Perla Read online

  But I never found my chance.

  A week after the incident, I found a note tucked into my science textbook, on torn paper, in Romina’s unmistakable capital letters:

  ARE YOU A MURDERER TOO?

  My hand shook, holding the paper. I couldn’t breathe. I looked around the classroom: the other students were raucously packing their bags, talking about lunch, and Romina was nowhere to be seen. I had read the note undetected. I stuffed it quickly into my pocket and hurried to the bathroom, where I locked myself into a stall and stood with my eyes closed and my face against the door. The stall smelled of urine and cigarettes and the cheap perfume someone had sprayed to disguise the smell of smoke. The note seemed to burn through my pocket, scalding me—I would surely take off my trousers that night and find red puckered skin. I closed my eyes and saw my father, face full of love, at my bedside at night as he stroked my hair and sang a lullaby off-key. I heard his laugh, watching television, the sound of him round and generous and dropping slowly in pitch, ha-ha-ha, as if somersaulting down steep stairs. I heard the long push of his breath as he filled an inflatable pool for me, in the summer, the pfffhhh, pffffhhh of his dedication to my joy. I saw him eating breakfast, about to leave for work, in proud clean uniform, the golden buttons shining on his cuffs. He was not a—no. Could not be. I was enraged. I was ashamed. I felt like breaking everything in sight, only there was nothing in my sight except the blistered paint on the stall door.

  The stall door stayed closed in front of me, dispassionate, unyielding, worn.

  I stood and stood while time stretched and moaned and pressed around me, until the bell rang to signal the end of lunch. I had forgotten to eat, I was late for class, I was not hungry. I took the note back out, unfolded it, and read it again. It had not changed. I read it and read it and read it. Then I tore it into many little pieces and flushed it down the toilet, a futile act that could not keep me from reading those words incessantly in the coming months, in the dark of night, where they blazed and hovered over my bed.

  After this, the crimes of my father—the crimes of the nation, also, crimes to which I had not given words—settled on me, rode my back, draped my shoulders, stuck to me and refused to wipe away. They were not delusions. I could no longer believe they were delusions. Things had happened in this nation, they were true, and Romina’s family had played one role while my family had played another, a role that could not easily be cleansed, and that clung to the underside of my skin like a dense sheet of lead that made it difficult to rise from bed in the mornings. I couldn’t clearly see what my father had done—the images only came in fractured pieces, his gleaming cuffs against a desk, his face gazing through iron bars—nor did I want to see any more clearly. But I had accepted that the disappeared had truly disappeared, and this was enough for condemnation. I was guilty by inheritance. There was no trial, no choice, only the here you go this belongs to you of guilt, which increased with every bite of bread from the dinner table, every absent smile from Papá as he looked up briefly from the morning paper, every brisk kiss I accepted from Mamá as I left for school, every night I burrowed into fresh linens that had been washed by a woman who was paid with pesos that my father earned the way he’d earned them. With every turn and motion and common daily act, the stain occupied more space beneath my skin. It was inescapable. I could no more free myself of it than I could free myself of my own face.

  I said nothing to my parents, and they did not seem to suspect that I had changed, that the secret at our family’s heart had become exposed.

  At that time, of course, I was sure that it had.

  My old friends accepted me back, though gradually and not without a few barbs, which I met with amiable shrugs. I did not explain and they did not ask for explanation. They were popular girls who did not care about French poets or Thursday marches or experiences that led down hazardous roads. Instead they were obsessed with eye shadow and hairstyles gleaned from fashion magazines and losing weight they didn’t have and movies from Hollywood in which things went terribly wrong but always ended well for everyone except, of course, the villain. I buried the parts of myself that seemed radioactive. My friends made it easy to pretend, so convincingly that on good days I lulled myself into believing my own act, and became a girl who was not haunted by the echoes of a question on a torn sheet of paper. She was an easier girl to be. So I became her.

  From then on, there were two Perlas: one on the surface who had good grades and good friends and smiled a lot and for whom everything was going fine, and a secret Perla under the surface where sins and shame and questions lay buried alive, like land mines.

  4

  The Chorus in the Depths

  The morning flares open, slowly, filling the air, piercing his mind. They are quiet together. He watches her smoke cigarettes, flip through magazines, flip through television channels. She doesn’t laugh when recorded laughter issues from the screen. He listens to the sound of her in the kitchen, clattering around, cooking nothing. The turtle crawls up to him on squat, scaly legs. It cranes its neck out of its shell. Its jaw smacks open, then closed, with a low clack. There were jaws in the water, many jaws of differing shapes and hardness, the toothy eel-jaw, the sluggish trout-jaw, the whole-body opening of jellyfish. Water has so many mouths. They ate his body while the rest of him drifted on, penetrated, porous, unperturbed. Now there is no water for him to drift through and he doesn’t want to be eaten, he doesn’t want to go away. He bares his teeth at the turtle. The turtle opens his jaws and lets his narrow tongue hang out. Neither of them blinks. The turtle is the first to close his mouth.

