Cantoras Read online

  After a few more rounds of mate, Malena woke up and joined their circle. Flaca took out remnants of cheese, bread, and salami, sliced them into pieces, and passed them around. They chatted easily, about their sleep, the ride in over the sand dunes, the astonishing landscape around them, its oddness, its beauty, its absolute lack of a toilet, were they really going to dig holes to shit in? We are, Flaca said, and the shovel is ready, who wants to start? Nobody wanted to start. Everyone’s bowels were tied up. In endless knots, Romina said, like my mother’s macramé. They laughed over their macramé bowels. They laughed at Paz, the girl, still sleeping through all of it, even as the sun rose up over her.

  “How can she sleep with the sun on her face?” Anita said. “And it’s already so hot.”

  “Especially for November,” Flaca said. “Our first heat wave of summer.”

  “It’s not summer yet!” Anita said.

  Flaca smiled. “Close enough.”

  “Close enough for what?”

  “Heat,” Flaca said.

  “Oh, stop it, you two!” Romina picked up a few pebbles and threw them at Flaca, but she was laughing. “You are the worst. Both of you.”

  Anita felt her face flush. She glanced at Flaca, hoping she’d say something to dispel the mood. But Flaca didn’t seem awkward at all; she was grinning at Romina, full of ease and mischief. So this was how they were together. Now that they weren’t surrounded by strangers—in the city, on the bus down the coast—this was their language. She looked at Malena, who’d watched the exchange in silence, her hair already pinned back in a tidy bun, when had she done that? And why bother with uptight hairstyles in a place like this? It made no sense, unless the pinning of hair was a kind of armor that Malena was loathe to let go. She seemed guarded that way, this Malena; the kind of woman who thought far more than she said aloud.

  “I am just saying,” Flaca said, “that it’s going to be a hot day.”

  “Oho, and aren’t you glad of it,” Romina said.

  “Well, I was hoping to go for a swim.”

  “Me too,” Anita said.

  “Then go.” Romina took the mate and drank.

  “Now?”

  “Why not? Nothing’s stopping you. We can do what we want, isn’t that why we came?”

  Anita considered this. She glanced up at the sun—a thing her mother had always told her not to do—then out at the southern beach. “I think we should go in search of supplies first. It looks like a fishing boat is coming in—over there, look, toward the beach.”

  They all looked. A dark red speck on the water, gliding slowly toward the shore.

  “Maybe they’ll sell us some of their catch.” Anita looked at Flaca. “Isn’t that what you said we were going to do? Buy fish from the fishermen? You had a whole plan.”

  “To make fish appear,” Romina said.

  “Like Jesus Christ,” Malena said.

  Romina laughed, and Anita joined her. Malena stared at them in surprise for a moment, as if she hadn’t seen the humor in her own words, then tentatively smiled. Flaca felt at once flustered at being the butt of the joke, and also proud at having built a circle of women that was getting along so well. She’d hoped they would, but she hadn’t expected this, for them to gang up in their teasing, and on the first day. It had to be a good sign.

  “Or like a pilot. Nuestra pilota,” Romina said, mock-saluting like a sailor.

  “We’ll find fish,” Flaca said, uncertainly. “And there’s that grocery. But we should start with the boats.”

  Anita stood. The other women watched her legs unfold languorously under her long, diaphanous skirt; Anita felt their eyes, warm, keen, like the eyes of men only coming from women and so made new. The hot sharp pleasure of it. “I’ll go talk to them.”

  “I’ll go too,” Flaca said quickly. “We need water, and if they can supply us, I can carry it.”

  “I’ll come too, Pilota,” Romina said, pleased with the new nickname that teased and paid tribute to her friend at the same time. “We certainly wouldn’t want this beautiful woman to go unaccompanied.”

  Flaca looked down sheepishly, then up at Anita, smiling.

