Perla Read online

  As I got ready for his party, I thought of Voz and brave young journalists and frightened fathers and broken rules and printed sentences that could shake the page that held them. I applied more makeup than usual, heavier eyeliner and shadow. The skirt was short already. I didn’t know exactly what I planned to do, or, if I did, I told myself that I didn’t know it. Just preparing, I said to myself, for whatever is offered by the night. I looked at myself closely in the mirror and the reflection didn’t look like me. Another woman stared out of the mirror, with bright eyes and a generous mouth, red-lipped, round with confidence. Such a daring mouth, to whom did it belong? I wanted to let that mouth loose, an animal off its leash, to see what sounds might tumble from it when it opened. Surprise me, I thought to the woman in the mirror, and she laughed at me with her eyes. There was the thrill of rebellion, that night (he was a fearless journalist! the very kind they’d warned about!) but also something more. What begins as rebellion can quickly become something else, something with flesh of its own.

  He had no idea I was eighteen. He was not the kind of man to seek out a girl so young. And he never did seek me out in the first place: I, Perla, a goodgirl and a virgin, was the one to make the advance. I found him in the kitchen, polite, confident, and almost haughty, the sleeves of his black linen shirt rolled to the elbows. He was the kind of man made beautiful by the generous conviction of his gestures. I watched him while pretending not to. The party came to him in steady waves. Three different girls approached him at the counter, asking him questions, smoothing their hair. Finally he glanced over. All I did was look at him, across the room, biding my time, holding him in a gaze that spoke and spoke and did not flinch or cool. As if I’d done such things before, as if I knew exactly how to calibrate the temperature of lust, as if I were some kind of vixen rather than an inexperienced girl exploring her own strength. As if I held the secrets of Eros in my power, instead of Eros having its sharp hold on me. And it did have its hold, it scratched fire across my skin, the terrible sweet wound of it, what had I begun? We stared at each other until another guest approached him and broke the spell. I slunk to the living room; I was not breathing; my own boldness seemed a cause for both triumph and alarm. I found my friends and joined their conversation, steadying my breath. If I was flushed, no one seemed to notice.

  Half an hour later, he approached me in the hall. The heat immediately returned.

  “Are you having a good time?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t think I’ve met you before.”

  “Perla.”

  “Gabriel.”

  “I know.”

  He smiled, with a coy shyness. “Can I get you another drink?”

  I looked at his hands. They were slender, surprisingly long, the hands of a woman, the hands of a languorous pianist. I wanted them to bring me things—a drink, a feather, broken glass, shards of unfamiliar songs.

  He brought me a beer and stayed beside me. He was easy to talk to. We didn’t talk about politics that night: we talked about his sisters, Bob Marley, Nietzsche, my dream of traveling the world.

  “Where would you go?” he asked.

  “Morocco. Laos. Indonesia.”

  He looked surprised. “Not Europe?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too close.”

  “Not r—”

  “I don’t mean geographically.”

  He looked intrigued. “Then what do you mean?”

  “Buenos Aires, the Paris of South America, and all that. I want to go to a place to which argentinos have never thought to compare themselves. Where no one knows a thing about Argentina.”

  “People don’t know about Argentina in Laos?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not.”

  “I see. And what would you do there?”

  “Look. Listen. Smell.” And lose myself, I thought, but this part I did not say.

  “You could do that in Buenos Aires.”

  “I already know Buenos Aires.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I started to say yes, then couldn’t.

  “How,” he said, waving toward the balcony door, “can you ever fully know a city like this one?”

  I looked toward the balcony, where a cluster of people smoked and laughed, while, beyond them, the city’s heart beat with electric light, and the great gray wall of an apartment building rose across the street, hoarding the secrets of centuries. In that moment the night’s pulse seemed to come roaring in through the windows, the delirious blend of a million human hearts. The city, incorrigible and sprawling and awake. For all its long and freighted history, for all its cracked façades and streaks of sorrow, on this night the city seemed young, renewed by the vigor of its people. I could have leaped from the balcony to the streets and wandered them until the sun came up, only I did not want to leave the party.

  “Let’s dance,” I said.

  It had been a long time since I’d danced with a boy or a man. In high school I’d begun to dance alone at parties and those around me had learned to keep their distance, that’s Perla, she’s a bit strange, there she goes moving like she’s the last person left on the planet, or, from less kind sources, like the bitch thinks music plays only for her. My friends saw me dancing with Gabriel and made faces of mock alarm, What, you? I laughed. I moved to the rhythm of my laugh. Gabriel looked at me strangely, Who is this girl, where is the joke, and I came closer so his cologne could fill my nose and coat my tongue when I opened my mouth to smile and though I longed to touch him I did not, we danced with our desire, we danced desire into being, we danced to the Rolling Stones, to U2, even to a tango when someone cued up those old songs and then his hand landed on my waist with all the sureness of a bird making a nest for itself; our bodies touched, shouts and laughter filled the room as a young generation revived the old steps their grandparents had taught them. When the song ended, we lingered close for an instant, not wanting to draw apart, and I felt his body listening for what mine wanted to say. I pulled away quickly.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “Let’s go outside and get some air.”

