Perla Read online

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “It’s true.”

  “You’re good at this, Gabriel. But I’m still not going to have sex with you.”

  He made a face of wounded innocence. “Sex? Who said anything about sex?”

  I laughed.

  He pouted. “I feel so used.”

  “Poor thing.”

  He grinned. “I have something for you,” he said, and left the room. He returned with a file folder, and opened it to show me a small stack of clippings. “If you’d like to borrow them. To read some of my work.”

  The article on top was called “Gentlemen of the Sea: The Role of the Navy in Disappearances.” The room went cold. I did not want to read his work. But I smiled and took the folder from him. “Of course I do.”

  I started reading on the subway ride home. The article was smart and eloquent. Outrage emanated from every sentence, hard as a spear, flung at men who had participated in atrocities and now held immunity under the law when obviously they had no right to roam free in the world with their daughters—no, it didn’t say that. The train was nearly empty. I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. I had been so stupid. I had thought that we could find some kind of common ground, or if not find it, then create it for ourselves, out of nothing, out of sheer desire for each other. As if common ground could exist between our worlds.

  The train hummed on. I felt Romina’s phantom presence in the empty seat behind me, lit with triumph. Perla, Perla. Who do you think you are?

  Go away.

  He’ll never love you.

  Go away.

  You have to stop.

  I know. I know.

  I broke off the next date, but Gabriel called and called and the thought of his smell when I last saw him, deep sweat under sharp cologne, decimated my resolve. I finally agreed to visit his apartment on a Sunday afternoon.

  “What happened?” he said, as soon as I came in.

  I stood uncertainly in the center of his living room. “I just wasn’t sure.”

  “About me?”

  “About this.”

  “Why?”

  I looked around the room as though the answer could be culled from it. Afternoon light poured in from the balcony, gilding the books strewn on the floor, the dirty coffee mugs, debris from a long night of research. “How old do you think I am?”

  “Twenty-two?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “God. Oh God. Are you joking?”

  I just looked at him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “You’re too young for me.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” I didn’t know where my words were coming from, there was a woman speaking whom I barely knew, a Perla who could not be trusted to keep to any script.

  “What are you saying?”

  “That you don’t know me.”

  He stared at me, and I met him without flinching. “You’re right, Perla. I have no idea who you really are.”

  “I didn’t mean it as—”

  “No, it’s a good thing. You’re complex. I never feel like you say things just to impress me.”

  “Why the hell would I say things just to impress you?”

  He laughed. “You see what I mean?”

  “So can I stay?”

  “Do you want to?”

  I should have left right then, taken the revelation of my age as an exit door, ensured the safety of my world. “What do you think?”

  I stayed, that afternoon. After that, we continued to see each other and I stopped resisting it. Those were delectable times. Our nights were long and full of beer and heat and urges that were probed but not satisfied; we cleaved to each other, we seemed to fit the convoluted curves of each other’s inner lives. This surprised me: I’d imagined him to be the kind of man who moved from girl to girl with distracted ease. You don’t know me, then, he said. Oh, come on, I answered, you’ve never been that way? with all those ex-girlfriends? This made him laugh and run his tongue along my ear, so that when he said You do something different to me, Perla, I could barely hear the words through streaks of pleasure.

  And on some level, I understood. He was not a man who could be penned in. He succumbed to bouts of writing during which the phone went unanswered, the dishes unwashed, schedules rearranged for the sake of the story, and in those bouts a woman could lose her footing by demanding too much. Other girlfriends in the past had badgered him—What are you writing? Can I read it? Can’t I sit beside you while you work? What are you thinking now?—but I had no desire to enter that sphere of his life; I understood the need for private spaces, the need for inner chaos to spin its whorls, because I needed the same thing.

  In any case, it was safer this way for both of us. I preferred his journalism stashed outside of our relationship, part of him yet separate, like a shadow. I did not make too many demands on his time. I did not insist that he come home to meet my family. We stayed in the present moment. When you are with me, give me your lithe hands and green eyes and use your wit to make me laugh, don’t talk to me about the article you published, the letters that streamed in, I don’t care, I only want to speak of what the sun is doing to our skin, what my skin does to yours and what yours does to mine, what our bodies generate and how our minds catapult together to new realms.

  Believe it or not, I kept my father’s identity from him for a year.

  Finally, one day, as we were getting ready to leave his apartment for a party, he told me about a meeting friends of his had organized. They were part of an exciting group called HIJOS, like the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, only by and for children of the disappeared who were now young adults. They were wonderful, they had the coolest tactics, they named perpetrators on the radio and listed not only their crimes against humanity, but their phone numbers and home addresses, and called protests at those addresses, an amazing method, eserache, what an innovation. There was going to be a rally next week outside a general’s house, why didn’t we go together?

  I felt hollowed out from the inside. I imagined a crowd of young people, Gabriel among them, shouting on a lawn that, in my mind’s eye, happened to resemble my own. “I’ll never go to anything like that with you. Don’t ask me again.”

