Perla Read online

  Why are you here?

  He shakes his head.

  You don’t know?

  Her lips are as red as the clothes she’s wearing. Her hair is long and dark, a heavy curtain around her shoulders. Once there was another woman with dark hair around her shoulders, he remembers now, a memory cuts into his mind, her name was Gloria and the day the black boots came for him her name rang out inside his mind, Gloria, Gloria.

  The woman rises. I have to go. I’ll be back in the evening.

  She is gone.

  He stares at the window, where the sun ebbs in, along with the gentle sound of a car passing. The shard is cutting deeper. The black boots and Gloria’s name grow vibrant. He remembers.

  On the train into downtown Buenos Aires, I almost missed my stop and had to barge through a knot of men in suits to make it through the sliding doors before they closed. I rushed up the stairs in a thick mass of people, all moving in the same direction on separate legs, not speaking or even looking at each other, focused only on speed and destination. Usually I took these stairs without noticing the bodies all around me, my mind absorbed by a friend’s romantic problems or an upcoming exam, but today I keenly felt their presence, their momentum and their folded psyches as they emptied out of the station into the broad light of the day.

  The street met us all with blaring horns and impatient cars. The tall buildings loomed over us, as always, casting their implacable shadows. Today they stood taller than ever. The strangers around me seemed to walk to the inaudible clicks and clacks of a hidden potent timepiece, the invisible machine that powers Buenos Aires, and though I usually fell in step without a thought, today I could not walk like them. My legs were loose, unleashed. I had lost the gait of reason within myself. You cannot walk with perfect reason when a dripping man who may not even be a man has appeared in your house. Purses and satchels swung in irritation as their owners overtook me. It’s not my fault, I thought, it’s the water: it leaked into my consciousness and soaked it, bloated it, ruined the regular mechanics. I wondered whether I had gone insane. If so, I thought, then this is what it feels like; I would never have guessed the world would still appear so sharp and vivid, the streets the same, the clouds the same, nothing different except your mind has come unhinged, its cogs whirling loose and wild and hazardous.

  As I walked up the noisy boulevard toward the university I thought of all the years that I had dutifully walked through the world with careful sanity, as though all were well, as though my family were well, as though nothing rotted beneath the surface, until I broke away from expectations by enrolling in the department of psychology. That was the first time I ever went against my father’s wishes on anything significant. He had always planned for me to become a medical doctor, a paragon career for his paragon daughter, the only path he would accept for me, chosen by the time I was born. When I first told him my decision, he would not speak to me for days, and even in my first year at the university, the campaign continued: You still have time, Perla, you could switch to medicine, it would take you longer but at least you won’t be making this mistake.

  “But it’s not a mistake, Papá. It’s what I want.”

  He shook his head. “You’re too young to know what you want.”

  “Everybody decides at my age.”

  “I’m not talking about everybody.”

  His hands were broad and large and calloused, resting on the table as he leaned in to persuade me, and his voice was stern but his eyes were pleading, almost tender, only the best for my princess, and I wanted to take his hands and cup them in front of me so I could pour in what I was learning. Look look, here are the secrets of the mind, the deep-sea treasures I am diving for, lost keys that can unlock what has long remained shut down in the dark. How I longed for my father’s reach. How I hated myself for doing so.

  I arrived in class fifteen minutes late. My professor raised an eyebrow—Perla, the eyebrow said, this is not like you—and kept talking. I took out my notebook and tried to turn my attention to the evolution of Freudian dream theory. The field’s understanding has deepened and expanded over the years; we are all responding to the constant cues of our subconscious, only the insane see dripping ghouls in their home. I looked up, startled, but of course no one had heard my thought. I made notes dutifully, but even as I wrote the page seemed distant and even hazy, as though seen through a windshield blanketed with rain. Inside, I was riding a torrent, to who knows where, back to my living room, to the madness of seaweed in my living room, and to the figure of a naked man or not-man lying on the floor at this very moment, moaning or muttering or just dripping in absolute silence. God, what was he? A ghost? A monster? Just a sad pale man? Would he still be there when I got home? What an absurd predicament. Gabriel, I thought, if only I could call you; you of all people would know what to do or at least would invent some way to respond, or barring that might at the very least put your arm around me as I face the living room tonight, how I long to see you, but surely, after the way we parted, you would never want to hear from me again. The professor glanced over at me—she’d made some point she thought would spark me, and I, Perla, excellent student, nodded thoughtfully. I’d missed what had been said. I was a liar, nodding Yes, Yes, like a dutiful machine.

