Perla (5 page)

It was quiet in the room; there were no cars on the street, all the neighbors were home behind closed doors. The tall lamp in the corner illumined a wide circle in the room, hemmed by silent shadows. The light was low, but gleamed gently in the wet drops on the man’s skin. I wondered whether he would ever dry, or whether he’d always appear this way, damp and clammy, as if freshly risen from the river. He was uninvited moisture. He had leaked into this house. I had every reason to find his presence an affront, to be enraged at his invasion, or at least to eject him in calm tones. Certainly he made me feel combustible, unsafe in my own skin. But though I didn’t know why, though the feeling shocked me, I did not want him to leave. It occurred to me then that there might be something the two of us had to do together, something ineffable, something I could not possibly do alone.

Perla, I thought, you’re delirious with the night.

Outside, it began, very softly, to rain.

3
Waters and Sorrows

M
orning came. I didn’t go to class. I left a message on my professor’s voice mail, something I’d never done before but it was so unlike me to miss school for any reason that I felt the need to explain. I’m running a high fever, I said, a strange summer virus. It wouldn’t be responsible to expose the rest of the class, and anyway, with my head in this state I won’t be able to apply myself. I said it all thinking I was weaving a big lie, but as I hung up it occurred to me that everything except the fever could be true.

The wet man slept on his patch of floor, his body curled into a loose ball. The rug around him was stained with water. I watched him breathe for a few minutes, taking in air, expelling it, his mouth slack. I wondered how old he was. In the morning sun his hair was still black with hints of green, his ash-white face unwrinkled—he could be my own age, twenty-two, or perhaps a couple of years older, twenty-five at most. But then again, he had been somewhere that could have changed his skin, darkened his hair, shifted his constitution in ways I couldn’t grasp. I was trying to fathom him, the bare essentials of his being; trying to open my thinking, my world, to contain what he claimed to be: one of the disappeared. One of the people who left for work and never arrived, or arrived at work and never came home, or went home and never emerged. People who left holes more gaping than the ordinary dead, because they can’t be grieved and buried, forcing their loved ones to carry their perpetual absence as though the absence itself were alive. Like Romina, with her missing uncles, and
her involvement with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, with whom she marched in sight of the Presidential Palace, a white kerchief around her face in protest. In the single year that we were close friends, I had always imagined the uncles’ absence as a dominating current in her house, sweeping the walls along with sunlight, murmuring under dinner conversations, lining the copious shelves of books. Of course that was all before we turned fourteen and Romina cut our ties in a single brutal gesture of disgust—or rage? or grief? or—after which there was no more speaking let alone dreaming between us, only glares at me in the hall that spoke with such ferocious naked force that I came to spend my high school years studiously avoiding Romina’s face. I imagined finding Romina now—an apparition in stern glasses, hovering in the hall—and saying Look, look, one of them is here, I don’t know how he got here but it’s true, he drips and stares like a human trout but he says he’s one of them, halfdead, undead, disentangled from the threads of nonexistence, he has not aged, could he be your uncle?

The apparition of Romina scowled and said, That’s impossible.

I know it seems impossible, but he’s here.

Not that, bitch. It’s impossible that my uncle would come to your house.

I stood, to dispel the vision, unsteady on my feet. I didn’t want to stay home, nor did I feel equipped to leave. I washed my face, but didn’t shower. Two cups of coffee for breakfast. For Lolo, boiled squash, which he picked at for a moment and then abandoned. I’d been boiling his food faithfully ever since I was old enough to be let near the stove. He hadn’t been able to eat lettuce in thirty-nine years, since before I was born, when he was my father’s turtle, and so mean, it is said, that my grandfather kicked him and broke his mouth. His mouth was still crooked from the injury. Occasionally he disappeared for days, and the squash I boiled for him would go untouched. I would worry about his hunger and demise until I saw him again, out in the open, alert, unperturbed, crooked jaw shut tight around the secret of
where he’d been. He was capable of immense stillness as well as a surprising gallop up and down the hall when the mood struck him. That bastard is strong, mean and strong, my father would always say, and shake his head in vexed admiration. Now, as I watched Lolo amble out, I wished I could crawl into his leathery head and dig up memories like buried stones. Because he was there when my father was a child, long before he became my father, when he was just a little boy called Héctor watching his own father kick a turtle in the face and break his jaw. A forceful boot, the rapid shatter of a mouth. Lolo had brought it on himself, or so the story went. What had he done? Walked too slowly? Too fast? Been too much underfoot? Perhaps he’d bitten his attacker first, though I’d never seen him bite anyone and could not imagine him doing so without provocation. And surely there were some provocations in the house that formed the boy who became Héctor, a house four kilometers away that smelled of medicines and disinfected floors, in which a childhood had unfurled that I had little knowledge of, barely a fistful.

