The Invisible Mountain (35 page)
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STEEL RABBITS AND
SONGS THAT MELT SNOW
T
hey were preparing the revolution. There was plenty to do. Funds to gather, and weapons, and members; banks and gun clubs to raid for supplies; copper wire to coil into a shape that holds without hurting. Salomé tried on every pair of handcuffs she made. She pulled her wrists against the wires, and if they left red slashes she kept adjusting to make them gentler. Of course, they could always twist out of shape in some faceless Tupamaro’s satchel or pocket or purse, but still, she did her best. The wearers might be guards, bank workers, customers, receptionists, the very people the Movement was for. The last thing we’d do is hurt these people, she thought, shaping circles slowly, massaging her good wishes into wire. Tupamaros were always kind and courteous during operations. Courtesy was an essential Movement rule.
There were many rules to learn. They seeped into her world and mind. Rule One: Be impeccable, don’t attract attention. She could do that, she was a natural, she’d been preparing all her life. Rule Two: Be devoted. Yes. She was not too young, she could work, could be trusted, could give herself to something fierce and noble, she’d show them who she was. Rule Three: You’re sworn to secrecy. She could do this too, though occasionally strange temptations took her by surprise. Her new identity roared and bubbled and frothed. She could have shouted at the bus driver, I’m going to save your country! She almost whispered at the nun in the back row, I understand, yes, yes, I’ve also made a vow. And the hoary man across the aisle, gaping at her legs: Watch out, she
didn’t say, you don’t know who I am, you haven’t seen the guns under my bed.
She hid them dutifully, as instructed. The trick was to store them under your mattress, and then to keep your bed so deftly made, your sheets so clean, that no one in your family thought to touch them. The day Salomé brought home her first cache—two pistols and one rifle—she fluffed her pillow for twenty-seven minutes, and adjusted her blue and green quilt for a full hour. It looked tidy, pristine, smooth, of course it did, a little to the left, a stretch to the right, was that a wrinkle, no, it was just the subtle pleat between the triangles, now the pillow has a hollow, now it’s convex, now the blanket, how’s the bottom, it seems fine, all things neat, all things tidy, this is an innocent bed.
“Salomé.” Mamá knocked on her door. “Dinner’s ready.”
At the table, the voices of her family sounded distant, as though caught inside a seashell, or as though she were curled in a seashell and they were far off on the beach. She saw them rise and run to her bedroom, first Abuela, then Abuelo, then Roberto, then Mamá, eight hands hurling up her mattress, but there was only boisterous eating, unrushed laughter, the taste of fried
buñuelos
, the pour of Coca-Cola into glass.
Salomé learned to sleep—and to not-sleep—with hard hillocks against her back. All spring and summer she shifted in the dark, trying to find a position where she wouldn’t feel them, but it was no use. Sharp protrusions stalked her hip bone. Long barrels lay from shoulder blade to waist. Some nights she lay in a restive state, half dozing, half awake, gazing through the window at a shard of moon or at the lack of moon. Other nights she’d catch enough sleep to dream, and then she’d find herself in a wilderness, in some unknown part of the world, waiting for other guerrillas to join her, curled up on a heap of weapons, surrounded by knotted trees and piercing birdcalls. As she lay, the pile grew, a rising mound of guns, higher and higher until she broke above the forest cover, and the sun poured down on her with hot and copious radiance, glistening on treetops and the pistols at her knees. She dripped with sweat beneath that sun. Then she’d wake (sweaty, on guns), and make her bed immediately. She’d shower and don her uniform, tucking the blouse carefully into the skirt. Then came breakfast—how did you sleep, Salomé? fine, Mamá—and then the bus to school.
She had to become larger to make room for so much life.
Meetings were punctual and cramped and efficient. Orlando delivered updates on recent operations—bank holdups, arms acquisition, delivery of food to a
cantegril
. Her role was limited to hearing the reports, storing a few guns, making the occasional handcuffs. Tinto distracted her with his enormous hands, the dark hairs curled above the top button of his shirt, wiry curls that surely led to more dark curls along his chest and how exactly did they lie between cotton and skin? He was the kind of
joven
old ladies fantasize about for help crossing the street, kind and large and just a little goofy. He had grown very quickly, judging from his stance, the slight stoop of his shoulders, an awkwardness with all that sudden bulk. Salomé liked this about him, both the bulk and awkwardness; sweet heft to pull down on a woman; what a thought, what a thought—where did that come from?
