Perla Read online

  Except that now, in his study, I felt so far from him. The very word father raw and open in my mind, like a wound.

  Searching his mind for the strange flicker that he’d lost he thought of God and how he lost Him. When he first disappeared he had a God, and when the dark swallowed his mind he reeled and broke and soared out to find Him, pray to Him, God as final refuge. Save us from this hell, forgive my sins, forgive my crime of not protecting Gloria, send your angels please like flying armies to save her and the child she carries. Gloria is alive, she has to be, the red rag might have been a trick, after all, just a cloth with which they’d mopped the floor. You’ve protected her, haven’t You? Give us this day our daily bread and keep her safe? Because, in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit, if I could only fly to her I’d give my life to mend her body, offer myself to her like a needle for the sewing, mend the nest where baby was, no, is, still has to be. But I cannot fly, please go for me. And hallowed be Thy name. He had not prayed so much in years. He was a bad Catholic, too fond of soccer and slow sex on Sundays, but surely God remembered him, the child he’d been, the altar boy with his frock perfectly white, gazing piously at the candles, the bloodsoaked cross, the yeasty body of Christ breaking apart in the hands of priests. He had loved the cold air in the vaulted church, the ceilings he would never ever be tall enough to touch, not even jumping, not even standing on the shoulders of ten men, and the stonecold air tautened his skin and made it tingle with the subtle gust of what must surely be God’s breath. And even though, when he grew up, he never bothered to pray, he had still felt God’s peculiar presence, in the colors of the dawn after a long night in the bars, the sway of wheat stalks in the country wind, the opening inside him as he opened a good book, the touch and sigh of Gloria, the memory of prayers pouring from his mother’s lips, by turns rapid and languid, mumbled in church pews, droned at home with the urgency of swarming bees, Pater noster qui es in caelis, at times in Latin, at times in Spanish, at times in the Italian she had gathered in slivers at her own mother’s heels, infused with magic power in every language, though who knew whether that power came from God or from the robust whip of his mother’s tongue. Everything his mother set her mind to either came to pass or spawned infinite warfare in which she unfurled all her weapons, word and will and fistful of rosary beads brandished alike and he could not would not think about what she might be doing now that he was gone from the normal world; what his absence was now doing to her; he could not bear to reach for his mother and so instead he reached for God, resurrecting the old prayers, Pater noster qui es in caelis our father who art in heaven save her, my Gloria, raise her from this place, I’ll go to mass each week for the rest of my life, I swear it, show me a sign. And then it came. He was on the machine. The explosions were in his mouth and on his genitals. And then they stopped, the hood raised up, he saw the composed face of a priest.

  Confess, my child.

  Father.

  You must cooperate.

  Father, please, tell them to stop, they’re going to kill me.

  My son, how can they stop when you won’t help them?

  I have nothing else to tell. I don’t know anything.

  Confess, my son. Confess.

  Please, I have a wife, don’t let them kill her.

  Death is in the hands of God.

  Then tell God not to kill her.

  The priest smiled sadly. God knows this is all for the good of the country.

  The hood went down, the machine began again and the Lord is with you everything seared with light and o ye of little faith his skin burst open in gashes of pain and thy will be done he screamed and screamed but not to God, God wouldn’t hear him, He was gone, He was on the side of the captors and their will was now His will: or else, far worse, the captors had stolen God out of his heaven and torn him slowly apart on their machines, and if it was so, then God was truly lost, God Himself was a desaparecido.

  She smokes a cigarette. It grows dark. He hears a dog bark, then silence, then a passing car. He hauls his attention back into the room; he is not on that machine; he is deeply relieved to be here instead of there. The more memories come, the more his mind feels cut open, wounded, and the more he looks to this house to hold him, even though this place is not entirely safe—he knows this, he can feel it, this house has its own specters. But he has a chance here, a chance at—what? At accomplishing what he came for, a purpose he still doesn’t know, but whose presence he senses, afloat on the air, vague and as yet unseen. There is a purpose. He needs to be here, in this particular house, with the turtle and the windows and the woman. That much of his knowing he’s pieced together, that many shards in place. He sits on his haunches, forward on the floor, like a dog. The rug on the floor is moist as a sponge from all his drippings. Leaning into it is like leaning into underwater mud, or into coral. There is a dangerous voluptuousness to coral, a cradling quality that lulls and surrounds you at the same time. The sofa glowers at him for soiling the rug, look what you’ve done, you are not welcome, intruder! drencher of rugs! Its pillows flare like a beast about to pounce, he is almost afraid, it is large and could easily crush him, but it has not moved since she walked in and sat on it, pinning it down, reinforcing its function, dominating it without a word. She has showered and her hair is different, glistening, heavy with wetness. It shines in the lamplight, and the lamplight fills his consciousness (it does not lacerate him like the sun, it does not shoot as quickly, these are duller blades of light that cut in slowly), his consciousness is clear and open, and everything is this now, this moment, watching the young woman smoke a cigarette. He can’t stop staring at her. He feels the heavy presence of her mind.