  We stayed on the balcony for hours. My friends left the party, and, eventually, so did his. At five in the morning only a small cluster remained, drinking beers in the living room, leaving us the balcony as our kingdom. And I did feel like royalty, strangely exalted, poised up on my perch over the city, watching people walk the streets of San Telmo, leaving bars or friends’ apartments with their arms around each other. Perched up there I felt for the first time that I could own the city, and it could own me back.

  “I love your apartment,” I said. “It’s the best in Buenos Aires.”

  He laughed. “How do you know?”

  “I know things,” I said, with mock imperiousness.

  “Ah! So do I.”

  “Oh really? Like what?”

  That’s when he kissed me. He tasted of cigarettes and eucalyptus and beer. I had only kissed high school boys before, never a grown man, and everything about his kiss took me by surprise: its skill; its supple confidence; the measured pleasure his tongue took in my mouth, the hints it gave of skills and pleasures yet to come; and my own response to the kiss, the places that opened widely to receive it, not only my lips but my thighs (and this alarmed me, I rushed to close them but his hand was there and so they stayed half-parted, listening to his light touch) and hidden places in my being where I’d long stashed parts of myself that could not be allowed into the light. I’d never guessed a kiss could do that. I should have stopped but I could not, we kissed for a long time and I could have kept on longer. I didn’t want it to end. I could have toppled over the rail and continued as we crashed together down the streets of Buenos Aires, limbs entangled, joined at the mouth, tumbling blindly through alleys and boulevards, knocking down kiosks and café tables on our way to the sea.

  He took me out to dinner the following week. We sat in a warm Italian restaurant, the kind with dim lights
and dark red walls and black-and-white photographs of other eras crowding every corner. I felt far from the suburbs, transported to a Buenos Aires that, though only a train ride away from where I had grown up, still felt somewhat foreign. I had determined that I would not talk about my family yet, and had devised various strategies for avoiding the topic, but as it turned out, it was shockingly easy. Though, I thought as the meal progressed, perhaps I should not be so shocked: he was a man, after all, accustomed to filling the air with his voice and being listened to, all the way from the reading of menus to the last spoonfuls of dessert. With just a few prompting questions from me, he told me about his father, who was from Mar del Plata, and his mother, who was Uruguayan, and how they had met on vacation in Piriápolis, a little town on the Uruguayan coast. His father was in medical school at the time, though he had hidden this fact from the girl he was pursuing to make sure that, if she returned his attentions, it would be for the right reasons, as he did not want to marry a social climber who would try to keep him from his dream of ministering to the poor. When he finally told her, at the end of an idyllic seaside week, he expected her to light up with delight, All this in a man and he’ll be a doctor!, but she looked at him without expression for a long time and then said, So you’re a medical student.

  He nodded.

  And a liar.

  No, he said quickly, of course not, I don’t lie.

  And that story, she said, about dropping out of school?

  He stopped cold, or so it was always told to Gabriel throughout his childhood, by both tellers; they agreed on the fact that he stopped cold in that moment and had no idea what to say. It was a test, he finally confessed.

  She said, And you failed.

  He thought of protesting this, pointing out that he had not been the one being tested, but then he gave up and nodded. I’m sorry, he said, I’ll never lie to you again.

  And therein, they told their son years later, lay the secret to their long and happy marriage.

  They moved to Buenos Aires, where Gabriel’s father worked for a clinic that served the slums at the edges of the city. When the dictatorship took over, Gabriel was five years old, and his sisters were four and one; fearing for their safety in a political atmosphere where anyone working for the most vulnerable elements of society was in danger of being labeled a subversive, they fled, and since they obviously could not return to Uruguay because of its own dictatorship, they went to Mexico City, where Gabriel grew up in a cluster of exiles from the Southern Cone who carved out homes for themselves in that cacophonous, phenomenal, disorienting city. How he loved it, with its palatial colonial buildings layered uneasily over and beside Aztec ruins that whispered—no, not whispered, he corrected himself: the ruins sang—of ancient days and powers we ríoplatenses down south have long forgotten in our stubborn amnesia over what this land has been, the life it had before Europe crashed in and transformed it with paving stones and spilled blood. Here, he said, we talk about the pretty paving stones but not the blood. We act as though the founding of Buenos Aires were the beginning of time rather than an interruption of what Time had long been doing. We think four hundred and something years is old, but please, that’s just a young snotnose of a city when you’ve experienced México D.F. You should really try these cannelloni, here, have some, they’re spectacular. Mm, see? In any case, I loved it there, but my mother couldn’t stand the pollution, the whorls of noise, and above all she could never get used to the edge of violence that accompanies you there as constantly as your own shadow. She pined for the tranquillity of Uruguay, where even the capital has the bucolic calm of a village. And so, after the Uruguayan dictatorship ended, we moved to Montevideo. I was fifteen then. My father would have preferred Buenos Aires, but my mother won that fight. No, she said, I can’t stand that many Argentineans at once. Despite her intermarriage, she never shook off the Uruguayan belief that Argentineans all too often suffer from excessive arrogance, and, to put it bluntly, are sons of bitches. She would sometimes throw up her hands in the house and say, My husband, my children, they’re all argentinos, I’m surrounded! So, I finished high school in Montevideo, and by my first year at the university I was writing for newspapers. Small, insignificant pieces at first. Then I started writing about political issues, the imprint left by both dictatorships, and I wrote an article about Uruguayan nationals who’d disappeared in Argentina. You know, I’m sure you’ve heard about it, they came here seeking refuge from their government, but then the junta took over here and—paf!—Operation Condor, lists of names, and the regimes are doing each other’s dirty work. A disgrace. But anyway, after I wrote that piece, I became obsessed with the desaparecidos in general, and I felt that I had to come back here, to Buenos Aires, to dive further into those stories. Now I feel like I can’t leave, he said, taking a bite of almond torte. I love Montevideo too, my family’s there, I visit, but this is home.

