The Invisible Mountain (16 page)

A fist flew at her face. She reeled back, the taste of iron on her tongue. He punched her again and she fell against the wall and braced herself for more blows, and when they came she was ready, covered, limp, far away from the man whose body had so much to say. When he stopped, she waited to make sure that he was done. Silence. She looked out. He was staring at his hand, watching it curl open, close, open again. He looked at her with crumpled eyes. He looked as though he might say something but there was iron in her mouth, sparks in her head, a space between them that was ripping wider, a steep black rift into which she would not fall.

She said, “I will never speak to you again.”

She stood shakily and walked down the hall. She heard him call out, but it didn’t sound like Spanish and she had never learned Italian. In the bathroom, she changed the blood-swelled paper, and scanned herself in the mirror. A cut at her lip, slightly darkened, no teeth lost.

She lay in bed and railed against the creep of numbness. Her legs were fading, but no, they could not go this time; what would happen to her new job if her legs disappeared? Don’t go, don’t fall, don’t die, you have to stay. Papá was not the world, and though it broke her in two to think of him, her mind had other places to fly, like the luminous thought of Pietro’s skin burning with pain, and La Diablita, with its bright warm smells, its bustling noise, its air that crackled, crackled, calling to that nub in her she’d thought would never flower but that waited (dense, explosive) under her skin.

The café’s colors reared toward her as in dreams, from brown wood walls, brown hair glistening in candlelight, a brown piano pouring songs, black dresses, black slick keys trembling all night, black kohl emboldening the curves of women’s eyes, pale cigarette smoke, pale pearls around pale necks, red chairs, red tables, red lipstick, bright red laughter, dark red wine.

He wanted to know her secrets, that man who was her father. Where she worked. What she was doing. What was in her mind. On the first night, he’d knocked—“Eva? Evita?”—six separate times on her bedroom door, every hour on the hour until dawn, and she kept thinking he would come in—there was no lock, after all—but he didn’t open the door and she didn’t either. The second night he made two visits that consisted of pure knocking. On the third night she came home from work at 3 a.m. to a note on her bed, in that handwriting of his that looked like a series of tiny balloons:
I’ll be awake. This is your last chance
. She tore it into pieces and flushed it with her urine.

Pride settled on Papá, a cloak that grew stiffer with wear. They glided past each other as though pretending to ignore a ghost. They spoke to everyone in the room except each other.

“Marco, pass the
salsa golf
.”

“Ask Papi—it’s right in front of him.”

She scowled at her brother. “Marco.”

“This is ridiculous! Papá, your daughter wants the
salsa golf
.”

“I have no daughter.” Ignazio skewered a boiled potato on his fork. “
No puta
is a daughter of mine.”

She told her mother she was a waitress, and not, in fact, a
mujer de la calle
, despite the makeup, the late nights, a new blouse cut lower than ever before.

“It’s a restaurant in La Ciudad Vieja. Good pay.” Eva spread a wad of pesos on the counter, as if presenting a winning poker hand. “Here, take it.”

Pajarita kept wiping the kitchen sink. She didn’t look at the cash. “What happened with your father?”

“Nothing.”

Mamá turned that gaze on her, the one that made Eva feel transparent. “
Hija
. You don’t have to do this. Other things are possible.”

She absorbed her mother’s face, her smell, her hands perched on the counter. She saw gray for the first time, just a strand or two invading the long slide of her hair. Rage flashed through Eva. It breached all decency that those braids could change, that any thread of that solid black should fade, that her mother—that any woman—could go gray without ever once in her life having worn a silk dress.

“Like what?”

“You could come to the
carnicería
. I could teach you.”

The morning sun was ruthlessly egalitarian: it lit the pesos and the dishrags, the rosemary and sage leaves and the chipped rims of their pots. Outside, the milkman jingled his bell and reined his horse. Eva heard it neigh in gentle resignation. She knew there was another Uruguay, outside this city and under it and even in her house: a Uruguay where women grew up sleeping on cow skins and sitting on skulls and where they never learned to read, learned instead to make bitter teas for dowdy women who gossiped in butcher shops. But Eva could read—and she had read that story about the girl who fell down the rabbit hole and discovered vibrant things; she could be that girl, she had found that place, in an old stone building filled with candles, rubies, poets, imported cigarettes, red wine. The milkman’s horse clopped away down the cobblestones. And anyway, it wasn’t as if Mami really needed her. She had Mirna now, and if Marco married that stupid, sap-sweet girl from La Blanqueada there’d be more than enough daughters to go around, daughters much nicer and cleaner than she was.

“Where is the place?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Her mother studied her. “You’re safe there?”

“Very safe. The waitresses are nice. They help me learn.”

Eva’s fellow waitresses taught her the mysterious arts of serving liquor, rouging cheeks, and smoking as a means of seduction. “
Mira,
” Graciela purred. “You purse your lips like this.” Smoke emerged from her red mouth: svelte, white, undulating. “Try it.” Eva tried. Her smoke puffed out in random clumps and made Graciela laugh. She would get it. She knew she would. How could she not, with these
chicas
as big sisters and she so eager for corruption? She listened to their jovial analyses of La Diablita’s customers. That eminent writer at the corner table was lying to all his girlfriends. These opulent patrons sipping Chardonnay fancied themselves art benefactors but gave stingy tips. The bohemian students discussing Batlle, Bolívar, and Marx would each give his right arm for a date with Eva. “Watch how their eyes trail you,
nena
. It’s obvious.” But Eva was most drawn to a circle of poets that gathered every weekend in the back room, behind the beaded curtain. Eight of them tonight, all young except the Well-Known Poet, who presided over them and spoke slowly so the
joven
with the little blue notebook could write down what he said. These were poets—real live ones. She could tell by the lyrical way they waved their cigarettes. She approached the table and placed glasses before them, one by one, listening for snippets to jot down on her covert papers.