  He sits up on the floor. His spine creaks. There is sensation in him, power of touch, he can feel his body beneath his fingers. The flesh is real, though soggy. He can feel pain. He feels the pain of sunlight in his head.

  There is a world beyond this house. He hears the groan of a car outside, the lilt of voices. They are close to the city, his city, but they are not inside it; the quiet is too great; the streets do not roil and purr as they did where he once lived. There, he had felt the city under every sound like the sharp drone of a bee in flight. He was never alone in the city, a place where solitude was always tinged with strangers’ voices, the low blare of a radio, the smell of someone else’s steak on the grill, the brush of a rough shoulder on the street. He recalls these now in a tumble of sensations. The city: how it accompanied him unceasingly, the way the devout claim to be accompanied by God. On visits to the country—rolling pampas, breezy beaches, the vast ice of Patagonia—he enjoyed the beauty of each place but always felt relieved to return home, to be folded once again in the great fabric of a living place imbued by the breath and noise of millions. He remembers this with a sting of longing for his city, for Buenos Aires. For a moment, he is tempted to stretch his mind wide the way it stretched inside the sea, so he can go and feel it, the incessant pulse and sprawl, legions of feet. But no, he will not. This is not the sea and it is painful and difficult to stretch here. In any case, there is no need: this room is a world within a world. He turns his attention to his surroundings, seeking the inner soul of the place. On the bookshelf, books stand shut, their secrets tightly pressed inward. These are not books that open often, nor do they want to. On the contrary, they seem to say to their own words, you are captives, we won’t let you out, you cannot fight us. The spines are tidy and betray no signs of the battle within. In front of the books sits a porcelain swan, its head bent in defeat or from carrying a terrible burden for too long. It throbs with unsaid thoughts. One shelf above the swan, there are two photographs, a bride and groom in one, a little girl in the other. He notices them for the first time. The little girl wears her hair in pigtails, she is sitting on a sofa, the sofa in this room. Her smile is too big for her face, her face is perfect, beaming and spilling what her features cannot hold. The wedding couple are young and handsome, both smiling with their mouths closed, the woman’s chin in a high slant of pride or defiance, the man’s eyes searching the camera for clue
s to an unsolved puzzle. Now the camera is gone but the man’s eyes keep searching, roving the living room for signs of what he sought. On the other wall, over the ominous sofa, the painting of the sea, the sea, slashed in thick blue paint not made of water but he knows it is the sea, with something riding it the color of the water, a ship, plunged in water, made of water, a ship risen from the wet arms of the sea itself, and he can swim-pour-flood into those brushstrokes and ride the swelling curves of blue, dreaming the waves of his lost home.

  She comes back from the kitchen with a plate of empanadas. On the way, she watches the turtle amble past her with an expression that he recognizes as tenderness. She loves the turtle, he thinks, and his mind is stabbed by the word loves. She sits down at the table, and eats without looking up. Her hair is pulled back in a rubber band. Gloria used to pull her hair back when she was serious about something: scouring the stove, taking a test, winning a fight. Gloria always won their fights. She was able to turn his words around and hand them back to him, hard, polished, proof of her triumph. She was going to be the greatest lawyer in the nation, that’s what he always told her, throwing his arms up in defeat. He had such faith in her. Thanks to her fighting prowess they wouldn’t always live in a small apartment with gray water leaking through the roof from the third floor. Good things would happen. They were sure to. They both said this. They were happy. The gray water didn’t matter, anyway. But they didn’t know that; they didn’t know, back then, how little the leaks mattered, how happy they really were. Didn’t know how good it was to have all of their toes. To drink too much red wine. To feed their animal joys, naked, slippery with sweat. To take doorknobs, showers, speech for granted, and complain bitterly about getting up early in the morning, as if it were some monumental sacrifice. What brats we are, he thinks, when we are happy.

  The woman at the table glances over at him, though when their eyes meet she stares down at her empty plate. Her body is young and beautiful, it is so whole, uncut, unbruised, unburned. She has the luxury of sinking in a vague sadness. She has never been raped with rods that deliver electric shocks. The skin has never been peeled from the bottom of her feet. She has never hung from a ceiling hook, basted in shit. She has never been shown panties, bloody, torn, in the hand of a man whose voice is intensely familiar but whose face is unknown. She has never even had the smallest bullet wound. And all of this is good: he is nourished by her wholeness. A wholeness that he knows she cannot see.