After meetings, in stolen moments, Tinto approached her with shreds of things to say.
“You know, my grandmother made your abuelos’ wedding bed.”
An odd conversation starter.
“You did know.”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
“My abuelo raves about your abuelo’s singing.”
He looked dubious.
“No, really. Apparently he was better than Gardel.”
He laughed. His Adam’s apple shuddered as he laughed. He looked at her. She felt the other Tupas, studiously averting their gazes.
“My turn to go,” she said.
“Right. See you next time.”
She thought about their brief exchange for days. She rolled each word through the thirsty expanse of her mind. He hadn’t seen how plain she was, how dull-faced, in the dim light of hidden, cavelike rooms. He had seen but didn’t care what she looked like. Or he did care and he liked what he saw. That couldn’t be, but anyway it didn’t matter, she didn’t care, it wasn’t what she went to meetings for and he was probably just being polite.
After the next meeting, Tinto approached and picked up the conversation as if they’d just put it down. “How did your parents meet?”
“In Argentina. In a hospital.”
“Interesting.”
She shrugged.
“You don’t think so?”
“How did your parents meet?”
“It’s a long story.”
“So?”
“Your turn to go,” he said.
September. Spring lifted its head and shook its warm, loose hair. Tinto slipped her a note before he slipped from the laundromat.
Would you like the long story? How about tomorrow night, Parque Rodó, at nine o’clock?
The next night, in the park, Salomé searched the darkness—path and trees and fountain, wrapped in night—for Tinto. She found him on a bench with
mate
and thermos. She sat down next to him. They passed the slow gourd back and forth. Their silence was as supple as the darkness. Behind them, the fountain sang its low, rippling chant.
“I still want the story,” she said.
“Oh. Of course.”
He told her that his papá, Joaco Cassella, was born on a stretch of road somewhere in the province of Rocha, on a carnival wagon surrounded
by costume trunks. His mother filled several velvet curtains with her blood while giving birth. They settled in Montevideo, where Tinto’s grandfather folded his magician’s clothes, became a full-time carpenter, and faced the strange frontier of urban life. Tinto’s mamá, on the other hand, had a lineage that linked her to the city for six generations. Her name was Magda. Her father was a tailor who had once made suits for President Batlle y Ordóñez himself. She met Joaco in the neighborhood bakery. She was sixteen, and she was struck by the way he stroked his coins before relinquishing them to the baker. They were soft strokes, intimate and assured. Joaco looked at her in a manner that made her leave the bakery without bread. The second time, she was on her way out with loaves in her arms and she looked down and didn’t see him touch anything at all. The third time, she walked in to find him caressing a single coin. Their eyes met. He approached her.
“I can make this peso appear wherever you want it to.”
“Excuse me?”
“In my sleeve. On the counter. In your hand.”
She laughed. “I’m not stupid.”
“Don’t believe me?” Joaco leaned closer, and in his version of the story he knew as soon as he smelled her hair. “Watch. If I succeed, you let me walk you home. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Years later, Magda would claim he cheated by not revealing his paternity.
Tinto paused; a couple approached on the wooded path, nuzzling, taking their time. He waited until their silhouettes had blended into trees.
Joaco and Magda’s walk was quiet and electric all the way to Quiroga’s Tailor Shop. He asked who her father was. The tailor, Don Quiroga? Yes, she said, we live upstairs. She slipped inside, and he hovered on the street, staring at the exquisite door and proud brass sign. “I’ve met my future wife,” he told his mother that night, “but to court her I need a suit fit for Batlle.” His mother, Consuelo, Mistress of Disguises, dusted off her sewing machine and told her son to save up for fine cloth. It took two months for every coin and stitch to fall in place. Joaco shone his
shoes and splashed on cologne and went to Quiroga’s Tailor Shop. Its owner looked exactly like a bulldog.
“Don Quiroga. I’ve come to ask your blessing. I’d like to court your daughter.”
