Perla Read online

  “Who cooked?” she asked, surprise in her voice. As if she never would have imagined that we’d eat without her.

  “I did,” I said.

  She sighed. It was a protracted sigh, almost melodic, almost ennobled. I thought she’d walk away then, but she didn’t. My appetite was gone, so I rose and took my plate to the kitchen. When I returned, she was still there, staring at my father’s back with an indecipherable expression on her face. I wanted to slap her. I wanted to shake him. The scene seemed at once tense and ridiculous. But whatever it actually was, I was not part of it; I left the room and they remained immobile, as though my exit were entirely inconsequential.

  I started to wonder whether my parents were headed toward divorce. Part of me wished they were, if divorce could ease this freighted atmosphere. I was seven months away from starting at the university and I tried to imagine what my life would be like when classes began, whether I would still live in this house, and if so with which parent. It would be a new life, more fully mine, or so I dared to hope. Wherever I lived, and whatever became of my parents’ marriage, I would have something of my own, a course of study that would take me down paths they could not enter. And what path would I take? The plan, not devised by me, had always been to study medicine.

  But now I felt no interest in it, even chafed at the thought, as if it were a drab coat tailored for a very different body. I wanted to be excited by my studies; I wanted them to make the world more real to me, or make me more real to the world. The practical approach, which many of my peers took, involved making decisions based on sensible, orderly long-term plans. I could not see so many years ahead with the months in front of me so hazy and uncertain. Later, the professional trappings would come into focus, but when I first decided, I could think only of what studying the mind could open for me, a direct route into everything that dwelled inside me, and around me, unspoken, unspeakable.

  I didn’t tell my parents about this plan, knowing they would disapprove, and they were too distracted to ask. I tried to imagine living alone with my mother or my father. I could not imagine living without Papá, knowing that he was alone, especially if he lost the house and no longer had his study into which to disappear. All those long nights alone in his study. I wondered how many hours he was spending in there, what thoughts went through his mind, whether he turned on all the lights or kept the room dim, whether he paced back and forth or lay on the floor or sat in his chair with his eyes closed.

  One night, I dreamed my father and I were in an airplane over the sea, and the hatch opened and he turned to me and said Shall we? and then he smiled and pointed at a naked man on his hands and knees at the hatch, grabbed his hair and pulled his head back but the man had no face, it was an empty face. The sky whipped in and I could hear the distant sound of bleating donkeys. My father pushed the head back down and pulled it up with a face now, a girl’s face, my face, with donkey teeth and donkey ears and my own terrified eyes, and the girl looked up at me as wisps of hair escaped my father’s fist and writhed in the wind and she bleated and bleated and said go on, push, and Papá said Perla, hurry up, the pilot has lost his way home.

  I woke in the dark and lay still for an hour, feeling the warm blankets, the pace of my breath, the air that hung still because it was not (was not) at the open hatch of a moving plane. I saw myself packing a hasty bag and running away into the night, leaving home and father and future university studies for the life of a vagrant, starved, vulnerable, free of conscience. I saw myself going to school tomorrow and denouncing my father to my class, my friends, reporters, Amelia’s parents, I am so sorry, I was just a baby, please forgive, tears and rage and a family torn apart. I saw myself going downstairs to look for my father in his study, in search of truth, in search of understanding, in search of the man whose heart was full of things to show his daughter: love for her, suffering, perhaps even remorse.

  I could not bear to do any of those things, that night. But the following night I got out of bed, went to the study, and put my ear to the closed door. I heard only silence. I did this every night for four nights, then slunk away and went to bed and tried to sleep. On the fifth night, I knocked.

  “Papá?”

  Silence. Then steps. To my surprise, the door opened.

  I entered the wood-paneled room. It was lit by a single desk lamp, which illuminated a small sphere around it. My father had already sat back down in his chair behind the desk. His jaw was sternly set. I stood in the middle of the room for a while, searching for something to say. Nothing came out. I was not sure what I had come for, whether I aimed to reassure him or confront him or somehow push unspoken burdens off my shoulders, out of my body, into his hands. Whether to magically absolve or to accuse. I settled down on the floor, not too close to him, not facing him, not wanting him to balk at too much proximity. I heard him pour, lift his glass, drink, set it back down. Enough time went by that I thought he’d forgotten my presence. I almost started to drift to sleep, and then he said, as if picking up the thread of an ongoing conversation, “It was war. It was a just war.”