  Something lurched inside Anita then, the wild part of herself that kept getting wilder—the thing that Flaca had unlocked with her glinting key and her swagger, oh, what’s this over here inside you, let’s open it, shall we, and have a look. That impish smile of Flaca’s. The things that followed that smile when they were alone. Who she herself became under Flaca’s hands: the radiance and savagery of it. How it spooled out, ravenous, seeming infinite, until time put up its borders and she rolled it all back into a corner of herself so she could make room for the good girl, the good wife, every picture the good wife—only now, today, for the first time, things were different, as she didn’t have to make even a centimeter of space for the good wife for seven days, seven blisteringly sweet beach days where there were no toilets and no telephones and no husbands.

  “Come with me, then,” Anita said.

  And so they went: Flaca, Anita, and Romina, leaving Malena to watch over the fire and the sleeping girl.

  Romina felt buoyant as she walked across the grass. Perhaps, she thought, this is all that life can give us, all it can give me, the most voluptuous gift it will ever offer. A day. A day in which the boundaries of you can expand to fit the sky, to fit the sky inside yourself, and no city streets no kidnap fears no familial duties can hem you in, shrink you down, curl you tight inside. She was walking over grass, toward a sloping path. She was draped in sunlight. She was free, breathing, stripped of pretense, untethered from the lies of everyday survival. She was walking with a friend and her lover. Their lust crackled in the air, made it shimmer, and even though it wasn’t hers, it flushed her with a kind of happiness. They too were untethered. They too were real. How long had she had it in her, this hunger to expand, this need for space? This need to breathe all the way into the bottom of her lungs. The city was a fist that grasped you tightly; there was always something sitting against your chest, hard as lead, pushing you closed. She closed. She shut down. She had learned to live inside a shell covering, tender parts hidden inside. Fear had become so familiar that she could no longer see it, couldn’t sense its borders, couldn’t tell how deeply it had seeped into her conscious mind. In Montevideo, the air itself was a hostile creature, lying in wait around you, breathing, invisible, a threat. People didn’t speak to each other anymore. The grocer didn’t smile or meet her eye as he wrapped her lettuce and measured out her rice. When the sun shone, outside, she barely felt it on her skin. There was no such thing as safe. Deeply, she knew this, understood this, in her skin, the not-safe of her body, of her days.

  Romina had known, all these four years, that she could be taken at any time, so that, when it finally happened, it was almost a relief—all right then, here it is, the slide down, the falling, it’s begun—even though another part of her mind had resisted the possibility at the same time: no, that wouldn’t happen, not to me, of course not, I won’t get caught, I’m not a Tupamara guerrilla, I’m not even that committed as a Communist, not like my brother, Felipe, or Graciela or Walter or Manuelito or Pablo or Alma or the rest of them, the real subversives, I’m not one of them, and anyway the worst of the round-ups is over now, and this was true, the government had slowed down its exhausted machine, but that did not explain why the next-door neighbor had been taken just last year, in ’76, why his wife now stood at her kitchen window with her arms plunged into a tub of dirty water and plates, not washing, just standing, stock still, staring out the window with blank eyes. As if she’d been removed from her own body.

