Perla (21 page)

What are you talking about?

Well, why me?

She laughed. She pulsed her fingers lazily against the steering wheel. She liked to drive, and he let her do it even though his friends had teased him about it,
you give your woman the wheel, next thing you know she’ll want you to piss sitting down
. Because you asked, she said, her eyes still on the road.

No really, he said, I mean it. Why? You could have any man.

Her face softened, then, in the way it sometimes did when he stroked her breasts, and he wanted to do it right then, lean over and run his hands across her blouse even if it meant careening off the highway.

I don’t want any man, she said. I want you. You have the face I want to watch grow old.

She said no more and he did not pursue the subject, did not dare upset the delicate grace of the moment, her words in the air, her breasts ripe against her blouse, his hands hungry to touch them and the rest of her as one day soon they would, the sun drenching the fertile fields, the highway long and straight, surrounded by the promise of fresh wheat. The cassette player crooned “Quizás Porque,” one of his favorite songs, in which a man confesses that he’s not of noble birth, yet dares to call his lover queen and princess, offering her a cigarette paper crown. He waited for the line and let it ripple over him. What a poet, that Charly García. He even says in the same song that he’s not a good poet, then there he is turning cigarette paper into a crown. The transubstantiation of love. I would like to make a crown for Gloria out of—what?—out of this song, out of broken bits of the plastic cassette that holds this song. He imagined Gloria walking down the wedding aisle in a crown of his own making, cigarette paper and crushed cassette and stalks of pampas wheat. That would be perfect. He felt drunk. He was full of hope, like air in a balloon, almost enough to buoy him into the sky.

In bed beside his sleeping wife, plagued by the shouts of inebriated patriots outside, anxieties settled on his chest like harpies. How quickly, he thought, a life can become burdened; from one instant to the next, worries flood in, and the body itself feels old. He worried that he would fail in his duty to protect Gloria, to shield her from the stresses that could weaken the development of their child. He wanted to erase her sadness, and could not. He worried that all the weeping would make her sick, he worried that she would stay this way until her brother came back, which could be weeks, even months, and he worried about the question of whether to leave the country before the baby was born—was it really necessary? What would happen to his or her citizenship? How would this rattle their child’s future? And what would they do for work in another nation, where would they land,
how immensely would they miss Buenos Aires, what would they do with all their homesickness, the three of them adrift in a strange place? It seemed a monumental sacrifice, the flight to exile. He touched his wife’s taut belly in search of signs of life, but it seemed that the baby was asleep in her amniotic sac. There were no kicks or jutting elbows. I don’t know what we’re going to do, he whispered, speaking to the baby, what do you want us to do? There was no answer. He kept his hand on Gloria’s belly and lay quietly, as the crowds on the street sang on and on for Argentina, an entity he had once loved blindly and that now seemed distorted beyond recognition. What is this Argentina they sing for? And does it even hear their cries? He thought this as he stirred and stirred the worries through his mind, not imagining—never imagining—how small, how absurdly palatable, even how enviable such worries would soon seem.

Buenos Aires gleamed. After days in the house with my guest, I felt dazed by the brightness of the city. Rain had cleaned the buildings and made way for a bright blue sky to hang over them, a shining tarp. Tourists bustled past me, obviously relieved at their change in fortune, smiling into the sun, wearing backpacks on their fronts because they’d read all about the pickpockets that roamed this city that, despite its legacy of old grandeur, could not escape the destitution of the Global South it still belonged to. Their legs were exposed below the hems of shorts, terribly pale because it was the dead of winter back home in Europe or the United States of America. I wondered how the city looked to them, whether they saw the lush majestic detail on the façades of old buildings and not the way they moldered from neglect, or whether they saw the moldering of façades and not the lush majestic details. I could take you home with me, I thought, and show you a hidden face of Buenos Aires, something that is sure to, ahem, make a splash; you won’t find it in guidebooks, it’s off the beaten path, as they say, or rather on a path that has sustained an entirely different kind of beating. I walked on. At the university, I sped up my pace, taking
detours down longer halls so as to avoid the classroom I should have been sitting in at this hour, and the offices of professors who might stop me and demand an explanation,
Perla, where on earth have you been?
, or perhaps they would simply look at me coldly and let me pass, or be too wrapped up in their own research to recall my days of absence. I couldn’t decide which was worse, to be shut out or forgotten or pressured to come back in.