Once, my mother had told me, when I was small and crying in my room because Papá was angry and I’d been bad and had to be punished,
Your father’s good to you, you know, he never hits you like his father did with him
. I was spoiled, the one who was not hit, escaping the fate of Héctor, and of Lolo. When we visited my grandfather, I saw a man who everyone said was ill but who seemed to possess a terrible charm, wearing his Navy colonel’s jacket just to sit at his own kitchen table, capable of mesmerizing a child, launching his special game that sent me hiding in the house without any seek, no one to come after me, no one to find me and pull me by the arm into the light. Yet still I breathed with quick exhilaration in the dark, counting to sixty as instructed, and then emerged a changed girl, always a changed girl, to find my grandfather talking to the grown-ups and to wait patiently (eyes on his feet, trying to discern which one had wounded Lolo years ago) until he looked at me and smiled, saying,
Well?
And I’d say,
Well
, not knowing what else to say.
Did you hide in the dark?
I nodded. Dark
places were always the best, the only true ones, for hiding.
How was it?
I never knew how to answer, what the right response was for the game, but no matter what I said, he always sent me out again.
This time count to eighty, if you can
.

The wet man awoke as I lit up my third smoke.

“Good morning.”

His body had not moved. His eyes wide open.

“Did you sleep well?”

“I don’t know.”

I tapped ash into the saucer on the table and tried to smile. “I’m staying home with you today.”

He glanced at the window without moving his head. He looked back at me. Eyes from the depths. Octopus eyes.

I got up, went to the kitchen, and returned with a glass and pitcher. “Hungry?”

He nodded, as if to say, I am voracious, I could devour the sea.

As I held the glass to the mouth of my guest, I felt terribly sad, and the sadness gaped inside me, faceless, formless, bottomless, ready to draw everything down into it, books, skies, cigarettes, the very texture of the day. It was not an unfamiliar sensation, but one that always came without warning. I struggled to keep it concealed, as I usually do, but this time the effort was futile: he stared at me with eyes so clear they could have read the emotions of a stone.

Sometimes, to hide your sadness, you have to cut yourself in two. That way you can bury half of yourself, the unspeakable half, and leave the rest to face the world. I can tell you the first time I did this. I was fourteen years old, standing in a bathroom stall holding the last note I would ever receive from my friend Romina, a note consisting of a single question in furious capital letters.

We had been in class together for years, but did not grow close until we were thirteen, when Romina began to have her
experience
.
That was her own word for it,
experience
, spoken in a hallowed tone that gave it an aura of great mystery.

“An
experience
,” I repeated blankly, the first time I heard of it.

“Come over tonight, I’ll show you,” Romina said.

