Perla (18 page)

He knows his story now, the essential arc of his own genesis. Once he rained into the sea and died. In death he merged with others. And the memories keep welling up, that’s why he’s here, why he’s back—to let the memories froth and rise and splatter out of darkness into sonorous light.

For that, and for her. His return would have no meaning without her.

The water looked as red as the pool that held it. He created his own red sea. When I drew the water out with a cup, it lost its tint and became
plain and transparent, with its traces of silt. The guest watched me pour water into the bucket, watched my hand as it dipped back into his pool to take more water. He looked up at me, his gaze unblinking.

I smiled at him.

He smiled, a little, for the first time since he arrived. I waited for him to speak, to tell me about his dreams, to ask me a question, but he said nothing. Now it was he who was reticent, and I who wanted to talk, the silence around us a palpable thing I longed to break into small pieces.

“Are you comfortable?” I asked.

He looked at me as though it were the strangest thing I had said so far.

“I mean, in the pool?”

“It is good, yes. Thank you.”

“If you need anything else …”

“You do too much for me.”

“No.”

“You must have other things to do.”

I shrugged. “They can wait.”

He leaned forward on his arms, in that pose that reminded me of a dog. A stray dog just starting to ease into the comforts of human housing.

I lit a cigarette, sat down, looked out the window. It was later in the morning than I’d first realized; the sky was strong with light, though covered with a smooth sheet of clouds. I hadn’t looked at a clock or brushed my teeth. I didn’t want to brush my teeth, wanted the stale taste in my mouth to mix with the morning tobacco, so that my mouth would taste the way I felt, unpresentable, reduced to urge and impulse. “Are you sure you can’t tell me what you remembered?”

“This time, it was about the water.”

“What about it?”

“How we blended in the water, when our bodies were gone.”

“We?”

“Many of us fell at the same time.”

“From where?”

“From the sky.”

“From an airplane.”

“How did you know?”

I kept my gaze over his head, at the bushes in the patio, which were perfectly still, there was no breeze. “Some stories have been told. Parts of stories.”

“About airplanes.”

“Yes.”

“And how we fell.”

“Yes.”

“Are these things still happening?”

“No. Not here.”

“In other places?”

“Who knows?”

“Do the stories scare you?”

“No. I don’t know.” The cigarette was gone, too fast, reduced to a stained filter I crushed in the ashtray and abandoned. The taste lingered bitterly in my mouth. I forced myself to look at him. He was staring at my parents’ wedding photograph on the bookshelf. His cheekbone jutted toward them like an arrow.

“Tell me about them.”

The room seemed suddenly deficient of air, a hostile place to breathe. “What about them?”

“Who are they?”

“My parents.”

He didn’t move and didn’t soften. “Yes. But who?”

“Their names?”

“Who.”

I wanted to shake him, shake the edge out of his voice, a new edge I didn’t want to understand. “They met at her cousin’s wedding. They’re both from Buenos Aires, although her family has land in the north.”

“And?”

“And … he was already an officer. She wanted to be an artist, a painter, but she had given it up by then.”

“Why?”

“Why did she give it up?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. I think her father forced her.”

“How?”