I made it to the library without incident. I thought—perhaps I hoped—that it might be difficult to find what I was looking for, but the computerized catalog instantly pulled up three titles that were all relevant and all available. One, I thought, I can stand only one. I wrote down the titles and numbers and carried the slip of paper into the stacks, held in front of me between ginger fingers as though it were a delicate grenade. When I was a girl, my mother would take me to the public library on Saturdays, and the stacks seemed like halls of hallowed knowledge where I’d pace randomly without a plan or any numbers jotted on slips of paper, emerging, to Mamá’s consternation, with piles of books captured in forays to the shelves for adults. A history of China, eighteenth-century French verse, a survey of the botanical wonders of the Amazon.

“What on earth do you want with these books?” she would say as she leafed through them, examining each one to give her approval.

“I’m curious.”

Mamá frowned. “About China?”

“Yes.”

“What is there to be curious about?”

“It’s a very big country.”

“Yes. But it’s full of Chinese.”

“I don’t know anything about the Chinese.”

Mamá sighed. “It’s good you want to learn so much,” she said, though she still tried to steer me back to the children’s books, which, she pointed out, would be easier to understand, and which were less likely to be riddled with lies.

“What kind of lies?”

“Various kinds. You have to be careful in the adult aisles; books for grown-ups have lies buried in them, like hidden fangs.”

When she said
fangs
, she aimed two crooked fingers at me, as if to emphasize the point. This only deepened the power of the image in my mind—if Mamá said it, it must be baldly true—and for years after that, while reading, until I began to read with Romina, I always felt the presence of those wild teeth between the lines, white fangs that concealed themselves in white space, chameleon fangs, ready to leap and sink into my skin if I wasn’t careful. They lent a layer of danger to the act of reading: you could be innocently tracing the shapes of black letters and suddenly the lies might rise out of the whiteness, a flock of small and deadly jaws, disembodied from heads or faces, ready to sink into you with force—they would leap first at the eyes—and destroy you in a rabid white swarm. Of course, this never happened. By the time I was in high school, by the time of my mother’s failed geraniums, I had discounted the whole notion of lies hidden in books as my mother’s attempt to keep a girl away from pages that could intrude on the fragile reality of a house. My mother did not want to see, nor for her daughter to see, certain things that could be written about in books, such as, perhaps, the years when I was small and the nation full of quiet.
She didn’t know. She knew. She knew. She struggled each day to not-know
. I had no way of discerning which it was. She would never tell me the true version, and even if she could I wasn’t sure that I could bear to hear it.

I found my book in the stacks and turned it over in my hands, once, twice, feeling the weight of it, the creased binding, a book purporting to be as ordinary as any other. On my way back downstairs, I pulled out two generic history volumes at random, to stack on top as I handed the books to the librarian, whom I knew and would have to face in the future. I pictured her looking up from the last title and staring at me, eyes softening in pity, or hardening in alarm, but she did neither. She was impartial, dispassionate, she had many other important things to do and this was just another student with just another
project or assignment or obsession, it’s all the same, the books were stamped and waved through the machine and released into my care. I placed them in my backpack and walked out, toward the sunshine, their weight mauling at my shoulders.

I didn’t know where I was going. I had nowhere to go but had to go somewhere, couldn’t go home, couldn’t yet face the melted clocks and thick damp air and contents of an inflatable red pool. I descended into the subway and took the first train. No one on board was smiling. A man read the paper with a mournful expression on his face. Another man, bald and hunched, stared out of the window as though he were watching trees, sun, houses, anything other than the black walls of a tunnel speeding by. A woman breast-fed an infant under her blouse. The child sucked greedily, surrendered to the pleasure of it, eyes rolled back under half-closed lids, legs kicking softly, fingers splayed in surrender. I was staring; I looked away. What is that like? I wondered. Did I ever do such a thing?

