The Invisible Mountain (37 page)
Eva bared her teeth like a cougar; for the first time in Salomé’s life, she feared her mother’s attack. “How can you say I’m not proud?”
“Not of this job.”
“You’re not taking this job.”
“I am.”
“You’re sixteen, Salomé. I’m your mother, and I say you’re going to school.”
Salomé panicked, imagining herself dragged to class by the hair, Mamá stalking outside lecture halls, the job at the embassy lost, her reputation ruined in the eyes of Tinto, Leona, Orlando, Anna, faceless Tupamaros, the ghost of Che. “You’re just mad because you never studied.”
She instantly regretted saying it, or at least regretted having to see the thing that happened to Mamá, the stiffening, the draining out of any trace of cougar, trace of heat, leaving a shocked and empty woman in a bathrobe with all the seams exposed. Eva did not sway. She did not blink. She did not look at Salomé. The silence was so thick it left no room for breathing until her mother left.
Eva stayed in bed for three days. Salomé avoided her. Once, and only once, Abuela Pajarita broached the topic. “This job. It’s what you want?”
“
Sí,
” Salomé said, scrubbing the counter.
“You’re sure?”
“
Sí
.”
“Because you know you could study. We’d manage.”
Salomé wrung the dishrag fiercely. “Why doesn’t anyone trust me?”
On her first day, Salomé rose at 5 a.m. to perfect her bun, her blouse, her panty hose. The embassy was a maze of wide, glossy halls. Mr. Frank Richards, her new boss, offered her a crushing handshake. He had long sideburns and a rapid smile; a triangular sign above his desk read
BOSTON RED SOX
.
“So, you’re Salomé.” He led her to a bare desk and motioned for her to sit. “You Uruguayans finish high school so early. I never woulda known what to do at sixteen.” He took out a cigarette and a silver lighter. “Not that I know now.” His eyes squinted as he laughed.
She smiled pleasantly. This wouldn’t be too hard.
Mr. Richards brought her files to organize, files to translate, files to type into clean copies
(Here you are, Salomé
, she imagined him saying,
get that to the rebels at once)
. There were banal letters full of pleasantries and promises, requests for help from U.S. nationals, official declarations with little to say. On Salomé’s seventh day, President Gestido died and left Vice President Pacheco in power. Memos from Pacheco’s aides poured into the embassy. She snooped in Viviana’s files to read them. Pacheco vowed to be amenable to the United States’ concerns. Their friendship would be strengthened. Lyndon Johnson need not worry: the plague of socialism would be thoroughly addressed.
“Commendable,” Orlando said, receiving her report. It was stacked and tidy, full of well-organized recriminations. Leona beamed at her from across the room, in her banker’s uniform. Salomé had thought deployment would devastate Leona, but she’d only said
there’ll be time to study later, after the revolution
. Her faith in that coming era was unshakable.
At home, Mamá said nothing. She eyed Salomé’s tight bun and panty hose with suspicion. She treated her daughter like a sudden houseguest, deserving of civility but foreign to her house, whose proclivities and moods could not be gauged. A strange guest who worked for the
yanquis
and dressed like a drone and did not seem incensed by this man who now called himself president, who had already shut down newspapers, outlawed meetings, outlawed leftist parties, railed about the need for
strict force in Uruguay. Mamá, she wanted to shout, I’m not what you think—shut up about the censorship, shut up about the laws, I’m doing more about it than you could possibly imagine, and in fact, when we get out of this mess, if we ever get out of it, you’ll see my sacrifice and you’ll have me to thank. But she said nothing. She swallowed the picture of herself as an office girl, indifferent, eating her spaghetti without taking down her bun, while Mamá made futile complaints about the state of affairs, knowing just how the ritual would go: Abuelo would mutter something about security, Roberto would complain of disruptions at school, Salomé would shuffle food around on her plate, and Abuela Pajarita would make a tired but sincere comment about survival—
We’ll get through this
, for example—and encourage everyone to have seconds, to eat more, there was enough.
