Perla Read online

  “It’s me,” I said.

  Gabriel was silent. For a moment I thought we’d lost the connection.

  “Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I just wanted to hear your voice.” Now that I’d said the words, they sounded stupid. And naked. Why had I picked up the phone?

  Gabriel said nothing.

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  “No. No.” He sounded uncertain. “I’m just surprised.”

  “I know. I mean, I can imagine. Look, if this is a bad time—”

  “It’s not. It’s really not.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  There was a pause. “I was starting to think you’d never call.”

  “You didn’t want me to?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Okay,” I said again, like an idiot.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You sound strange.”

  “I am strange.”

  I said it without thinking, and he laughed, hesitantly, but enough to ease the tension. “Tell me about it.”

  I smiled into the phone receiver.

  “Why did you call?”

  I didn’t answer. The words sounded harsh. Until ten days ago, I’d never needed a reason to call him. I would simply turn to him, for company, comfort, or pleasure; to hear how he was, to be with him. But now there was a wall between us that had to be taken down. If it even could be taken down, because, having heard his voice, it seemed possible that it was now too late. And of course I should have known, should have shielded myself and gathered my tools, but instead, in my disoriented state, I’d reached for the phone out of longing, impulsive, unprepared.

  After a long silence, he said, “You’re so quiet.”

  “So are you.”

  “But you’re the one who called me.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “And so? Why did you call?”

  Because a phantom of the disappeared is in my living room, and he won’t go away, and the things he’s tearing open only you would understand. “It’s complicated.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Nothing. You’re right. Everything is complicated.”

  “But still,” he said, exasperated, “some things are simple, Perla. It’s simple to say, because I miss you. Or to say, I’m sorry.”

  The hurt and anger in his voice were palpable. What a huge mistake, I thought, to make this call. “You know—” I said, then stopped.

  “ ‘You know’ what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Perla?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “That’s not what I mean. I didn’t mean us. We do matter.”

  “Is there still a we?”

  How easily he could cut me, even when that wasn’t his intention. “You think there isn’t?”

  “I don’t know what to think. If there were a we, you would have called.”

  “You didn’t call either.”

  “But you,” he said, “are the one who ran away.”

  I could have said because you made me, but we would only have descended further into a hole that seemed to have no bottom and for which I had no words, no verbal tethers that could pull us back to the surface. “Listen, Gabo, this isn’t a good time. I’m at a pay phone.” I closed my eyes. My forehead ached. “And for other reasons too.”

  “Such as?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  His voice softened. “Are you really sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes. No. I will be. I have some things to deal with, and then I’ll call again.”

  “And how long will that take?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “But you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “No. That’s not possible.” There was no language for it, after all, no place to begin. “But please don’t give up on me.”

  He was silent.

  “Gabriel?”

  “I don’t know what to say to that.”

  “Just say, ‘Of course I won’t give up on you.’ ”

  “Perlita. Listen to yourself.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  He laughed. I wanted to live inside the gauzy folds of his laugh. They could lilt up on the wind and I would float there, suspended, surrounded, at home.

  Before his laughter could abate and deposit us back on hard earth, I quickly hung up the phone.

  I took the subway to Puerto Madero and walked along the promenade, flanked by glossy restaurants and clubs to my right, and the water to my left. Through the doorways came the scent of freshly grilled churrascos, the thrum of techno music, bursts of people dressed for the night. It always amazed me that the old, abandoned docks of Buenos Aires had been changed into such a fashionable destination for tourists and well-heeled locals, with its long brick warehouses refurbished to hold upscale businesses and lofts. You never know what a city can become. I was the only person by myself, and I felt out of place, unkempt, though in fact I probably blended in just fine, judging from the way I was ignored. There was no reason for someone looking at me to suspect that anything was wrong, any oddness at home, any drenched interlopers to contend with, any nightmares rearing up and demanding to be seen, and this was good; this was how it worked, wasn’t it? You don’t walk in the truth, you walk in the reality you want to inhabit, you walk in the reality you can stand. This is how realities are made.

