Perla Read online

  The apparition of Romina scowled and said, That’s impossible.

  I know it seems impossible, but he’s here.

  Not that, bitch. It’s impossible that my uncle would come to your house.

  I stood, to dispel the vision, unsteady on my feet. I didn’t want to stay home, nor did I feel equipped to leave. I washed my face, but didn’t shower. Two cups of coffee for breakfast. For Lolo, boiled squash, which he picked at for a moment and then abandoned. I’d been boiling his food faithfully ever since I was old enough to be let near the stove. He hadn’t been able to eat lettuce in thirty-nine years, since before I was born, when he was my father’s turtle, and so mean, it is said, that my grandfather kicked him and broke his mouth. His mouth was still crooked from the injury. Occasionally he disappeared for days, and the squash I boiled for him would go untouched. I would worry about his hunger and demise until I saw him again, out in the open, alert, unperturbed, crooked jaw shut tight around the secret of where he’d been. He was capable of immense stillness as well as a surprising gallop up and down the hall when the mood struck him. That bastard is strong, mean and strong, my father would always say, and shake his head in vexed admiration. Now, as I watched Lolo amble out, I wished I could crawl into his leathery head and dig up memories like buried stones. Because he was there when my father was a child, long before he became my father, when he was just a little boy called Héctor watching his own father kick a turtle in the face and break his jaw. A forceful boot, the rapid shatter of a mouth. Lolo had brought it on himself, or so the story went. What had he done? Walked too slowly? Too fast? Been too much underfoot? Perhaps he’d bitten his attacker first, though I’d never seen him bite anyone and could not imagine him doing so without provocation. And surely there were some provocations in the house that formed the boy who became Héctor, a house four kilometers away that smelled of medicines and disinfected floors, in which a childhood had unfurled that I had little knowledge of, barely a fistful.

  Once, my mother had told me, when I was small and crying in my room because Papá was angry and I’d been bad and had to be punished, Your father’s good to you, you know, he never hits you like his father did with him. I was spoiled, the one who was not hit, escaping the fate of Héctor, and of Lolo. When we visited my grandfather, I saw a man who everyone said was ill but who seemed to possess a terrible charm, wearing his Navy colonel’s jacket just to sit at his own kitchen table, capable of mesmerizing a child, launching his special game that sent me hiding in the house without any seek, no one to come after me, no one to find me and pull me by the arm into the light. Yet still I breathed with quick exhilaration in the dark, counting to sixty as instructed, and then emerged a changed girl, always a changed girl, to find my grandfather talking to the grown-ups and to wait patiently (eyes on his feet, trying to discern which one had wounded Lolo years ago) until he looked at me and smiled, saying, Well? And I’d say, Well, not knowing what else to say. Did you hide in the dark? I nodded. Dark places were always the best, the only true ones, for hiding. How was it? I never knew how to answer, what the right response was for the game, but no matter what I said, he always sent me out again. This time count to eighty, if you can.

  The wet man awoke as I lit up my third smoke.

  “Good morning.”

  His body had not moved. His eyes wide open.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I tapped ash into the saucer on the table and tried to smile. “I’m staying home with you today.”

  He glanced at the window without moving his head. He looked back at me. Eyes from the depths. Octopus eyes.

  I got up, went to the kitchen, and returned with a glass and pitcher. “Hungry?”

  He nodded, as if to say, I am voracious, I could devour the sea.

  As I held the glass to the mouth of my guest, I felt terribly sad, and the sadness gaped inside me, faceless, formless, bottomless, ready to draw everything down into it, books, skies, cigarettes, the very texture of the day. It was not an unfamiliar sensation, but one that always came without warning. I struggled to keep it concealed, as I usually do, but this time the effort was futile: he stared at me with eyes so clear they could have read the emotions of a stone.

  Sometimes, to hide your sadness, you have to cut yourself in two. That way you can bury half of yourself, the unspeakable half, and leave the rest to face the world. I can tell you the first time I did this. I was fourteen years old, standing in a bathroom stall holding the last note I would ever receive from my friend Romina, a note consisting of a single question in furious capital letters.

  We had been in class together for years, but did not grow close until we were thirteen, when Romina began to have her experience. That was her own word for it, experience, spoken in a hallowed tone that gave it an aura of great mystery.

