The Invisible Mountain (23 page)
The Santos family home was a place of chandeliers and echoing halls and plush drapes that hid the windows. They ate in a taut silence, broken
only by the clink of terse knives on white china. Señora Santos, with her rod of a back and high lace collar, eyed Eva with frank skepticism. Señor Santos slumped over his soup, shaking his head between bites as if to a tragic opera he alone could hear. Eva punctuated the meal with pleasantries.
“What a beautiful home.”
Clink, clink.
“That portrait is lovely.”
Clink.
“The soup was exquisite, thank you.”
Roberto, to her right, bent his head over his plate like a man in prayer or penance. No one spoke. The maid cleared bowls and refilled wineglasses without a word. Halfway through the main course (herbed potatoes,
boeuf au vin)
, Eva resigned herself to quiet eating. The sauce was delicious, piquant, rich; she washed it down with long gulps of wine. She would have mopped it with her bread if it hadn’t seemed undainty. Her wineglass seemed to fill of its own accord (the maid was skilled, unobtrusive—she looked a bit like Mamá had in old photos, the hair, the glow-black eyes). Eva felt Señora Santos’ eyes on the red pour as it landed in her glass. She sat up straighter. The silence was palpable, it almost had flesh, it stretched along the table like a muscle, flexing, issuing its challenge. The chocolate mousse arrived in crystal goblets. She lifted a silver spoon. She would make it through dessert. She had faced many challenges in her life; surely she could survive a chocolate mousse. The thought made her laugh—a short, sharp cackle. Ha-ha-ha! The three of them—his father, his mother, Roberto himself—stared at Eva. Roberto flushed; his mother pursed her lips; his father’s mouth hung open. She waited for shame to heave its mantle over her, but she felt only the weight of the gold necklace at her throat. She held her head high (necklace sparkling, she imagined, in the candlelight), and smiled.
“I love chocolate. Don’t you?”
She took a bite of mousse (so sweet, so heavy). Señora Santos sent back her own dessert.
“Don’t worry,” she said to Roberto on the car ride home. “They’ll come to accept me.” She leaned against his arm. They would because they had to. Roberto took her hand and curled their fingers into a knot.
The day before her wedding, Eva received a package that held a gift wrapped in tissue, and a letter.
Dear Eva
,
Congratulations. I want to meet him. I want your marriage to be very happy
.
Please send photographs. Everybody wants to see. Artigas asks about you often. He is in good health, drumming every day, often with César, Xhana’s fiancé, who is a wonderful drummer—you remember him of course? They are getting married next month. Xhana is teaching history. And she’s one of the best dancers in all of Carnaval. You really should see
.
More news: Mirna has had another boy—you’re an aunt, again. And Coco’s granddaughters are growing up to be fine girls. Ay, you should see them, Eva, almost
muchachitas
and so pretty—can you believe I am such a lucky grandmother? It’s just too bad their good-for-nothing uncle Andrés is still not writing home. If you see my son (you
must
know something!) tell him he’s broken our hearts and he should come back where he belongs
.
Back to your Mami
.
I never had a wedding dress
, hija,
so I can’t send you mine to wear. Take this instead. Something old. Something blue. I made it from the curtain that was my wedding bed. The first time I ever saw your father, he was walking out from behind this curtain on a ridiculous little stage. Well. You are missed
. Cuidate.
Love
,
Mami
——————
ACROSS BLACK WATER,
A SECRET SEA
F
ine things filled her life: a house in La Recoleta with an entrance flanked by pillars and a perfect hedge, four-course meals from a cook trained in Toulouse, five boxes of jewelry, warm legs beside her own at night, damask drapes, silver platters, Louis XIV chairs, enough ingredients—surely more than enough—for brewing happiness.
Eva retreated into the house as though it were a huge cocoon. There would be time for the world, but first she sank into the luxury of avoiding it. While her husband spent long days at the hospital, she spent languorous afternoons in the study, suffused in dusty sunlight and the orgiastic scent of old books. She fell into epics, novels, history, reading greedily until the light had drained entirely from the sky. When Roberto arrived, they ate at the long dining table. He talked about his day. She nodded at his stories, smiled at his triumphs, ruffled her forehead sympathetically at his complaints. Later, upstairs, he unwrapped her clothing like a present. Pinned beneath him she would feel as if no wind could sweep her away, no storm disturb the rocking anchor of his weight.
Eventually, she ventured out, a refined lady now in silk and gold. She spent hours composing poems alone in chic cafés. She bought books by the armful. She attended parties where guests sipped Veuve Clicquot and engaged in calculated banter. She quickly learned to ply her wit with politicians, intellectuals, aristocratic women with sleek hair. Some were stiffer with her than others but she held her head up high and kept on beaming. After all, what could they do? It was a new era, when even the
first lady could come from poverty, be called a whore behind affluent hands, yet step into the limelight with ferocity. No apologies from Evita Perón. At home, Eva listened to her speeches on the radio.
Perón is everything, the soul, the nerve, the hope of
argentinos.
I am only a simple woman who lives to serve Perón
. The lavish chairs and carpets could catch fire from the sheer heat of that voice. Eva could almost see the spreading flames.
One cannot accomplish anything without fanaticism! It is well worth burning up our lives!
Photos filled the papers: Evita at her office, where droves of Argentina’s poor came knocking, every day, asking for help, receiving money, dentures, meals, smiles, shoes, sewing machines, toys, imported rugs, imported curtains, promises of more help to come; Evita in opulent Parisian gowns, dripping with diamonds, laughing toward the camera; Evita at the microphone, face wrenched with speech, hand high as if about to wave or slap. Eva cut out pictures and kept them tucked in folded underclothes, hidden from Roberto. Roberto did not like the Peróns.