  He was silent for a long time. I didn’t move.

  “So it brings bad memories. Show me the war that doesn’t bring bad memories. Hah? Just try it, you can’t, there isn’t one. That’s war for you. Look, hija, even the church said it was just. God’s work, they said. Separating wheat from chaff. The subversives, you know, they didn’t believe in God.”

  He went silent, as if waiting for a response, but I said nothing.

  “Want a drink?”

  I shook my head.

  He poured himself another glass. When he spoke again, he sounded more at ease. He was quite drunk. “We were the ones restoring order. For years and years this country had no order. You have no idea what a shithole this country was before. It needed to be saved, and people knew it, they even asked for it. Now they criticize. Well, you know what—fuck them. They talk about the suffering of the prisoners, but what about our suffering? What about our sacrifice? Fucking bastards, the lot of them.”

  He leaned back in his chair, away from the low sphere of light, his back approaching the wall of plaques behind him. I stayed very still, just like when I was a little girl and he would come into my bedroom late at night to stroke my hair and turn a bar song into a lullaby, with a voice as gentle and meandering as lazy waves on a warm day, his hand like raw cotton along my scalp, and I always feared that if I moved too much he’d go away and I’d be in the dark without his songs. Somewhere in the far folds of the cosmos, there might be a script that held the right responses to his words, the way a father confessor intimates the next lines in a penitent’s dialogue with God. But I had no access to this. I was not a confessor and in any case my father had expressed no penitence. My voice seemed to have vanished from my throat.

  “I just did my job,” my father said. “I carried out orders, like anybody else.”

  Then he wept.

  At first, I did not recognize the sound, hoarse and stifled as it was. The sobs did not come freely; they pushed under the surface of short, heavy breaths. He sounded like a man with a fresh bullet wound, desperate to keep quiet, battling to contain the pain. I did not look over at him. I did not move. I could not have moved even if I’d wanted to: my legs had frozen in their curl beneath my body and there was no hope of running, not toward him, and not away. I did not cry. I felt as though I’d never be able to cry again, as though my father’s and Scilingo’s tears had robbed me of my own.

  After a long time, the sounds abated. He blew his nose, once, twice. We sat in silence.

  “Ay, Perlita,” he finally said. “Then there’s you. It was all worthwhile, because I have you.”

  I strained to understand how these words connected to the rest of them. These words like tiny foreign bombs. Looking back, I should have known right then, except that something shut in me and left those words out in the cold.

  He rose from his chair, abruptly, and turned off the light. I watched him walk past me, toward t
he door.

  “Go to sleep,” he said, and then he was gone.

  I stared into the blackness all around me, thick and dark like the inside of a great mouth, ready to gulp you into oblivion. The floor heaved like a bottom jaw. I sat for a long time, in the swirl of air and dark and whispers that were not to be deciphered, trying not to think too much, unable to stop thinking, my ears ringing with the sound of my father’s tears, and also with sounds that were absent from the room, the soft whooosh of naked bodies falling and falling and falling. I felt sick. I almost fell asleep there, on the floor, but I feared what I might dream if I stayed. When I finally went to bed, I dreamed, mercifully, of nothing.

  The next day, he found me in the backyard. I was standing in front of the flowerpots, restacking them in higher towers, for no good reason.

  “Perla,” he said, and was silent until I turned toward him. His face had changed from the night before, closed up, a storefront that’s been boarded and abandoned. “I want to make something clear.”

  I waited.

  “There are elements in this country that are not to be trusted. You’ve got to be careful. Especially now that you’ll be at the university soon, exposed to more kinds of people.”

  I looked into his eyes and he looked away from me, at the rosebushes at the edge of the patio, the tall stacks of mosaic flowerpots, the plant stands that held nothing but air. He looked exhausted, his skin lined in that manner that seems to etch the story of a life without revealing any secrets.

