Perla (28 page)

“Maybe you’re finally appearing.”

I looked past the bookshelves to the window, with its shred of visible sky. “Out of nothing? And with nothing?”

“With your true self.”

“I don’t have a true self.”

“Of course you do.”

“It’s all been false.”

“What about us? Was that false?”

“No. No.”

Silence hung between us; I could almost hear him thinking. “Have you talked to your parents? I mean the—”

“—I know which ones you mean. They’re not here. They’re on vacation, they come back tomorrow night.”

“So you want to leave before then.”

“Right.”

“Do you need a place to stay?”

“If I could. For a little while. Until I find my own place.”

“How will you manage that?”

“I’ll find a job. I’ll drop out of school.”

“You can’t drop out.”

“Of course I can.”

“You don’t have to, Perla. You can stay with me.”

Gratitude rushed through me, mixed with relief. But then I tried to imagine our lives together—him, me, and the guest—with that ridiculous pool installed forever in his living room. It was too much. “Thank you, Gabo. Really. But you don’t know what you’d be getting into. There’s something I haven’t told you yet.”

The line between us seemed to prickle.

“It’s not what you think.”

“I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“And I don’t know how to say it. It can’t be said, I have to show you. Can you come over?”

“When?”

“Tonight, if you can.”

“How about nine o’clock?”

“Okay, nine o’clock. Could you drive? So I can take some things in your car.”

“Sure.”

“Thank you. I love you.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“Say it again.”

I laughed. “I love you.”

“Well then.” He sounded lighter. “See you soon.”

We hung up. I sat back in my father’s leather chair, the chair of the man I had always called my father. I tried to imagine Gabriel’s face on meeting the guest, his shock or disgust or fascination. I hoped he would not run away, and would agree to help me move the man to the backseat of his car. We’ll have to wrap him in a blanket, I thought, and perhaps a plastic tarp. I should take the red pool. I should take some of my clothes, books, childhood photos. Not everything, of course, just the things I can’t live without. Which may be no things at all. It may be that there’s nothing in this house that I can’t live without, that I could walk out with empty hands and survive. And then the exhaustion I had evaded all these hours swept its plush black hood over me, and I gave myself to sleep. I dreamed of ants, millions of them, scaling the oak in the yard, climbing and climbing toward the sky.

The light is fading. The corners lose their sun. There is so much he could shout into the gathering darkness. The turtle enters on slow legs and stands in the center of the room and it is good to see him.
Clack
, his hard jaws say to the shadows.
Clack
.