  The sky spread above me, black and cloudless, robbed by the city of its stars. I was separated from the water by a metal rail, which a couple leaned against to kiss, while an older, well-groomed couple glanced at them with a mix of amusement and envy. Behind the rail, the water glimmered darkly, holding the bellies of yachts and a weak reflection of the Hilton Hotel on the other side. Just a ribbon of water, really, though I knew it came from the river, which, I suddenly realized, was why I’d come here: to see some piece of the Río de la Plata, which was not a river really but an estuary, a big wide-open mouth that swallowed the sea, gulped it in toward the land. Such wide water that the other side, the shore of Uruguay, was too far to see. The river made a long seam with the horizon, stitching the world closed in a great sphere of water and sky, a vast ethereal cloth hemmed around Argentina. As a child, I had imagined that the city did not end at the shore but rather continued underwater, down in the depths, in the great low cradle between two countries. I would stare at the water and picture streets, castles, and houses flooded with brackish water, fish lacing through windows, waving coral, the high distorted songs of mermaids, sailors drowned in long-forgotten vortices of time. I tried to imagine the secret laws of such a place. I imagined hieroglyphs that painted shimmering tales in the water and vanished with the shifting of the tide.

  It had been so easy, as a little girl, to believe in such a city. As a grown woman, of course, I knew better than to believe in an underwater world, except that now, on this night, with no compass to tell me who I was, I had no idea what I could believe. And so I had wanted to come here, to the old port, that was now the ultramodern port, to lay eyes on a strip of water.

  Its surface shone with electric light, and revealed nothing.

  I slowed to light a cigarette and leaned against the rail to smoke it. Dark, quiet water licked the bodies of the yachts. Nearby, a group of young women shrieked with laughter and spoke to each other in a rapid foreign tongue. I thought of Gabriel, his delectable laugh, and how he must have felt when I cut off the call without giving him a chance to say good-bye. He must have said Hello? hello? into the receiver, dismayed, affronted, then stared at it and perhaps decided in that moment that he was tired of this, tired of me, ready to find a woman who was less of a headache and fit better into his life. Sadness engulfed me at the thought.

  I looked out over the water in search of reprieve. Light from electric streetlamps fell and broke against it, glimmering shrapnel, caught in the ripped cloth of the river.r />
  That night in Uruguay, when I last saw Gabriel, sand had filled the gaps between my toes, wet and dark. I couldn’t see it but after he spoke I looked down anyway, at the dark water tearing open at my ankles, thinking, there are grains of sand down there, millions of them, burying my toes, burying themselves, as if they knew that some things can never be exposed. As if hiding were a matter of survival.

  I walked on. I reached the construction zone for the Women’s Bridge, which was well under way. A sleek white walkway with a great fin rising at an angle, spearing the heavens, or so it seemed through the scaffolding. A bridge like nothing you’ve ever seen, one columnist had said. I stopped at its edge and stared at the bridge, thinking of things that were like nothing I had ever seen. I stood for a long time. Water beckoned from below. I gazed down and imagined myself plunging, swimming, in search of unthinkable places that could not and yet seemed to exist.

  5

  Failed Geraniums

  I have to tell you more about Gabriel, and about who I was when I met him. I can’t fully paint my world without those strokes—and I need you to take in the whole picture, which is made of words instead of colors because it’s the best way I know to give you this story, here, tonight, six years after the stranger came, sitting at this window, torn by pain and ecstasy in alternating waves. As though the world itself were surging through my body and my body had to stretch to give it space. That’s how it feels. But I can’t stop. There is no place to stop this story, which, in being voiced, has taken on a life of its own, as stories inevitably do. Now I myself am whirling in its orbit, suspended in it, unable to do anything but ride. It’s the only way I can think to do the telling: careening around the center, circling and circling, in a spiraling path, whirling gradually closer to the source. Though you may not understand, though it may sound strange, this is the best way in. Linear routes seem faster, but they lack dimensions, they lack flesh, they are dead—and this is not a dead story, it’s a living story, it breathes and palpitates. Keep following me. This is the best way I know to show you who I really am—and it’s urgent for me to do so, here, now, while there is time.

  From the start, it was dangerous to pursue Gabriel, like walking calmly into a burning house. I knew this, of course, and some part of me sought him out for just that reason: to be scorched, to catch fire, to search for myself in the flames of danger.

  I met him at a party in his honor, invited by a friend of a friend. He was celebrating his new job as assistant editor at Voz, an amazing feat, my friend explained, for a twenty-five-year-old man. Her eyes lit with admiration as she told me about it. I had never read Voz, but I knew what my father thought of it: that pack of lies, not good enough to wipe my ass with. He said that but he feared it. He only bothered, after all, to insult the things he feared. And there were few things that he feared more than reporters. Which, naturally, made me extremely curious to meet Gabriel.