  “You’re never to speak to reporters. They’re like vermin, they get in where they shouldn’t and they’re never any good. And in general, be careful of the company you keep.”

  “Whom I speak to is my concern.”

  “Perla. Everything you do is my concern.”

  “It’s not. I have my own life.”

  “Because I gave it to you.”

  I stared at him; he seemed startled at his own words. “Fuck you,” I said, fully expecting him to shout or slap me for it. I’d never dreamed of saying such a thing to him before.

  But he did not shout or slap. Instead, he said, “Perla, listen. You have to listen. There are things you don’t understand.”

  He stared at me with an intensity that reached beyond his words, and in his gaze I read a plea that he would not articulate and that I should not accept, a plea that reached back to our conversation from the night before and asked for absolution or amnesia or, at the very least, for continued love. He wanted me to stomach his confessions and stand by him, his faithful daughter, an essential part of a united family that knew how to keep secrets from reporters, from the world, from their own selves. I should not accept the plea, I thought. I should spit in his face on behalf of a nebulous thirty thousand, or at least denounce him with brutal measured words, disentangling my own conscience from his deeds—but I could not. I would pay a price for this. It seemed a terrible crime to allow the threads of our connection to go uncut. I wanted to be a different kind of person, free to condemn the flights and other horrors with pure contempt. What a luxury, pure contempt. How very civil, how very smooth. Like Amelia’s mother, and like so many members of my own generation, with whom I felt out of step, unable to join the full-throated recriminations without tearing myself in two. My father needed me. Only I had seen his tender places, heard his tears; if I abandoned him, in any sense of the word, he would surely wander lost and fragile and alone, without anchor, without salvation.

  I wanted to run from him, from the crowded patio, from his gaze on me, from my own freighted love. But I did not run. I stood, paralyzed, while my father walked away with the last word.

  6

  The Word Where

  This is how it ended: they came in with syringes and he thought it would be lethal but it was just some kind of drug, to keep you calm, they said, while we transport you to a special station in the south. Bliss, relief, to enter the haze drugs gave him, like white gas piped into his mind. Then he was in a truck, an Army truck, the kind with a green canopy over the top, he couldn’t see it through his blindfold but he could tell by the fabric he leaned against, the leak of air from outside. He was crushed against the other bodies, also drugged, all of them nameless with nothing but a number to identify them. He tried to recall where they were going: to the south, yes, that was it, they were going to a special station in the south. He tried to hold on to this with his sedated mind, grasping at the word south like an anchor, but it kept slipping away into white fog.

  When the truck stopped, they were taken to an airplane, dazed cargo that they were, with legs that could not walk or run. They were half-carried, half-dragged, a guard holding his arm, holding him up, guiding his steps. The guard’s body was young and lean, muscular, most likely he grew up on the edge of town, so many of the military boys of low rank grew up on the edge of town, meals without meat, not enough bread, not enough school, hard knocks, perhaps he’d been a good boy, was still a good boy now, the arm was strong and could be leaned on, faster, said the guard, come on, let’s go.

  At the door of the airplane two guards fought over their bodies. There isn’t room said the guard right beside him.

  Then make room, the other guard said. Pack them in.

  What if they don’t fit?

  Idiot, then come back for the second load.

  Strange, he thought, that they would argue in front of prisoners. Perhaps they were confused by their instructions. Perhaps they thought their charges were too drugged to understand. He was dragged into a hold and pushed against other bodies, stacked like odd-shaped boxes.

  They flew.

