Perla (3 page)

“Well?” she’d said. “How did it go?”

“Fine,” I’d said, and once it was out of my mouth it was too late to take back the lie.

“You didn’t get caught?”

I had told my parents I was taking a trip with Marisol and her family. “No, that all went smoothly. Thanks for covering for me.”

“And his family?”

“Whose family?”

“Perla. Come on. Gabriel’s family. How was meeting them?”

“Sorry, Marisol, but this isn’t a good time. Can we talk later?”

“Sure, sure. Just call me when you have time.”

But I never had the time. Or I did have the time, but lacked something else essential to making the call, and such an ordinary call at that, to catch up with a friend. It wouldn’t even have to be particularly involved; Marisol wasn’t the best of listeners, and would soon turn the conversation to her latest fight with her mother. But I didn’t have it in me. And now, even less so—with the whoknowswhat in my living room, I felt incapable of feigning chatter.

What would she say if she knew? And what would the rest of my classmates say? I imagined my professor presenting the case study, my story told: a young woman believes she saw a wet ghost just like you see me here, that she gave him water from a glass and he chewed it. Now remember, your patient is convinced of her reality, attached to its veracity even though it plagues her. What treatment would you say she requires? The hands shoot up.

When I woke up that morning I’d lain in bed, staring at the ceiling, the impervious ceiling, asking it for a normal day. A normal living room. A normal fist of silence in my mind. Not like these raucous thoughts, these eddies, this whirlpool of wondering what the hell had poured into my house.

The day the black boots came for him was a pretty day, with bright blue slices of sky between the buildings. He remembers, now, the café he went to on his way home. It was halfway between the office and his apartment. It was beautiful and ordinary, with ivory walls, bitter coffee, little cookies. People walked sharply outside the window. It was just another cup of coffee to him then, and just another window. He was tired. He had stayed up too late fighting with Gloria, about a stupid thing, the apartment, something about the apartment, whether or not they should move and what they should do with the apartment if
they did, though he couldn’t remember what had raised the question about moving, where they would go and why, all he knew was that her mouth was pursed in profile, she turned and showed her shoulder blades, they didn’t touch in sleep that final night, what an idiot, not to have touched her. He dreaded going home, the chance that she was still angry, the dance-step of apologies, and so he stopped for coffee. The coffee came with little almond cookies, not the butter ones today, what a shame. He remembers. He tastes the coffee and the almond cookie, tinged with his petty disappointment. Then home. He turned the key and pushed the door open and there was Gloria, bound to a chair, blindfolded, still as a doll. The first fist sent him to the floor and he stayed there, there were many of them, dozens, a dozen boots around him, in his ribs, kicking, speaking, the boots were speaking, they wanted to know things but he couldn’t speak. Blood filled his mouth. A hand caught his hair, lifted him from the ground, then came a fist and he was down again, sinking in a vortex of men. He understood that they had come for him, it was his turn, he would be gone, Gloria was right about people being taken and he wished that he’d believed her, held fiercely to this wish as though believing her could have staved off this moment, there was red in his eyes, wet copper in his mouth, two teeth floating across his tongue like hidden shipwrecks, and Gloria was pleading please don’t hurt him, shut up Gloria, a slap and then a cry, that’s right darling, don’t say a thing, sit still until it’s over and then maybe they won’t take you, please shut up. She didn’t shut up and they weren’t done and he was on the floor and pulled up and back down again, they wanted to know where Carraceli was but he had never known a Carraceli, it was no use, the hood came over his head, the room went quiet, by now it was the middle of the night, he was rolled into a carpet, he was carried down the stairs of his apartment building past neighbors’ doors that did not open, everybody seemed to know to keep their doors closed on such nights, and then he was in the footwell of a car that drove and drove and drove and drove and that—he now remembers—is how he disappeared.

2
A Secret Dimension

I
arrived home with brown bags full of food. I was ready for anything—ready to find an empty living room and accept that I had hallucinated and was clinically insane, and also ready to see him there still, in which case perhaps the world was crazy and not me. I imagined this, the world on the couch, the whole of it lying prone and anguished, a globe deflating in the grip of confession, and my professor scribbling on a tablet,
Suffers from delusions, psychosis. Acute
.

