Perla (11 page)

He nodded.

And a liar.

No, he said quickly, of course not, I don’t lie.

And that story, she said, about dropping out of school?

He stopped cold, or so it was always told to Gabriel throughout his childhood, by both tellers; they agreed on the fact that he stopped cold in that moment and had no idea what to say. It was a test, he finally confessed.

She said, And you failed.

He thought of protesting this, pointing out that he had not been the one being tested, but then he gave up and nodded. I’m sorry, he said, I’ll never lie to you again.

And therein, they told their son years later, lay the secret to their long and happy marriage.

They moved to Buenos Aires, where Gabriel’s father worked for
a clinic that served the slums at the edges of the city. When the dictatorship took over, Gabriel was five years old, and his sisters were four and one; fearing for their safety in a political atmosphere where anyone working for the most vulnerable elements of society was in danger of being labeled a subversive, they fled, and since they obviously could not return to Uruguay because of its own dictatorship, they went to Mexico City, where Gabriel grew up in a cluster of exiles from the Southern Cone who carved out homes for themselves in that cacophonous, phenomenal, disorienting city. How he loved it, with its palatial colonial buildings layered uneasily over and beside Aztec ruins that whispered—no, not whispered, he corrected himself: the ruins
sang
—of ancient days and powers we
ríoplatenses
down south have long forgotten in our stubborn amnesia over what this land has been, the life it had before Europe crashed in and transformed it with paving stones and spilled blood. Here, he said, we talk about the pretty paving stones but not the blood. We act as though the founding of Buenos Aires were the beginning of time rather than an interruption of what Time had long been doing. We think four hundred and something years is old, but please, that’s just a young snotnose of a city when you’ve experienced México D.F. You should really try these cannelloni, here, have some, they’re spectacular. Mm, see? In any case, I loved it there, but my mother couldn’t stand the pollution, the whorls of noise, and above all she could never get used to the edge of violence that accompanies you there as constantly as your own shadow. She pined for the tranquillity of Uruguay, where even the capital has the bucolic calm of a village. And so, after the Uruguayan dictatorship ended, we moved to Montevideo. I was fifteen then. My father would have preferred Buenos Aires, but my mother won that fight. No, she said, I can’t stand that many Argentineans at once. Despite her intermarriage, she never shook off the Uruguayan belief that Argentineans all too often suffer from excessive arrogance, and, to put it bluntly, are sons of bitches. She would sometimes throw up her hands in the house and say, My husband, my children, they’re
all
argentinos
, I’m surrounded! So, I finished high school in Montevideo, and by my first year at the university I was writing for newspapers. Small, insignificant pieces at first. Then I started writing about political issues, the imprint left by both dictatorships, and I wrote an article about Uruguayan nationals who’d disappeared in Argentina. You know, I’m sure you’ve heard about it, they came here seeking refuge from their government, but then the junta took over here and—paf!—Operation Condor, lists of names, and the regimes are doing each other’s dirty work. A disgrace. But anyway, after I wrote that piece, I became obsessed with the
desaparecidos
in general, and I felt that I had to come back here, to Buenos Aires, to dive further into those stories. Now I feel like I can’t leave, he said, taking a bite of almond torte. I love Montevideo too, my family’s there, I visit, but this is home.

“What makes Buenos Aires home?” I said.

“I don’t know. The streets. I never get tired of these streets, their noise, their colors, even their sadness. Even the cracks in run-down buildings seem beautiful to me.”

I drank the last drops of wine from my glass. The bottle stood empty. I felt warm, sated.

Gabriel looked as though he’d just woken. “But wait. We haven’t talked about you.”

“We don’t have to.”

“This is terrible. I’ve talked the whole night.”

“I like to listen.”

“You’re very good at it.”

“You sound alarmed.”

“Perhaps I am. I don’t usually tell my whole life story on a first date like this.”

“No?”

“No.”

I smiled.

“I’m a journalist, for God’s sake. I’m supposed to get people talking.”