“They’re fascists,” he said, straightening his tie in the morning.
Eva nodded blankly.
“They control more each day.”
She smoothed his collar.
“We have to be careful. Stay on their good side.”
“Certainly,
mi amor
.”
Sometimes, deep in the night, she dreamed she was Evita and a throng of children pressed into her bedroom. They were barefoot. The women followed close behind. She shook Roberto, in bed beside her, but he wouldn’t wake. The women and the children put their arms out, open-palmed, demanding, and then Mami was among them with scissors in her hand, she didn’t look at Eva, she began to slice the satin bedclothes, and Eva tried to gather sheets around her, tried to scream, but the children had grown bigger, were suddenly young men, tearing at bedclothes with hungry hands. On good nights she woke up before they reached her.
After two years of marriage, Eva gave birth to a son. Roberto. Robertito. His first cries pierced the air and seemed to shatter it. She longed to quiet him with her body, fill him with her milk, but Roberto had made
other arrangements. Her son was whisked into the next room, where a wet nurse waited.
“Don’t worry,” the delivering doctor said. “Just rest.”
For months Eva ached for her baby. She lingered fiercely at his cradle while he slept. The wet nurse was called María: a ripe young woman, maddeningly sweet, offering a softness those tiny hands now recognized, pouring what Eva had let dry. Her breasts were wastelands. She was a lady now, had a role to play, a part with no room for babies sucking at her body. Her son grew larger. She barely knew him. She saved his shoes. She couldn’t help it, the urge was primal, subterranean, and anyway she did it secretly, there was no one to mind. She played her part impeccably. Señora Santos, Doctor’s Wife, Charming Lady, Really a Delightful Poetess. Did You See Her Recent Verse in
La Nueva Palabra?
Quite enchanting. Elite salons opened their doors to her. Even her poems had to fit into her role: she was not, after all, some anonymous girl, some immigrant waitress no one cared about. She mattered; she was seen; her words could lift or stain her husband’s career. She corralled her poems into good-wife themes—domestic joys, devoted love, the sweetest slices of motherhood. She also combed each line for anything that could be construed as anti-Peronist. There were writers and editors who’d gone into exile.
If I have to apply five turns to the screw each day for the happiness of Argentina
, Evita shouted,
I will do it
. Eva’s poems grew as sculpted as the hedges around her house.
She didn’t mind. It was her duty. When she was tempted to write with too much heat, she took cold baths to drain the poems out of her.
I chose this life, she thought, naked, gritting her teeth against the cold. So I will live it.
Hard white tiles gleamed at her from all sides.
Eva’s second child arrived on a day that seemed to rip her into two. The girl shot out red and screaming; Eva was screaming; their voices formed a jagged fugue. The nurse swaddled the baby in a blanket and took her away. Eva calmed her breath. She waited until the room was almost empty. Only she and a single medical student remained.
He approached her.
“Bring me my baby.”
He scanned the empty room.
“Please.”
“It’s against the rules.”
“I know.”
“It might take a while.”
“Fine.”
The young man studied her. His face was stocky, earnest, in need of a shave. He left the room. Eva waited. The ceiling tiles weren’t moving anymore. She watched them do nothing in their perfect rows. The student returned, darting in quickly, a jewel thief with loot wrapped in a blanket. He laid the baby on Eva’s chest, a tiny face, so clean now, strange and wizened, alien, delicate, eyes shut, skin pink, fingers squirming in the unfamiliar texture of the air.
The student was also staring at the baby. “Have you chosen her name?”
“Yes,” Eva said, having prepared for a girl one month prior, in the library with a play by Oscar Wilde.
I am athirst for thy beauty
, the heroine had said.
Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion
, and that line had rushed into her, had seemed to redeem the horror that came next. “Salomé.”
“Salomé?” He frowned. “Isn’t she the one who beheaded John the Baptist?”
“Yes.”
“You know the story?”
“Yes.”
He cocked his head and stared at her with new intensity. Footsteps rang out in the hall, then faded. He looked at the baby again. He was quite handsome. Eva wondered whether this was his first birth.
“Salomé,” he said slowly, as if tasting the word. “What will she do?”
Eva adjusted her daughter’s frail weight on her breasts. “Do?”
“With her life. Isn’t that strange, the pure potential of one life?”
Eva said nothing. The student closed his eyes and laid a hand on
the tiny head. Salomé leaned into his palm with total trust. “You can do anything, Salomé. Change the world, the course of history. It’s all possible.”
Eva was exhausted and rapt and vaguely embarrassed, as if she’d stumbled into someone else’s private ceremony. She wanted to swallow Salomé back into her body. She wanted to shout at
this joven
to stop interfering, to leave them alone, to stay near them always. The intimacy he’d struck up was unbearable. Salomé’s face crunched, she whimpered, and Eva peeled off her hospital gown and pulled the baby to her nipple. The small mouth groped for her.
“It may take a while,” he said, “for milk to come.”
The baby-mouth found the nipple. Nothing came out. Salomé began to cry.
“If I may,” the student said, and reached for Eva’s breast. Adjustment, pinching, baby-soothing,
there, there
, and then the mouth arrived again and it began, the smallest trickle, stinging from Eva’s body. The young man looked away at the wall.
“What’s your name?”
“Ernesto.”
“Your last name?”
“Guevara.”
“Señor Gue—”
“Just call me Ernesto.”
“Ernesto. Thank you.”
He nodded. “I should take her. Once she’s done.”
“Of course.”
They waited until Salomé’s mouth softened its grip. Eva pried her away and handed her to Ernesto. His hand was on her baby’s head again, holding it up, a necessary touch, but Eva felt the urge to call out,
Stop, you thief
.
“Shall I turn off the light?”
“Please.” She pulled her gown back up and watched them leave.