Perla Read online

  I said nothing to this because I was a goodgirl. But later, weeks later, one night after homework, I asked my own mamá about it: Where are Romina’s uncles? Will they come back?

  Mamá sighed. She was holding a scotch, and she swayed it back and forth, so that the ice cubes chimed against the glass. “Who knows?”

  “Where are they?”

  “They probably went off to live lazy lives in Paris.”

  I felt sorry for Romina then, with her hand-me-down galoshes and her grandmother wandering the plaza and uncles too lazy to come home. She did not have a mamá like mine, the kind that had her nails done every week and wore imported French scarves that draped across her collar like bright plumes. Mamá had beauty all around her, Papá was a strong man who arrived home in the evenings with his uniform still pressed, and I was a lucky girl to have parents like these.

  But Romina was not the only one who spoke about these things. We’re a democracy now, said the puffy-haired lady on the television news; the dictatorship is behind us. I had never heard the word dictatorship—dictadura—before. I tried to understand what it could mean. It had the word dura inside of it, meaning hard, so perhaps there had been something hard about that time, which might explain why Romina called them the Bad Years, but did not explain why Papá seemed not to like that they were over. Maybe it wasn’t a bad kind of hard. Like walls. Everybody knew it was good that walls were hard, because that way the rain couldn’t come in. But you wouldn’t want your pillows to be hard, or your father’s hand, or many other things.

  Whenever the puffy-haired lady came on television, I watched intently so I could better understand this word, dictatorship. From her, I learned that in those years a thing had happened called El Proceso, the Process, and some people said it was a good thing, while others said it hurt a lot of people, especially some people who were called desaparecidos. The disappeared. At that point, I waited for the puffy-haired lady to name Romina’s uncles, maybe even show Romina and her family on the screen, but she did not. Instead, she was busy talking about a man called General Jorge Videla, who had commanded the country (I could see this clearly, the commanding: Argentina at the table like a schoolgirl, Videla the headmistress, passing the bread, telling Argentina to keep its elbows off the table and chew with its mouth closed), and now people were mad at him and other generals because of the disappeared, and so there were going to be trials. On the first day of the trials, my parents watched the news after dinner without saying a word. I watched them more than I watched the footage of stern military men and shouting people on the street. On the second night, they watched for five minutes, until my father got up quickly and turned it off.

  “We’re not watching that shit.”

  “Language,” said Mamá.

  Mamá and Papá bought another television for their bedroom. I didn’t see the news anymore. But still, I learned at school that the former commanders went to prison. And as the years passed, I learned that the disappeared had not reappeared. The word disappeared kept ricocheting, through rooms, down streets, in grocery stores, in plazas, in newspapers, in whispers and in wails and all tones in between. A new number of desaparecidos was calculated, denied, defended. Thirty thousand. That number was a lie from foreign groups. That number was a truth that had occurred. The number was of people that the government had taken. No. It was people who simply had gone somewhere else. No. There were mass graves. There were exaggerations. They were dead. There must be survivors. El Proceso was a national shame. El Proceso had been necessary. The disappeared had been innocent. The disappeared had endangered the security of the nation.

  So many words, so many versions, always pushing back and forth. I wanted to believe everybody, wanted to find the space where everyone—my father, the journalists, strangers in the store—had a little piece of the truth. When I was eleven, I read Borges in school, and it occurred to me that everything was possible. Because, in Borges’s stories, there were men who dreamed grown men into being, and points in space that contained the universe, and gardens that forked the paths of time itself. If all of this could happen, then there must be a way to understand the vanished people. Maybe El Proceso had tapped into an unknown seventh dimension. A crack had opened between our plane and another secret realm. And thirty thousand people had fallen through, by a slip of the foot, a slip of the tongue, a slip of reality. In which case, the disappeared were still somewhere. Still alive. But not with us.

