Perla (29 page)

“It’s their house. Héctor and Luisa’s house.”

“I understand.”

He was studying me now. I felt my nakedness. I thought of inviting him to sit but there was no dry surface to offer, so I just stood and let him look at me. In that moment, I realized that no matter what words I chose and no matter how much time I spent in telling, I would never be able to express my full experience. If I tried, he might choose to believe me—or pretend to believe me, for my sake, kind as he was—or he might discount the stranger parts of my story and try to rationalize them away. But it didn’t matter. No matter what he really thought, no matter what I did or did not say, what had happened in this room—everything I’d seen and felt and come to understand—was impossible to convey to him, or to anyone. There are some experiences that only you can enter, that only you can truly hold. They are too vast to be imparted. You cannot even hold them wholly in your arms: they spill over into the dark beyond you, brimming, shooting out in ropes of light that make you ache with loneliness and yet yoke you to the world at the same time, because the vast things that have happened to you, however terrible, were always born out of the world, and so perhaps they offer you a place even as they push you out of another, even as they weigh you down with a self that can never fully be conveyed. Though most of us will try. We make bonds, we grow trust, we tell stories; we strive to articulate what
it took to become who we are. Sometimes, if we’re very fortunate, our listeners catch authentic glimpses of what we mean to say, like sparks in a dark room, but never the whole of it at once, not even with the best of friends or closest lover, because the whole of it at once is beyond speaking. It lives nowhere, absolutely nowhere, except inside your skin. That’s where it flares, enormous, hazardous, utterly yours.

Finally, Gabriel stepped toward me. I owed him some kind, any kind, of explanation, and I opened my mouth to try.

But then he said, “So this is what you wanted to show me.”

The room, I realized. He meant the state of the room. “It wasn’t this.”

“No?”

“It was more than this. What came before it.”

He stepped closer, and took my wet hand in his. “Perla,” he said. “It’s all right. You thought this would scare me away, but it doesn’t. I can see why you did it.”

“You can?”

“Of course. With everything you’ve been through.”

“But there’s more, Gabriel. A lot happened these last few days.”

“I can imagine.” He stepped closer and embraced me. His hands on my back, they could surely hold up anything, a crumbling tower, a wounded tree. “We’ll go home and you can tell me all about it.”

“But I can’t show you anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“My father’s gone.”

Softly, he asked, “Which one do you mean?”

“Both of them. They’re both gone.” I was weeping now. “Everybody’s gone.”

“I’m not gone,” he murmured into my hair. “And neither are you.”

I didn’t fight the tears.

He was right. I wasn’t.

13
Homecoming

T
he man and his wife arrived home late at night after a ferry ride from Uruguay, during which he stared out the window at the water spreading long and black in all directions, the water of the sea and then, gradually, though no one could say precisely where the shift occurred, the water of the river, still black and long and spread out like the mantle of a king in mourning.

His wife did not speak to him on the ferry or in the taxi ride that followed. Hours before, he had begged her to let him speak to their daughter first alone,
Give me a chance first
, but she had only said,
She already knows, there’s no undoing that
, to which he had responded by slamming the suitcase shut on their vacation bed. On the ferry and also in the silent taxi he formed the words he would say to his daughter, carefully sculpted sentences he would not have the chance to speak because, when he arrived home and opened the door, he was met with a bizarre smell that made him afraid for his daughter, for what had happened in the house while he was gone. Though perhaps, he thought, she herself had caused the smell by leaving something (what on earth?) to decay and spread its stink inside their house, she should know better, he called her name in a stern voice as he turned on the light.

The devastated room reared up at him. Sofa, walls, books, all things soaked and destroyed. He looked and looked around him, called his daughter’s name and looked in his study, the kitchen, the hall, came back into the living room where his wife stood still as a
pillar. Then he saw the painting, the one created by his lost sister, of a ship at sea, the wall around it stained with streaks of water. The painting alone had withstood harm, its blue oils still miraculously in place. The ship rose from the waves with an unconquerable strength that struck him as almost violent.