  My friend Marisol looked at me from across the room, and smiled hello. Her eyes added, Where have you been? I answered with a halfhearted smile back, and hoped she wouldn’t approach me after class. If she did, I’d make a quick getaway, or, if she caught me, I’d tell her I had an appointment. We usually went out for coffee every few days, but I’d been avoiding her this week, ever since my return from Uruguay. We had spoken only once on the phone.

  “Well?” she’d said. “How did it go?”

  “Fine,” I’d said, and once it was out of my mouth it was too late to take back the lie.

  “You didn’t get caught?”

  I had told my parents I was taking a trip with Marisol and her family. “No, that all went smoothly. Thanks for covering for me.”

  “And his family?”

  “Whose family?”

  “Perla. Come on. Gabriel’s family. How was meeting them?”

  “Sorry, Marisol, but this isn’t a good time. Can we talk later?”

  “Sure, sure. Just call me when you have time.”

  But I never had the time. Or I did have the time, but lacked something else essential to making the call, and such an ordinary call at that, to catch up with a friend. It wouldn’t even have to be particularly involved; Marisol wasn’t the best of listeners, and would soon turn the conversation to her latest fight with her mother. But I didn’t have it in me. And now, even less so—with the whoknowswhat in my living room, I felt incapable of feigning chatter.

  What would she say if she knew? And what would the rest of my classmates say? I imagined my professor presenting the case study, my story told: a young woman believes she saw a wet ghost just like you see me here, that she gave him water from a glass and he chewed it. Now remember, your patient is convinced of her reality, attached to its veracity even though it plagues her. What treatment would you say she requires? The hands shoot up.

  When I woke up that morning I’d lain in bed, staring at the ceiling, the impervious ceiling, asking it for a normal day. A normal living room. A normal fist of silence in my mind. Not like these raucous thoughts, these eddies, this whirlpool of wondering what the hell had poured into my house.

  The day the black boots came for him was a pretty day, with bright blue slices of sky between the buildings. He remembers, now, the café he went to on his way home. It was halfway between the office and his apartment. It was beautiful and ordinary, with ivory walls, bitter coffee, little cookies. People walked sharply outside the window. It was just another cup of coffee to him then, and just another window. He was tired. He had stayed up too late fighting with Gloria, about a stupid thing, the apartment, something about the apartment, whether or not they should move and what they should do with the apartment if they did, t
hough he couldn’t remember what had raised the question about moving, where they would go and why, all he knew was that her mouth was pursed in profile, she turned and showed her shoulder blades, they didn’t touch in sleep that final night, what an idiot, not to have touched her. He dreaded going home, the chance that she was still angry, the dance-step of apologies, and so he stopped for coffee. The coffee came with little almond cookies, not the butter ones today, what a shame. He remembers. He tastes the coffee and the almond cookie, tinged with his petty disappointment. Then home. He turned the key and pushed the door open and there was Gloria, bound to a chair, blindfolded, still as a doll. The first fist sent him to the floor and he stayed there, there were many of them, dozens, a dozen boots around him, in his ribs, kicking, speaking, the boots were speaking, they wanted to know things but he couldn’t speak. Blood filled his mouth. A hand caught his hair, lifted him from the ground, then came a fist and he was down again, sinking in a vortex of men. He understood that they had come for him, it was his turn, he would be gone, Gloria was right about people being taken and he wished that he’d believed her, held fiercely to this wish as though believing her could have staved off this moment, there was red in his eyes, wet copper in his mouth, two teeth floating across his tongue like hidden shipwrecks, and Gloria was pleading please don’t hurt him, shut up Gloria, a slap and then a cry, that’s right darling, don’t say a thing, sit still until it’s over and then maybe they won’t take you, please shut up. She didn’t shut up and they weren’t done and he was on the floor and pulled up and back down again, they wanted to know where Carraceli was but he had never known a Carraceli, it was no use, the hood came over his head, the room went quiet, by now it was the middle of the night, he was rolled into a carpet, he was carried down the stairs of his apartment building past neighbors’ doors that did not open, everybody seemed to know to keep their doors closed on such nights, and then he was in the footwell of a car that drove and drove and drove and drove and that—he now remembers—is how he disappeared.