  “An experience,” I repeated blankly, the first time I heard of it.

  “Come over tonight, I’ll show you,” Romina said.

  I nodded. I wondered whether the experience had something to do with breasts. If so, Romina’s change was no great secret: on the contrary, it was sudden and astonishing, and had rapidly transformed a perennially mousy girl into an axis of hushed attention. Boys and also girls had started glancing sidelong at the blouse of her school uniform, under which those early and voluminous globes hummed—surely they hummed!—and pushed out curves that incited whispers and giggles and stares. They were fecund; they were bolder than their bearer; they sang themselves into the rounded air. I was fascinated by them too; I wanted (though I would never say this) to touch them, to explore their bulk and shape, the buoyant slope of them, their quiet yet absolutely incontrovertible presence. My own breasts had grown only a little so far, and could not possibly equal this capacity to command the center of a room. At night, in bed, I stroked my own breasts and wondered at their fresh swells, the soft-then-firming nipples, and, as I did, I wondered what Romina’s breasts would do under my fingers, how they would curve, how the supple skin would respond. The only thing more unbelievable than Romina’s breasts was her own reaction to them. She barely seemed to notice all the new attention. She had always been the kind of girl who stared out of the window and chewed her pencil to shreds and looked perfectly comfortable lunching alone, and her new reknown left that unchanged.

  As it turned out, Romina’s experience had nothing to do with breasts, not talking about them and most certainly not touching them; it was nothing more and nothing less than the philosophical and aesthetic expansion of her world. She had begun exploring her parents’ bookshelves. That was all. I tried to hide my disappointment. That afternoon, she walked me back and forth in front of them, pointing out the spines of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Storni, Parra, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Vallejo, pulling out the volumes and spilling them open in her hands as if they had wills of their own. She had been sleeping with them under her pillow. She had been waking in the middle of the night and opening them to arbitrary pages, imbibing words, and then reciting them in her head as she drifted back to sleep. She had been rolling words around her mouth, consuming them like food, even instead of food. She had been thinking—and this, I realized, was a very concrete and important action in Romina’s world: her father, after all, was a philosopher, which meant that he had forged a life out of thinking, and that the university even paid him to do it, a notion that amazed me, far as it was from anything I had seen in my own family. Imagine! A man who is paid to think! What happens in such a mind (and such a household)? As Romina spoke, the sun gradually faded from the living room, casting huskier light along the books, and I touched the spines, with their embossed titles and names, wondering what it would be like to draw so passionately from a mere printed page, or, for that matter, draw so passionately from anything at all. By the time night had fallen, my disappointment had given way to curiosity: there was something hallowed and ecstatic about Romina’s relationship with the books that I had never seen before. I wanted to feel what she felt.

&nbs
p; That night, I stayed for dinner, and Romina introduced me as That Girl Who Wrote the Story About the Disappeared, with a glow in her voice that surprised me and made me blush. It had been a year since the story had been published, and she had never said anything to me about it. The parents exclaimed, A wonderful story, we loved it, how brave of you, and a hot shame ran through me at accepting praise for this story that had brought so much trouble at home, that I had willed myself to renounce, because surely it was a bad story, wasn’t it, and I had been bad for writing it? Wasn’t it an embarrassment? Hadn’t it been woven out of lies? Romina’s parents did not seem to think so; the father grinned, the mother served me more potatoes, delicious potatoes, perfectly salted, crisp around the edges. At this table, I realized, it was not my story that was embarrassing but something else, other parts of my life, the things my parents said. Even things they had done. It was a confusing thought, surrounded by cacophonous thorns. I pushed it down and said nothing so I could stay at this table and eat potatoes without breaking the spell.

  We began to spend hours together after school, after homework was done, exploring books, ideas, poems, life’s great questions. We pillaged her parents’ bookcase, pulling volumes down, reading, and sharing our findings with each other. We built small fortresses around ourselves, with volumes as the bricks. We read chaotically, opening books at random, reading a page aloud, watching each other for wordless excitement or disinterest. If it lit us up, we continued. If it did not, we discarded it without a thought, like greedy children with an enormous box of truffles, abandoning one flavor for another after a single bite. I often had no idea what the words meant, but I didn’t say so, and if Romina didn’t understand them, she didn’t say so either. Tasting the words was enough. We approached them freely, without the pressure of analysis or even understanding, for the pure pleasure they incited. The words began to spin inside me, to sing to me of wakefulness and wanting and mystery and pain, to thread through my days and accompany me to class, to bed, to meals with my mother and father who I thought could not possibly understand what I was discovering, who read newspapers and popular novels but never lines of words like these, lines that could whip you from the inside.