I exited at Plaza de Mayo. Upstairs, in the street, light stung my eyes.

I walked to the plaza. A breeze traced light and furtive patterns in my hair. Scattered tourists snapped photos of each other, while a vendor of ice cream and key chains looked on, sleepy, haggard, he had seen many days like this one. I didn’t know why I’d come here but I stood, taking in the vast spreading presence of the plaza, which throbbed with pride or sun or history, its pink flagstones empty but still straining, surely, under the weight of all the steps that had traversed this patch of earth in the long years in which it had been a congregating place. I wondered what the flagstones knew: whether, for example, they still felt the blood that was shed here in the 1800s by Manuel de Rosas and his circle of assassins, the Mazorca, with their public destruction of all enemies, real and perceived. Violinists, the killers called themselves, for the long stroke of knife across throat, the music that surged from victims as they died. One throat after another, so that blood from dozens of men and women blended on one blade.
And then their heads were cut off and placed on tall stakes here in the Plaza de Mayo for all to see and dream about, so even dreams could be scrubbed clean of thoughts of treason by the sight of severed heads, perhaps of friends or neighbors, slowly becoming unrecognizable thanks to the flies. All of this was long before the city was a sprawl of many millions, it lacked the cars and high-rises that wrap around the plaza now, but even then it was the center of the city. The decapitated heads were on display for drivers of horse-drawn carriages, government officials, ladies visiting the shops. Now you could no longer see the flies and rotting heads on stakes, they were not here, unless we can believe that the past is always present in the place where it unfolded, still a phantom hiding in the winds of the current moment. If it were possible for time to collapse, for the great hulking curve of it to crash into itself, then perhaps I would see the heads on stakes surrounded by swarms of flies, as well as the crowds who faced the Casa Rosada when Evita Perón came to the balcony to speak, and the film extras who crowded here when Madonna came to the Casa Rosada to pretend to be Evita on the balcony, and also the countless afternoons and mornings they had come here, the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo, a small group at first, then growing, white kerchiefs tied around their heads to represent the innocence of their beloved lost ones, with their enlarged photographs in hand, walking around and around the plaza as if their bodies formed the spoke of a great wheel,
we want them back with life
, walking despite the governmental warnings and the nightsticks and arrests and
those women are crazy
and the threats, walking in the shade of the dictatorship and walking later in the shade of a democracy that still failed to cough up the ones they loved,
with life
—all the walking would compress here in the great collapse of time. As I stood and stared, I imagined how the various eras might melt into each other, how the women would march around the rotting faces eaten by the flies, flies would buzz around the kerchiefs of the Madres, the tourists who now snapped photos of the statue and the Casa Rosada just across the road would swat the flies away and say, It’s so hot here in the south, the film extras would mingle with the
masses waiting for Eva Perón, Eva Perón would gaze at Madonna as she gazed out at the Madres in their eternal circle of a walk, resolute, constant, women in their forties, women in their seventies, ageless as the sea, tattooing their existence into the flagstones and the earth below. And as for me, I thought, what if I’m seen here? What if one of the Madres could turn her head and see me, include me in the mad blend of epochs with a single gaze? The past has not disappeared, far from it, the millennium may have turned and placed us in the fresh new twenty-first century, but that does not protect us from the reach and clear-eyed gaze of the past.

Perhaps that was why I had come here, against the current of my own conscious mind.

To be recognized.

Even though nothing terrified me more than the notion of one of those kerchiefed women capturing me with her eyes, across the veils of time, opening her mouth to speak or weep or spit at the lonely, silent girl. I looked out across the empty plaza, where the invisible Madres walked with the dignity of people who know more of pain than fear. I was certain that I could almost see them; they, however, did not seem to see me. I stood at the lip of their world, small, separate. Never in my life had I felt so small.