  2

  A Secret Dimension

  I arrived home with brown bags full of food. I was ready for anything—ready to find an empty living room and accept that I had hallucinated and was clinically insane, and also ready to see him there still, in which case perhaps the world was crazy and not me. I imagined this, the world on the couch, the whole of it lying prone and anguished, a globe deflating in the grip of confession, and my professor scribbling on a tablet, Suffers from delusions, psychosis. Acute.

  He was still there. I smelled him as soon as I opened the door, a gust of metallic fish and rotting apples. He still looked wet, as if he’d just emerged from water. He sat on the floor, staring at the painting on the wall, Tía Mónica’s blue rendition of a ship on tumultuous seas. The monochrome approach was inspired by Picasso’s blue period; that’s what Papá always said about it. Intermittently, Mamá would make a case for them to take it down, or at least hang it in the upstairs hallway, the last thing I want in my own living room is to be reminded of your sister, but none of the appeals ever worked. On most decorating points my father caved to my mother, but there was no moving this vestige of Tía Mónica.

  “I brought more food,” I said.

  He didn’t move.

  “I had no idea what you wanted.”

  He turned his head toward me, slowly.

  “Are you hungry now?”

  He didn’t answer and I felt like a fool, standing in my living room with two bags of groceries I had painstakingly chosen—lingering in the aisle, thinking, Pasta? surely he’d like pasta?—for a guest I had never invited and whose humanity was in question and whom I had no reason at all to long to feed and who now would not even deign to speak. “You must be hungry.”

  “Rain.”

  “What?”

  “It’s going to rain.”

  “Oh.” I looked out the window, at the heavy sky beyond the trees. It had been a hot summer day, humid as always, and rain had not occured to me. “Maybe.” I put the grocery bags down on the table. “You can talk.”

  He nodded. “I am remembering.”

  “What do you remember?”

  He said nothing.

  “What are you?”

  Through the wall, I heard Belinda, the neighbor child, shrieking with pleasure in the yard. Another child laughed; there was a friend over. I wanted to hurl a loaf of bread at this stranger who would barely talk to me.

  “I’m going to make us dinner. You want dinner?”

  “Water.”

  “What?”

  “Water.”

  “That’s not dinner,” I said, and stopped myself before adding not for real people, anyway.

  His eyes probed and entered me, his eyes were looking into my mind, they were all sight, they were all dark, they had no bottom. “Water. Please.”

  He eats the water, chews it, it has substance, it’s the only thing with substance in this world. It sparkles in his throat as it goes down. It flows into this unfamiliar flesh, not like the living flesh he had before he disappeared, but something else; he doesn’t understand what; he can’t answer her questions, still doesn’t know it all, the who and what of his presence, after so much absence he must defend his presence, that’s how it is, how the world is, a dry dry world, he wants water to pour into him, over and over, fill him up, like it did in the cradled years, the deep-in-river years, when everything was water and he not only ate water but the water—sparkling, ravenous—ate him.

