Perla (2 page)

He shook his head, almost imperceptibly.

“Cheese?”

He shook his head again.

“Chocolate?”

Again.

“Water?”

He nodded, and his eyes widened. Pleading.

There was no avoiding it. He could not serve himself. I lifted the glass from the tray, toward his lips, and he raised his head a few centimeters from the floor. Now that I was closer, I saw a bluish tinge to his lips, and a sheen of moisture on his face. I tipped the glass, carefully, and he chewed as though he were eating the water, as though it were as solid as bread. I was careful not to touch him with my fingers, although even then my repulsion warred with a prick of curiosity: what on earth would his skin feel like?

He finished eating and sank his head back to the floor.

“Who are you?” I said, but he had closed his eyes.

I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I sat on the floor for a while, next to the stranger. I thought of trying to move him somewhere,
to the backyard, to the street. But he seemed too heavy, it would be worse if the motion woke him up, and in any case what if the neighbors saw? Easier to just do nothing, go to bed and in the morning he’d be gone the way he came. Not a rational solution, but one to get me through the night.

I felt so tired. It had been ten days since my fight with Gabriel, since I’d left him on that Uruguayan beach with empty hands and emptier eyes and no promise of ever seeing him again. Since then, unpalatable visions had not let me sleep. But in the morning I would always rise and polish the surface of myself, a gleaming, confident young woman, an excellent student and good daughter starting her fourth year at the university, moving smoothly through the world, and even though inside the chaos scraped and railed I would push it into the crevices of the day so it could not be detected.

The only person who could be counted on to see through my masks was Gabriel. When we first met, four years ago, I thought it was because he was seven years older, and therefore more sophisticated. But surely there were twenty-five-year-old men who were barely men and didn’t know how to see the black hole in a poised eighteen-year-old girl. I had managed to deceive professors, friends, my parents and their friends, everyone except Gabriel. Early on, when I said I had to go study for a psychology exam, he had said,
All that Freud, and yet you can’t see your own demons
. Then he kissed me, laughing, which enraged me. My own desire to kiss back enraged me more. Don’t talk to me about demons, I said, until you’ve wrestled down your own. He looked at me as if I’d just spoken the secret of seduction. I did no studying that night; not of Freud—only of the slopes of his body, the urge in his hands, his mouth against my skin, his sex hard against me through his jeans. That was our first year together, the least complicated of our years, when I was simply Perla and not the people I was linked to, before we talked about his work or my family let alone the explosive combination of the two, before our images of each other started cracking, fault lines spreading, as happens to mirrors hit by
tiny stones. It was enough, then, to kiss and laugh and argue, to smoke and drink and undulate against each other until the heat we generated hauled the sun out of its sleep.

I thought of this as I left the stranger on the floor and went back to the kitchen, where I put the boiled squash in a bowl on the floor for Lolo, who was hiding somewhere but would surely come in the night, when the house was asleep. I walked up the stairs toward bed, feeling both exhausted and viscerally awake. I longed to turn back time and reenter those early nights with Gabriel, reenter Gabriel himself, the scent of him, his vigorous voice, the gaze that made me feel transparent. Wrapped in his presence I would look for the woman I had been with him, or believed that I could be.
And who is that woman, Perla?
A braver woman, a woman from underground, carrying secrets like subdued snakes in both hands. Inklings of that woman had flared at me during nights with Gabriel; I could imagine burning through my own reality to become the snake-woman, hair on fire, ready to rise. But these were only absurd imaginings, and anyway ten days ago I’d shut that door, and shut the door on Gabriel. He was gone from me now and it was my own doing. I had to do it, there was no other choice, I thought, night after night, running the words through my mind,
no other choice, no other choice
, an incantation whose power grew with repetition. I had thought he might call me, but he did not. He had been angrier than I’d thought. If he doesn’t call in seven days, I thought, it’s absolutely over—and when seven days had passed with no Gabriel I thought my heart would come apart but instead of shedding a single tear I went to a bar near the university, found a shy classmate called Osvaldo, and let him take me home. It was shockingly easy, all it took was a split second longer gaze than usual and five minutes later he’d bought me a drink, thirty minutes later we left the bar for the raucous night. On the walk to his apartment he acted like a miner who had stumbled on a vein of gold. He was a kind person, but when he reached into my body he found my body only. He never sensed the inner shape of me that even I could barely face but that Gabriel had
always seemed to reach for, to touch, to want to understand. There was pleasure in the way Osvaldo touched me, the way he wrapped my legs around his neck like rope, the way his sex quickened its pace from sheer enthusiasm, but the pleasure seemed to belong to someone else, a girl who had taken my body for the night and whom I scarcely recognized. Afterward, I lay naked beneath him in the dim light and thought, Now, Perla, you’ve got what you want, freedom from exposure, a self so well hidden it cannot be found. I should have felt relief or at least some scrap of triumph, but I only felt terribly alone.

