The Invisible Mountain (40 page)
“I didn’t want you to see me this way.”
“I just wanted to see you.”
“But like this?”
“You. I wanted to see you.”
He recrossed his legs, trying not to grimace. “They don’t know your name. Not from me.”
She touched his hand. He flinched. She began to pull away.
“No,” he said. “Stay.”
They were quiet. His bottom lip shook. She looked away. More time passed.
“Salomé. Salomé.”
She bent to the crook of his elbow, to a cigarette burn on which she placed an extremely gentle kiss. She kissed his wounds, slowly, one by one. She followed them beneath his clothes to all the tender hidden places that La Máquina had visited before her. They made love in that dark hole for the first time. Virginity melted like ice thrown into flames. After all the pomp and warnings, the loss of virginity was such a simple thing. You just raise your arms and hurl it. The rest is ready, waiting, beating hotly under skin. That is what she learned, that is how she did it, pressing in, against the bruised parts, the burned parts, everything. It was clear that he hurt everywhere but he wouldn’t let her go. They took their time. She wrapped her legs around his body like two bandages; together they pushed through pain into intolerable ecstasies beyond it. Afterward, they stayed tangled, sweaty, charred, exhausted, in an airless room, with nothing but each other’s breaths to breathe. With moth-soft fingers she stroked the swollen skin, its colors hidden in the dark although she knew them, red burns, white blisters, blue and tender bruises.
“We’ll get them,” she whispered, and only in that moment did Tinto Cassella weep.
———
Anna became the new head of their cell. She was exacting. Her words were clear and crisp and she demanded the same of others. Guillermo left their cell to head his own. Their numbers soared. The day at Pando had ignited the city’s youth and sent them searching for Tupas in their urban lairs. Student groups across the globe had rhapsodized about the bold, clever guerrillas of Uruguay, as underground reports informed
them. Fidel Castro himself had commended their victory and praised the Tupamaros:
Revolution is alive and strong in Uruguay
. Salomé felt the new members’ excitement, the fresh sweat of their thoughts:
we’re part of something. Robin Hood. People are hearing about us everywhere. Castro even said
. She wanted to shake them, wanted to shake her country, little country, forgotten country, wide-eyed for all its cleverness, so easily taken by a scrap of glamour. She was being unfair. They’d come for other reasons, surely, and were smart enough to know the risks. Still, they hummed with hope and purpose, while she felt old, worn, full of opaque layers that she herself could not see through. Autumn hurtled into Montevideo. She took part in the swift and seamless robbery of a casino, transferred stockpiles of guns and cash and uniforms, and helped arrange a jailbreak from the women’s prison, which released a few dozen bodies back to work.
“It’s a shame.” Mr. Richards shook his head. The cigarette between his lips scattered ash. “You had yourselves a nice little country.”
Salomé typed on.
“Sir.” Viviana slapped the file cabinet. “With all due respect, it’s far from over. The rebels don’t stand a chance against the Measures.”
Mr. Richards looked at Viviana’s stalwart chin. She made his coffee and hung up his coat every morning. She was not a woman to offend. “You’re right. You must be right. Still … I gotta say … those are some mighty smart guerrillas.”
Salomé buried the impulse to smile. She had to focus, she had a mission: to find all the files she could about a man called Dan Mitrione.
It took her two weeks. He was hard to find. He was not in the drawer with all the other U.S. nationals in Uruguay. He was in the top-secret drawer, the one Mr. Richards sealed with his own key, which Salomé stole one day and pressed into a bar of soap. Dan Mitrione, the file said, was an aid official, a minor one, sent by the Alliance for Progress. He was here to advise the police force. He had worked as a police chief in the state of Indiana, and since then had been an adviser in Brazil and the Dominican Republic. He had a wife and nine children, six of whom currently lived in Uruguay. He had an address in Malvín. He specialized in communications. There were some handwritten notes. Communications, the notes suggested, was an art form. It required nuance and practice and precision. Training was going well.
“Well done,” Anna said at their next meeting. “This corroborates the other reports.”
She briefed them on Mitrione. He gave lessons in a fully equipped studio in the basement of his house. The basement was soundproof. The police were the protégés. Trainings were conducted on “samples,” beggars, prostitutes,
cantegrileros
, taken by force, never seen again. Salomé glanced at Tinto. He was staring at the flame of a candle. There were no oil lamps tonight, only two naked wicks, with their slow burn. She tried to catch his eye but he would not look up.
“So what are we going to do?” Leona said.
Anna brushed her hair back. She was beautiful, in a brutal sort of way. “Put him on trial.”
Three weeks later, Mitrione disappeared. He was kidnapped, said President Pacheco and President Nixon and Mr. Richards and Abuelo Ignazio and all the newspapers still in print. No, the Tupamaros said in a communiqué, he was not kidnapped; he was arrested, held at the People’s Prison, for crimes against the Uruguayan people.
It was August 1970, a bite-cold winter, the People’s Prison a freezing basement. The defendant was offered a coat and coffee. He was brought meals by guards who kept their faces hooded at all times. He went on trial each morning—can you explain these memos from the Montevideo police? to the U.S. Embassy? these photos from Santo Domingo? what are they? again, sir, what are they?—and all his answers were elliptical, measured, cool. Salomé heard them from her post in the next room. She was on guard duty for the day. Just a day. She could do it. She had shivered from the cold as soon as she’d come in. The room was lit by one bare bulb and smelled of mold and sweat. She wore a burlap hood with eyeholes, held her rifle upright. The walls were plastered with newspaper, top to bottom, a cell with words for bars, words everywhere, crowing headlines, hemming their captive in. Finally the questions trailed off. The captive had reduced himself to monosyllables. She heard the shuffle of a blindfold being retied, and then two masked Tupas led him into the room. They sat him down, bound him to his chair, nodded to her, and left.