Hours have passed since the two phone calls, and she is still in the
other room, completely silent. She must have fallen asleep. Let her rest, he thinks. And let her go. He cannot steal her life. He does not want to be a burden. How moving that she planned to take him. She is a kind girl—and courageous, too, the way she talked to the man who had been her father. But no, he cannot live with whoever she called next, whoever is coming tonight with a car and prying eyes. A certain Gabo. Whom she loves, she says, and he hopes this Gabo loves her back and will be good to her, treat her like the miracle she is. In any case, she has a place to go
and you have to let her go
. He looks around the room now and he loves it, loves the painting of the ship made with the same strokes as the sea, the curtains where he has seen shards of Gloria’s body, the walls that have sung with blinding light, the sofa with whom he warred, the porcelain swan that longs to spread its hard white wings and tell its secrets in a slash of flight. Where else will he go? He has no idea. He will follow the pull. He closes his eyes and searches, dives, reels until he finds himself in the chamber with electric devices and trained men, he sees it clearly around him but it is different now, this is not his own memory, he is not the one tied to the mattress, it is an older hairy man who lies there writhing, he can see the man at the machine and the guard at the door and the doctor with his clipboard: the man at the machine is as calm as a captain at the helm of his ship, upright, broad-shouldered, prepared to steer through any waves that come; the guard is young and clean-shaven and earnest, he is doing his part to save his nation, he does not watch; the doctor makes notes on his clipboard as the man at the machine turns a dial and the small hairy naked man thrashes against his restraints, the doctor watching keenly, a man of science, he rubs his nose and nods to himself. He watches the four men from the ceiling. A dance, a strained choreography, four men in a bare room. He is lighter than air, floating, he can float out into the hallway and he must, something pulls him out into the hall and down it and he goes because
she is not far and I must find her
, past the shut doors of cells with covered peepholes, one after the other, he is not so much
searching for something as moving toward it the way a shard of iron moves toward a magnet. The pull grows stronger as he travels up a flight of stairs and down a hall past a room where guards play
truco
, a card game, and watch television (and they seem bored, their eyes are glazed, they laugh but do not look at each other), down another hall to another room where he finds her. She lies shaking. She is curled up like a fetus, her belly is smaller now but not yet down to normal size. She is blindfolded and unrestrained, bleeding down her legs, the guards have just had a round with her, they have used her like a dog but you are not a dog, my Gloria,
tesoro, mi vida
, I am here with you and I will stretch the nothingness I’m made of and cover you like a blanket, can you feel me across the boundaries of space and death and time? Do you feel warmer, Gloria? I would like to swaddle you, enfold you with myself, the soft of my consciousness a layer to blunt the edge of any fall. He unfurls the swath of his naked mind and strokes her with it. It is her skin, the same skin he has touched on many sweaty nights and languid mornings, supple and a joy to touch, like the joy of coming home after a long journey.
You. Come home
. Her breathing softens, her thin fingers move in the air as if playing a very quiet song on a piano, sensing for wayward keys. She tilts her head back, and her lips part. Yes, Gloria, I’m here, I’m here. She feels him, she must feel him, he believes it with his whole translucent being, he feels her body relax beneath his intangible caress. They lie together for an infinite instant or a brief eternity. When the guards come in to cuff and take her, he drapes himself around her shoulders like an unseen weightless shawl and stays wrapped around her in the Army truck that rumbles through the night, toward the outskirts of the city, carrying its cargo of dazed blindfolded people pressed close together in the dark, naked people merging with each other and straining to breathe air thick with the smell of unwashed bodies. They cannot see where they are going but some of them must know, they hang their heads as if in sleep or prayer. Gloria sways with the motion of the truck. He sways with her, the human shawl, he knows this journey, recalls the truck that led to
the airplane and he tries to stroke her body with the limp invisible cloth of his mind. Once, Gloria, we drove through the pampas and your profile was so beautiful against the wheat fields passing by, such long flat land, how I loved you then, how I love you now, remember the wheat fields, Gloria. The truck stops and the guards unload their cargo on a dirt field beside a barracks, command the people to line up in the beam of the headlights, though the people cannot see and so the guards arrange them with their own hands, the air is cool and fresh and he can feel Gloria take deep breaths of it, her first night air in months, dark and sweet with the breath of leaves and rocks and the lingering taste of the sun, and she has just inhaled deeply when the shots begin and the air stays coiled inside her, she never lets it go. The guards roll the crumpled bodies into the ditch nearby, already prepared, large enough to take the whole pile at once, a mouth in the earth that swallows them all. She is gone now, lost under one female body and one male and the spray of falling dirt, and he unwraps from the shell that does not hold her anymore and rises, rises, out of the mass grave and high over the land so that the guards and truck and disturbed slash of earth become small below him, now he knows, he has seen, he knows that it was earth that took her (not sea, not fire) and with this knowledge slashing through him he can surely find her, Gloria, the glint of you must be somewhere, burrowing through mountains, trapped in the bedrock, curled into tree roots, riding a river, roaming the blue vaults of the sky, I will rove and rove for you, and when I find you I will have so much to show and give and pour, we will be together soon, none of this is finished, we are not finished, it’s a girl, it’s a girl, her name is Perla, her hair is rich like yours and her mouth is yours God help her, I have spent moments with her that are safely folded in my memory, the moments live and live and cannot be undone, they are more powerful than bullets or planes and see, see, I carry them toward you, wherever you are. He is higher now, beyond the trees, so high he sees the city to the east, Buenos Aires, glimmering with the lights of the living on an ordinary night, these things all
happened on an ordinary night, the river glimmers black and long beyond it and even though he doesn’t know what he’s becoming he is not afraid, he is ready to change, ready to search, ready to rise.