Don Quiroga knew his daughter was beautiful and he had plans for her, marriage to a mayor or a bureaucrat at least, excellent wine, trips abroad, years of front-row seats at Teatro Solís. This young man came with no credentials. But his lapels were flawless, his cuffs classic, his face determined. He could not deny him outright.
“I’ll leave it up to her.”
They were married two years later. Tinto was born in a bedroom littered with woodchips. He’d built four tables by his seventh birthday.
“And now?” said Salomé.
Now his father worked longer hours for dropped prices. His mother found new ways, each day, to stretch the food and fill each mouth. His abuela Consuelo, Mistress of Disguises, was dying of cancer in the front room. Tinto brought her
mate
in the mornings, soup and crackers at midday. Pain or age made her crotchety and forgetful. At her insistence he had taken their only hanging from the wall, a watercolor of the Montevideo port, and nailed her old pink leotard in its place. She stared at it for hours, sometimes with horror, sometimes as if sighting a frayed angel.
Salomé could have listened to Tinto until the sun came up. “I should go.”
“I should too.”
Neither of them moved.
“Perhaps,” Tinto said, “we could meet again.”
The bench became their private lair. They always met at night. One night, he asked how she’d Become, and she told him about Leona, the eucalyptus shade, the cryptic invitation in the bathroom. Another night he told her how he’d Become, how he’d joined the Socialist party after a leaflet was pushed into his hand in the street, at a strike of sugarcane workers who’d marched from the northern fields to Montevideo, and he’d stood there on the sidewalk, damp from the heat, holding the half-crushed leaflet with both hands, thinking of his abuelo Cacho, also from
the country, perhaps a very distant cousin to these men, hammering with arthritic hands. He went to the meeting described on the flyer. A man called Orlando watched him for a year before saying, You, Tinto, let’s go for a drink. She told him stories too, sprawling ones, about a Venetian man’s arrival in the city, when both he and the city were young, when so much promise filled them both; and about a baby girl who disappeared from a home that did not want her, that had not given her a name, and who survived mysteriously until she was discovered, wild, birdlike, alone, in the crown of a tree, and soared from there, or fell, depending on whom you asked and when you asked them. And she told of this girl’s childhood in the
campo
when there still was unfenced land, and the knowledge of plants and their powers that began, perhaps, in rebirth from a tree, and that lasted all her life, became enough to feed her family through hard times, and filled her kitchen with jars and pots of herbs that seemed to whisper to her in the silence underneath the sounds of her family. She told him about another woman who, legend had it, met her future husband while she was his patient, in a wheelchair and a dull hospital gown, seducing him with her sheer intensity of spirit. Salomé had always imagined this encounter as a physical collision in the corridor, a hazardous accident of fate, the poet careening down the long hall on loose wheels, the doctor crisp and helpless in his starched white coat, her wheels aimed at his knees, her head rushing toward the space below his heart. She told about the love or need or complicated lust that drove them into marriage, and the opulent Buenos Aires house she was born into but could not remember seeing with her own eyes. The house, she said, was now filled with a life she did not belong to, a doctor with a new wife who sent cash for Christmas gifts, but never sweaters that might fit or books she might enjoy, except the year he published his volume on neurology, and sent two copies, one for each child, signed by the author. One copy, Salomé’s, gathered indifferent dust under her bed, but the other stood on Roberto’s highest shelf with its cover facing out so it could shine like a faraway star. She described all of this, and also her mother’s book,
The Widest River in the World
, which fascinated her, each line of words uniquely shaped, like keys to her mother’s inscrutable interior life, keys she fingered with her mind but could not use because the
locks were intricately folded into the ever-shifting fabric of the woman who had penned the lines. A woman who kept writing, and who somehow found the time to teach poetry classes in various living rooms throughout Montevideo, an endeavor that brought virtually no money but after which she came home shimmering and triumphant. In Salomé’s tales, her mother, to her surprise, became an icon of inspiration, beauty, glamour, all the qualities that seemed so slippery and foreign in her own hands. It surprised her, all this talking, all his listening, all the stories that moved and breathed within her like creatures with limbs of their own. The air conspired with them, giving them darkness, enfolding them in lush and humid nights. One evening his hand landed on hers, a palm over her knuckles, broad, strong, tentative. She didn’t move. Heat stung her arm. Beyond the trees, the fountain poured out its wet song.