  “What makes Buenos Aires home?” I said.

  “I don’t know. The streets. I never get tired of these streets, their noise, their colors, even their sadness. Even the cracks in run-down buildings seem beautiful to me.”

  I drank the last drops of wine from my glass. The bottle stood empty. I felt warm, sated.

  Gabriel looked as though he’d just woken. “But wait. We haven’t talked about you.”

  “We don’t have to.”

  “This is terrible. I’ve talked the whole night.”

  “I like to listen.”

  “You’re very good at it.”

  “You sound alarmed.”

  “Perhaps I am. I don’t usually tell my whole life story on a first date like this.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  I smiled.

  “I’m a journalist, for God’s sake. I’m supposed to get people talking.”

  “And I’m an aspiring psychologist,” I said. “I’m supposed to do the same.”

  “Looks like you won.”

  “I liked hearing your stories.” I meant this. I could have listened for hours more.

  “Well, you owe me some next time.”

  He invited me back to his apartment that night, and I declined, though I did kiss him long and slow at the subway gate before descending to catch my train. On the next date, at the same trattoria, he was ready with his questions.

  “I don’t want to talk about my family,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  I waved my hand, hoping that the gesture seemed both confident and casual. “Your family doesn’t define who you are.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “No.”

  “But it’s where you come from. Where you begin.”

  “Not where I begin.”

  He looked slightly amused. “Where do you begin, then, Perla?”

  Without thinking, I said, “With Rimbaud.”

  He laughed. “What? The poet?”

  “The poet.” I spent the next hour weaving a creation story for myself, miraculously devoid of parents. I described my experience at Romina’s bookshelves, opening volume after volume as if opening the gates to textual cities. In those cities, among those words and meanings, I said, the true trajectory of my life began. Everything I said was true, though of course I left out details of my friendship with Romina—her discovery in the study, her uncles, the note I read and reread in the bathroom stall. Instead, I focused on the appetite with which we’d open book after book, picking out delectable lines to roll against the tongue of the mind, the wonder of those hours, the way the words and visions and ideas sparked from those pages and dug into my flesh like splinters of a fire started on the page by a writer long dead. It made me fall in love with the mind, I said. It made me see how everything—ideas, poems, buildings, even wars—ultimately began in the mind. First comes a thought, then words to carry it, and only then does a thing take shape in a concrete way. In the beginning there truly was the Word. Eventually I became a student of the mind, the place where words begin, so that one day I could accompany people’s
journeys into the dizzying labyrinths within them, and help them navigate, help them change. It felt good to tell the story without the context of my mother this, my father that. My own story, unhampered, as if my parents did not exist. I had never described my life that way to anyone. I felt entranced by my own telling, and wondered how much of it was fiction and how much a new way of looking at the truth.

  “So Freud has the keys to the labyrinth?” Gabriel asked.

  “Some of them.”

  “Do you believe everything he said?”

  “Even Freud didn’t believe everything he said. He contradicted himself, he made mistakes. But he was the first to unlock certain rooms of the psyche.”

  “Such as?”

  “Unconscious desires.”

  “Mm hm. Unconsious desires.” He looked at me with a subtle smile. He was so confident with his lust, I found it both maddening and impressive. “Do you have any of those?”

  “If I did, I wouldn’t know it, would I?”

  That night, I did go back to his apartment, and he turned on Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and poured us wine and we kissed in the middle of the living room, on our feet, swaying, a kiss that started with languor and rapidly intensified as though it had a will of its own. We were on our knees, kissing, we were on the floor, his hands on my breasts and in my hair and everywhere else all at once or so it seemed, and my hands too, we were there a long time, we didn’t take our clothes off but we pressed so forcefully it seemed the fabric might burn away from our bodies. Finally, I said, reluctantly, “I should go.”

  “Do you have to?”

  “I have to.”

  He brushed my hair back, very gently. “I’ve never met a girl like you.”