  When the coup happened, in ’73, Romina had just begun her first year at the university. It was June, and she was preparing for exams, studying at the linoleum kitchen table as the first cold winds of winter blew against the window. She was studious, a goodgirl to her exacting parents,
in love with Flaca, from whom she’d recoiled when she’d first seen her at the Communist Party meeting, because she knew immediately what Flaca was, she wore her masculinity like a cologne, she even wore cologne, men’s cologne, so brazen was she. Hair pulled briskly back into a rubber band, broad shoulders, the tang of masculine scent. A steady gaze. Girl. As dangerous as a snake, coiled and hungry, ready to bite. And there was Romina, serving coffee and shuffling papers because she was helping change the world, there would be justice for the workers and a new day for Uruguay, a revolution that would shine as brightly as the one in Cuba, Workers of the World, Unite! She believed in it all. She had no boyfriend. It had been so easy to be a goodgirl, to linger in books and ignore the attentions of boys, who cared about boys? Then came Flaca with her naked allure. She felt the coldness of her comrades toward Flaca, the disapproval for her short ponytail and plain blue T-shirt. Her own brother, Felipe, the one who’d brought her to the meeting, twenty-one years old and a student of law, looked at Flaca with a mix of disdain and fear. Romina found it hard to look away from her. Snake in waiting. What kind of snake? Majestic anaconda? A boa with its power to wrap you in its long muscular body until you can’t breathe? Flaca wrapped around her, Flaca strong and lean, coil, flick, bite. That was how it began. With the invasion of her imagination. Their months together hurtled along, bursting with discoveries. Sex, first sex, at eighteen. Aching flames unleashed, spilled out into another body. The vigor of desire. The heave and stab of it. Like eating the ocean and still wanting more. Dissolving into ash, and then, when your body returns, when the room returns, she is still there, woman, girl, gazing at you with animal eyes. All of it shrouded in a shawl of quiet. They were perfect together, or, more accurately, together they shaped perfection out of nothing and cradled it in their arms. Romina was happy. Even as the situation around them grew more chaotic and the government increased its crackdown, she held out the beacon of the better world around the corner, Workers of the World, Unite!, and what if in that new world—breathless thought, rabid thought—there could be more room for women like her and Flaca? Would the Communists fight for that too? There was no evidence whatsoever that they would. She dared dream it only in the glow after sex, lying naked and limb-woven with her lover.

  Like so many others, like her own Communist brother, she didn’t see the dictatorship coming, as their country was supposed to be immune to such collapse. Uruguay was special. A tiny oasis of calm. Their neighbors throughout South America were one thing, with their shaky democracies, their sordid political legacies, poverty, repression, Peronism, corruption: but Uruguay, drab little Uruguay, was the stable little sister, the goodgirl one, the safe one, the Switzerland of South America; they had arrived at social advances—the abolition of slavery, votes for women, separation of Church and State, eight-hour workdays, the right to divorce—before the giant nations around them. Her high school history class told the story of a progressive democracy, a role model, a Latin American jewel, using that very word, jewel, making her imagine a tiny yet exquisitely polished Uruguay-shaped gem among big plain stones. She’d never left Uruguay, so what did she know, really, except what she could see with her own eyes, and hear with her own ears? She heard little in the conversations around her to prepare her for the coup.

  That morning, the morning of June 27, 1973, the headline was gigantic and in thicker black letters than she’d ever seen. PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED. President Bordaberry had turned over his powers to the generals of the military, an institution to which Uruguayans had rarely given much thought until the recent years, when troops had been called out to quell the workers’ strikes and round up the Tupamaro guerrillas. There had been unrest for some time now, and curfews for civilians, searches of private homes without warning, rumors of torture in the prisons where the subversives were kept—but even so, this? A coup? They were not calling it a coup. Transfer of power, they called it. Like handing over a cluster of keys. Here, take this. Look after it for a while, while I go down the road, to the sea, to the abyss. The President was in the photographs on the front page of the newspaper, and he didn’t look chained or wounded or even afraid, just grim as he signed a paper on his desk with the generals towering over him, gathered in a ring. She wondered what was happening in his mind, whether he secretly feared for his life or whether he felt safe in that ring of generals, safer than everybody else, whether he’d be able to sleep soundly in the nights to come and what he’d dream. After that her brother had disappeared. He went to the store and never came home. Her terrified parents cornered her and learned the truth about their children’s attendance of Communist Party meetings. Were you Tupamaros too? her parents asked. Can it be? You? Her mother scouring under Romina’s mattress and in her closet for hidden guns. No, of course not, Mamá, we were never Tupas, Romina said, thinking that the very idea was ridiculous considering that the Tupamaro guerrilla movement and the Communist Party had never gotten along even for a minute, with Communists accusing Tupamaros of rashness and Tupamaros calling Communists all talk and no action. But her parents, of course, knew nothing of that, they knew only that their children were in danger, not so different from the danger that Mamá’s family had been running from when they fled the Ukraine, and Russia before that. Her parents withdrew her from school and sent her up north to Tacuarembó to hide out with her aunt, and, sure enough, it was just in time, because soldiers came and swept their house at 3:15 a.m. one night, though they found neither Romina nor any of her Communist pamphlets or books. She had evaded them, and when she returned to Montevideo (and to Flaca’s infidelities, which had crushed her then but which she now saw as Flaca being Flaca), she returned to her university studies with her head down.