  What are you thinking about? he asks.

  Nothing.

  What kind of nothing?

  Same as usual.

  I want to know more. He is surprised by the force in his own voice. For the first time he hears longing in his voice.

  You’re talkative all of a sudden.

  I’m waking up, he says, and even as he says it the waking unfurls further, there is more room inside him.

  I see.

  Little by little.

  The turtle crawls in from the kitchen. He goes to her. He rests his shell against her naked ankle.

  How is it? Being awake?

  It makes my head hurt.

  The memories?

  No, memories don’t hurt. I just see them. What’s painful is the sun.

  I don’t understand.

  The turtle yawns his mouth open and closes it, snap. The eyes don’t blink. He wants to shake the turtle, without knowing why.

  It doesn’t matter, he says.

  At least you can talk now.

  Yes.

  Were you gone a long time?

  Yes. I think so. More or less.

  You were kidnapped?

  Yes.

  And you died?

  Yes.

  She lights another cigarette and taps the arm of the sofa with her lighter, as if bored, as if killing time with little questions. Do you remember what happened in between?

  Almost.

  And it doesn’t hurt to remember?

  Not like sunlight. Not like thirst.

  You want more water?

  Please.

  She leaves for the kitchen and comes back with a large blue jug.

  Thank you, he says.

  Take your time.

  He takes his time. Water pliant between his jaws, coruscating, brilliant in his throat. Water sturdy and enduring, the liquid flesh of the world. He eats and eats and she is watching, silent in her faint haze of smoke, and when he’s done and wiping the last streaks from his chin, she says, What else do you remember?

  Why?

  I want to know.

  Why?

  I want to understand.

  Understand what?

  Why you’re here.

  The light, the light, small flecks of it are catching in her hair. It hurtles in through the window and
lands everywhere, walls, shelves, picture frame, but there is something in the way light mingles with her hair that hurts him. He says, Why wouldn’t I be here?

  You’re dead …

  He nods, waits.

  … and we didn’t know each other. Didn’t you have anyone you loved?

  Of course I did.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.

  I had many people. A wife.

  Sorry.

  They took her.

  Her cigarette has burned down, but she’s still holding it. They are silent for a while. The turtle has closed his eyes. The woman looks out of the window, at the deep blue sky. Buoyant voices rise from the street. She gets up and goes to the kitchen, and as he waits for her, he returns to the painting. He roams the painted waves, tastes their expansive salt, and takes comfort in the curves that dissolve barriers between sea and ship, path and voyager, object and world. As though brushstrokes could unify reality. She returns with a glass in one hand and a bottle of gold-brown liquor in the other. By the time she sits down, she has emptied one glass. She doesn’t look at him, and the distance is vast between them, she has shrunk away from him into some invisible shell and he can’t stand it, her distance, the hard line of her jaw, he wants to get close, he would curl against her naked ankle if he didn’t think she’d pull away in horror.

  He says, Are you happy?

  What?

  In your life.

  I don’t know. She finishes her second glass and pours another. You’re talked about, you know.

  Me?

  All of you. The disappeared.

  What do people say?

  Depends. Mostly, how bad things were.

  You weren’t born yet?

  I was born during.

  Ah.

  It is not her naked ankle that he wants to press against: it is the Who of her, the inside sound, the secret aural texture of her being. He wants to hear the chorus in the depths of her, where the past and all the unseen futures gather to sing.

  Tell me what you were like at fourteen.

  She pulls back in shock. Why that age?

  Why not that age?

  She stares at him in silence. He isn’t sure why he picked that number, fourteen. He could have started elsewhere, anywhere. Finally she says, I was studious. Great at Latin. I wanted to be a poet.

  What else were you like?

  I wore my hair long.

  In a ponytail?

  Sometimes. She swirled her drink.

  The boys must have liked you.

  Not the ones I wanted.

  What else?