  They rose into the air, stuffed into their dark hold. He felt a woman’s body crushed beneath him, a man’s legs on his chest, felt the lurch and rattle of the machine. The air was scarce and fetid. He wondered where they were really going. The plane rumbled and groaned. It took a long time but there was no time, not anymore, it had stretched and warped so it didn’t matter. He felt another needle in his arm, another prick, more drugs. From the flinches of bodies next to him he knew they were injected, too. More time passed. The fog inside him deepened. The hands returned and stripped their clothes off. He thought, The south, I’ll never see it, not that I’d have seen anything anyway, but the south is not where we are going. The stripping seemed to take a lot of time. His sores opened as pants legs were removed, he oozed onto their hands. They wiped their palms off on his thighs, brusquely, still so much to do. Eventually his body pressed against other naked bodies, his thigh was in an ass, a hand pushed against his rib cage, no, it was a foot, twisting the skin, as though trying to get some kind of foothold, they were so close, the gas so thick inside his mind, skin is pliable, it melts, skin is made to melt right into skin, you can’t escape it, their bodies seemed to blend into one writhing, liquid body. It was hot and hard to breathe. Suddenly the slide of metal, roar of air, and the hatch stood open to the sky. The bodies drew back from the open door as if they were one body. He felt the scuffling of many limbs, some of them his own, a slow and pointless stupor of a scuffle. A body was pulled on, pulled away, and he felt the ripple of its loss through the mass of them, the swirling human cumulus.

  A guard-voice: Come on, push.

  Another guard-voice made a sound, a sob, the kind of sob that cuts the throat.

  You faggot. Fuck.

  Another voice, deep with age: Take him to the cockpit.

  There was confusion among the naked ones, they were too dazed to scream, some of them were pinned against unconscious bodies, the hatch was open, there were a few groans that rose and disappeared. He heard the guard who’d sobbed move through the groaning mass, away from the opening, away from the bare sky. From the hatch he heard a whimper, a whimper falling away, so far already, lost in the air. More groans now, grunts, whispers, quiet sounds of terror. Slowly there began to be more room. There were less of them and he was not so crushed, they were pulling apart into discrete bodies. Naked bodies were falling from the hatch. He swung an arm and it was caught by
a firm hand that pulled him to the edge of whipping air; he didn’t resist; he was so flimsy: he was on his knees at the lip of the hold and the push was almost gentle like a blind man being guided through the night and then he tumbled forward into sky.

  His hands flew to his face and pushed his blindfold off his eyes. Below him was a sea of clouds, torn, white, criminally beautiful, blinding in their radiance, the moonlit water far below. They fell down, naked humans, puncturing the clouds. He is one of them, a drop of rain, it’s raining humans, naked humans, naked drops, below him white, around him wind, the whir and whip of air, his mouth hangs open and he opens his arms too, as if to fly, as if to brace, he thinks he may be pissing on himself, he falls into the spray of his own piss, white, he falls through white, it doesn’t break his fall and for an instant he is cloud and there were times when as a boy he’d lean back and stare at clouds and on his wedding day she came to him right down the aisle in her white bridal gown all puffs and lace and how he longed to touch her, he falls now through her skirt, her billowed bridal skirt, vast and white and torn by bodies falling and so soft so very soft it cannot hold him, cannot keep him, he grasps the air for threads but still keeps plunging, hold me, wrap me, where are you mi amor, I think I smell you, the musk under your skirts, strong, savory, opulent, your deep scent; I want to stay inside the skirts but I am falling, down, away, he fell through all his memories of white, the clouds in boyhood, altars at church, paper silent underneath his hand, all those words he’d written, the words he’d never write, none of his words had white to land on anymore and he had nothing to land on also, he was below the clouds now in the black crystal air, his arms still out as if to embrace the sea, wind rushed against him, the water stretched below him long and calm, a thick dark mass now broken by a falling body, then another, naked bodies break the surface and the water twists and spikes and takes them in, ripples circle out around their landing, subtle wrinkles glistening beneath the moon, water slightly wrinkled by human bodies and the wind, he would not wrinkle, would not age, now it was decided, instead he would be swallowed by the sea as he was, young, smooth-skinned, rainbow-skinned, with red and blue and white and green and purple marks across his skin, it would take him and he prayed it wouldn’t sting, he could face death if it only wouldn’t sting no more stinging, water was close, an instant left and he said, God, where the fuck are you? where’s my wife? our baby? though all that left his mouth was the word where before the water broke and swallowed him and cracked his bones and filled his mouth and didn’t sting at all.