Board by board, their house arose. Brick by brick, it strengthened. Ignazio hammered, measured, mortared, hauled; Pajarita sewed and watched him. She watched for when he needed something from her basket—hot
mate
, a spinach
buñuelo
, an empanada she’d stuffed with ham and cheese the night before, a handkerchief to wipe his forehead, extra caresses, extra nails. He worked on it for months. Each nail pierced a dart of hope through wood. Each strange electric vein ran prayers
through the walls. Each corner came to being through their wanting, through their sweat. No prior lives had seeped into these spaces: they could leave the past outside and begin their own story, a sprawling narrative encased in four fresh walls, with unknown chapters and generations and twisting turns whose very notion made her long to crane her neck into the unlit reaches of the future.
“This is our palace,
mi reina,”
he called down from the roof. “I can see everything!”
Pajarita, standing on the earth below, called back, “Careful, don’t fall.”
“These men,” a voice behind her said. “They’re always climbing a bit too far for their own good.”
Pajarita turned. A woman stood a few meters away, holding a large basket. Bloodstains streaked her apron. She stepped closer.
“I’m Coco Descalzo,” she said, “from the butcher shop.” She pointed down the path at a house with a hand-painted sign. “What’s your name?”
“Pajarita.”
“Where are you from?”
“Tacuarembó.”
“Really! So far north!” Coco squinted up at Ignazio, at work again. “Your husband too?”
“No. He’s Italian.”
“Ah.” Coco moved her basket from one ample hip to the other. “When your house is finished, come get a nice
churrasco
from my shop. A welcome gift.”
Pajarita and Ignazio painted their house the color of sand and filled it with a bed, three chairs, a table, and mint-and-lemon wallpaper. They cleaned out their apartment in La Ciudad Vieja and left it for good. They ate
milanesas
and rice in their new kitchen under the lighthouse’s pulse. In bed, their rhythm slowed to match the beam gliding over them: a beat of light, then pulling back, a beat of light.
The next morning, Pajarita made her husband breakfast, saw him off, and walked the path to Carnicería Descalzo. The butcher shop had low ceilings and sharp, pungent air. Two women talked at the counter. Coco
presided behind it. Pajarita lingered near the door and examined the beef. It was good meat, red and lean and freshly slaughtered. The women were talking about war. The English, apparently, were winning: the woman who was shaped like a soccer ball had heard this. The lady in the huge hat had a son who liked the war because soldiers need uniforms, and Uruguay had wool.
“¡Por favor!”
Coco said. “That makes it good? Do you know how many boys have died already?”
“I suppose,” said Huge Hat Lady. “In Europe. But here we’re doing well.”
“Hmmph,” Coco said. “That’s thanks to
batllismo
, good schools, good pay, not the war.” She pursed her lips. “Pajarita. Come in!”
Pajarita approached the main counter.
“This is our new neighbor. I promised her a
churrasquito.”
She bent to look for one among the thin, lean sheets of meat.
“I’m Sarita,” the big woman said, staring at Pajarita with frank curiosity.
Huge Hat Woman squinted at Pajarita. “Well? What do you think?”
She looked uncertainly at the woman. Her eyes were small and mouselike. “About what?”
“About the Great War! Is it good or what?”
She hesitated. These women spoke of things that happened so very far away, as though they saw across great distances and were accustomed to appraising the turning of the world. She thought of Europe, a nebulous place her mind could not bring into focus. She thought of soldiers, like the ones who’d joined the rebels in her grandfather’s time, returning to Tacuarembó with missing limbs, howling dreams, twitching mouths.
“It must be ‘what.’”
Sarita laughed. The woman in the hat scowled, took her package, and left.
“Don’t worry about her.” Sarita looked vaguely victorious. She smelled of vanilla perfume. “She loves to complain.”
Coco handed Pajarita a neat paper package. “Welcome to Punta Carretas.”