The room was almost dark when I woke up, surprised to find my face against a desk. I felt groggy, disoriented. I had meant to pack some things before Gabriel arrived, but now he’d be coming any moment. And something wasn’t right in the house, though I didn’t know what. It was a feeling, a buzzing sound, or perhaps an absence of sound. I wondered how my guest was doing. I had to see him.

But when I entered the living room he was not there. The pool overflowed with water that had spilled over the edges to the hardwood floor, but there was no one in it.

No
, I thought,
No
and
No
.

I tore back the curtains, ran to the kitchen, searched the hall closet, opened the sliding doors to the backyard and looked and looked around the rosebushes, the silent oak, the dark and unrevealing sky. He was gone. I had no name to call for him, no syllables to send into the heavens. But I knew him, I thought, he was mine and I was his. Every cell of my body screamed for his return, but he did not come. The loss of him crashed over me, surging in a tidal wave of losses. Too many losses to measure. Too many to contain. The yard stood utterly silent, the house leered at my back, even the skies were empty, unresponsive, thick and dark where are the stars? where is my father? where am I? And at that point I seemed to watch myself, as if I were not the woman standing in the yard but a pure field of sight, watching the woman as she turned and went inside, where she stared at the pool for a minute, then took her clothes off and stepped in. The water rose and spilled around her, onto the floor, snaking out toward the walls. She crouched there, naked, for a long time. She thought of everything and nothing. She wept. She looked at her empty hands through the clear water. And then, in a sudden act of alchemy, she
became herself, nothing less and nothing more. I felt the warm water embrace my limbs, murmuring of times long gone and times that still awaited. I looked around the room. I could not let it stay like this, false and immaculate. I rose out of the pool and let my hands take over, they knew just what they wanted to do, they took charge and grasped the bucket, filled it at the pool, aimed, and cast water against the wall. I plunged the bucket again and a great wave collided against the leather sofa and ruined it for good. I kept going, soaking another wall, where the Dalí print dripped and puckered, its dry landscape deluged with sudden rain to twist the clocks into new shapes; the wall wept streams of tears; I threw more water and the painting of the ship glistened with fresh moisture and I heard a sound now, a woman groaning with her own voice, not caring anymore about the proper use of voices or the proper place for wetness, let the waters rise and drown the house and draw its entire structure out to sea. Now the bucket heaved again and waters—memory-water, almost unbearably clear—splashed along the bookcase, soaked into the books, toppled the wedding photograph of one man and one woman who smiled with their mouths closed, and I wanted their mouths to open and swallow the sea that enveloped their house, I wanted the whole house to pour and swim and sway under these waters, and the hands flew the bucket to the kitchen, to the study, flooded the leather chair and desk and rug and books whose pages would forever curl from the force of this deluge, and from the front hall came a ringing bell and then a thudding sound, over and over, what the hell could it be, back in the living room the floor was wet and all was wet and I was wet and naked and still throwing water when the thudding sound came back coupled by a muffled voice from outside, calling,
Perla? Perla?

I went to open the door. Gabriel made a strange sound when he saw me.

“Come in.”

“What—”

“Quickly.”

He came in, and I closed the door and returned to the living room. He followed me and stood, uncertain, gaping at the drenched room. I felt as though I’d just risen from a trance. I tried to imagine how the place looked through his eyes, and searched for words to account for the state of things, the source of the pungent water, my days with a guest who had appeared and just as suddenly disappeared. But nothing came. In the meantime, Gabriel seemed to recover himself.

“So this is your house.”

“It’s not my house.”

“Oh. Right.”