  I was eighteen years old, in my first year at the university, studying the axis of repression, the dance of consciousness, the hidden havoc of the id. I dreamed of becoming the sort of psychologist who could reach into people’s minds, touch the unspeakable, and guide them to it and beyond it, for don’t we need to pass through the unspeakable to be truly free?

  Even if it meant facing, for example, what lay within my father. The ugliness there.

  But not only that, my father was not only that. He was also the man who, long ago, prowled to the kitchen at 3 a.m. only to find his daughter barefoot on the tile floor, a small insomniac in a pink flowered nightgown. You can’t sleep, can you, Perla, you are your father’s daughter, he would say, smiling, and search the cupboards for chocolate we would break into little jagged squares, our midnight prize for being the wild ones, the two who could not wrestle themselves down to sleep, just because the lights went out, just because the clock said it was time. We were not like Mamá, the Queen of Sleep, who could lie down when the extended ritual of cotton balls and makeup removal was complete, and doze as soon as she closed her eyes, and who could not understand why her husband and daughter tossed and turned, rose and roamed the night. Only we shared this fate, Papá and Perla, and when we were together in the kitchen in the hours before dawn, what could have been a defect came to seem like a boon, a source of stolen pleasure and shared pride.

  On those nights the chocolate was sultry-sweet on my tongue. My father would look relieved and glad as if my presence had eased whatever plagued him. He would stroke my hair and look at me as though we shared a profound understanding, beyond language, beyond time, and he’d say something like God was good to send you to me, or just Eat, eat. And I felt happy, so happy with the chocolate and his touch.

  But then came the revelations of his profession. So much in one man, I could not grasp it. I could not comprehend how it all resided in one skin, and yet this seemed essential to grasping who I was. I longed to understand him, not to exonerate him, but to extricate myself, and perhaps to save him, or at least to be able to see clearly and without fear. Surely somewhere in the annals of psychoanalysis lay the secret to seeing without fear. He became my phantom patient, on whose analysis I depended for survival.

  And so, at the university, I dug through the theories and case studies the professors presented to us as maps to the subconscious, in search of the workings of my father’s mind. I exhausted my textbooks, and not only my textbooks but the other tomes assigned to more advanced classes that did not yet belong to me—curled up on the floor of the university bookshop for hours, or forsaking homework to linger in the library stacks—but nowhere could I find a profile that described a person like my father, a person who had done the kinds of things that he had done. Freud had never analyzed a man like him, or if he had, his pen had refused to tell of it. (What a time Freud would have had with Héctor Correa! He would either have run away or salivated at the thought of sessions.) There were references to men like him in sociological texts, but only with the word evil attached, a word that, for all its moral strength, flattened the picture of a man rather than plumbing the depths of his consciousness. I read and read but still could not unravel the thick dark knots that I encountered; they were too tangled, I got lost over and over in the mire of my own mind. I was searching for answers to questions I had not fully dared to form. I had never lain on an analyst’s couch—my parents would not have permitted such a thing, and I did not have money of my own to do so without being discovered—and in any case, though our professors considered it essential to our development, I didn’t want to. The notion terrified me. When I imagined it, I saw myself talking and talking on the couch, only to meet with silence and turn to see my analyst staring at me with Romina’s face, that night in the study, the horror and urge to run. I would not take that risk. Better that I pursue the slippery things I was pursuing by myself, surreptitiously, ravenously, each theory and case study a nest of clues. Books were already a familiar refuge, after all, and they still took me in without the slightest judgment. They don’t close to you the way a person can. You might feel as though you don’t belong anywhere, least of all in your own home, you might feel bound to a person whose actions you abhor yet unable to divorce yourself, struggling to individuate in their shadow—all these feelings you wouldn’t dare articulate to another person, no matter how highly trained—but you can bring your whole untempered self to books. You can ask them anything, and though you may need to search for the resonant lines, though the answer may come at a slant, they will always speak to you, they will always let you in. And so I entered and entered. Back then, in my first year of university, I trusted books more than people. If I was lonely, if I wished for something deeper with living breathing human beings, I didn’t know it—until the night I met Gabriel.