Perla Read online

  It was February, the ripe height of summer, and the sun cascaded over us in slow, humid waves. Mamá wore long gardening gloves over her manicured hands, and her fingers pressed soil into place with fastidiousness and even passion. She had bought me gloves too, but I refused to wear them.

  “You’ll get so dirty, Perla.”

  “I want to get dirty.”

  “Ay, Perla,” she said, shaking her head. She said no more but beamed with irritation. After all, my refusal disturbed the plan for how the geranium days should go, mother and daughter tending flowers and don’t they look picture perfect in their matching gloves? Such interesting gardening gloves, with their violet fleur-de-lis, what a find! For half an hour she would not talk to me, but then she thawed, so engrossed in the execution of her project that she forgot my transgression, or perhaps for fear that I might abandon the project altogether.

  She needn’t have worried. I didn’t want to leave. I had protested this chore, but only mildly; it was a rare chance to spend time with my mother without the pressure of speaking to one another. We could crouch side by side, our attention on the plants, and I could taste the scent of her perfume and feel the rhythm of her breaths without having to find anything to say. We often struggled to find things to say to each other, beyond the essential good morning and here’s your breakfast and what time will you be home? and good night, as though we were both foreigners who’d stumbled into this house from utterly different faraway lands, and had only just learned the rudiments of each other’s languages. At that time, I still wanted to learn my mother’s language (though I would not have told her that), if only to better understand her, and to increase the chances of her understanding me. There was so much I longed to tell her as I squatted beside her with my hands full of dirt, but I also feared that, if I started, other matters might leap out that were not meant to be spoken. Better not to risk the opening. Better not to attempt too much speech with my mother, especially on such flagrantly hot days on which it was impossible to rest your eyes on anything but geraniums and geraniums.

  They were hardy little plants. The blooms themselves were bright and simple, relatively unassuming, but when gathered in such plentiful crowds they seemed to acquire an almost hypnotic power. The roots were much darker than the petals, and more twisted than the stems, a hidden half that exposed itself to my curious fingers in the journey from pot to pot. Strange, the body of a plant, with limbs never meant to be exposed to the sun. Every once in a while, over the course of our three days, Mamá hummed. The melody meandered, it was nothing I recognized, but it soothed me. At night, I would close my eyes for sleep and see a great geranium with its root bared in all its gnarled intricacy until my hands arrived full of soil to cover it back up.

  When all the flowers were ready in their decorated pots, Mamá spent a fourth day distributing them through the house, moving a wooden stand here and now there, there and now here, now this pot with the shell motif, now the other pot with the Spanish tile, until at last every geranium had moved into the house and she collapsed onto the sofa in exhausted triumph. Flowers lurked at every turn. You could not rest your gaze without encountering a geranium, two geraniums, hundreds of geraniums, and you could not walk without the feeling that geraniums were following you close at heel, bright mobs of them, crowding the air at your back. You could not help feeling vastly outnumbered.

  For a week, Mamá was delighted. The geraniums gave order and purpose to her days. She spent hours watering them, tending to them, examining their petals in gently cupped hands, even whispering to them when she thought no one was looking. The flowers may or may not have whispered back, but they stood fresh and still and, in that first week, they thrived.

  And then, as Mamá later put it, everything was ruined by Scilingo.

  He appeared for the first time on March 2, 1995. Every year thereafter, I would remember the date, an unnamed anniversary. It was not a live show, just a photograph and his recorded voice on television. Everyone knew about the broadcast. The ads had been running all week. I didn’t watch it with my parents; this was for their private bedroom viewing only, and I knew this without having to ask. I went to my friend Amelia’s house to watch. Don’t worry, she said, my parents don’t know. She didn’t add about your Dad, but I understood and I was thankful. Amelia’s father was an attorney, her mother was a housewife who made her own aprons. Her mother brought soda and cookies on a tray and we all sat down in time for the start of Hora Clave.

  The famous journalist presented his story. This, he said, is not the first time we learn what happened, but it is the first time we hear directly from one of the men involved. He approached me of his own accord, in the subway, wanting the truth to be known. We met many times. It was extremely difficult for both of us. We recorded these tapes.