  This is how I discovered Rimbaud, one rainy evening. The first time I opened Illuminations, I read, In an attic where at the age of twelve I was locked up, I knew the world and illustrated the human comedy. My hands shook. I felt cut open. It was not a line I could read to Romina. I turned the pages back toward the beginning.

  Waters and sorrows, rise up and bring back the Floods.

  This line hooked into me and would not let me go, the way a song from the radio repeats in the mind, a chant to which my feet beat on the pavement, left foot, Waters, right foot, sorrows, left, rise up, right, bring back, on and on as I walked wherever I was going. Perla, where are you going? To the moon, I thought, to the city, to myself. I had no idea what the line meant, but it shook me. There’s that feeling that comes when you read something and the lines speak directly to you, and to you only, even though the person who wrote them died long before you were born, or, even if alive, has no idea you exist. The words seep right into your mind. They pour into your secret hollows and take their shape, a perfect fit, like water. And you are slightly less alone in the universe, because you have been witnessed, because you have been filled, because someone once found words for things within you that you couldn’t yourself name—something gesturing not only toward what you are, but what you could become. In that sense, books raise you, in a way your parents can’t. They emancipate you.

  For my fourteenth birthday, Romina gave me a copy of Illuminations, complete with a handwritten dedication. To Perla, So your truth will always burn bright. Abrazos, R. I slept with the volume under my pillow. In the mornings, before rising, I would open the book to any page and read a line. My hands opened the book, the book opened the day. The line I read accompanied me, furled in my mind, a mantra beyond meaning.

  Needless to say, the other girls found this new friendship strange, even laughable. But I didn’t care. I had never had a friend who ignited me like Romina. I no longer pitied her as I had years before, when she first told me about her uncles, but rather saw her as fearless and free, and I wanted to be more like that, even if it meant that the other girls stopped calling my house, gave me berth. In some ways, I was in fact free then, perhaps more so than at any other time in my life—though there were limits. Every Thursday, Romina went to the Plaza de Mayo, where she marched in a long, slow circle with her grandmother and many other women in white kerchiefs carrying placards with enormous black-and-white photographs of men and women who had vanished long ago, and messages also: WE DEMAND JUSTICE, WE WANT THEM BACK WITH LIFE. It was a part of her world that made me sting with discomfort. I could not reconcile this aspect of her life with the rest of her. Mamá, after all, insisted that the accusations about desaparecidos were untrue; if these women in the plaza were caught up in a big mistake, unable to accept the wanderlust of their sons (and wouldn’t it be good if it had always been that, if Romina’s uncles had just gone roaming the world like Rimbaud! if they arrived back one day with too-long hair and exotic tales to tell!)—then wouldn’t Romina with all her sophistication see through her family’s delusions?

  Unless they were not delusions. Unless the people in the plaza were the ones with the truth, and I was the one who breathed in lies. This strange thought hovered inside me, a live grenade. I did not know what to believe. I wondered whether Romina was as sure of her beliefs as she seemed. I wondered what went through her mind as she marched the plaza, what it meant to her, what she privately thought about her family’s weekly ritual. Whether she participated for herself, or just to placate her abuela, and, above all, whether she also harbored doubts.

  But these were not questions I would ever ask aloud. The topic was hazardous, to be avoided at all costs. She asked me to come with her to these demonstrations—We can go to my house afterward, she said—but I always found an excuse, spoken in a carefully casual voice. I had told her that my father worked in the port, a vague description that was not exactly a lie, was it, considering that the port had to do with water and the Navy did as well? It was just a slight blur of reality. No. I could not fool myself. It was a lie. I had to do it, I told myself, to protect our intimacy, our hours together, the radiant bond I could not bear to lose.

  I finally had Romina over to my house, and that was my great mistake. We were at the dining table, doing homework, textbooks spread around us. My parents were both out.