She found a haven for her lunch hour, on a bench in a nearby plaza. A stone general claimed the center, sword raised high, covered with pigeons and their droppings. She’d never read the general’s plaque and didn’t know who he was. How many people—how many thousands—fought and died for their country without having statues made of them? Who would grace the city’s plazas once the revolution won? I don’t want to be a statue, she thought, I just want to know that I was part of it. That I did something to help the change as it was coming, and can say so to my grandchildren: I knew the change was coming, I gave myself to it, I did everything I could; they’ll look into my face in wonder and be proud. Tell us again, they’ll say. Tell us all about it. I was fighting for you, so you could have a happy Uruguay, where everybody has enough to eat. They’ll be puzzled at the crazy past, where not everyone could eat, and they’ll grow up and grow old and tell their grandchildren. Salomé took another bite of her sandwich. I am fighting for you, she said in her mind, speaking to the city: you, Montevideo, flat and slow and unassuming, the only place I know, with all your hungry mouths and unsung charms, capital of a small land at the far end of the earth, where light falls on fractured pavement, where look, look, two old ladies now walk arm in arm toward a bench carrying purses that match their hats, and beneath those hats who knows what memories lie fallow. She finished her sandwich. The ladies were still walking. Their steps were infinitesimal, they
looked as though they’d never hurried in their lives, the journey to the bench could take all day. The wind rustled the leaves and Salomé’s collar and the skirts of the old ladies. Another day, another plaza, in this sweet-sad city. The general bore his pigeon shit in silence. The park bench held nothing but sun.
Six minutes left of her lunch hour. She threw crumbs at the agitated birds.
President Pacheco ruled by decree. He routinely overrode the constitution. He proclaimed union strikers to be subject to the draft, which enabled soldiers to open fire on them, force them back to work, and take them into custody in martial jails. Reporters wrote obliquely, burying hints of unrest in careful columns. Jobs were slashed, including Abuelo Ignazio’s, leaving him home each day, slumped on the sofa, staring out the window at the pale walls of the prison, which filled with political prisoners, from socialists to laborers to Tupamaros. His pension was paltry but the family could go on: Mamá still brought home cash from waiting tables, Abuela Pajarita still offered herbs and teas and listening ears in the back of Coco’s butcher shop, and Salomé, of course, brought home a decent salary. Roberto, now a star in the biology department, did not need to leave the university in order to bring home wages, nor did the family have to join the bread lines that coiled around blocks throughout the city.
Her days were soft and hard, soft and hard, the soft hot lips of Tinto, the hard slopes of guns (twenty of them, newer kinds, including M16s just like the ones being used against Vietnam), the soft wind she read instinctively for signs of danger, the hard heels of her pumps against the office floor, the soft voice of Abuelo as he told and retold stories of an older mystic sepia Uruguay, the hard doors that closed for secret meetings to begin.
The Movement gathered momentum. Membership swelled. Her cell now had eleven members, more elbows and less oxygen. It was 1968 and the world heaved and gasped and coruscated with uprisings, you could read all about it, they were everywhere, all over their continent and also
in Mexico City, Czechoslovakia, London, Paris, Vietnam, Warsaw, Berlin, Chicago, Australia, Japan, places she had never seen or touched but could connect to, was linked to already, one fleck in a gargantuan glittering web that spanned the globe, surrounded it, entangled it in sticky threads of change. Uprising threads. There was no escaping them. In her little peripheral country—she could feel it, sometimes, looking down a dusky street—she fingered the subtle reins of the world and it was true, wasn’t it, the ride to revolution, the slant into a gallop. The time had come for headlong hurtles that would never be forgotten, that historians of the future would write of in grand terms:
that’s where liberation began
. It called for intensity, concealment, sacrifice. Others sacrificed far more than she, like Orlando, for example, whose name had appeared on a list of people wanted for sedition and who now was in hiding. Tupas were wanted. They were notorious. Their name was banned from the press. Reporters could only use the words “criminal” or “terrorist.” One paper called them “The Nameless Ones,” and the office burned to the ground (buildings burn, thought Salomé, over our name!)—but the term stuck. She heard it on bus rides, in plazas, at kiosks downtown, over Coco’s glass cases of meat.
The Nameless Ones are at it again—they’ve just robbed a casino.