And I was alone, for three more nights, until this stranger broke in without shattering a single pane.

He wakes up in the morning from a sleep that heaves like tides. There is sunlight in the room, more intense when poured through air than through the water. He was in the water before, was he not? From the wet blur of his memory comes the feel of light through water, its slow rhythm, the dispersion of beams through a dense realm. There is so much he can’t remember, but he does remember this: he lost his body, once, though he’s not quite sure how. Somehow he disappeared, then died, then floated in the water for a very long time. The sea and the river were his homes. Until finally, last night, he rose into the air, buoyant, invisible, and the darkness rubbed against his naked mind, he had no form, he had no bulk, he was translucent as the air, which was black and sweet and weightless, and he felt that he could rise up to the sun, but in the night there was no sun, nor was there any moon. And in any case he wasn’t drawn into the heavens, he was drawn toward the earth, toward the shore, where little lights winked and gleamed and boasted. The city. His city. Buenos Aires. He was starved for something there but he didn’t know what. He knew only hunger and specks of light.

He glided toward the city, and as he did, his form began to change. He slowly took the shape of a man. At the edge of the city there were
houses full of light and darkness. He was pulled toward them. He was pulled toward one.

And then suddenly he was here, in this room, where light moves so fast, it shoots right into him. He is not accustomed to it. He is not accustomed to anything—not this large room; this wet and limber body he’s encased in; not this morning sun that shouts its presence, ricochets from the walls and the paintings hanging from the walls, the ship and hills and disfigured clocks inside those paintings, this sun that makes the room cry out. The sofa seems to swell, the bookshelf looks over him, the rug glows at the edges and the song is broken, chromatic, invisible. Fast light cuts into all of him and he can’t shout, he hears the room and hears the light and he can smell it, also, he lets in the scent of light, the lemoncrush and greensweat of morning.

She enters the room, the woman from last night, she is wearing something red and she is marvelous, a marvel. There is something about her that chafes at him. Something important, though he doesn’t know what it is. Knowing comes to him haphazardly, sharp and sudden, his mind is a bowl full of splinters that he cannot sift through, cannot gather, cannot see, all he can do is wait for them to cut him so he’ll know that they are there. She comes closer. She looks at him with thinly veiled disgust.

You’re still here, she says.

He stares at her.

You seem stronger.

He is silent.

I have to go out.

Colors, he thinks, there are colors in her face he’s never seen.

Why are you here?

He shakes his head.

You don’t know?

Her lips are as red as the clothes she’s wearing. Her hair is long and dark, a heavy curtain around her shoulders. Once there was another woman with dark hair around her shoulders, he remembers now, a
memory cuts into his mind, her name was Gloria and the day the black boots came for him her name rang out inside his mind, Gloria, Gloria.

The woman rises. I have to go. I’ll be back in the evening.

She is gone.

He stares at the window, where the sun ebbs in, along with the gentle sound of a car passing. The shard is cutting deeper. The black boots and Gloria’s name grow vibrant. He remembers.

