The Invisible Mountain (39 page)
The door flew open. Salomé turned, gun cocked for laughers or old ladies or anyone at all. It was Tinto, flushed, fresh from the fire station, hair falling in mad fronds over his eyes.
“It’s official,” he shouted. “The Tupamaros have taken Pando!”
He leaped onto the counter and broke into a speech, garbled, impassioned. “Liberation, see, it’s in the air, we’re breathing it, it’s filling up this spectacular country, Uruguay, a forgotten gem on a lost continent—but no more—we’re going to shine, nothing can stop us—
uruguayos
, dear citizens, brothers, sisters, you are the revolution, and you will be free—all of Latin America will be free. Che is here with us, cheering—can you hear him?” He talked on. Plaid Man’s eyes grew moist behind his glasses. The old lady with the pension pursed her lips, out of annoyance or to keep from smiling. A few stayed wooden, but others nodded, cheered, hooted, their hands still on the wall, their bodies twisting to see Tinto over their shoulders, a large young man with open palms, awkward, damp-faced, bright-voiced, hair flung in several directions, arms wide on his sudden stage.
Orlando emerged from the vault, hauling sacks. “Let’s go.”
Tinto leaped down. They headed toward the door. Shots rang outside. More shots. The room fell silent.
“I’ll look,” a pale Tupamaro said. He came back quickly. “There’s a cop outside. He’s exchanging shots with two of ours.”
Orlando’s face was a wall of calm. “We’ll wait inside.”
They waited. Shots punctured the quiet of the room. Someone whimpered at the wall. The shots stopped and they walked outside and sun stabbed Salomé’s eyes. Three funeral cars were parked across the street, the last one riddled with bullet holes. Its tires were shredded. A policeman lay behind it, young, black-haired, his pant leg soaked and shining. A red pool spread slowly from his leg.
“Shit,” Orlando said. “We’ve lost a car. We’ll have to double up. Pile in!”
Salomé ran to a car and pushed Tiburcio, the undertaker, into the backseat, then pressed in after him, Orlando after her. Through the rear window, she glimpsed Tinto crammed into the car behind them. She
threw the rest of her leaflets out the window as they peeled off, and they fell like huge confetti onto the street, blanketing the asphalt, absorbing, she hoped, some trickle of the officer’s blood. They turned a corner. The avenue was thronged with people: on the sidewalks, perched in doorways, swarming in the middle of the street, waving white kerchiefs from balconies, lunging for their car.
“Will you be back?”
“When’s the revolution?”
“Enroll me!”
“Take me!”
“Take my brother—”
“Hey!”
“Long live Che Guevara!”
The driver honked and yelled out of the window. “Clear the way! Please, clear the way!” He swore under his breath.
There were nine of them, jammed into the car: Orlando, Tiburcio, Salomé, and six others, three of them in Pando police uniforms. Flesh and sweat and thick air pressed on every side. The crowds abated. They pulled over at the edge of town, in front of cemetery gates.
“Let’s drop him here,” the driver said.
Salomé removed Tiburcio’s cuffs with rapid tenderness. The feel of him had become familiar, almost second nature. “Thank you.”
The undertaker squeezed her arm with his. “Listen, you be careful.”
She didn’t look at him. “I’m fine.”
The car door opened. He stood alone on the gravel driveway, blinking in the sun, a round man with fine white hair just waking from a dream. She wanted to say more to him, but the door closed and they pulled away. She waved through the back window. He waved back, ornate iron gates looming behind him, his gesture smaller and smaller in the distance.
The highway opened its long arms to them. She was starving; she could have eaten the upholstery, the pistols, the sky’s bright cloth. The boys in police uniforms were giddy, disheveled, recounting their stories from the front.
“You should have seen the looks on their faces. Those cops.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
“On our street we snarled the traffic, throwing leaflets, shouting, ‘Long live the revolution!’”
She felt their charge: electric, untamable. It shot through her skin. They had done it, they had triumphed, they had come out unscathed.
Orlando leaned toward the driver. “Is this the fastest you can go?”
“I’m flooring it,
compañero
. It’s the extra weight.”
“Of course.”