  I don’t know. I was sad.

  Why?

  My parents were sad.

  Is that why?

  No. It was me. I don’t know why. I was afraid.

  Of what?

  Everything.

  Did you cry a lot?

  Never.

  Did you write poems?

  Rarely.

  Did you have friends?

  Yes. No. I lost a friend that year, the year I was fourteen. Then I made new friends.

  How did you lose her?

  We fought.

  Over what?

  Why should I tell you?

  She is becoming resistant, he can feel a shield rising around her, but his hunger to know will not let him stop. He leans forward, onto his elbows, into the moisture of the rug. What happened after that?

  Then I turned fifteen, sixteen.

  Were you still sad?

  Yes.

  Then what?

  I started at the university.

  How was it?

  Why do you want to know?

  I do. I just do.

  I don’t see why.

  I want to know all of you. Every instant since you were born.

  Now she looks him right in the eyes and the room goes bright, too bright, and something in her stare slices him open, the ease is gone and the disgust is back and there is something else, too, something new that fills him with confusion.

  That would take forever.

  I have time, he says.

  She gets up so quickly that the bottle falls to its side. Liquor spills onto the table. She stares at it, then goes to the stairs and rises out of view. He hears steps down a hall above him.

  I don’t have time, she shouts, and just before the door slams: I’m not dead.

  I hid in my room. I thought the stranger might try to drag himself upstairs and knock on my bedroom door with his damp knuckles, but he didn’t come. I reached for a magazine and attempted to distract myself with its pages, to care or at least pretend I cared about the fashion spreads and photos of celebrities with their ostentatious teeth, as if it were a normal night and the silence in the living room were normal also, why wouldn’t it be silent when my parents were gone and I was alone? Only I couldn’t fool myself, I was not alone, he was downstairs in the living room. I couldn’t stand the lack of sound. Silence prickling with the stings of incursion. I’m not crazy, I said to myself, and tried to believe it. Sometimes, when I was very small and cried too much, my father would say Don’t be crazy and I would quickly become quiet, brush away the tears and try to forget the lost doll or scraped knee or the punishment freshly meted out. There was always that fear of going mad, of falling off the edge of the family. Such a paralyzing fear. Girls who fall off the edge of their family have nothing left to stand on in this world. Or so it seemed, and not a fiber of my being dared test the theory. Not even now. That man, that thing, his presence downstairs threatened my sanity and my house and the very tenets I’d grown up on and now my thoughts were curling in on themselves, twisting into dangerous shapes; I had to get rid of them. I wished the man would vanish. If only I could make him leave: but how? Pack up your things was a futile thing to say, as there was nothing to pack. I could simply say Get out, and see whether he could devise a way to exit—I pictured him scanning the room, at a loss for where the doors were and how to use them; trying to heave his body forward and failing; dragging himself to the sidewalk with slouching steps, neighbors staring at him through their curtains. Maybe he wouldn’t go of his own volition. Maybe he would hover in the living room, refusing with one of those ghostly stares of his and then I’d have to grab him by the arm and drag him out, all the way out, more neighbors at more curtains that would blatantly pull open to watch me haul a soggy naked man to the curb. And then there he would be, out on the street, wet, abandoned, naked, trying to find his way through the suburbs, the train station, the cafés, the ruthless cars. I saw him razed by a fast taxi, or fallen in an elegant front yard (he seemed so weak, he could collapse, I’d never even seen him walk), or arrested for his inexplicable demeanor. Worst of all, I saw him staying at the front door of this house, ringing, knocking, ringing, waiting for me to open, filling the threshold and driveway and street with the smell of rotting fish, and me inside, trapped in my own home. Trapped, I thought, I’m trapped already. I wanted to scream.

  Perla, I thought, if you stay here like this much longer you’re going to come unglued, and in fact you’re already on your way.

  So I changed my clothes and came out of my bedroom, went down the stairs, and grabbed my purse without looking at the strange wet man who looked up as if snapping from a dream and said, “Where are you going?”

  I slammed the door behind me as an answer.