A lanky man was talking. “If only Hitler could hear your ‘Ode to Struggle.’ ” That voice. She looked closer at his wiry face and it was him, Andrés Descalzo, talking with poets as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He seemed to feel her stare on his skin, and before she could say his name he turned away. “Especially that line about washing the enemy’s feet. What an incisive image.”

Eva filled a wineglass. She understood. In this room, he was not—had never been—the Little Butcher. His ironed ivory shirt was plain compared to his comrades’ clothes but finer than anything his family wore. She slipped back through the beaded curtain.

“A dance, please.”

“
¿Perdón?
” she said, thinking that, in the din, she’d misheard the name of a drink.

“I’d like to order a dance. Or, perhaps ‘humbly beg for’ would be better?”

They were all looking at her. He was not attractive, not to her, with that graying hair, that rolling laugh, those knuckly hands that were so much like Pietro’s. But his eyes were kind.

“Yes.”

He lit up with complacence.

“ ‘Humbly beg’ is much better.”

The Poet flushed. He ignored the snickers. “Well, by all means, then, let me beg.”

There was no dance floor. They went to the corner by the piano. Eva had not danced since the storeroom lessons. The music rose; she held her breath; she pressed her cheek against the Poet’s. Her body snapped into the angles of the tango, still there, still beating. Jaimecito, the pianist, enthused, let his voice rise to a wail:
Como ríe la vida—Si tus ojos negros me quieren mirar
—she remembered this, could move this way, could spin and dip and careen with precision. The Well-Known Poet led clumsily, but it didn’t matter; the grace was in the bone-beat, in the blood, in the song as it waxed warm—
y un rayo misterioso—
and urgent
—hará nido en tu pelo—
and hands began to clap in time, and mouths whistled, and the Well-Known Poet actually found his stride; their bodies both said Turn at the same time, then said Swoop down, and Jaimecito sought an ambitious climax beyond his vocal range:
florecerá la vida, No existirá el dolor
. The song ended with a boisterous ripple of the keys and applause. She was giddy. She was shy. Graciela yelled from the kitchen door. The Poet glittered. “
¡Qué cosa! Will
you come sit with us?”

“I have to work—”

“Surely you could take a moment?”

“I’m on shift until midnight.”

At midnight Eva crossed the beaded curtain, not to serve, but to sit. The Well-Known Poet introduced her to the others: Joaquín, the eager college student with the faithful notebook; Pepe, a literature student with a crisp collar (surely ironed by his maid); Carlos, a kind young lawyer with enormous ears; Andrés; and Beatriz, a glowing
muchacha
with unlikely red hair.

“We were just discussing Moradetti’s new volume,” the Well-Known Poet told her. “Have you read him?”

“
Por favor
.” Pepe straightened his cuffs. “Don’t torment our poor waitress. She is paid to wait tables, not to analyze trends in poetry.”

“Now, now—”

“No, he’s right.” Eva formed a fist under the table. “Poets don’t pay me to read them. They don’t have to. I read Moradetti entirely for free.” She smiled. “Why? Did he pay you?”

Pepe coughed. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Of course not,” Eva said.

The next three hours were a gilded blur. The poets talked; they argued; they bantered and drank and talked some more. Moradetti turned to Mussolini, Mussolini to the purpose of art, art’s purpose to modernism (controversial) to the charms of French desserts. Glasses emptied. Ashtrays filled. Eva leaned forward to listen, leaned back to think. She was awake, alive, full of ideas like branches in a greenhouse, growing thick and rife against the glass.

On her way home, she felt more than saw Andrés walking in the same direction, on the other side of the street. He crossed the darkness to join her. They didn’t speak. They walked out of La Ciudad Vieja, down the house-lined streets of Parque Rodó. An old, wiry woman smoked a cigar on a yellow stoop. Through green curtains, Eva saw a silhouetted couple slow-dancing to a phonograph. The song was muffled and mournful. Eva’s and Andrés’ steps rang out on the sidewalk, her sharp little heels and his heavier, deep-toned shoes.

“Where do they think you live?” she asked.

“Pocitos.”

“Ah.”

“Have they asked about your family?”

“My father imports French jewelry. My grandmother’s a clingy pain. That’s how I keep them from holding readings at my house.”

“I see. And poetry?”

“
¿Qué?
”

“Do you write poetry?”

Andrés slowed his steps, and she felt him thinking, a crackle and hum in the air between them. “I don’t know whether I write poetry, or poetry writes me. Sometimes I feel like all of it—the world, my body, each move I make—is turning into a poem. It’s excruciating. I can’t breathe until I write.” His head was bent toward the ground, dark curls against his cheek. “It must sound crazy.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“Is it that way for you?”

He touched her shoulder. His hand was full of heat that stung her body. She thought back to the one thing she’d written, before, before everything. “Perhaps.”

They kept walking. The houses grew plainer: flat-roofed boxes pressed up side by side. “Remember,” she said, “when we were children?”

“Of course.”

“We were pirates—”

“Yes—”

“Finding treasures in the floor!”

Andrés laughed edgily. “Treasures in a butcher shop. There’s a feat of imagination.”

In the silver wash of moonlight, he looked ethereal, otherworldly, a man (a boy) who felt the world turn into poems, a butcher’s son, born to inherit cleavers, bloody aprons, meat hooks and their meat. She listened to the mingled sounds of their footsteps.

A few doors before Eva’s, Andrés kissed her on the cheek. His skin felt like clean linen. “Good night. Keep coming. Don’t let snotty Pepe scare you off.”