I tried to tell him the story, the version I had cobbled together from my mother’s furtive slips and sharp explosions, and he listened intently with his gaze still on the photograph. This young woman, the woman in question, this Luisa, grew up in a family that had owned cattle ranches for five generations, and in which there were two constants: rules, and money. These two entities were ubiquitous, unquestioned. From what I could gather, the father never raised his voice and never bent his will for anyone, and the mother was an elegant socialite who glittered on her good days and glowered on her bad days until, finally, when Luisa was nine, she left for Rome and never returned. Luisa grew up as a goodgirl, obediently Catholic, obediently quiet, with all her ruffles and smiles in place, though no one knew what churned and curdled under the surface. Then, when she was seventeen, she spent the summer with an uncle in Madrid, and in that summer, the summer of 1969, she found the nub of rebellion within her and made it unfurl. This was the period that fascinated and bewildered me, the brief version of my mother I could not comprehend, and longed to see. This version of my mother parted her hair in the middle, wore long peasant skirts, and in a single month discovered both marijuana and Salvador Dalí. She confessed all of this to me right before I graduated from high school, the only night she ever told the story, the two of us alone on my bed. She curled in close to me. She had had more wine than usual at dinner and I had had two glasses myself. My leg fell asleep beneath me but I did not dare stretch it out to relieve the numbness for fear that, if I did, Mamá might wake from her storytelling trance, interrupt herself, and leave to begin her nightly rituals. I did not want
to move and shake the warm, fragile portal that had opened between us and through which my mother’s stories now poured. You may as well know, she said, you probably think you’re the only one who has had big dreams, that’s how it is when we’re young, we always think we’re the first to taste whatever it is we’re tasting. Well, you should have seen me, that summer in Madrid. She propped her elbow against my pillow, her legs tucked under her like a daydreaming girl, as if the intervening years had somehow fallen away in the comfort of this night and she were not a mother on her daughter’s bed, but a teenager spilling confessions to a friend. (On that night, I felt delicious hope that we’d stay like this now, mother and daughter, woman-friends, sharing secrets and delights. It seemed attainable. It was probably the wine.) In Madrid, she said, the marijuana had made her too paranoid for her liking, made her feel like a rapidly spinning steering wheel, and so she soon abandoned it. But the Dalí sank into her bones and lit them up: naked women with roses bleeding on their bellies, ants erupting from bare hands, heads peeled open like an orange—savage truths, relentless vision, the human mind turned inside out. She glutted herself on trips to the city’s museums, spending hours in front of a single work by Dalí or Picasso or Goya or Velázquez or Bosch. She was most moved by the famous paintings, the ones that drew throngs of tourists to gape and gaze and forget the time and place in which they stood. All that attention, across time, on a canvas painted by a single mortal man. One day, standing in front of
The Garden of Earthly Delights
, watching naked men and women fall in ceaseless anguish through the guts of a beaked monster in hell, she decided to become an artist. She would spend her life creating images on canvas, painting shapes and creatures into being that did not exist anywhere else, that would never have existed if it were not for her hands. When she returned to Buenos Aires, she had two notebooks full of sketches and a print of
The Persistence of Memory
, a painting she’d never seen with her own eyes since the
yanquis
had stolen it away from Spain long before. She bought herself paints, brushes, a palette, and a single
enormous canvas. Once she had these items safely in her room, their presence irrefutable, she went to her father and said, I want to be an artist, I want to go to art school.

Perla
, she said the night she recounted the tale,
you have no idea how my hands shook as I was speaking
.

Luisa’s father laughed, and then, when it was clear that she was serious, spat into a nearby rosebush. He walked away and the subject never arose again. Luisa went to her room and stared at the canvas, the paints, the notebooks full of summer sketches, evidence of the girl she had discovered oceans away from Argentina. She refused to eat for three days, but her father didn’t seem to notice. On the fourth day, she locked herself in her room, blended all her oils in chaotic swirls, and created the only painting of her life, an abstract monstrosity of black and brown and maroon rage, piled thick in sweeping strokes that loomed and protruded from the canvas, hideous and heavy as a storm. She burned her notebooks, gave away her brushes and palette, and slept under the shadow of her huge painting because there was nowhere else to put it. She vowed to escape her father’s house as soon as possible, and succeeded two years later, when she found a young Navy officer called Héctor who wished to marry her. By that time, the girl who had prowled the Museo del Prado was gone, her only vestige caught inside an awful painting that moved into the attic of their new house.

“He didn’t force her,” the guest said.

“What?”

“Your grandfather. All he did was spit.”

“But he forbade her.”

“Did he cut off her hands?”

I was startled by the question. No, I wanted to say, he didn’t cut off her hands because he didn’t have to, he had cut them off long before, with years of keeping all authority in his own palms, all the rules and all the power and all the answers emanating from him and no one else. And if you don’t understand that, if you’ve never been in such a family,
then you can’t know the way the mind shackles itself and amputates its own limbs so adeptly that you never think to miss them, never think that you had anything so obscene as choice. But how could I say this to someone who perhaps had seen the cutting, the real cutting, of real hands or toes, and felt shackles of real metal against real skin? How did a rich girl’s thwarted desire to paint look through the eyes of a person like that? “No. He didn’t cut off her hands.”