  I didn’t know where I was going. It didn’t matter, it couldn’t matter. I headed toward the city. I emerged from the train a little past midnight and the streets were swollen with people. I was out in the world again, out in Buenos Aires, where everyone lives above water and where restaurants are full of little candles and clinking knives, where people stroll or sit without ever leaning forward on damp haunches, where look look people were smiling as if the past were just a flattened thing beneath their feet, easily sidestepped, or at least possible to ignore long enough to go out for a drink. True, not everyone was smiling, but that’s the street, that’s the city. Ever since I was a child, walking th
rough Buenos Aires in my thick winter coat with Mamá’s hand firmly on mine, I had heard a strange voice in the city. It was subtle and unpredictable, as thin as a fairy’s wing, and all it would say was psshhh, psshhh, you—and then I would turn and look around the sidewalk, across the street, but no one would have opened their mouth or tried to meet my eye. The strangers around me would look bored or busy or distracted, gazes averted, and I would wonder whether my father was right, whether I was, in fact, a little crazy—or whether I was hearing the voice of the city itself, a disembodied sound that sprang from the mesh of all other sounds, from the cars and constant footsteps, the private lives through open windows, the creak of ornate doors, the glad moan of sunlight, the hum of humidity, the twisted whispers of crumbling walls, all combining into something neither human nor inhuman, neither real nor imagined. My mother would keep leading me as though nothing had happened, maintaining a brisk pace, focused on our destination rather than our surroundings. And I would wonder what would happen if I broke from Mamá’s hand and followed the voice, pursued it around the corner and down the block, into alleys and out of them and around more turns until I knew I was alone in the great maze of the city, sublimely lost, wandering on cobbles and asphalt toward something for which I had no words. I never did it, I was always too afraid, Mamá’s gloved hand a steady anchor—but still I wondered. Could a voice like that lead me to a place where I’d belong? Even now, as a grown woman, part of me listened for the fluid voice of the city. I did not hear it. I walked. The streets smelled of bread and gasoline, gutters and coffee, stone and age and sadness. The summer air was humid and it didn’t look like rain.

  I walked into a bar, a regular spot, and scanned the tables from the doorway. My friends weren’t there. A couple of men near the back looked up and tried to meet my eye. I didn’t look at them and didn’t sit down. I knew the bartender, who grinned at me and raised his hand in greeting—Perla, he said, smiling—but I turned and left and walked on. I would have liked to see my friends, but it was probably for the best that I failed to find them; I was always the confidante, the mature one, the shoulder to lean on when drunk or in pain, and my friends had grown so accustomed to my composure that any other face became invisible. You can lean on Perla. Talk to Perla, she’ll understand. I looked generous to people, with so much room for tending to their problems, but people rarely saw the power it gave me, the shield from scrutiny, Perla Who Has the Answers, Perla Who Can Help You, Perla Without Problems of Her Own. How I liked to see myself through the eyes of a grateful friend. How strong I seemed, floating above the earth with all its human tangles. Not at all like a girl who feels out of place in her own home. And they appreciated me, called me kind for it, Leticia with her constant love troubles, Marisol with her hard-drinking mother, Anita with the faltering grades and the childhood rapes that continued to haunt her dreams. They needed me, and I needed to feel needed—a perfect symbiotic fit. These were the friendships I had chosen, the ties I’d formed, with girls who wanted to be listened to, grateful for a friend who demanded no attention in return. But tonight I would not be able to sustain the act; the façade would surely break and burden my relationships with more weight than they had been designed to bear. I was lost tonight, the cage lay broken, even my mother’s rules lay shattered on the ground, always neaten your clothes before you leave the house, always think before you speak, always make sure your hair is in place, so thoroughly drilled into me, so familiar and now so savagely abandoned, my mouth was capable of anything, my hair was surely a disaster. I could roam the city, just as I was. I had never wandered the city much as a girl; our family forays were always focused, purposeful, and in any case my parents mostly kept me in our neighborhood. They were protective. They enfolded me in great protective wings. They did everything for me, they said so, and it was true. Perla, we do everything for you. There was so much shouting in my mind, about my father, about my mother, doubts and questions I had spent these recent days struggling against with all my desperate strength. And now, with the ghost’s arrival, I could not escape the questions, and yet I still couldn’t bear to put them into words, even in silence, even inside. I was walking and walking the lambent streets and had nowhere to go. I could have swallowed all the buildings in this city, could have swallowed anything, the sky, a corpse, a lie, a truth, the sea. I was starved for something that had no name. Buenos Aires was so beautiful, full of noise, full of night. I couldn’t go home yet. I needed to hear the voice of another human being, someone who didn’t smell of river or of death and who could hear the whole of me no matter what I said. Of such people there was only one. I hesitated for a moment, imagining him hanging up on me, but then I stopped at a public telephone and dialed. He answered after two rings.