  They are linked, he and the girl. But how? By a rope of light, a truth that flickers for an instant before fleeing into the morass of his mind.

  The phone rang and I didn’t want to talk in front of the dripping man, so I ran from the living room to my father’s study.

  “Hello?”

  “Perlita.”

  “Hi, Papá.”

  “It rang so long, I thought you weren’t home.”

  “I’m home.”

  “Yes. Well, we’re just calling to make sure everything’s all right.”

  The room was dim, the curtains were drawn, and I hadn’t turned on the light when I came in. I leaned against his desk. “Everything’s fine.”

  “You’re fine?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the house?”

  “What would be wrong with it?”

  “Perla, I’m just asking.”

  “But what could happen? I don’t see why you need to ask.”

  “Because it’s my house.”

  “Only yours?”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  I was wondering the same thing myself. I hadn’t meant to pick a fight, hadn’t meant to expose him to my private chaos. “How’s Punta del Este?”

  “Beautiful. We’re having a great time.” He sighed, the heavy sigh of a man beseiged by a child. “Look, just be careful. Here’s your mother.”

  I waited. There were distant murmurs before she came.

  “Perla?”

  “Hi, Mamá.”

  “What’s happening over there? Is everything all right?”

  “Everything is fine. Papá’s just being paranoid.”

  “He worries, that’s all.” She said it soothingly, almost in a purr, and I could see him at the other end of the room, pouring them drinks. “So you don’t need anything?”

  “No.”

  “Good. We miss you. I wish you’d come.”

  But Mamá, then who would stay home to water the ghost? “I couldn’t miss the start of classes.”

  “Right. Well, maybe next time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Call if you need anything, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Take care of yourself, Perlita.”

  I hung up. The sun hovered at the window, reticent to fill the room. I thought of my parents in Punta del Este, enjoying the sun and the food, forgetting their troubles. That’s what my mother always said about it: Punta del Este is where we go to forget our troubles. There was a time when I was very small, long before Romina, when I had no idea what she could be referring to, what troubles my Mamá and Papá might face. All I knew was that when we took the ferry to Uruguay, troubles remained miraculously bound to the shores of Argentina, unable to cross the waters, waiting for our return. Whatever we might be escaping from, I’d feel relieved to be doing so, our family taking refuge in a high-rise apartment that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean.

  For me, the best of Punta del Este was not the boutiques, the brazen yachts in the harbor, the waves crowded with people, or the bustling restaurants to which Mamá wore her most elegant summer dresses every night. It was that hour when twilight began to run its lightest fingertips over the beach, whispering of the impending dark, I know, you don’t believe it, or don’t want to believe it, but it’s coming. At that hour, my father would usually suggest we go for a walk. I’d always say yes, and my mother occasionally did, but more often she’d say, No, you two go on. I always preferred it when we two went on. We’d walk along the damp sand near the water, not talking, I rooting for sea-shells and then jogging to keep up. Around us, other families would splash and play or start to fold their towels and umbrellas. Not every group had children in it, but the ones that did usually had several, and you could see them running through the foam together or bickering over plastic spades. Not everybody built their sand castles alone, like I did. We were a small family, just the three of us, no brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles living nearby, but at that age I never thought to see us as incomplete. It was just the way we were. A constellation of three stars, and I the faint one, like the pinprick at the tip of Orion’s sword. What shape we might have made among the heavens, who can say.

  On our walks, I thought about how it would be if we kept walking, beyond the little peninsula of Punta del Este, along the edge of Uruguay, all the way to the country’s end. A perfect place to start from, since the town sat right at the formal border between the Río de la Plata and the Atlantic Ocean, like a guard watching their bodies mix. If we walked with the water on our left, we would trace the shore of the wide river and eventually wind our way back to Argentina. With the water on our right, it would not be river but ocean, and we’d end up in Brazil. I always asked to walk with the water on our right. Of course, to reach another country the walk would have to be extremely long. It would take days, or maybe months, which was almost the same thing as forever. I liked the idea of perpetuating the walk forever, or at least until the last of my father’s sadness had been shaken out by our steps. You are my light, he’d sometimes say when I ran up to him with a particularly beautiful seashell. I had to time this at the right moment, so it wasn’t a bother to him, but a welcome interruption of his mood. When I succeeded, he would hold my palm in his as he admired the shell, paused on the beach, commenting on its pattern, its color, its size. Look at that swirl along the edge, how lovely. And such a nice pink, so deep, like raspberries. Like wine. You are my light, you know that? As if without me he’d be stumbling in the dark. And so the star of me would shine that much bri
ghter. My bare toes would revel in the sand between them. The sun was going to set soon, but it didn’t matter; I was light for my father, and the world was well.