  I stared at the photograph of Scilingo as the tapes played. He looked older than I remembered him, hair and mustache gray around the edges, eyes tired and plaintive, but it was him, Adolfo Scilingo, the same man who never came to my house without pulling a dulce de leche or apple candy out of his pocket for Perlita linda. That’s what he called me: Here you go, Perlita linda, just for you. His face earnest, hopeful, as if he’d spent all day worrying about whether I’d like the gift. The candy was always warm from having traveled against his leg, slightly melted into its paper skin, and I always took it eagerly, put it in my mouth and sucked gladly with no thought of where the candy or the leg that warmed it had gone that day. So that, as a girl, whenever I saw Scilingo coming, my mouth would water in anticipation of something sweet.

  The voice of the man on the tape spoke of requesting to be sent to ESMA, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, to serve with the saviors of the nation. The voice did not work in the quarters where subversives were detained, but it did once stumble into the zone by accident and see and hear and smell more than intended. One day, a superior told the voice to take subversives on flights, assuring that these acts were sanctioned by the clergy as Christian and humane. He took part in two flights, casting thirty people altogether into the sea. How many others there had been, he couldn’t say, but thirty fell from his own hands. The people were drugged and stripped, then thrown out of the airplane, naked and alive. Everyone had participated in such flights, as part of their rotating duties. There were times when the voice paused, broke, lowered, other times when it sailed through details as if reading a shopping list out loud.

  Afterward, Amelia’s mother stood quickly and turned off the television. A gaping silence filled the room. “God,” she said. “Oh God.”

  The father rubbed his forehead as though it pained him.

  “I can’t believe it,” the mother said. “All those people.”

  For an instant the room filled with the watery breaths of thirty ghosts, burdening the air with their damp, ragged exhalations. Then they were gone. I could not feel my legs, my arms, I felt unhinged from them.

  “The worst part,” the father said, “is that we can’t throw him in prison. With a confession like that!”

  “I know. That men like him should get immunity.”

  “That’s politics for you.”

  “I hope they all die a painful death and rot in hell.” Amelia’s mother turned to me. “Another cookie? Really, don’t be shy.”

  The late summer light fell on the plate of cookies. They were homemade, and the warm scent of their baking still lingered in the house. My own mother hadn’t baked cookies in over a decade. I took another one, not because I wanted it, but to please Amelia’s mother, or perhaps to feel like less of an intruder.

  The next evening, at home, I sought and failed to find a rudder in my parents. Why I looked to them for one, why any part of me thought it could depend on them to navigate a clear route through the dark, I cannot say. There was no reason to such a thought. But in any case, that fantasy was soon dispelled. They, too, were lost. Dinner was burned and too salty and no one said a thing about it. We ate our tough milanesas in silence. The silence was taut and ominous.
I ate slowly, dutifully, though my stomach clenched and I had no appetite. Out of the corners of my vision I glanced at Mamá and Papá and attempted to read the emotions on their faces. They looked like refugees of an unexpected natural disaster: there was shock and fear—was that fear?—and also anger, especially from Mamá.

  I looked for shame in their faces but could not find it. I looked for innocence in their faces but could not find it.

  Mamá emptied a bottle of wine and opened a second. Her cheeks grew flushed. I had never seen her with such turmoil on her face. My mother, after all, was the consummate expert at keeping her poise, she was none other than Luisa Belén Correa Guzmán, known for a smooth exterior that some interpreted as coldness and others as graceful restraint. I admired this exterior, even tried to emulate it (though it was hard work for me, with so many inner fires to douse and douse), but I also cringed from the moments when the mask would crack and reveal the seep of molten forces mortal girls were not designed to withstand. A kind of heat pulsed from her, across the dinner table, urgent and amorphous. Sitting at the table in the scope of this heat, one could forget that my father was the one trained in the art of war. He seemed to skulk from her; the air grew tense between them; they explained nothing to me. They did not look at me. I pictured our feet under the table, forming an agitated hexagon.