Pajarita returned the next day and the next, and within a week she
began drinking
mate
upstairs from the
carnicería
, in Coco’s home, during siesta time while the butcher shop was closed. Coco’s husband, Gregorio, stayed down in the shop, cutting and carving and hanging up meat. Their baby, Begonia, crawled underfoot. In days where work began before dawn and went into the night, the siesta hour at Coco’s was a refuge, a raft of time, a stolen sacrament for those who came. The Descalzo living room teemed with knickknacks, bright décor, and an authentic English tea set enshrined at the center of the mantel. Coco was extremely proud of her Anglo cups and saucers, which gathered dust while her
mate
gourd made daily rounds. Above the tea set hung a photograph of José Batlle y Ordóñez, the recent president, who, Pajarita gathered from conversation, had transformed Uruguay into a modern, democratic nation with his thoughts and laws and words. The photograph, framed in silver, showed a large, jowled man gazing gravely to the right of the camera. There was always a large platter of
bizcochos
, whose sweet-pastry layers melted in the mouths of Punta Carretas women. These women. Like Sarita Alfonti, with her inescapable scent of vanilla, her laugh like two copper pots colliding, her hands that cut the air when she spoke. And La Viuda, who had been widowed so long that her original name had been forgotten. She sat in the corner, on the rocking chair, and blessed or dismissed comments with a wave of her hand. And María Chamoun, whose grandparents had come to Uruguay carrying the spices of their native Lebanon. Sometimes she still smelled of them, very faintly, a nuanced aroma that made Pajarita think of summer shadows. María had hair like a prize stallion’s, lush and dark. She had perfected the art of making
alfajores al nieve
. The two biscuits were smooth and slender, dulce de leche joining them with calibrated sweetness, powdered sugar pressed on curves with delicate tenacity. María Chamoun oversaw their consumption with the pride of an unrivaled champion. Clarabel Ortiz, La Divorciada, always leaned into sofa cushions, the first woman in Punta Carretas to exercise her legal right to divorce. In Coco’s living room, this gave her notoriety and an intangible mystique. Her face was pallid, her lips painted pink. Her body was shaped like a fence post. Clarabel held occasional séances in her newly empty home. Some women joined her. Others scoffed.
“Hmmph! Shaking teacups tonight?”
“They don’t always shake, Sarita, and you know it.”
“Still. I’d just as soon leave my dead alone. Even if they could be raised, which they can’t, why give myself more headaches?”
“Espera. Pero no.”
La Viuda raised her palm. “Séance or no séance, the dead are there for more than headaches.”
Silence hung in the room. Coco took the
mate
from Pajarita’s hand. She poured in water and gave it to María Chamoun.
“Did you hear?” María said. “Gloria’s granddaughter was found by the lighthouse, pushed up on the rocks under a boy.” She dropped her voice. “Her blouse was open.”
“¡Esa chica!”
“She’s been trouble since her birth.”
“I heard she got a good whipping from her father.”
“She’ll never see the boy again.”
“That’s all a bit
exagerado
. So what if she has a boyfriend?”
“Clarabel! You have the strangest ideas.”
Clarabel also believed that women should have the right to vote, and would soon gain it. She had her friends practice by casting votes on perfumed pink papers that she gathered in a basket and mailed to city hall. They were still discussing the recent election of President Viera.
“I just couldn’t put his name down.”
“What other choice did we have?”
“Granted, he’s not as good as Batlle, but no one can be.”
“Phht. He tried to stop the law for eight-hour workdays. Good thing he was too late.”
“Well, thanks to Batlle, we have it.”
“And education. And pensions.”
“And divorce.”
“And peace.” La Viuda’s hand flew up, a bony bird. “Reprieve from coups and bloodshed. The last century was terrible. I remember.”
They found Pajarita fascinating, with her darker-than-most-of-them skin, her
campo
origins, her name after an animal. They demanded stories about her gaucho family, and the way she’d lived in Tacuarembó, as if it were all wild and romantic and just a touch unsavory. Pajarita felt a
bit like the English tea set, removed and exposed, only not for the fragile glint of china but the leathery musk of
campo
life. She drank in their presence as a way to taste the city, and slowly it occurred to her that through her they perhaps reached for the land. That’s how it is, she thought; we carry worlds inside ourselves and long to taste the worlds of others, we stare and prod and sip and can’t inhabit. Sometimes she felt their interest as a slight—Oh, look, Pajarita, she is brown, she cannot read, isn’t it novel? Coco was not like that. She came in close, bold as a hare. Sometimes, after siesta hour, Pajarita lingered alone with her, helping her clean up, listening to her chatter and confessions. She gave Coco herbs to ease her female cycles, her nerves, her secret impatience with husband and daughter. They were easy to concoct out of the stash she’d brought from Tacuarembó and the wild trees and weeds in the neighborhood. In return for these gifts, Coco helped her write letters home.