He was still there. I smelled him as soon as I opened the door, a gust of metallic fish and rotting apples. He still looked wet, as if he’d just emerged from water. He sat on the floor, staring at the painting on the wall, Tía Mónica’s blue rendition of a ship on tumultuous seas. The monochrome approach was inspired by Picasso’s blue period; that’s what Papá always said about it. Intermittently, Mamá would make a case for them to take it down, or at least hang it in the upstairs hallway, the last thing I want in my own living room is to be reminded of your sister, but none of the appeals ever worked. On most decorating points my father caved to my mother, but there was no moving this vestige of Tía Mónica.

“I brought more food,” I said.

He didn’t move.

“I had no idea what you wanted.”

He turned his head toward me, slowly.

“Are you hungry now?”

He didn’t answer and I felt like a fool, standing in my living room
with two bags of groceries I had painstakingly chosen—lingering in the aisle, thinking, Pasta? surely he’d like pasta?—for a guest I had never invited and whose humanity was in question and whom I had no reason at all to long to feed and who now would not even deign to speak. “You must be hungry.”

“Rain.”

“What?”

“It’s going to rain.”

“Oh.” I looked out the window, at the heavy sky beyond the trees. It had been a hot summer day, humid as always, and rain had not occured to me. “Maybe.” I put the grocery bags down on the table. “You can talk.”

He nodded. “I am remembering.”

“What do you remember?”

He said nothing.

“What are you?”

Through the wall, I heard Belinda, the neighbor child, shrieking with pleasure in the yard. Another child laughed; there was a friend over. I wanted to hurl a loaf of bread at this stranger who would barely talk to me.

“I’m going to make us dinner. You want dinner?”

“Water.”

“What?”

“Water.”

“That’s not dinner,” I said, and stopped myself before adding
not for real people, anyway
.

His eyes probed and entered me, his eyes were looking into my mind, they were all sight, they were all dark, they had no bottom. “Water. Please.”

He eats the water, chews it, it has substance, it’s the only thing with substance in this world. It sparkles in his throat as it goes down. It
flows into this unfamiliar flesh, not like the living flesh he had before he disappeared, but something else; he doesn’t understand what; he can’t answer her questions, still doesn’t know it all, the who and what of his presence, after so much absence he must defend his presence, that’s how it is, how the world is, a dry dry world, he wants water to pour into him, over and over, fill him up, like it did in the cradled years, the deep-in-river years, when everything was water and he not only ate water but the water—sparkling, ravenous—ate him.

I ate my bread, torn from the loaf, unbuttered. I felt both restless and paralyzed, yearning for motion yet unable to do anything ordinary such as open a book, cook dinner, call friends and meet them for drinks. I needed a drink. I couldn’t imagine what I would tell my friends. How’s your week going? Oh really? As for me, there’s a pale wet man who smells like a dirty beach sitting in my living room. No, I don’t know how long he’s staying. No, he looks too weak to steal the stereo. Don’t worry. Let’s buy another round.

I poured myself a scotch from my father’s good bottle. I would have offered some to the man but he wanted only his plain water, which he consumed with such intensity it should have been a private act. He finished and looked up at me.

“Thank you.” His voice was clearer now, just a little blurred.

I nodded. The window was open. Outside, I heard a dog bark, a man silencing the dog. It didn’t rain.

“I was in the water.”

It was difficult to hold his gaze. “In the water?”

“Yes.”

“Which water?”

“All of it.”

I finished my scotch and filled my glass again. “And before that?”

“I disappeared.”

I reached for my cigarettes and matches. The small flame moved
down the match toward my fingers. I let it scorch me, and it seemed incredible that my fingers didn’t shake. “Are you alive?”

He cocked his head to the side and stared at me; it was maddening, terrible, corrosive, the way he didn’t blink. “I don’t think so.”

I smoked the cigarette, watching the smoke curl on itself in the air between us. “I don’t think so either.”