  I wrote a story for Spanish class in which the thirty thousand clustered, waiting, wakeful, trapped in a secret dimension. I was twelve when I wrote it; the democracy was five years old. Videla had been released from prison, pardoned by President Menem. In the story, the thirty thousand crowded their new homes and survived by taking in memories instead of air, craving recollection the way the rest of humanity craves breath. Their mouths grew large from telling their own stories. They kept looking for the rift in their reality, the crack they’d slipped through, a way to go back home, or at least tell those they’d left behind what happened so they wouldn’t have to worry. But the slipping-place was gone. I wrote this story for myself, in the depth of the night, spilling over beyond the demands of the assignment, which was a story of three pages while my own version continued on for thirteen, and every page surprised me, made me wonder where it came from, where the words and memory-breaths and tangled translucent avenues and ethereal lost people with distorted mouths had come from, what this force that pushed my pen across the page could be. When I finished, I didn’t dare to read it over. Instead I put it under my pillow and slept the three remaining hours of the night.

  The story won a school contest, and a briefer version was published in the newspaper. My teacher had me stand up at her desk while the whole class clapped, and though they did so with wooden duty and even envy, the sound still showered through me and reached inner chambers I had not known were there.

  When I came home that night, at ten o’clock from studying at a friend’s house, my father was waiting for me in the living room. He was drunk.

  “Come here.”

  I didn’t want to go there but I did.

  “Sit down.”

  I sat.

  He held up the clipping of my story. “What is this?”

  “A story.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  I grasped my fingers in my lap. “I did.”

  “Oh yeah? And who are you?”

  Papá looked old, gray around the edges. I thought that he might shout or hit me, but he didn’t. His tone was a slap already. He stared at the wall and then at me and with his eyes upon me I wanted to shred that story and swallow it, piece by piece, pull the whole thing back into my body and make it disappear.

  “Perla. There are a lot of things that you don’t understand.”

  I nodded.

  “We’re your parents. Your mamá and I.”

  I felt Lolo amble up to me. He leaned his cool shell against my ankle, and this calmed me a little. I nodded again.

  “Do you want to lose us?”

  I shook my head.

  “You want to be an orphan?”

  “No.”

  “Then why the hell would you write a thing like this?”

  Mamá was in the doorway now. “Héctor,” she said, “that’s enough. Stop it.” She walked over, hard shoes echoing, and put her hand on Papá’s shoulder, her long red nails against his white shirt like exotic insects. I leaned forward, into the sweet edge of her perfume.

  Papá looked at me with an open face, a face more open than I’d ever seen on him, afraid, exposed, a man lost in the jungle. At that moment, I felt as though I understood nothing, not a single thing about the world, except one: I would not write. I moved forward and put my hand on his knee to comfort him, or to calm him, or to keep myself steady.

  “Perla,” he said, “you’re killing me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “All right then,” said Mamá. “Let’s all go to bed.”

  His eyes ar
e closed but he isn’t sleeping. He recalls the time when he had no eyes. They hooded him, a simple way to take eyes from a man. He wore the hood day and night, and day and night did not exist, there was only dark, the dark was everywhere, all around him, in the air while he swung from the ceiling, in the cold water thrown over his sleep, in the steel mesh of the electric table. The men said You are nothing, We are God, and pissed and spat on him, his countrymen, all in a day’s work. Sometimes they said it shouting, and other times mechanically, duty done, mission accomplished; in his other life when he had eyes he might have asked them for their names, or for some shred of who they were, perhaps he’d known them, their feet may have once kicked a soccer ball his way in some park in the city, it was possible, there had been many games in the park, but this was not soccer and he was not a ball and their feet had their own marching orders.