They’re just like Robin Hood.
They’re going to save us from this mess.
The Nameless Ones, they caused this mess, what are you talking about, idiot, they’re the problem.
They’re the cockroaches of Uruguay.
More like the heroes.
More like the caca.
They’re going to liberate this nation.
Pacheco won’t let them.
The Nameless Ones are smarter than him.
That’s for sure.
They care more about us too.
I hate them.
I applaud them.
Careful, don’t clap too loudly.
Why not? You see? We’re not free anymore!
The Nameless Ones are free.
How do you know?
It’s obvious.
Nothing about them is obvious.
You should ask them.
Ha!
I fear them, if you’ve got to know the truth.
I wish I had the balls to be one.
I wish that I could meet one because, let me assure you, I’ve got a load of things to say.
Even children heard the whispers, as Tía Xhana recounted one night.
“Señora Durán, she teaches third grade next door to me. She’s no sympathizer, I can tell you that.” Xhana poured wine into Ignazio’s glass. “But last week, she asked her students to write down a word, any word, that starts with ‘T.’ Nineteen of them—nineteen!—wrote ‘Tupamaro.’ So what did Señora Durán do? She tried to remove all the Robin Hood books from the school library. But guess what?”
A thick pause settled over the table.
“What?” Mamá said.
“She was too late. They were all checked out. Even kids know what’s going on.”
“As well they should,” said Mamá.
Abuelo Ignazio looked as if the potatoes had soured in his mouth. “How can The Nameless be a good lesson for children?”
“How can repression?” Mamá swung her hair, which she wore today in a loose and supple mane. “People need all the hope they can get.”
Abuelo rolled his eyes. Salomé pictured herself pouring hope—a viscous liquid stored in secret vats, now pouring onto streets, under cars, into gutters, over cobbles, right through walls, like the porridge in that story of the pot that wouldn’t stop. Wine swirled sharply against her tongue.
———
In December 1968, Roberto crossed the river to visit his father in Argentina for the summer. He packed his bag fastidiously and wandered the house with buoyant steps. He assured his girlfriend, Flor, on the phone,
Of course I’ll miss you, don’t be silly
, leaning absently against the wall. Salomé was invited too, but did not go. She was needed at her embassy deployment. Times were brutal, times were bright; even the Beatles had written a song called “Revolution.” The world sped at full tilt. There was work to do. And in any case, even though he’d offered, her father didn’t want to see her as much as he wanted to see Roberto, a reality made clear by the discrepancy between the conversations they had on the phone. With Salomé, their father was awkward, sometimes monosyllabic. With his son, he seemed to become animated, keeping him on the line for many minutes, with long stretches in which Roberto the younger listened avidly, nodding slowly, then finally responding with a comment related to his studies, or their father’s accomplishments, or a singular biological phenomenon that, of course, yes of course, he should know about, or how wonderful it would be to meet the scientists his father mentioned, eminent men, his father’s friends. Men Roberto the younger looked up to the way his peers looked up to John Lennon. She, Salomé, would be a nuisance on this trip, an afterthought at best, the girl who dropped out after high school, a mere secretary—what would they talk about? When she searched herself for feelings about her father, in the candid dark of sleepless nights, she found not love or hate or rage or even longing, but a hollow absence of emotion, a cavity so old it had no desire to be filled. She lacked the words to explain this to her mother, but fortunately, she didn’t need to. To Salomé’s surprise, Eva responded to her decision with an acceptance that bordered on relief. Her son seemed to cause her far more worry, with his obvious enthusiasm, his distraction during dinner, his preoccupation with what to take and what to leave behind, all of which Eva bore with a tense smile, as though the ride across the river were a ride away from her, as though the pull he felt toward his father might capture him, mothlike, and never fully deliver him home. On the day he left, Salomé stood at the ferry station between Eva and Pajarita, who waved and waved as he walked down the ramp, even though his back was to them. Finally he paused and turned and
they not only waved but called,
Adiós, adiós, llámanos
. They could have set a fire with the energy they generated, calling and waving and rising to their toes, and Salomé felt a sting of envy, not for the voyage, but for the ferocious love revealed in the good-bye.