  Toward the end of the meal, Mamá tipped the second bottle to her glass, found it empty, and knocked it over. She watched it roll slowly to the edge of the table, fall to the floor, and continue rolling until it hit the wall. No one moved to pick it up. No one acknowledged its trajectory, or even its existence. The next morning, as I left for school, it was still there.

  A week later, on March 9, I returned to Amelia’s to watch Scilingo’s live appearance on Hora Clave. This time, her parents had recovered from their initial shock and grown emboldened. They had had a week to let the revelations simmer, and they had plenty to say to the television screen during the show. It was clear that they still did not know who my parents were, and I was grateful to Amelia for this protection, even if she did it less out of loyalty than for reasons of her own. We had never talked directly about my father’s profession, only in half phrases that trailed into silence. She seemed not to judge, or at least she seemed to pity me the way one might pity a cripple who cannot help her inability to walk, which stung, of course, but was far better than the alternative. Amelia glanced nervously at me as her parents hurled forthright insults at the television, but none of that mattered. I wasn’t there for them or even to hear Scilingo’s words, all I wanted was to see him on the screen.

  He wore an expensive suit and had every hair in place and, at one point, to the contempt of Amelia’s parents, wept. I believe you, I thought at him, I believe your tears, though I wasn’t sure whether I could believe in whatever had impelled the tears, or merely in the fact of their existence. Tears seemed so simple, an obvious answer I had not yet managed. I envied Scilingo his tears. I wondered whether there was candy in the pockets of his slacks, what he would say to me if I could crawl into the television screen to meet him, whether he would take everything back, Perlita linda, it’s you, I’ve been stuck in a strange dream, conjured by a curse, absurd lies have been pouring from my mouth, but no matter, you’re here, you know who I really am. And I would curl up on that lap and we would rock, Scilingo and I, my body would shrink to infant size and his arms would be warm and we would rock, back and forth, forgetting planes, forgetting silences, forgetting the words that cut our minds.

  “Monsters,” Amelia’s mother said after the show. “Those men are monsters.”

  I nodded blankly.

  In the week that followed, the tension between my parents deepened and expanded. They fought behind closed doors. I tiptoed to their bedroom door to listen. Sometimes there was nothing; sometimes there were scraps.

  “Don’t you dare call him.”

  “He’s not a bad man, Luisa.”

  “He’s a disaster. Look what happened to his career. He has nothing left but to go crying on TV.”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “He was your friend.”

  “Just a phone call.”

  “A phone call is enough to destroy us. Is that what you want?”

  “No, no.”

  “Then shut up, Héctor.”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up—”

  It went on, but I went to bed, and as sleep had long since abandoned me I stared out of the window and watched the moon hang in the sky and do nothing. I tried not to think, but the images came, my father on Hora Clave, my father on an airplane, my mother kissing my father good-bye on a Monday morning, have a nice day, call if you’re staying late, my father in a dark room with naked bodies, my own self in a dark room with naked bodies, implicated, struggling for breath, unable to get out. My father in my bedroom, kneeling on the floor, begging for something incomprehensible in flotsam words. He was not there, his shadow not hulking in the dark beside my bed, but still I turned away to face the wall.

  April came. I strove to maintain order at the surface of my life. I threw myself into the pursuit of excellence in two arenas: my studies, and drinking shots at parties. I was equally ruthless and equally successful in both endeavors. My grades were perfect and I gained a reputation for drinking even the most athletic boys under the table. All I wanted was to burn my throat with grappa while a boy floundered in his effort to keep up, until his eyes registered wonder and Who is this girl still in control and Shit why won’t she let me and then I’d rise from the table with my head on fire and dance, dance, dance alone and not let anyone touch me, dance so hard the beats could almost bruise, dance my way through exorcisms no one else could see.