  He missed his eyes at first. He longed for light and thought that light might save him. He wanted to see his welts, his bruises, he was worried about his balls. The way they hung it seemed they’d swollen to the size of grapefruits from the twisting and the twisting, from the electric shocks, they throbbed and throbbed, there was a time when Gloria had cradled them in her fingers, in her mouth, squeezing playfully, a daring squeeze, how could they have imagined what could be done to balls? how much more daring things could get? where was she now? his wife safe, safe, safe drinking coffee with her girlfriends, typing letters for her boss, taking off her earrings in the bedroom, taking off her blouse, leaving on her wedding ring, wondering where he was. His mind returned to her over and over, finding her in bed, her body warm, hair redolent, opening arms and legs to him, shhhhh you’re back, don’t worry, he’d shrink to baby-size and be enfolded, crawl between her legs into her body where the baby was growing, shhhhh there’s room for both of you, he stayed inside her, warm, lush, halfway between worlds, all three of them resting in one nest of flesh—until cold water and spit made him return.

  Days passed. Weeks. He couldn’t tell. He learned that there are things worse than the dark. Light in the wrong places, like his ass, the hole of him, filled up with a metal rod that lit with current. The questions kept coming and coming, over and over, he no longer knew what he answered, he no longer knew what they wanted, what his body could survive. He longed for dark, retreated there, a microscopic coil of a man.

  The men said You don’t exist.

  They said it loud and also said it low and there was no day, no night, no slope of time between light and darkness.

  You don’t exist. You’re nothing.

  Little did they know those words could be a refuge. What does not exist can feel no pain. Pain still approached with jaws wide open, but it found nothing to clamp onto. Nothing mattered. He slipped away. Even his name was gone from him, erased from the past, from all the mouths that ever made the shape of it to call him from the street for dinner, to call on him in class, to sing him to sleep, to punctuate a question—did you steal that? are you cold? do you still love me? how many oranges? where do you think you’re going? Where there are no questions there’s no life. Where there is no name there is no calling. Better not to be called, not to feel yourself again, the skin and cold nightwater and the boots, the three other men in the small tube of a cell, whom he smelled nearby though they were strictly forbidden to speak. They too had no names. They only had numbers, called out by guards when they arrived to take them to the interrogation room down the hall.

  The men in that room. They existed. They were hot unyielding they were everywhere. He hated them. He needed them. Sometimes he loved them—he despised himself for it but couldn’t help it, they could grant reprieves, could halt the beating and say Look what I did for you, could fill his mouth with a sweet pastry when he was starved, the same hand brought the pastry and the electric jolts, stroked his forehead dry with a cloth and pushed levers, and he was so debased that when the pastry came and the voice said Say thank you, sir, he would not only repeat the words but mean them. I want to live and so I want your love. Men who could grant life and thresh it to oblivion. The guards were myriad, they gave him mate sometimes and sometimes a crust of bread, a bowl of gruel, a small moment to lift the hood off and eat. Sometimes they laughed, the laughter of a bored man or of a boy watching ants drown in the water he’d just poured over them.

  In the end it was light that broke him, light worse than the dark. Light revealing colors that never should be seen. He was tied to the table, as usual, facedown, beaten first, then shocked, poked, twisted, as usual. A hand touched his face, caressed it, two fingers soft along his cheek, then drawing up his hood. His head was pulled back by the hair. His eyes were stung by the light, it had been days or months, he blinked several times and the voice said Do you know what this is? and so he blinked again and strained to focus. There was another hand in front of him, holding a rag that dripped with blood; he had no answer and anyway there was no time, the voice went on—It’s your wife’s panties, that’s what—and then the hood came back down and the dark, the dark, the dark clasped him and swallowed his whole mind.

  I woke up, not in bed. I was at the table. What had I dreamed? Of swimming through dark waters, full of broken fish. And I was cold. And then? Already I couldn’t quite remember.