“They won’t catch us. We’re ahead. By the time the Montevideo police get word, we’ll all be safe at our—wherevers.”
Orlando touched the driver’s shoulder. He was really a gentle man. “Just go as fast as you can.”
They reached the edge of Montevideo. A police car lurked on the side of the road. They fell silent. The officers—the real ones—sat up at the sight of the long black car, gunned their engine, then spied the uniforms in the backseat and slumped, no, those couldn’t be the Tupas. She felt sick. They were hunted already. She said a silent, clumsy, half-forgotten Hail Mary, Full of Grace, Blessed Are You, isn’t that how it goes, in any case protect us, here in this car, and also Tinto, wherever he is, and Leona, and Anna, and Guillermo, and all the Tupas who kissed me at the funeral this morning, all the Tupas still making their escapes; and Tiburcio as he finds his way home; and the officer with his wet leg; please see our hearts, Holy Mary Mother of, forgive us the wet leg; pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of, again for Tinto. Tinto. Tinto. They kept on, into the folds of the city. The car pulled into a quiet street and parked behind a blue Ford. A young woman with a white kerchief on her arm emerged from the Ford, approached their car, and opened the trunk without a word. The driver began to transfer bags of guns and cash from the black car to the blue. Orlando climbed into the backseat of the Ford and lay down, invisible to the street. She wondered where he would sleep tonight, where he had been sleeping this past year, where his wife imagined that he was. The rest of them scattered in four directions,
without good-byes. Salomé stopped to buy empanadas in a bakery, six of them wrapped in crisp white paper. More than she could eat but she was famished. Her bus pulled up; she sat in the back with her surreptitious lunch and watched Montevideo’s streets turn larger, louder, squat dwellings rising into tall apartment buildings, cobbles giving way to asphalt streets. Montevideo, city of urban guerrillas with smooth cheeks. City of pigeons and their shit and possibility. City of damp soft undertakers, hidden guns, stolen copper wires.
She arrived at the embassy building and headed to the bathroom. She freshened her lipstick, changed her blouse, pressed her searing thoughts into a ball where nobody could see them, and checked her hair in the mirror. It was 2:56 p.m.: and here she was, Good and Quiet Salomé, back from the dental appointment she’d dutifully requested time for weeks ago, ready to work, punctual as always. She slipped behind her desk and started typing the letter at the top of her stack. Mr. Richards came to her station.
“Salomé. How was the dentist?”
“Okay; not too painful after all.” She cradled her cheek to nurse her invented ache.
He dropped his voice. “I’m not sure I believe you.”
Breath trapped in her lungs.
He leaned closer, with his Marlboro scent. “The dentist is always painful.”
She laughed, too sharply. He grinned and sauntered to his office.
Half an hour later, Viviana, the head secretary, rushed into the room. Her eyes glittered behind her glasses. “The Nameless! Have you heard?”
“No.” Salomé looked up, careful to veil her face.
“Well, they did this crazy thing at Pando—”
“Oh?”
“Yes, it’s terrible, but anyway, the police got them on the way back.”
“Got them?”
“There was a shootout at Toledo Chico.”
Salomé couldn’t speak. Viviana leered in satisfaction. “I know. They thought they were so invincible.”
She forced a smile. “Well, look at that.”
“What?”
“That’s what the radio said.”
Salomé stared at her typewriter. “And they deserved it.”
“Exactly what I say.”
Viviana left. Salomé ran to the bathroom and vomited up four and a half empanadas. The rest of the afternoon was a dull haze. After work, she went directly to her cell meeting. She could have torn her skin off. Tinto wasn’t there.
Anna gave the report. She had been in Toledo Chico. Her words were flat; she spoke them to the oil lamp. The police had surrounded two cars. Three Tupas tried to surrender. Anna watched them raise their arms high and walk slowly toward the police through knee-high grass. They were shot down, and when they fell officers ran up and filled their bodies with more bullets, then kicking, then more bullets into corpses. One carload, with Anna in it, managed to escape; the other was captured. Tinto’s car. Nothing to do but wait and hope for news.
Salomé couldn’t vomit, her intestines were empty, completely stark, as if she’d never eaten and would never eat again. At the close of the meeting, Leona approached, arms open.