  Four years passed.

  Four years and no arrest.

  An almost obscene amount of luck, considering the fate of so many of her comrades and of her brother, whose name was no longer spoken in her home. Romina carried the weight of all parental expectation, the burden of easing her brother’s absence with her own perfect performance as a daughter. It was never enough. The dinnertime silences ached and stung, the three of them at the square table that had always had one side for each member of the family. When her own arrest finally happened, just two weeks ago, the great relief was that it hadn’t happened at home, with her parents watching; that had always been her worst fear, that she’d be taken in front of her parents, that they’d have to watch, unable to stop what they saw. She’d already given them enough suffering and disappointment, with her Communist past and her plain appearance and no boyfriend in sight, never as pretty as her own mother had been though they would never say that directly and that wasn’t the issue anyway, you have such nice eyes, if you wore a little more makeup and smiled more often, they’d say, though these days with a tone of resignation. In any case, they had not seen the arrest, had not sullied their eyes or ears; mercifully, it had taken place on her walk home from the Biblioteca Nacional after a long afternoon of study. Two men on the sidewalk, flanking her suddenly, a waiting car, a push. Hood over her head. Long drive. Circles, she knew, to keep her from knowing where they were going, and though she tried to keep track of the grid her steady sense of direction failed her, dissolving after a particularly sharp turn. No beating until they arrived in the cell. They wanted names. It seemed that someone else, a prisoner, had given them her name. Who. Who. It doesn’t matter, don’t think about that, don’t think. Don’t give them names. You have no names. Say it aloud: I have no names, I don’t know anyone. I don’t know. I am not. Cold. The floor is cold. Waiting for the rape. It doesn’t come. Not coming makes it terror more. Second day, the machine. Electric. No. Knew it would be. Knew it. No not that not there. Will leave no marks, she knows. There is knowing but the knowing it does not protect. Have nothing, have no names. Sorry. Sorry sorry. Cannot help you. Act stupid, like a stupid woman, useless. Useless good. They talk. They ask. Demand. You are not. But in the end they stop and she is back in the room from before and on the second
night the rape is only one. Only one. Where are the others. Why this luck. Some luck. A halfhearted arrest. Why is that. Is the whole damn country tired. And what is next, is this forever, will she ever see the sky. The next day, no machine. No rape. No beating. Ignored. At night, the rape returns and the same one is back, she recognizes does not want to but she does, she knows him, she will know him always for better or for worse, and, it is worse, he is not alone this time, she counts them, one, two, three. Only. Three. The stories are of numbers much larger than three. How do the others do it, she thinks, survive the numbers larger than this counting, and tell me someone are they true, the stories, is this story true, the story she is trapped in, is it her forever, is it her world now to be one, two, three, every night and on and on. At last they are gone. Ignored again. What is this. What is this. And then dragged out, no explanation, pushed into a car and pushed back out of it somewhere on the edge of town. Alone. Alive. Luck. Luck. Sky.

  It is less, what happened to her. She tells herself this when she wakes in the night.

  And now, here, Polonio, sunshine. Copious. Flagrant. Ocean everywhere.

  Celebrate, Flaca had said.

  She would not tell Flaca about the cell, the machine, the Only Three. Not because she didn’t want to, but because language could not hold it. Her tongue failed her. There was no speaking what those days had been, those nights, nor how their terror spilled into the days that followed, into the now even here on this beach, and into the future, which would not be the same because those days had taken place and all the more so if her period never came—and this was the thought she must not think, the thought that tore her. She kept searching her body for signs of menstruation, a leak, a soreness, anything. Bleed, body. Bleed and set me free. Bleed! The happiness of this moment stained by that ferocious prayer. This too she could not speak of. This too she could not say. The wide-flung joy of being here was a liquor she could drink from, to drown out, to forget.