  He looked shocked, but his comb kept moving through his hair. There was a party to get to, after all. “But why?”

  I had dodged these subjects before, with elliptical remarks and timely silence. But it had become exhausting. “Gabo. Listen. My father is in the Navy.”

  The comb stopped moving. He held it in midair. He stared at me, and though I’d imagined this moment many times, I still was not prepared for the look on his face. “Was he in the Navy … when …?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to speak, so I just nodded.

  He was silent. He stepped away from me, sat down on the bed, and covered his face with his hands. I didn’t move. The city blared in through the window, cars and murmurs and the heavy groan of an overloaded bus.

  “Perla,” he finally said, “why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “He must have taken part in it, you know.”

  “Don’t lecture me.”

  “But how can you talk to the man?”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Do you?”

  “You don’t know what I know and what I don’t know.”

  “Fine. No need to shout.”

  “I’m not shouting.”

  “It was just a question.”

  “Are we going to the party or what?”

  “Can’t we talk about this?”

  “What for?”

  He opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it. I hadn’t meant to speak with such hardness, and I thought I might see him lose his temper for the first time. But he only sighed. “Fine, let’s go, we’ll talk about it later.”

  We went to the party and afterward we came back to his apartment and stood in the light of one dim lamp, sta
ring at each other like two jaguars in the jungle, quiet, drunk. He looked at me as though he’d never seen me before, as though I had just broken into his home. I wanted to run but could not tell whether the impulse was to run away or run toward him. I longed to say but did not say so many things, I am not my father and When will I ever be free of this and Mea culpa mea culpa mea culpa, but the words were impossible to my mouth and my eyes did all the speaking, his eyes spoke back and not only spoke but shouted and I thought that he might strike me but instead he kissed me brutally, I crushed against him, I let him strip me down to nothing, and I pressed my nakedness against him with all the ferocity of a demon straining for deliverance. I pulled him to the floor and pulled him into me, brashly, savagely, the first time. We made sounds like people fighting for our lives. Such pain, so round and swift, whirling through my body, carrying specks of pleasure on its back. I did not want it to stop, I wanted it to lash through me forever. Afterward, I heard him weeping softly. He was beside me on the floor, his face half-buried in my hair. I crawled over to the lamp to turn it off and then returned and cradled him in the dark until the tears were gone and he was limp against me, wrung out, open. Then, gently, we began again.

  We kept on for three more years. We were pulled to each other again and again, we breathed each other’s air, there were nights when it seemed the rest of the world with all its rage and nightmares could fall away and leave us to the savage joy that spilled from us when we made love. On those nights—this may seem mad, but I must tell you, of all people in the world I must tell you, even though you won’t understand what I am saying—I could have sworn that the world was being born again in the rocking cauldron of our hips. Lust as cleansing force, not only for us, but for the wounds that haunted us.

  But it was not always like that. We also fought like dogs. Gabriel attended HIJOS meetings, he protested outside the homes of accused members of the former regime, he spent hours between midnight and dawn at bars with other people who gladly rode the rapids of political discussion with him. He engaged in similar discussions with his parents, or so he told me. His mother in particular was proud of his work. She was passionate about the subject, so much so that The Official Story had become her favorite film. She never tired of watching it. It wasn’t particularly original of her, of course, to love that movie, which was a source of pride to all of Argentina (those were her words about it) ever since it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. And a pride to the world, really, since it wasn’t just the first Argentinean film to win the prize, but the first film from any part of Latin America, can you imagine that! And so, she would say (and Gabriel was an expert at impersonating her exaggerated fervor), it has made history. But more important, she’d go on, Norma Aleandro is an absolute genius, perfectly cast in the starring role, she makes you feel exactly what it would be like to be in her shoes—that is to say, in her character’s shoes—discovering your adopted child was actually stolen from the disappeared. Gabriel found all this amusing, but it made me dread ever accompanying him home. I tried to stay distant from his work, and though in the past this had relieved him, now he found it irritating. He wanted to learn more about my family; I could not stand the notion. I avoided spending time with his friends, who, it seemed to me, might appear any day at my own doorstep. I often imagined the scene, the angry faces, our curtains drawn, Gabriel outside with them unable or unwilling to cross the lawn to see me, or even yelling Won’t you come outside and join us?

  “Understand,” I told him, “that I hate who they are. Who they’ve been.”

  “Have you told them that?”

  I hadn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t explain it to him. Not the fear, nor the guilt, nor the love—least of all the love. “I know you’re ashamed of me.”

  “Look, I keep asking you to come with me. You’re the one who won’t meet my friends. I’m not the one who’s ashamed.”

  “Fine. I’m ashamed. Of course I’m ashamed.”

  “Perla.”

  “But you don’t understand them.”

  “If you understood them you wouldn’t live with them another instant.”

  “Go to hell, Gabo.”

  “Why won’t you bring me home to meet them?”

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said quickly. “What if I do?”

  “That’s impossible.”

  He turned away to heat more water for our mate. “You know what’s impossible? This. We are. We’re impossible.”