I could kill her, he said.

His wife answered, You won’t have the chance.

What is that supposed to mean?

She’s gone.

I’ll find her.

She’d still be gone.

No, I’ll hold her down and—

Héctor, she’s lost to us. It’s over.

He was shocked by the cold edge in her voice, and the way she did not turn to look at him while speaking. No, he said. No. He ran up the stairs in search of his daughter, calling her name in sharp barks at first, and then in long protracted cries, her name, her name, the one he gave her when she was a little precious thing he salvaged from the depths of hell, that’s how I chose your name, because of the way I dove for you,
hija
, that’s how we started, how you became mine, you were not in the world until I brought you here because that nether place where you were born cannot be called part of the world and I was the one who fished you out of there, it was me, and no one else. As he reaches the upstairs landing, he recalls the very first time he saw her, the way she stared at him, and how he thought
a fish, she has the eyes of a fish
. She was four days old and, though in the coming days and nights there would be countless tears, at that moment she was not crying. She had just woken from a nap in a wooden drawer in a dim room. He had approached her quietly, thinking she was still asleep, but when he reached her side she turned and fixed her gaze on him, a black-eyed gaze that did not blink and seemed to have no bottom. Her gaze made the room—made the whole accursed building—disappear. Were all newborns like this? He did not know. He had no experience with babies. He had never heard of such a thing, of a person falling
into a newborn’s eyes the way a stone falls to the depths of the sea. With eyes like that no one would ever say she looked like Luisa, he thought, but no matter, she is still right for us, she is the one. He wondered, that first day, whether her eyes would lose that strange power over the years but they did not. You don’t know that story, do you,
hija
? Of course you don’t, there are so many things you don’t know, so many things you can’t begin to understand, now where are you, where are you, not in the bathroom, not in the hall, your room is in turmoil but you are not in it, the master bedroom is empty and the walls in here are screaming with the lack of you, and his joints loosened as if the glue of him had suddenly dissolved, bringing him slowly to his knees. His wife came up behind him and placed her smooth hands on his two shoulders, whispering, Let her go.

We’ll get her back.

It’s too late.

No.

She’s not our daughter anymore.

How can you say that? he asked, although he knew this woman well enough that he felt no surprise. His wife’s heart was a maze, things could fall into it and get lost without a trace, never to be seen or spoken of again. It was not a closed heart, exactly, but a complex one, full of darkened convolutions that were better left unprobed. And in any case, there was plenty to incriminate the girl; the water in the fine Italian sofa could never be expunged. He, for one, did not care about the sofa or the walls or the books, although he could not stand the thought that anyone would try to damage the painting, Mónica’s painting, the last vestige of his sister,
hija
, how could you, if only you’d known Mónica who was a goodgirl once for all her delusions and mistakes, the one who brought me soup during my fevers, who taught me how to skate and catch beetles and steal the cookies in a manner where no one would find out. She was a lot like you, her face was similar to yours, if you’d stood side by side the whole world would have believed, without the shadow of a doubt, that you were related.

He said, No. I can’t let her go.

She said, You have no choice. If you saw her now, what would you say?

He tried to form the conversation in his mind, the one he’d have with his girl, his daughter. He would rage at her, he would try to explain, she would melt and come back to him. Or she would resist until he became stern and his words broke her. Or he would be stern and try to break her but she would not let him, the girl capable of that downstairs room might keep on looking at him steadily with eyes that did not bend and then—and then—he could not complete the thought because dark water flooded his imaginings the way it had come to flood his house, and he was suddenly awash with memories, the ones of which he never spoke, they rose against his will and drenched his mind with sights and smells and sounds he had to push back and push back with all the force of a drowning man and then he realized, to his horror, that to keep those memories pushed back he had to let his daughter go. Only then did he see what he had lost, and it was radiant, like the sun. Like the sun, it blinded.

