Perla (19 page)

“Mamá,” I said.

My mother did not move or blink, but the eye grew strangely hard. It continued to look at itself. I waited, wishing suddenly that I could erase my actions, unmake my entry, wait until the morning light to talk about the zoo. After a long moment, Mamá’s reflection stared at me without smiling.

“What do you want from me?”

She said this in a voice I had never heard before, the voice someone might use toward a stranger who is not to be trusted. The mirror reflected a single naked eye, cold, aggrieved, and utterly foreign.

“I should have knocked,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Stupid girl. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

I hovered. I could not imagine what else my mother might be talking about. I tried to think of what else I’d done wrong that day, aside from the transgression of bursting through this door, but nothing came to mind. It had been an ordinary Friday. I had done all
my homework and helped set the table for dinner. It must be something else, I thought, something much larger, a failing that transcends time and defies correction. Defining it seemed like a Herculean task—big and impossible and essential to survival; I could not face it. I felt so small.

I heard her sigh, long and slow. I stayed, frozen, until finally, to my relief, Mamá spoke again. “You know what?”

“What?” I said.

“I wasn’t made to be a mother.” She said this in a tone at once resigned and vaguely ennobled by her own sorrow. “I often think you shouldn’t have come.” The naked eye gazed at the reflection of itself, intently, as if searching for something hidden. All I could think of was the painting in the attic, the thick strokes of black and violet, threatening to leap into the room.

Then she looked at me, through the mirror, and her gaze was so raw I wished I could look away. “Perla. Let’s forget this.” She spoke very quietly. “Go to bed and let’s pretend this never happened.”

I retreated to my room without a word.

That night, I dreamed of doors and doors and doors.

The next morning, I felt afraid to see my mother, but when I came downstairs for breakfast I found her with her mask whole again, immaculately applied: powder, lipstick, bright smile. She served me toast and milk and glanced at her watch. “Ready?”

I nodded.

“Well then, let’s get going,” she said. Her face was warm and steady, so much so that I briefly wondered whether I’d invented the encounter of the previous night. I might have come to believe this if it had not been for the way her gaze lingered on me, searching for confirmation of a pact that would never be spoken. A pact that encircled me in that moment and that I knew I would not betray. She would wear her mask and I would wear mine and as long as neither of us let them drop, everything would be all right, she needed this from me so I had to help her, and I needed it too, didn’t I? It lasted only a few
seconds, the lingering gaze, and then she nodded in what seemed like satisfaction. “Eat your toast, Perlita.”

I had no appetite, but I ate anyway, and even managed a false smile.

At the zoo, I received my ice cream cone and my hour with the giraffes and I licked the cold vanilla slowly and most carefully as I gazed and gazed in silence at the beasts before me, with their famous necks and graceful jaws, but no matter what I did, no matter how long I stood there, no matter how I shouted with my mind, this time I could not make them meet my eyes.

It rains. Small drops torn from the body of a cloud announce their fall in wails and moans. He hears their trajectories through the air outside, gray, blue, violet, streaking the inner lining of time’s cloak. They are pure color, pure substance, pure sound. Only rain is pure in this strange world, collapsing toward the thirsty chaos of the earth.

She is in the kitchen, making lunch. She will bring him more water soon. He is hungry for it, ready to grind it wetly between his teeth, to feel it enter him and give him substance, fortify his presence and veracity with its whisper through his insides,
you belong here, wshhhh, this world is yours as well
—but he won’t ask for it, she’s coming, he knows she’s thinking of it. It is easier every hour to sense the rhythms of her mind. Her mind is a wary forest creature, a deer perhaps, elegant, light-footed, expert at disappearing into dark folds of foliage at the slightest rustle of alarm. Not a simple creature to approach, let alone touch. If he is to touch her mind, he must be patient. He must circle and circle and also be immensely still. Above all, he must not let her see what rises up in him when he thinks of the two in the photograph, the other denizens of this house—the sour flood that makes him want to howl. He will not shake, he will not howl, he does not want to scare her and in any case he needs to bear the truths that have filled this house and taken possession of the girl. Because he hungers for the truth, however poisonous the draught of it. Without the truth
he cannot truly know the girl. And you, Gloria, I do this for you: if I should ever find you, if I can hope against all hope that you might come here again, one day, one night, appear as I appeared with seaweed in your hair, or earthworms or bullets or flames—if I should find you in the curved road of the future that surely arches back into the past, and if we are unbroken enough to speak to each other or to meld as I did in the water, I know that you would reach into me for each follicle of knowledge of the girl, and I would give you everything, the nectar with the venom, the stars with the abyss, all the sights and scents and sounds of her that will quiver and break you, all the truth that I could gather, all the truth I could bear to imbibe.