  “Are there more books in your father’s study?”

  “Some.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “You can’t.”

  I said it too quickly, and Romina put her pencil down and looked up. “Why not?”

  “We’re not supposed to go in there.”

  She looked surprised, then hesitant. She returned to her work. I thought the danger was gone, but then, an hour later, she went to the bathroom and twenty minutes passed and she still had not returned.

  I found her in the study. She stood completely still, in front of a bookcase, her profile to the door. Her hands were at her sides, frozen with fingers far apart like startled starfish. I thought of my father coming home at that moment, the invasion discovered, sharp words in front of my friend. We had to leave the room. I searched for the words.

  Romina said, “What is this?”

  Her voice was tight, almost foreign. I followed her gaze to the bookshelf, where a photograph stood in a silver frame, of my father in full uniform, standing in a row of officers in front of ESMA, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, with stately door and soaring ivory pillars that, to me, had always evoked the unshakable laws of an ancient world. Romina was staring at it, concentrating furiously, as though working through a complex algebraic equation. Speak, I thought. I need to speak. I opened my mouth, but it was empty.

  “He’s one of them, isn’t he,” Romina said. “Your father.”

  The
silence spread through the room, long tentacles that wrapped around my throat and slid into my belly. I felt seasick. Romina turned and stared at me, and she looked like a girl lost in dark waters, a girl who had just stumbled on evil in those waters, for the first time, in its wild form. A girl looking evil in the face. My face? Mine? No, it could not be, this was terribly wrong, we had fallen through the world’s ice into a mistaken place. I took a step toward her in an attempt to shift the story but her face wrenched into a brutal wail that would not come.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, and began to cry without sound. Her body shook violently, straining to sob, straining not to sob, at war with itself.

  “Romina,” I said.

  She hurried past me, to the dining room, where I heard her packing up her textbooks. I knew I should go in there, say something, persuade her to stay, to understand. But I myself did not understand what had happened, what had spread through the study, the nausea at the pit of me, the look on her face. I could not move. I stared at my father’s desk, which was long and wide and freshly polished, the cherry-dark wood as smooth and gleaming as a mirror. A leather-bound cup of pens stood reflected on the desk, and I knew they all had ink in them; my father was scrupulous about discarding pens as soon as they ran out. I stared at the pens’ reflections. I counted them. There were seven. I counted them again. I was still counting when I heard rapid footsteps, the front door opening, the loud slam shut.

  The next day, in class, Romina would not look at me, her back a rod of steely reproach. The naked horror had been replaced by something else, something shuttered and cold. I pretended not to care, although my hand shook as I copied Latin lessons from the blackboard. The fear of losing my friend consumed me. Romina’s voice, surprisingly throaty, reading aloud from a book in the diminishing light. Romina’s face, eyes closed in pleasure, absorbing the sound of a paragraph or poem. Her breasts. Romina bent over her homework, her hair a fine brown wall around her, her pencil turning to shreds between her teeth. Romina in the study, wrestling down sobs. I wanted nothing more in the world than to rebuild our friendship. It seemed a looming task, but in those first days it did not yet seem impossible. The more I thought about it, the more the situation seemed like nothing more and nothing less than a misunderstanding—though, granted, one of epic proportions, historic proportions, a tragic disconnect between two poles of reality as much as between two schoolgirls. It seemed to me that the rift between us was larger than us, larger than either of our understandings—wasn’t it? surely that’s how it was?—since to understand it fully would mean seeing things from all sides, and neither of us had done such a thing. For all I knew, no one in all of Argentina had truly seen all sides. Maybe no one had ever stood in the gales between men like Papá and men like Romina’s uncles and somehow absorbed all of it, the whole scope of the story, every inch of shadow and light. Maybe no one had ever loved a person on both sides of that chasm. It seemed impossible, too far for a heart to stretch. I was trying to do it, and felt dismantled by the effort—and yet in those first days I still longed to occupy that space and swallow everything, mend everything. I still believed in such mendings, with all the fervor and deaf hope of adolescence. Romina, I wanted to say, it’s not what you think, I’m not what you think, I don’t know what we are but I want to discover it with all the roving intellectual boldness we found together. We can rewrite this story; come with me, come back, I’ll explain. I’ll try to explain.