On the train into downtown Buenos Aires, I almost missed my stop and had to barge through a knot of men in suits to make it through the sliding doors before they closed. I rushed up the stairs in a thick mass of people, all moving in the same direction on separate legs, not speaking or even looking at each other, focused only on speed and destination. Usually I took these stairs without noticing the bodies all around me, my mind absorbed by a friend’s romantic problems or an upcoming exam, but today I keenly felt their presence, their momentum and their folded psyches as they emptied out of the station into the broad light of the day.

The street met us all with blaring horns and impatient cars. The tall buildings loomed over us, as always, casting their implacable shadows. Today they stood taller than ever. The strangers around me seemed to walk to the inaudible clicks and clacks of a hidden potent timepiece, the invisible machine that powers Buenos Aires, and though I usually fell in step without a thought, today I could not walk like them. My legs were loose, unleashed. I had lost the gait of reason within myself. You cannot walk with perfect reason when a dripping man who may not even be a man has appeared in your house. Purses and satchels swung in irritation as their owners overtook me. It’s not my fault, I thought, it’s the water: it leaked into my consciousness and soaked it, bloated it, ruined the regular mechanics. I wondered whether I had gone insane. If so, I thought, then this is what it feels
like; I would never have guessed the world would still appear so sharp and vivid, the streets the same, the clouds the same, nothing different except your mind has come unhinged, its cogs whirling loose and wild and hazardous.

As I walked up the noisy boulevard toward the university I thought of all the years that I had dutifully walked through the world with careful sanity, as though all were well, as though my family were well, as though nothing rotted beneath the surface, until I broke away from expectations by enrolling in the department of psychology. That was the first time I ever went against my father’s wishes on anything significant. He had always planned for me to become a medical doctor, a paragon career for his paragon daughter, the only path he would accept for me, chosen by the time I was born. When I first told him my decision, he would not speak to me for days, and even in my first year at the university, the campaign continued: You still have time, Perla, you could switch to medicine, it would take you longer but at least you won’t be making this mistake.

“But it’s not a mistake, Papá. It’s what I want.”

He shook his head. “You’re too young to know what you want.”

“Everybody decides at my age.”

“I’m not talking about everybody.”

His hands were broad and large and calloused, resting on the table as he leaned in to persuade me, and his voice was stern but his eyes were pleading, almost tender, only the best for my princess, and I wanted to take his hands and cup them in front of me so I could pour in what I was learning. Look look, here are the secrets of the mind, the deep-sea treasures I am diving for, lost keys that can unlock what has long remained shut down in the dark. How I longed for my father’s reach. How I hated myself for doing so.

I arrived in class fifteen minutes late. My professor raised an eyebrow—Perla, the eyebrow said, this is not like you—and kept talking. I took out my notebook and tried to turn my attention to the evolution of Freudian dream theory. The field’s understanding has deepened and expanded over the years; we are all responding to the
constant cues of our subconscious, only the insane see dripping ghouls in their home. I looked up, startled, but of course no one had heard my thought. I made notes dutifully, but even as I wrote the page seemed distant and even hazy, as though seen through a windshield blanketed with rain. Inside, I was riding a torrent, to who knows where, back to my living room, to the madness of seaweed in my living room, and to the figure of a naked man or not-man lying on the floor at this very moment, moaning or muttering or just dripping in absolute silence. God, what was he? A ghost? A monster? Just a sad pale man? Would he still be there when I got home? What an absurd predicament. Gabriel, I thought, if only I could call you; you of all people would know what to do or at least would invent some way to respond, or barring that might at the very least put your arm around me as I face the living room tonight, how I long to see you, but surely, after the way we parted, you would never want to hear from me again. The professor glanced over at me—she’d made some point she thought would spark me, and I, Perla, excellent student, nodded thoughtfully. I’d missed what had been said. I was a liar, nodding Yes, Yes, like a dutiful machine.

My friend Marisol looked at me from across the room, and smiled hello. Her eyes added,
Where have you been?
I answered with a halfhearted smile back, and hoped she wouldn’t approach me after class. If she did, I’d make a quick getaway, or, if she caught me, I’d tell her I had an appointment. We usually went out for coffee every few days, but I’d been avoiding her this week, ever since my return from Uruguay. We had spoken only once on the phone.