“And I’m an aspiring psychologist,” I said. “I’m supposed to do the same.”

“Looks like you won.”

“I liked hearing your stories.” I meant this. I could have listened for hours more.

“Well, you owe me some next time.”

He invited me back to his apartment that night, and I declined, though I did kiss him long and slow at the subway gate before descending to catch my train. On the next date, at the same trattoria, he was ready with his questions.

“I don’t want to talk about my family,” I said.

“Why not?”

I waved my hand, hoping that the gesture seemed both confident and casual. “Your family doesn’t define who you are.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No.”

“But it’s where you come from. Where you begin.”

“Not where I begin.”

He looked slightly amused. “Where do you begin, then, Perla?”

Without thinking, I said, “With Rimbaud.”

He laughed. “What? The poet?”

“The poet.” I spent the next hour weaving a creation story for myself, miraculously devoid of parents. I described my experience at Romina’s bookshelves, opening volume after volume as if opening the gates to textual cities. In those cities, among those words and meanings, I said, the true trajectory of my life began. Everything I said was true, though of course I left out details of my friendship with Romina—her discovery in the study, her uncles, the note I read and reread in the bathroom stall. Instead, I focused on the appetite with which we’d open book after book, picking out delectable lines to roll against the tongue of the mind, the wonder of those hours, the way the words and visions and ideas sparked from those pages and dug into my flesh like splinters of a fire started on the page by a writer long dead. It made me fall in love with the mind, I said. It made me
see how everything—ideas, poems, buildings, even wars—ultimately began in the mind. First comes a thought, then words to carry it, and only then does a thing take shape in a concrete way. In the beginning there truly was the Word. Eventually I became a student of the mind, the place where words begin, so that one day I could accompany people’s journeys into the dizzying labyrinths within them, and help them navigate, help them change. It felt good to tell the story without the context of my mother this, my father that. My own story, unhampered, as if my parents did not exist. I had never described my life that way to anyone. I felt entranced by my own telling, and wondered how much of it was fiction and how much a new way of looking at the truth.

“So Freud has the keys to the labyrinth?” Gabriel asked.

“Some of them.”

“Do you believe everything he said?”

“Even Freud didn’t believe everything he said. He contradicted himself, he made mistakes. But he was the first to unlock certain rooms of the psyche.”

“Such as?”

“Unconscious desires.”

“Mm hm. Unconsious desires.” He looked at me with a subtle smile. He was so confident with his lust, I found it both maddening and impressive. “Do you have any of those?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t know it, would I?”

That night, I did go back to his apartment, and he turned on Coltrane’s
A Love Supreme
and poured us wine and we kissed in the middle of the living room, on our feet, swaying, a kiss that started with languor and rapidly intensified as though it had a will of its own. We were on our knees, kissing, we were on the floor, his hands on my breasts and in my hair and everywhere else all at once or so it seemed, and my hands too, we were there a long time, we didn’t take our clothes off but we pressed so forcefully it seemed the fabric might burn away from our bodies. Finally, I said, reluctantly, “I should go.”

“Do you have to?”

“I have to.”

He brushed my hair back, very gently. “I’ve never met a girl like you.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“It’s true.”

“You’re good at this, Gabriel. But I’m still not going to have sex with you.”

He made a face of wounded innocence. “Sex? Who said anything about sex?”

I laughed.

He pouted. “I feel so used.”

“Poor thing.”

He grinned. “I have something for you,” he said, and left the room. He returned with a file folder, and opened it to show me a small stack of clippings. “If you’d like to borrow them. To read some of my work.”

The article on top was called “Gentlemen of the Sea: The Role of the Navy in Disappearances.” The room went cold. I did not want to read his work. But I smiled and took the folder from him. “Of course I do.”