She sat across from the blindfolded man. Her hands were clammy in their leather gloves. He was tall, a little paunchy, his dark hair graying at
the temples. He looked small through her eyeholes. A pocket of flesh hung under his chin. Stubby hairs grew on his jawline. His body was soft, mortal, made of flesh that drooped and bulged and sprouted hairs, and it was monstrous, untenable, that he should be man and not a monster, Dan to some, Dad to others, some other name—what name? what name?—to people on his table, made of flesh also, just as pliable and alive. He used water and electroshock together. He probed the tender darkness of the body. He taught the most recondite tools of pain. She couldn’t fathom it, couldn’t reconcile her thoughts with the plain man slouched against a battered wooden chair, but it seemed crucial to do so or else she’d never see the world with lucid eyes. Her eyes hurt. She closed them behind her mask. Here you are, the enemy, vulnerable and blind, and I can’t even look at you. What kind of warrior does that make me? Who are you and what are you, how did you become Dan Mitrione, and how did we become these two cold people in a basement facing each other without looking? She saw him standing, unfettered, over Tinto, naked Tinto, writhing, mouth wide open, and then he turned into Mitrione, wide open, writhing, and it was she who stood over him and watched and bent in close to whisper, Do you understand yet? do you? do you?
Mitrione shifted. “Is there water?”
She poured a glass of water from a jug. She held it to his thin, pale lips.
He drank. “Thanks.”
“
De nada
.”
He raised his eyebrows. “A woman?”
She said nothing.
His mouth smirked. “You sound so young.”
“The young have power too.”
“So they think.”
“What do you know?” she said, and regretted it immediately.
“What do I?” His voice was almost sweet.
Salomé looked down into his face. The blindfold was incongruous, a paisley bandanna stolen from Tinto’s abuelo’s drawer. El Mago Milagroso’s bandanna. She thought of Tinto, the gentle muscle of him. She thought of Abuela too, with her panoply of plants; Mamá with her
unslakable pen; the children of Dan Mitrione, in quiet beds, sharing a house with their father’s machinations, the calibrated whispers, the patient escalation, the glazed eyes of officers acquiring a new craft.
“Not enough.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Not what matters.” She walked back to her post.
“Oh, Christ,” he said in a bored voice.
Silence spread into the dim, damp room. They sat across from each other, breathing the same air. Finally he slumped and seemed to doze. She relaxed her hands around her rifle. Two hours passed, walled in by written words. Her thoughts roamed to Tinto. His wide hands. Right now they might be sawing wood, or nailing hard, or cradling a gourd of
mate
. Tonight, at midnight, when they met in his uncle’s car, she would peel the gloves off them despite the cold. She would slide them under her sweater to keep them warm, to bring them to the furnace. And maybe one day, after all, this lurching revolution would be done (was it still possible? where were they headed? toward the shining prize or off the road into dark gullies too deep to claw out of, no, don’t think about that) and they could marry in broad daylight in a rain of uncooked rice. A liberated nation and a honeymoon. And then a quiet life of carpentry, babies perhaps, new lives for a new Uruguay. And Mamá wouldn’t prod her anymore, the way she did now, disbelieving that her daughter, at nineteen, would have no suitors. Surely there’s someone, she’d say, waxing on about Salomé’s supposed beauty, calm disposition, brilliant mind. The only way to stop her was to say, Well, Mamá, what about you? Mamá would laugh—what, her, ha!—but it kept her from persisting. At first Salomé had done it in her own defense, no thought of answers, but something in the laugh, a glint of brass in it, had made her wonder, though of course it was impossible, it meant nothing, that glint of brass, that flush of Mamá’s sometimes after seeing her hairdresser, a woman, and all those chic styles in hard times, impossible of course, but what had Tío Artigas said before he left for Cuba?
I don’t judge you, Eva. Really
. He could have meant her itch for luxury: or something else, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, a secret in her mother as unimaginable as her own. People do not suspect what they cannot imagine. If such a thing was true, no
one would suspect Eva, except perhaps the daughter who also knows about hiding the unthinkable.
Mitrione was awake. “Is it still you?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like more water.”
She rose and held the glass to his lips. He made slurping noises. He dribbled water on his chin, like a baby. She didn’t need to clean him—it wasn’t in her duties—but she raised the edge of her shirt to his face, and wiped. He drew back. She finished wiping, wondering why she did it. She felt his stubble through the cloth. When she finished, he nodded, as if dismissing her from a mission he’d assigned. She returned to her post. They sat.
“You Tupamaros,” he said. “You’re not what I expected.”
“What did you expect? Vicious terrorists?”
“Of course.”
Salomé settled the rifle on her lap. “How ironic.”
Mitrione sighed, the long, slow sigh of a burdened man.
They sat for another hour. She was hungry. Outside, the sun had surely swept its light off the streets. She wondered whether there was any moon.
When he spoke again, Mitrione was hushed. “Are you … they … planning to kill me?”
“We don’t want to.”
He cocked his head, as if cracking a code. A detective in a paisley blindfold. “The demands are still on the table?”
They were: the release of over a hundred Tupamaros, Orlando among them, in exchange for the life of Mitrione.
“I can’t answer that.”
“Ah.” He paused. He looked as though he’d eaten something sour. “Can I have a cigarette?”
Salomé returned to his side, slipped a cigarette between his lips, and lit it. He sucked deeply; the tiny tip blazed orange.
“They’ll never do it,” he said. “I wouldn’t either.”
The thread between them—thin and sticky like a spider’s—was too much. “All right,” she said sharply, “no more talking.”