“Salomé.”
“I have to go.”
“Salomé.”
“Leave me alone.”
She stumbled out before her turn.
That night, at dinner, Salomé couldn’t touch her food. Her family’s voices meshed and blurred and rose around her. They were talking about Pando, how shocking it all was, how this side or that side had gone too far, the Tupa deaths were a tragedy, the Tupa deaths were a relief, shut up, shut up, and now Abuelo Ignazio was talking to her,
Eat, Salomé
, Mamá was eyeing her too keenly,
What’s wrong, what’s the matter
, Roberto at his (far, far) end of the table,
she looks sick
, Abuelita reaching over,
Perhaps you’ve got a fever
, her hand on Salomé’s forehead, then shoulder,
Tomorrow you should stay home
.
She stayed in bed for four days. Fever shook and pressed and stretched
her and hung bits of Tinto in her vision, wide mouth, bent knee, torn hand, broken face. She was breaking every rule in the unwritten Tupa handbook, she should rise and show a calm and healthy face, but she either didn’t care or couldn’t help it anymore. Bad guerrilla, look at you, what shameful cracks in your self-discipline. Shut up, go to hell, where is he now, where is he? She didn’t want to eat or drink, but Abuela came each mealtime with a bowl of soup and deep brown tea. Mamá slept on the floor beside her bed. This forced her to pretend to sleep, until she heard her mother’s breathing grow audible and slow.
“What happened?”
Don’t ask
.
“Salomé.”
Stop it
.
“Is it a young man?”
You can’t, Mamá
.
“You can tell me.”
“No. It’s not.”
“Then what?”
“It’s just the fever.”
“It seems like more.”
“I just don’t feel well. I don’t know why.”
“Just tell me what I can do.”
You can shut up
.
You can give me Tinto
.
You can spit on me and call me a horrible daughter
.
Each day, Abuelo Ignazio came in and sang her lullabies, old ones he’d learned when he was a Venetian boy. He meandered, off-key. The songs were in Italian, a language she rarely heard and that made her think of glistening water and errant angels.
“My mother sang these songs to me.”
“Oh.”
“They cured my nightmares.”
Nightmares? What did you dream about?
“Maybe they’ll cure yours.”
They kept coming and coming, with their teas and words and songs,
and she was not a girl but a monster in girl’s clothing for treating them this way, drinking tea and listening to songs and feigning sleep on a mattress full of secret steel. And there was part of her that wished things could be as they had been, long before, when she was small and didn’t know how to stash parts of herself so far down she ran the risk of losing them, when wanting good things for the world was still a sweetsafe thing to do, and when Abuelo and Abuela and Mamá could be turned to for a warm embrace and sound advice on tricky homework or any other problem she might face. She was not that girl to them, not anymore, not even slightly. She was a thief who’d stolen their girl and left a false copy in her place.
Leona phoned on the fourth day. “I found your book.”
Salomé leaned against the wall. She didn’t want to buckle. “Where?”
“Oh, around. There’s a hole in my bookshelf now.” She paused. “It wasn’t too cold today, was it?”
Hole. Pocitos. Guillermo’s uncle’s house was in Pocitos; their cell had met in the basement. The basement had a trapdoor that led into a tunnel, and Salomé had never gone down it but she knew it led to a
ratonera
. A rat’s nest. A hiding place. Its code words:
cold today
.
“No, it was nice and warm.”
“Well, I’ll see you later.”
“Okay.
Adiós
.”
Salomé grabbed her coat and darted out of the house before anyone could stop her. She walked to Pocitos and knocked on the uncle’s door. Guillermo appeared, led her to the basement, and handed her a flashlight. She sank through the trapdoor and down a ladder through a fetid passage. When she landed, she saw a low tunnel in front of her. She bent over and walked down it; he was there, at the end, in a dank cave of a room.
He was a spectre of himself, hunched beside a bucket of his own shit and piss. He squinted in the beam of her flashlight as if it bruised him. She turned it downward; the room dimmed; but she had already seen the burns, welts, a face folded on itself like a sealed letter.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
She reached for the bucket. “I’ll be right back.”