I poured my third glass of scotch and tore another piece of bread from the loaf, but didn’t eat it. I pulled out the soft, white center and pressed it into a ball. Disappeared, I thought. I should have felt bemused, disturbed, at the very least surprised, but all I felt was the low burn of scotch inside my throat.

“Why did you come here?”

He stared at the white ball in my fingers. Bread with all the air crushed out of it. “I don’t know.”

We spent the next few hours in silence. He stared at Tía Mónica’s painting, the ship and sea evoked with the same hue and brush. This painting seemed to engage him far more than the print on the other wall, Dalí’s
Persistence of Memory
, with its melted clocks draped over a barren branch, an angled surface, a sleeping creature of inscrutable origins. I had not caught him looking at the Dalí even once, whereas Mónica’s painting seemed to have the effect of a gripping story, as though a part of him could leap over the frame and into its blue world. When I was a child, I had done the same: watched the painting in naked fascination, certain the ship was in motion and would lunge toward me at any moment, as if to save me from perilous shores. The brushstrokes were thick and dynamic, blending ship with sea, creating the illusion that they interpenetrated. A ship melting into the ocean waves, or being born from them: my child-mind could never decide which was more true and always longed to ask the woman who had made the painting.
Does the ship form the water or the water form the ship?
But I could never ask her this, of course, because she was gone, to an unknown place, a woman even more enigmatic than her art. I drank and smoked and pretended not to watch the man who watched
the painting. The street lifted its low voice into the room. The air swirled. I put my head down on the table, and slept.

Perla, Perlita, my mother said, don’t believe the lies about the disappeared. You’re going to hear things in school and I’ll tell you now that they’re not true, Perlita, these people are hysterical, they don’t understand a lot of things. Don’t say anything to them about it. Just stay quiet and remember they’re confused.

I nodded then, and my tight braids brushed against my dress. Mamá smiled at me, helped me into my coat, and gave me a hug. As always, I wanted the embrace to last longer so I could dissolve into my mother’s soft blouse and bright perfume, but the touch was perfunctory, a means to an end, delivered in the rush of a busy morning. Mamá loved me very much, but she had many things to think about, and very nice clothes that should not wrinkle so early in the day.

I was six years old. The democracy was about to turn one. And yes, there were people now who clearly did not like Navy men like Papá. Romina Martínez’s uncles had been gone for seven years, or so she’d told me in the coatroom at school. There are many people like that, she’d whispered. Many people who never came home in the Bad Years. Her grandmother still marched in the plaza downtown every Thursday, wearing a white scarf over her head, so that her uncles would return. But, Romina said, taking off her green galoshes, Mamá said that’s crazy, they won’t come back, because they’re dead.

I said nothing to this because I was a goodgirl. But later, weeks later, one night after homework, I asked my own mamá about it: Where are Romina’s uncles? Will they come back?

Mamá sighed. She was holding a scotch, and she swayed it back and forth, so that the ice cubes chimed against the glass. “Who knows?”

“Where are they?”

“They probably went off to live lazy lives in Paris.”

I felt sorry for Romina then, with her hand-me-down galoshes
and her grandmother wandering the plaza and uncles too lazy to come home. She did not have a mamá like mine, the kind that had her nails done every week and wore imported French scarves that draped across her collar like bright plumes. Mamá had beauty all around her, Papá was a strong man who arrived home in the evenings with his uniform still pressed, and I was a lucky girl to have parents like these.

But Romina was not the only one who spoke about these things. We’re a democracy now, said the puffy-haired lady on the television news; the dictatorship is behind us. I had never heard the word
dictatorship—dictadura
—before. I tried to understand what it could mean. It had the word
dura
inside of it, meaning
hard
, so perhaps there had been something hard about that time, which might explain why Romina called them the Bad Years, but did not explain why Papá seemed not to like that they were over. Maybe it wasn’t a bad kind of hard. Like walls. Everybody knew it was good that walls were hard, because that way the rain couldn’t come in. But you wouldn’t want your pillows to be hard, or your father’s hand, or many other things.