  The man was still on the living room floor. His eyes were closed, so I took a long look at him. There was a drenched translucence to his skin, an unnatural paleness, that did not belong to the living. His limbs were as limp as tentacles. His lips were blue and swollen, and his genitals drooped. I had never offered him clothes, I realized, and he had not asked for them; somehow, the notion of clothing seemed extraneous and even strange. He did not seem cold, after all, and appeared to have no way of becoming dry. As for modesty, he seemed to have none, and I had no desire to draw attention to his nakedness by making the suggestion. In any case, I did not feel the embarrassment I would have expected to feel in response to a naked stranger; I might as well be embarrassed at the nakedness of a fish. He had a few bits of seaweed stuck in his hair. I thought of the seaweed on the beach in Uruguay, that last night with Gabriel, how it glistened obscenely in the moonlight. How I ran away and left him there, alone on the beach, calling after me. I thought of his face right before I turned from him, washed in moonlight, the lost look of a man who’s exited the train at the wrong stop. I didn’t want to think about that moment, couldn’t bear to think about it, but this man’s presence was pushing at the dam I had erected to keep it out of my thoughts. This man’s presence was wet and heavy and seemed to have this effect, he threatened to collapse the dam so anything could pour into my mind, memories, urges, melted question marks. I was afraid of what would happen if he stayed here, who I would continue to become.

  It was quiet in the room; there were no cars on the street, all the neighbors were home behind closed doors. The tall lamp in the corner illumined a wide circle in the room, hemmed by silent shadows. The light was low, but gleamed gently in the wet drops on the man’s skin. I wondered whether he would ever dry, or whether he’d always appear this way, damp and clammy, as if freshly risen from the river. He was uninvited moisture. He had leaked into this house. I had every reason to find his presence an affront, to be enraged at his invasion, or at least to eject him in calm tones. Certainly he made me feel combustible, unsafe in my own skin. But though I didn’t know why, though the feeling shocked me, I did not want him to leave. It occurred to me then that there might be something the two of us had to do together, something ineffable, something I could not possibly do alone.

  Perla, I thought, you’re delirious with the night.

  Outside, it began, very softly, to rain.

  3

  Waters and Sorrows

  Morning came. I didn’t go to class. I left a message on my professor’s voice mail, something I’d never done before but it was so unlike me to miss school for any reason that I felt the need to explain. I’m running a high fever, I said, a strange summer virus. It wouldn’t be responsible to expose the rest of the clas
s, and anyway, with my head in this state I won’t be able to apply myself. I said it all thinking I was weaving a big lie, but as I hung up it occurred to me that everything except the fever could be true.

  The wet man slept on his patch of floor, his body curled into a loose ball. The rug around him was stained with water. I watched him breathe for a few minutes, taking in air, expelling it, his mouth slack. I wondered how old he was. In the morning sun his hair was still black with hints of green, his ash-white face unwrinkled—he could be my own age, twenty-two, or perhaps a couple of years older, twenty-five at most. But then again, he had been somewhere that could have changed his skin, darkened his hair, shifted his constitution in ways I couldn’t grasp. I was trying to fathom him, the bare essentials of his being; trying to open my thinking, my world, to contain what he claimed to be: one of the disappeared. One of the people who left for work and never arrived, or arrived at work and never came home, or went home and never emerged. People who left holes more gaping than the ordinary dead, because they can’t be grieved and buried, forcing their loved ones to carry their perpetual absence as though the absence itself were alive. Like Romina, with her missing uncles, and her involvement with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, with whom she marched in sight of the Presidential Palace, a white kerchief around her face in protest. In the single year that we were close friends, I had always imagined the uncles’ absence as a dominating current in her house, sweeping the walls along with sunlight, murmuring under dinner conversations, lining the copious shelves of books. Of course that was all before we turned fourteen and Romina cut our ties in a single brutal gesture of disgust—or rage? or grief? or—after which there was no more speaking let alone dreaming between us, only glares at me in the hall that spoke with such ferocious naked force that I came to spend my high school years studiously avoiding Romina’s face. I imagined finding Romina now—an apparition in stern glasses, hovering in the hall—and saying Look, look, one of them is here, I don’t know how he got here but it’s true, he drips and stares like a human trout but he says he’s one of them, halfdead, undead, disentangled from the threads of nonexistence, he has not aged, could he be your uncle?