And I would want to know your truths as well, the story of what happened to you after I disappeared. There are still so many questions.

He looks for Gloria’s face in the room, but this time cannot find it, cannot re-create it in its entirety against the backdrop of the wall. The room is too alive now, noisy with the breath of shelves, the hum of books, the howl of rain, the constant sound of clouded light careening through the air. And there is the pool he now inhabits, that holds his fluids warm around him; this also sings; his mind is full of the slosh and buzz and glitter of his own little sea that came from him and now sustains him, surrounds him, holds him in its malleable embrace. It pains him—Gloria, the lack of Gloria. He gathers his mind by force and tries to focus. She comes in glimpses. He can see her if he lets go of the need for a coherent whole. Fractured Gloria, scattered shards, bits of Gloria protruding from the objects in the room. Gloria’s eye, lashes and all, blinking on the tip of a pencil in a jar. Gloria’s hair draped over the back of a chair, a pinewood slatted back that holds the tresses up like hallowed things. Her nose protruding from the spine of a novel. Her neck arched in the minuscule motions of the curtain, lithe and supple, ready for a kiss. Gloria’s breath in the slow darkening of the day. Her thigh, without knee or hip to join to, thrown against the sofa in seduction, only there is no body to seduce him toward, no whole woman to laugh or arch or pull the skirt up and say
come
. Her
sex appears only at night, in the shadows of the far corners, in many of them at once, the floor the sill the ceiling opening in the darkness to become her, Gloria, Gloria, damp and rich and potent. You are here, Gloria, and I accept each piece of you, I revel, I drink the sight, every single hair and toe a benediction. The eye watches, the neck turns, the hair quivers, the thigh awaits touch. He wants to tell the girl about Gloria’s presence, tell her how Gloria’s fragments haunt the room, but, as with everything, he battles vainly for the words. And anyway, the girl—though he loves her, though he hungers every moment for proximity—is not like him. She is alive. And the living may not understand; they may not find beauty in a broken woman flung across the house like shrapnel.

I came out of the kitchen with water for him and toast for me and saw him gazing at the painting, Mónica’s painting, of ship and sea formed out of the same blue brushstrokes. He was riveted, as though its contents were in motion, unfolding a tale of homecoming or escape. I wondered what had gone through Mónica’s mind as she painted, whether she was thinking of escape or homecoming, the urge to forge a home or flee from one.
Remember
, hummed the painting,
turn me in the light
, and the air itself seemed to brandish the shattered partial accounts of my aunt Mónica. Many of them were filtered through the lens of Mamá’s disdain. Though surely Mamá’s own repressed desires helped explain it: all her longing for the brush and palette compressed into that sharp knife of hate.
Your sister
, she once told Papá,
is the only thing about you I despise. A silly woman trapped in Picasso’s blue period, no talent at all, who lived like a whore and shamed her family
. Words that stung Papá enough to make him glare at his wife as though he wanted to hit her, a rare response from him, but Mamá showed no trace of surprise and even seemed to hold her chin up as if to say, I not only stand by what I’ve said, I glory in it. It must have been unbearable to her, as a new bride, to watch Mónica painting away in direct defiance
of her father and God’s supposed unwillingness to bless her with the gift, and not only painting but hanging her work in little galleries across town. Free, flagrant, terribly shameless. At that time, Mónica lived in a run-down apartment in San Telmo with a girlfriend, and then, everybody knew it, she got involved with politics—that is to say, with the subversives. It was believed that she became part of ERP, that guerrilla group whose acronym always sounded, to my child-ears, like the imitation of a burp.