14
You

T
he day after my escape, I went to Las Abuelas’ office, a warm, cluttered space in downtown Buenos Aires. I was welcomed by Marta, a kind woman with a yellow cardigan and sad eyes. She listened to me for longer than I expected to talk. She asked questions, but did not press for answers when I could not bear to give them. She filled out a form for me and arranged for the drawing of my blood. It would take a few months, she said, to decode the DNA. Did I want to look at the book of disappeared parents? I shook my head. I did not want to look. I had done as much as I could do on one evening. I left the office and took the elevator and once outside in the warm March air I thought,
Now what?

I didn’t know.

The city was so full, I was so empty.

For the next nine hours I walked and walked the streets, searching without knowing what I was looking for, staring at doors and faces and gutters with the slow intensity of an exile, though whether I was returning to my homeland or newly cast adrift in an unknown place, I could not say. Night fell and the streetlights came on. I lost my way. After five hours, my feet throbbed with pain. I thought of a fairy tale I’d read long ago, about a mermaid who longed to live on land. A witch transformed her tail into human legs, but condemned her feet to agony—every step would feel as though she were traversing shattered glass—so she would never forget her foreignness, never forget her liquid home. But I’m not a mermaid, I thought, I have no home.
I walked on, block after block, on boulevards and through alleys, and my legs propelled me forward with surprising force despite the throbbing feet, and who knows, perhaps my legs were in fact bewitched. After all the madness I had seen, why not believe in this strange story? New legs for a new life. Fresh limbs for a broken girl. No, I thought, a broken
woman
—and this made me laugh aloud, not caring about the people glancing at me from a sidewalk café with eyes that said
that one’s gone mad
. I walked right past them and continued on, across the street, around the corner, lost in the unceasing maze of Buenos Aires.

In the weeks that followed, I did very little. I spent long hours on Gabriel’s balcony (it’s
our
balcony, he would say), where I studied or pretended to study while the sun fell copiously on textbook pages. I sat alone in the apartment with Lolo, who had accompanied me as a stowaway in my purse, and stared at him as he stared at the wall. I cooked dinner with Gabriel, grateful for his chatter as well as for jazz albums that filled the silences so I did not have to. On some nights, we made love; on others he held me in his arms and demanded nothing from me, not even an explanation for my tears. I could not have explained them, not even to myself.

At school, I was able to catch up and retain my academic standing, largely thanks to Marisol, who provided me with class notes, study sessions, and, above all, the listening ear of true friendship. When you change, some friends don’t follow you where you’re going, and they fall away, whether abruptly or over time. This happened with most of my friends, but not with Marisol. In fact, we became closer than ever.

“I like this new Perla,” she said to me one day.

“She’s more fragile than the old one,” I said.

“No, she’s not. She just knows what she’s made of.”

In the mornings, I often lay in bed for a long time before opening my eyes. It was strange to awaken in the heart of the city rather than at its margins, the throaty songs of car engines already in my ears, along with passing radios, raised voices, the inconsequential dramas of everyday urban life. At first it bothered me to have my mind infused
with the city like that, with no respite, but soon I grew addicted and could not imagine waking any other way.

I thought often of the man who had been my guest. The time I’d spent with him seemed like the most real time of my life, more vivid than the years before it. I felt his absence keenly, but there were also times when I could have sworn I sensed his presence. I smelled him in the thick weight of a hot day, a sudden whiff of fish and copper that could not be traced to the open window or the kitchen. Or I’d hear a splash when no water lurked nearby. Or a wisp of lullaby hummed toward me in the depths of the night. And then I’d want to reach for him, to run for him, but it was impossible to know which way to run—whether I could find him to the left or right, forward or back—so instead I’d light a cigarette and send the smoke into the sky like a furled message. I wished that I could follow him wherever he’d gone.