  I ate my bread, torn from the loaf, unbuttered. I felt both restless and paralyzed, yearning for motion yet unable to do anything ordinary such as open a book, cook dinner, call friends and meet them for drinks. I needed a drink. I couldn’t imagine what I would tell my friends. How’s your week going? Oh really? As for me, there’s a pale wet man who smells like a dirty beach sitting in my living room. No, I don’t know how long he’s staying. No, he looks too weak to steal the stereo. Don’t worry. Let’s buy another round.

  I poured myself a scotch from my father’s good bottle. I would have offered some to the man but he wanted only his plain water, which he consumed with such intensity it should have been a private act. He finished and looked up at me.

  “Thank you.” His voice was clearer now, just a little blurred.

  I nodded. The window was open. Outside, I heard a dog bark, a man silencing the dog. It didn’t rain.

  “I was in the water.”

  It was difficult to hold his gaze. “In the water?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which water?”

  “All of it.”

  I finished my scotch and filled my glass again. “And before that?”

  “I disappeared.”

  I reached for my cigarettes and matches. The small flame moved down the match toward my fingers. I let it scorch me, and it seemed incredible that my fingers didn’t shake. “Are you alive?”

  He cocked his head to the side and stared at me; it was maddening, terrible, corrosive, the way he didn’t blink. “I don’t think so.”

  I smoked the cigarette, watching the smoke curl on itself in the air between us. “I don’t think so either.”

  I poured my third glass of scotch and tore another piece of bread from the loaf, but didn’t eat it. I pulled out the soft, white center and pressed it into a ball. Disappeared, I thought. I should have felt bemused, disturbed, at the very least surprised, but all I felt was the low burn of scotch inside my throat.

  “Why did you come here?”

  He stared at the white ball in my fingers. Bread with all the air crushed out of it. “I don’t know.”

  We spent the next few hours in silence. He stared at Tía Mónica’s painting, the ship and sea evoked with the same hue and brush. This painting seemed to engage him far more than the print on the other wall, Dalí’s Persistence of Memory, with its melted clocks draped over a barren branch, an angled surface, a sleeping creature of inscrutable origins. I had not caught him looking at the Dalí even once, whereas Mónica�
�s painting seemed to have the effect of a gripping story, as though a part of him could leap over the frame and into its blue world. When I was a child, I had done the same: watched the painting in naked fascination, certain the ship was in motion and would lunge toward me at any moment, as if to save me from perilous shores. The brushstrokes were thick and dynamic, blending ship with sea, creating the illusion that they interpenetrated. A ship melting into the ocean waves, or being born from them: my child-mind could never decide which was more true and always longed to ask the woman who had made the painting. Does the ship form the water or the water form the ship? But I could never ask her this, of course, because she was gone, to an unknown place, a woman even more enigmatic than her art. I drank and smoked and pretended not to watch the man who watched the painting. The street lifted its low voice into the room. The air swirled. I put my head down on the table, and slept.

  Perla, Perlita, my mother said, don’t believe the lies about the disappeared. You’re going to hear things in school and I’ll tell you now that they’re not true, Perlita, these people are hysterical, they don’t understand a lot of things. Don’t say anything to them about it. Just stay quiet and remember they’re confused.

  I nodded then, and my tight braids brushed against my dress. Mamá smiled at me, helped me into my coat, and gave me a hug. As always, I wanted the embrace to last longer so I could dissolve into my mother’s soft blouse and bright perfume, but the touch was perfunctory, a means to an end, delivered in the rush of a busy morning. Mamá loved me very much, but she had many things to think about, and very nice clothes that should not wrinkle so early in the day.

  I was six years old. The democracy was about to turn one. And yes, there were people now who clearly did not like Navy men like Papá. Romina Martínez’s uncles had been gone for seven years, or so she’d told me in the coatroom at school. There are many people like that, she’d whispered. Many people who never came home in the Bad Years. Her grandmother still marched in the plaza downtown every Thursday, wearing a white scarf over her head, so that her uncles would return. But, Romina said, taking off her green galoshes, Mamá said that’s crazy, they won’t come back, because they’re dead.