I nodded. I wondered whether the
experience
had something to do with breasts. If so, Romina’s change was no great secret: on the contrary, it was sudden and astonishing, and had rapidly transformed a perennially mousy girl into an axis of hushed attention. Boys and also girls had started glancing sidelong at the blouse of her school uniform, under which those early and voluminous globes hummed—surely they hummed!—and pushed out curves that incited whispers and giggles and stares. They were fecund; they were bolder than their bearer; they sang themselves into the rounded air. I was fascinated by them too; I wanted (though I would never say this) to touch them, to explore their bulk and shape, the buoyant slope of them, their quiet yet absolutely incontrovertible presence. My own breasts had grown only a little so far, and could not possibly equal this capacity to command the center of a room. At night, in bed, I stroked my own breasts and wondered at their fresh swells, the soft-then-firming nipples, and, as I did, I wondered what Romina’s breasts would do under my fingers, how they would curve, how the supple skin would respond. The only thing more unbelievable than Romina’s breasts was her own reaction to them. She barely seemed to notice all the new attention. She had always been the kind of girl who stared out of the window and chewed her pencil to shreds and looked perfectly comfortable lunching alone, and her new reknown left that unchanged.

As it turned out, Romina’s
experience
had nothing to do with breasts, not talking about them and most certainly not touching them; it was nothing more and nothing less than the philosophical and aesthetic expansion of her world. She had begun exploring her parents’ bookshelves. That was all. I tried to hide my disappointment. That afternoon, she walked me back and forth in front of them, pointing out the spines of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Storni, Parra, Baudelaire,
Nietzsche, Vallejo, pulling out the volumes and spilling them open in her hands as if they had wills of their own. She had been sleeping with them under her pillow. She had been waking in the middle of the night and opening them to arbitrary pages, imbibing words, and then reciting them in her head as she drifted back to sleep. She had been rolling words around her mouth, consuming them like food, even instead of food. She had been thinking—and this, I realized, was a very concrete and important action in Romina’s world: her father, after all, was a philosopher, which meant that he had forged a life out of thinking, and that the university even paid him to do it, a notion that amazed me, far as it was from anything I had seen in my own family. Imagine! A man who is paid to think! What happens in such a mind (and such a household)? As Romina spoke, the sun gradually faded from the living room, casting huskier light along the books, and I touched the spines, with their embossed titles and names, wondering what it would be like to draw so passionately from a mere printed page, or, for that matter, draw so passionately from anything at all. By the time night had fallen, my disappointment had given way to curiosity: there was something hallowed and ecstatic about Romina’s relationship with the books that I had never seen before. I wanted to feel what she felt.

That night, I stayed for dinner, and Romina introduced me as That Girl Who Wrote the Story About the Disappeared, with a glow in her voice that surprised me and made me blush. It had been a year since the story had been published, and she had never said anything to me about it. The parents exclaimed,
A wonderful story, we loved it, how brave of you
, and a hot shame ran through me at accepting praise for this story that had brought so much trouble at home, that I had willed myself to renounce, because surely it was a bad story, wasn’t it, and I had been bad for writing it? Wasn’t it an embarrassment? Hadn’t it been woven out of lies? Romina’s parents did not seem to think so; the father grinned, the mother served me more potatoes, delicious potatoes, perfectly salted, crisp around the edges. At this table, I realized,
it was not my story that was embarrassing but something else, other parts of my life, the things my parents said. Even things they had done. It was a confusing thought, surrounded by cacophonous thorns. I pushed it down and said nothing so I could stay at this table and eat potatoes without breaking the spell.

We began to spend hours together after school, after homework was done, exploring books, ideas, poems, life’s great questions. We pillaged her parents’ bookcase, pulling volumes down, reading, and sharing our findings with each other. We built small fortresses around ourselves, with volumes as the bricks. We read chaotically, opening books at random, reading a page aloud, watching each other for wordless excitement or disinterest. If it lit us up, we continued. If it did not, we discarded it without a thought, like greedy children with an enormous box of truffles, abandoning one flavor for another after a single bite. I often had no idea what the words meant, but I didn’t say so, and if Romina didn’t understand them, she didn’t say so either. Tasting the words was enough. We approached them freely, without the pressure of analysis or even understanding, for the pure pleasure they incited. The words began to spin inside me, to sing to me of wakefulness and wanting and mystery and pain, to thread through my days and accompany me to class, to bed, to meals with my mother and father who I thought could not possibly understand what I was discovering, who read newspapers and popular novels but never lines of words like these, lines that could whip you from the inside.