“ ‘Dear Tía Tita,’ ”
she dictated, as Coco wrote and eked the last weak flavor from the
mate, “ ‘How is home? I miss you. Montevideo is colder this winter than the last. It’s never as hot as in Tacuarembó. Ignazio is well. He has been promoted at the port. He says business is good these days, there are many exports, because of the—’ ”
“War in Europe? No, don’t say that. That’s not happy news. How about ‘because of his hard work’?”
“Ta. ‘
How is Papá? How is everyone? The town? The family? The chickens? Send everyone my love. Thank you for the wool. And please let me know if you hear from Artigas
. Con cariño,
Pajarita
.’”
The late-siesta sun seeped through the window, grudging and golden, taking its time. The room smelled of mothballs and fresh sausage and soap. Coco finished writing and then laughed, for no good reason, her laugh a warm brass bell.
“Mi reina,”
Ignazio asked in bed, “are you lonely all day without me?”
Pajarita fingered the curls on his chest. “No.”
“Why not? You don’t love me?”
“Don’t be silly. I just like the neighborhood. I’ve made friends.”
“Men?”
“No.”
More grimly, this time, “men.”
The lighthouse swept its beam through the silence. It swept again. Ignazio sat up sharply. His broad silhouette blocked out the window. “I wish you would get pregnant.”
Pajarita sat up too. She turned on the lamp beside her and waited until the electric light no longer jarred their eyes. She had been stalling, waiting for the right moment, unable to intimate its shape. “I am.”
Ignazio’s face went blank, then soft, then (just for an instant) pained, then he kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her body. The light clicked off.
Being pregnant felt like turning into an orange: her skin turned taut and round and she was full of potency. She ripened more each day. The thing inside her made her sick until it made her euphoric, full of tears and heft and motion: the strange being inside her turned and lurched and pelted in the middle of the night, making her ravenous for the future.
Birth came the day that men across the oceans signed a paper to end war. On November 11, 1918, while the streets of Montevideo filled with drums and confetti and loud sweat, Pajarita lay at home in white-hot labor. She survived the birth without injuries, with the small exception of a scolding from the doctor for having squeezed the baby out while he was gone from the room. He had left to confer with Ignazio in the kitchen, when they heard a cry and ran to the bedroom to find Pajarita, red-faced, heavy-breathed, a drenched blue infant wailing between her thighs.
They named him Bruno. Friends filled the house, including Cacho and his wife, Consuelo, who had sewn baby clothes adorned with sequins; Coco and Gregorio Descalzo, with Begonia and their new baby girl and the ribs of a whole cow; the Punta Carretas women with their baskets of hot food; the Spaniard and Bajo the midget, bearing poker chips; and Pietro (tall and sparkly) and his wife and baby. Their little house swelled with noise and laughter. Cacho did magic tricks that made Sarita gape and Clarabel cheer like a sailor. The Spaniard fawned on La Viuda like a fresh young suitor, making the old woman blush for the first time in twenty years. María sang baby Bruno an Arabic lullaby as he
drowsed against her prodigious breasts. Bajo, to his delight, beat Pietro several times at cards.
After the last person had left, Pajarita still felt the loud, tender breath of guests. It curled around her as she lay in bed, cradling Bruno, listening to her husband turn off the kitchen light, enter the room, and sink down beside her. He lay completely still. She touched his shoulder.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Being a father.”
She stroked his skin. “Are you happy?”
He didn’t answer. He turned away. She stared at the outline of his back.
“Ignazio?”
No answer.
She lay still for a minute, then another. Bruno squirmed and began to whimper. She raised her nightgown and placed him on her breast. Lay silent in the dark while he ate.
That night Ignazio dreamed he swam underwater, in a Venetian canal, looking for the body of a woman. His father’s corpse, blue and engorged, floated toward him. Rotting arms pushed forward to enfold his body. He tried to scream, tried to resist, but when he opened his mouth it filled with putrid water.
A prison arose in Punta Carretas. Right there, across from Carnicería Descalzo, the crank and haul of strange machines brought it into being. A vast wall formed, with an arching gate at its center, and behind the gate a huge box of a building was taking shape. It was imposing, castlelike, the most majestic structure Punta Carretas had ever known.
“At least it’s pretty,” Sarita said, leaning on the sausage counter.
“But it’s a prison,” Coco said. “It blocks our view of the lighthouse. And what kind of neighbors will we have?”
“There’s no stopping it.” La Viuda spread her hands in a gesture of doom. “The whole
barrio
is changing. Punta Carretas is pure city now.”