  I never told my parents about him. It may seem strange that I could hide such an important relationship for four years. I’d love to take the credit and say it’s all because of my expert sleight of hand, but that’s only partly true. At the end of the day, people will believe what they most want to believe. And my father, in particular, preferred to believe that I was too engrossed with my studies to take any boys too seriously.

  That didn’t mean he didn’t ask.

  “So,” he said over dinner, “you’re going dancing tonight.”

  I shrugged, casually. “With my girlfriends.”

  “But you’re not going to be dancing alone.”

  “I don’t know yet, Papá.”

  “A gorgeous girl like you? The men will be all over you.” He waved his fork in a mix of worry and pride. “Be careful.”

  “Ay, Héctor, leave her be. She knows how to take care of herself.” Mamá smiled at me. “Right, Perla?”

  “Right, Mamá.”

  “And if there were anyone special … anyone worth mentioning … well, you’d tell us that too, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded, somewhat impatiently, as if the answer were too obvious to say aloud.

  “Well then, in the meantime, let the girl dance.”

  After dinner, though, as we were clearing the dishes and Papá had retired to his study, my mother added, conspiratorially, “It’s too bad it didn’t work out with that Rodrigo fellow. Is he going to be there tonight?”

  “No,” I said. “Thank God. I don’t ever want to see him again.”

  She sighed in commiseration, though I also sensed a pinch of pleasure at being in the know. “You’ll find someone else,” she said. “Just wait.”

  I felt guilty, then, unworthy of her compassion and encouragement. As far as my mother knew, my dating life was riddled with these fitful starts and stops, young men whose names I had to keep careful track of so as not to confuse my stories. They never lasted; they were never worth bringing home. Sometimes, it was nothing more than an interest, a spark with a classmate that I’d drag on for months without it going anywhere. And she’d coach me: have you given him enough clues? Do you think he’s shy? I’d answer in two or three words, and she learned quickly not to press me for too much information so as not to break the fragile shell of our confidence. It delighted her that we shared this mother-and-daughter talk, and that she knew things about my life to which my father was not privy. She never told him a word of it. She almost seemed to revel in the notion that there was something Papá and my secret club could not contain—especially something like this, that gave her vicarious access to the dating life of a young woman, something she herself never had, having shut so many doors at a young age. She seemed to imagine my romantic prospects as a limitless horizon to be savored. After so many years of feeling far from my mother, I would have liked for this new closeness to be genuine, rather than a farce made up of one small lie after another. But I could not tell her about Gabriel without eventually telling her who he was, and bringing him home to meet them. Each day I felt more entrenched in a double life.

  But what choice did I have?

  Once, lying naked in Gabriel’s arms, in the succulent warmth of half-sleep, I succumbed to fantasy and imagined the four of us—my father, my mother, myself, and Gabriel—sitting around a table. We looked at each other and talked, and though I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, the scene seemed miraculously calm. Maybe such a thing could happen after all. Maybe the world wouldn’t come apart at the seams. These were drun
ken thoughts, of course, steeped in the liquor of sex and love and hope. But then the vision changed: suddenly the table was strewn with dead geraniums, and the four of us stared at them in horror. I snapped awake. Gabriel had fallen asleep, his arm around me, his chest against my back. I lay in the dark for a long time. Outside, cars moaned through the insomniac city, a song with no solace and no end.

  The geraniums arrived in droves, during my last year of high school. They invaded our house, shouting red, shouting orange on their way to a synchronized death. Mamá had read about geraniums in a magazine—versatile, pretty, easy to grow—and, after that, had seen them featured in the home of a Navy captain’s wife. The wife had placed a few cheery painted pots near the windows, that was all. Not enough for Mamá. Her geraniums would be extravagant, unparalleled. She would have a fiefdom of geraniums if she would have any. She became possessed with a vision of a house flooded with flowers, accosting you with their bright colors everywhere you turned, drowning out the chairs and shelves and carpets, more flowers than any other house in Buenos Aires—so that when you enter, she said, you feel as though you’re swimming through petals.

  The notion ignited her and propelled her into motion. She spent a small fortune on elegant plant stands, imported flowerpots inlaid with mosaic, and armies of fully grown geraniums. She could be like that, my mother, given to sudden sprints of creativity. When she was young, she’d wanted to be an artist—she had not yet told me the whole story, but I’d seen the single frightening canvas in the attic—and though that desire had long ago been strangled, occasionally its phantom escaped to attack the world, usually in a bout of shopping that yielded designer shoes and skirts and blouses which she combined into tastefully bold outfits for a few weeks until she tired of them.

  I had never seen her take an interest in plants before, beyond providing general instructions to the gardener. The geraniums were different: they were not to be delegated to a mere professional. She repotted them herself. The operation took three days. She commandeered the backyard and transformed it into a flower factory, crowded with pots and plants and large bags of fertile soil. She enlisted my help, and we squatted in the backyard together, surrounded by the red and orange flowers (she had, I noticed, overwhelmingly chosen red), arranging roots in their elegant containers.