Of course, it was also possible that she’d joined a different group, not ERP at all, since in that time there were so many factions and so many strains of leftist underground movements; those subversives, Mamá once said, they plagued Argentina like cockroaches in those days, in the early 1970s, you have no idea how bad things got, the violence, the kidnappings, nobody was safe anymore, let me tell you, some people talk badly now against the military but something had to be done. Of course, she didn’t mention the violent right-wing groups, like AAA, whom I learned about much later on my own. Growing up, my sense of the era before the dictatorship was one of utter chaos, of danger around every corner, of young people corrupted by bad people, of wanton violence in the name of revolution. It amazed me that a relative of my father’s—his own sister!—could have become one of those people. It seemed impossible, though of course it wasn’t. She would not have been the only guerrilla to come from such a family.

In any case, from what I could gather, Mónica did not deny the accusations when they were cast her way, though she did not admit to anything, either. She fled to Spain before the generals took over. Rumor had it that she landed in Madrid—how Mamá must have seethed! That woman, that supposed whore, in her own beloved estranged mecca! Twenty-five years now, and we had heard nothing of Mónica, she could be living in Madrid or any other part of Spain or of the planet, or not living at all. She never wrote, never called, and though Mamá always claimed that the family had spurned her, it had always seemed to me that it was Mónica who had spurned us.
Mónica, the Girl Who Got Away, Mónica the aperture, the cautionary tale, the exile, the embarrassment, the wild card. She was rarely mentioned by name in our house. I had met her only through photographs older than myself—a serious young woman with a mournful yet defiant stance, even in her first communion dress—and through the single painting of a blue ship that I sometimes caught my father staring at, searchingly, almost expectantly, as though the ship might at any moment turn its course or cast its anchor down in a long-awaited gesture of arrival.

And there it hung now, the ship, neither reaching its destination nor abandoning the attempt. I stared at it as I gave the guest his water. If Mónica could come into this house right now and see who was here, what would she say? Perhaps she’d gape in amazement at this red pool and its contents, or perhaps she’d just want to turn and leave,
I left all this for a reason, don’t drag me in
, or perhaps she’d sit down and open up her stories of where she’d been and who her brother was and who her father was and after she had emptied herself of all those keys and tales she might ask the impossible question that the ghost had asked and that still hung unanswerable in the air,
And you, Perla? Who are you?
And I would still have no tenable answer. There would be no words on my tongue, nothing but air.

The ghost devoured his water. He was so grateful (I could tell from the softening of his eyes) for a simple cup of water. He seemed to feel its secret texture, making it crunch and shape-shift between his working jaws.

His pool was already half full. He looked like he was bathing. I brought over the cup and bucket and began to empty it out. I thought, there is no end to his dripping, he will never be dry, for the rest of my life I will scoop and pour this pungent water that possibly contains the liquid essence of the nightmares my guest endured before he died. Who could have imagined it, such memories distilled in pungent water, what does it taste like? If I drank it would I absorb his memories, and if so how could I stand it? I was hypnotized by the
pour of it, the gentle rush into the bucket. How easily water returned to itself and took the shape of anything that held it. It was clear and supple; it revealed nothing.

It should have felt like a burden, the edge of madness, this need to kneel beside his pool and remove the water he’d secreted. But it did not. I was too far gone to care about madness and its edges; it seemed to me that I had crossed them long ago and all I wanted was to stay close to this guest forever and not think too much and let his presence filter through me, through the air, this house so full of hieroglyphs and shadows, this house that had been thirsty for so long. It saturated me, woke up my empty spaces and made them roar. I felt dissolved and expanded, all at once. The regular world seemed far away, a strange realm whose language I was steadily losing the ability to speak. I thought of the city out there, full of people, full of rain: students ducked into class with dripping hair, professors closed the windows and noticed or did not notice my absence, taxis skidded dangerously on wet streets, coffee poured into demitasses in cafés crowded with bodies demanding warmth, umbrellas staved the rain away from small, lurching circles of dry space that people make around themselves, marching, purposefully, or pretending to have clarity of purpose. As if everybody knew where they were going and why. The city was an exhausting place, with all its charade of normalcy, its real and invented purpose. Tomorrow I would have to face it—my provisions were starting to get low—but not today. It was no place for a girl who was steadily coming untied, no place for a mind so unmoored.