one was getting exiled from Uruguay, and surely no one would be, but still, if, if, where would they go? Better to support the struggle in the ways she could, from a distance, in the realm of poetry, and poetry, after all, did matter; words did matter; her weapons were her words.
When they stayed over late, the children fell asleep in Tío Artigas’ bed, and Eva and Xhana would spend time alone in the kitchen.
“Have another, Eva.”
“Thanks, Xhana. I really am full.”
“Any news from Roberto?”
“A letter. He’s landed, he’s settled in. I suppose he’s doing fine.”
“Are you getting a divorce?”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s illegal in Argentina.”
“So you can’t remarry.”
“Not that I was going to.”
“But in the future, Eva?”
She hesitated for a long time, surely too long. “My future is with my children.”
“You could still meet another man.”
She didn’t mean to laugh, and tried to suppress it, so the sound came out twisted into a witch’s cackle. “Let’s not count on it.”
There was no thought of marriage, no thought of any lover but Zolá, whom she saw several times a week, after work, or before work, or during hair appointments, while her children were under their grandparents’ watchful care. She wanted to grow old with Zolá, wanted to know
how her touch would feel on wrinkled skin, what age would do to their two naked bodies. She wanted to dig deep into Zolá and curl up at her center, make a nest there, never leave. She wanted Zolá to fill her, again, again, to walk the streets full of her lover’s fingers, baptized by her tongue. All their moments were stolen and there were never enough.
Tell me more. Tell me your heart, the whole of it. I was born to touch you, my life for this, my hand along your skin
. Once, years ago, she had wanted to die; now she raged that there was not enough life, that they did not have a thousand years to spend, that one day their pockets would be emptied of days. They had only little coins of time and they spent and spent and spent them, polished them with their pleasure, made them gleam. So this is what joy does to a woman, she thought: it makes you hungry, makes you long to live and live, makes you guard the secret at any cost, wakes the animal inside and makes her growl to break the heavens into pieces.
Fall came and draped the streets with leaves begging to be crushed underfoot. Eva felt them crack against her soles; sometimes she broke them lovingly, a slow, heavy caress, and other times she brought force into her step, imagining they were her husband’s face. Roberto had been forgetting to send money. That’s what he said when she called him: I’ve forgotten, yes, yes, I’ll send it soon. His voice was tense and he rushed to hang up, the woman who’d answered the phone surely tapping her foot in the background. And Eva believed him, that he’d meant to send the money, that it had slipped his mind, that Montevideo was simply drifting farther and farther from the scope of his thoughts. It was a small sum to him, after all; a trifle. Eva kicked a little pile of leaves as she walked through it. Rent was due in four days, and she did not have enough.
She confided in Xhana, in her kitchen at 2 a.m.
“Call him.”
“I already have.”
“Call him every day.”
“The woman clearly doesn’t like me.”
“Who cares? This is his responsibility.”