I started reading on the subway ride home. The article was smart and eloquent. Outrage emanated from every sentence, hard as a spear, flung at men who had participated in atrocities and now held immunity under the law when obviously they had no right to roam free in the world
with their daughters
—no, it didn’t say that. The train was nearly empty. I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. I had been so stupid. I had thought that we could find some kind of common ground, or if not find it, then create it for ourselves, out of nothing, out of sheer desire for each other. As if common ground could exist between our worlds.

The train hummed on. I felt Romina’s phantom presence in the empty seat behind me, lit with triumph.
Perla, Perla. Who do you think you are?

Go away.

He’ll never love you
.

Go away.

You have to stop
.

I know. I know.

I broke off the next date, but Gabriel called and called and the thought of his smell when I last saw him, deep sweat under sharp cologne, decimated my resolve. I finally agreed to visit his apartment on a Sunday afternoon.

“What happened?” he said, as soon as I came in.

I stood uncertainly in the center of his living room. “I just wasn’t sure.”

“About me?”

“About this.”

“Why?”

I looked around the room as though the answer could be culled from it. Afternoon light poured in from the balcony, gilding the books strewn on the floor, the dirty coffee mugs, debris from a long night of research. “How old do you think I am?”

“Twenty-two?”

“Eighteen.”

“God. Oh God. Are you joking?”

I just looked at him.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“You’re too young for me.”

“Don’t be so sure.” I didn’t know where my words were coming from, there was a woman speaking whom I barely knew, a Perla who could not be trusted to keep to any script.

“What are you saying?”

“That you don’t know me.”

He stared at me, and I met him without flinching. “You’re right, Perla. I have no idea who you really are.”

“I didn’t mean it as—”

“No, it’s a good thing. You’re complex. I never feel like you say things just to impress me.”

“Why the hell would I say things just to impress you?”

He laughed. “You see what I mean?”

“So can I stay?”

“Do you want to?”

I should have left right then, taken the revelation of my age as an exit door, ensured the safety of my world. “What do you think?”

I stayed, that afternoon. After that, we continued to see each other and I stopped resisting it. Those were delectable times. Our nights were long and full of beer and heat and urges that were probed but not satisfied; we cleaved to each other, we seemed to fit the convoluted curves of each other’s inner lives. This surprised me: I’d imagined him to be the kind of man who moved from girl to girl with distracted ease. You don’t know me, then, he said.
Oh, come on
, I answered,
you’ve never been that way? with all those ex-girlfriends?
This made him laugh and run his tongue along my ear, so that when he said
You do something different to me, Perla
, I could barely hear the words through streaks of pleasure.

And on some level, I understood. He was not a man who could be penned in. He succumbed to bouts of writing during which the phone went unanswered, the dishes unwashed, schedules rearranged for the sake of the story, and in those bouts a woman could lose her footing by demanding too much. Other girlfriends in the past had badgered him—What are you writing? Can I read it? Can’t I sit beside you while you work? What are you thinking now?—but I had no desire to enter that sphere of his life; I understood the need for private spaces, the need for inner chaos to spin its whorls, because I needed the same thing.

In any case, it was safer this way for both of us. I preferred his journalism stashed outside of our relationship, part of him yet separate, like a shadow. I did not make too many demands on his time. I did not insist that he come home to meet my family. We stayed in the
present moment. When you are with me, give me your lithe hands and green eyes and use your wit to make me laugh, don’t talk to me about the article you published, the letters that streamed in, I don’t care, I only want to speak of what the sun is doing to our skin, what my skin does to yours and what yours does to mine, what our bodies generate and how our minds catapult together to new realms.

Believe it or not, I kept my father’s identity from him for a year.

Finally, one day, as we were getting ready to leave his apartment for a party, he told me about a meeting friends of his had organized. They were part of an exciting group called HIJOS, like the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, only by and for children of the disappeared who were now young adults. They were wonderful, they had the coolest tactics, they named perpetrators on the radio and listed not only their crimes against humanity, but their phone numbers and home addresses, and called protests at those addresses, an amazing method,
eserache
, what an innovation. There was going to be a rally next week outside a general’s house, why didn’t we go together?