  Another confession hit the television screens, this time a man notorious for his creative cruelty and high voltages, and he was neither well groomed nor repentant. His name was El Turco—or so, at least, he’d been known in the force—and he seemed to revel in the national attention. The immunity laws, after all, gave him a protected sphere in which he could speak of his acts with frank abandon and no fear of being arrested like a common criminal, for he was no common criminal, he was just a man who had carried out his duties to the state with special zeal. His appearance barely seemed to affect my parents, who were already caught in the gales of private skies. They didn’t speak to each other, they glared at each other, Mamá seethed through dinner and afterward Papá disappeared into his study with his scotch.

  The geraniums died of thirst. They turned brown and brittle and withered in their pots. You could not rest your gaze in the house without seeing the corpses of neglected geraniums unless you looked to the ceiling, steadfastly ignoring the sphere in which people move back and forth to inhabit their everyday lives. Because in that sphere, in the everyday sphere, the bright mobs of flowers had turned to dark mobs of putrefaction that crowded the vision so thickly and filled the nose with such a ripe, sharp odor that they created the illusion of also reaching other senses: your mouth could taste the decay, your skin crawled with the sensation of a hundred crumbled flowers, your ears were privy to the dying cries of potted plants that echoed through the air in fine high voices long after their demise. We were choked and crowded out by the geraniums’ deaths. We were stranded, three lone humans in the botanical graveyard our home had become—a graveyard without graves, since no one bothered to clean anything up. The pots remained in place all over the house, offering up their stems like gnarled thin fingers reaching out of dirt. In an act of denial so prodigious it bordered on a marvel, my mother swung from tending the geraniums like children to ignoring them completely, as though she could make them cease to exist by barricading her own mind. She went about her days as if the flowers were invisible to her. She left them to die. My father seemed to notice nothing; his gaze was always reaching toward something just behind the walls. At times, I wondered whether I was insane, hallucinating dead plants that no one else seemed willing or able to see, while my parents lived God knew where, in some other hou
se that occupied the same physical space but adhered to different rules of reality, impossible to penetrate.

  After three weeks, I couldn’t stand it any longer and I finally began to clear the flowerpots myself, filling garbage bags with broken blooms, stacking empty pots and plant stands along the edge of the patio. I filled thirteen garbage bags with dirt and plant remains. I stood among them on the patio and stared and stared at the bulging black bags and pots still laced with earth. I wanted to haul the bags up the stairs and spill their contents on my parents’ bed so that dirt and broken roots seeped into their clean linens. I wanted to smash the flowerpots against the patio and use the shards as knives with which to cut my parents open, and myself as well, peeling back the skin as if the truth of who we were could be so easily laid bare.

  There was so much to lay bare, so much hidden. Behind the locked door to the study, in the flowerpots, and in the stiff and bitter smile my mother wore like armor. The Hidden loomed among us, impossible to shrug off or deny. It claimed all three of us as its creatures. It thickened our nights and drained the color from our days. I could barely stand to be in a room with both my parents. Even the smallest pleasantry seemed to throb with hostile undertones. My mother never said anything disparaging to my father—at least not in front of me—but she looked at him differently now, with an expression of vexed pity, as if he had crumbled in her esteem. She had married a man with a clean uniform and clean hands, a man of righteous actions and sure footing, and now that man was in danger of becoming something else, something unacceptable, neither righteous nor sure.

  On some nights, dinnertime would arrive and Mamá would not be home. She neither called nor left a note informing us of her whereabouts. On those nights, I cooked pasta and heated a jar of tomato sauce, which Papá and I would eat at the table without talking. I never found out where my mother spent that time, though I imagined her wandering through her favorite boutiques, perhaps in search of outer manifestations of an inner wilderness, rubbing skirts between her fingers, stroking shoes, never purchasing a thing. One night she arrived home while we were still at the table. My father and I both looked up, forks in midair, at the sound of her key in the door. Her footsteps approached the dining room, stopping at the threshold. I turned to greet her but she didn’t look at me; she was staring at the back of my father’s head, which had not turned. He had resumed eating as though nothing had happened. Somehow, it seemed that anything I might say would only make the situation more awkward, so I faced my plate again. For a minute, the only sound was my father’s fork against his plate.