“Then she could paint, she was free.”

“But she didn’t know she was free. She couldn’t possibly see that. Doesn’t that make her chained?”

He shrugged, unconvinced, and a veil seemed to fall over his face to make his expression indecipherable. I felt a need—and this surprised me—to defend my mother, to convince the guest that she had been the victim of a subtle yet brutal psychic force, that she was a complex woman with wounds and flaws and a tenacious will that could be bent toward good things, like the protection and enfolding of a little girl. I said none of this, held it close inside, suspecting that the guest would not want to hear it, or would not receive it in the manner it was meant. I myself was not sure how I meant it, or what I actually believed. My head hurt. He, too, seemed taxed by the conversation: his skin was dripping copiously, as if he’d just risen from a plunge.

“And he?” he asked, eyes on the photograph again, on the man beside the bride. His voice was low and throaty. “Who is he?”

I should have known the question was coming. “A confusion.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

I waited for the guest to recoil from me, as I’d already said before that my father was an officer and surely that is more than enough information for repulsion; I had seen that look before, in Gabriel’s face, in Romina for years at school and in so many other faces that I knew exactly how to shield myself, make the surface impenetrable, the face composed, the subject of conversation changed and the stain of wordless crimes buried and hidden. Though no matter what I did,
I still felt my inner reaction keenly. Shame was ready at the base of me, would rise to choke me any moment at the slightest flinch of his body or mind. But he did not flinch or falter. He only looked at me with an open face and something in his eyes that I’d be tempted to call tenderness if it weren’t so ferocious and if tenderness, in this exchange, weren’t so absurd and impossible. Outside, it was raining; I hadn’t noticed until now. The window caught the weeping shivers of the sky. We stared at each other and listened to the sound of the rain.

“And you?” he said, very softly.

“Me?”

“Who are you?”

“About that, I don’t know anything at all.”

He tilted his head and held my gaze, and I had no way to comprehend it, no theory to encompass or articulate this hunger, this need to be with him, to lose or find myself in his dark, fathomless eyes.

“No,” he said. “No, no. You do.”

No one, on meeting my mother, Luisa, would imagine she had once been that earnest and ardent young woman, bent on becoming a painter, prowling the museums of Madrid. Even I, growing up in her presence, could not have imagined it. My mother the mystery, my mother the masked woman.

Once, only once, I saw my mother’s naked face. It was an accident, a slip, the result of a grave mistake. I was about to turn eight, and it was time for bed, but my heart was full of brightwarm colors because, the following day, Mamá was going to take me to the zoo for my birthday, and I would see the giraffes again with their slim legs and fluid jaws and serene eyes. Everybody thought the necks were what made giraffes special, but no, it was the eyes, I knew this because the last time I had met the gaze of my favorite giraffe our souls had spoken to each other for a long instant before the animal had turned back to her leaves. Eyes so far apart they seemed prepared to catch the
whole world in their vision. Eyes that gave me the sense of floating high high above the ground. And now I was going to see them again and, since it was my birthday, perhaps Mamá would let me stay with the giraffes extra long. Ice cream cone first, then the giraffes—that, I realized as I brushed my teeth, was the best way to do it. And once I was finished with brushing my teeth and hair, eager to share my plan, I barreled to my mother’s bedroom door and opened it with so much haste that I forgot the strict rule of knocking first.

Mamá was removing her makeup. This was a solemn, private nightly routine, conducted on a cushioned seat in front of a table and mirror surrounded by eight little bulbs of light. I had glimpsed moments of it in the past, though in general the ritual took place behind closed doors, and bore a shroud of mystic secrecy. A mound of dirty cotton balls lay on the table, between the jewelry boxes and vials of perfume. Mamá was half-finished: one of her eyes wore a perfect mask of black lines and blue shadow, while the other was naked and sunken, bereft of paint, staring wearily at its own reflection.