The Invisible Mountain (32 page)
Dear
Familia,
Hello hello I miss you so much you can’t imagine. When I landed here I was in one piece and I still am. I sweat a lot and do not sleep and I am happy. There is so much work to do. Mostly I’ve been helping turn casinos into schools, private companies into national factories. What belonged to the rich now belongs to the people. The U.S.A. is not happy—we will see how long they buy our sugar. They want their companies back. Nothing is certain, it all depends on hope. And work, of course, always that. I am studying the music of Havana. Such music. African rhythms, similar and different to our candombe. Everything is different and similar
.
Everybody please take care of everybody
—
Kisses and more
,
Artigas
“Thank God,” said Abuela. “The man has finally learned to write home.” She brought empanadas to the table. Hands attacked the platter from all sides.
“Sounds like he’s doing well,” Mamá said.
“Well?” Abuelo said. “He’s going to break his back. And what for?”
“To build a better country,” Mamá snapped.
Abuelo drew himself up, but Xhana raised a hand to stop him. “First of all, Pajarita, the empanadas are delicious.” There were murmurs of agreement. “So that’s unanimous. Tío, think of it this way. Think of Uruguay. How much have pensions been cut?”
“Too much.”
“Not much left for the elderly.”
“No.”
“A bag of potatoes, perhaps.”
Abuelo ceded the point with a nod.
“Why do you think that’s happened?”
Abuelo reached for another empanada. Beside him, Roberto resumed his equations. “Times are hard. Our industries are struggling.”
“And what else?”
Ignazio shrugged.
“Debt to the
yanquis
, Tío.”
“That’s right.” Mamá leaned forward, casting a shadow over Roberto’s page. He put his pencil down, too hard. “We’re taking from our own people to give to those who have the most.”
“Debts should be paid off,” Abuelo said.
“Not at the expense of workers,” said Mamá.
“Hmmph.”
“What do you mean, ‘hmmph’?”
“That’s just what communists say.”
Mamá tightened.
“Of course,” Xhana said. “I’m a communist.”
Abuelo Ignazio looked at Eva. “Are you,
hija?
”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Abuelo sighed. “Whatever happened to old-fashioned
batllismo
?”
“Our leaders sold it,” Xhana said, “to the highest bidder.”
Abuelo Ignazio turned to his wife. “Pajarita, did you know your niece was a communist?”
“Of course.”
“What do you think of that?”
“I hope she stays for dinner.”
“And what about your own daughter?”
“I hope she stays for dinner too.”
Mami laughed. Abuelo Ignazio slunk his shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of defeat.
“I’d love to,” Xhana said.
She was eleven years old, a good girl, a plain girl, with two braids that hung limp and thin against her collar, despite Mamá’s attempts to enrich her hair, the salves, washes, fragrant shampoos, olive oil soaks that left
her smelling like a salad. Nothing worked; she stayed plain. The years that lay in wait mystified and terrified and thrilled her. She wanted to shoot up into new skin, the way Roberto had, fourteen now, separate from her, almost a man, taking a blade to his face in the mornings. They did not cleave to each other anymore. She was alone. She wasn’t good at making friends, though there were girls at school who asked her over when they needed help with homework, and in their homes she saw their mothers, aprons tied around broad waists, hair pulled back brusquely as if they didn’t care, as if they had more important things to think about than hairstyles. They baked and cleaned and waited for their husbands and did not write poems or seem to have secrets tucked in their closets or clothes or morning errands. She didn’t go often. She read constantly. In some stories, very old ones, there were girls who weren’t really girls but sprites belonging to the forest, at home inside a tree trunk or reed or river, and she looked, sometimes, on city streets, in her city that was growing a ring of
cantegriles
—far from where she was, but she had seen one, knew its sad, crowded shacks, kept seeing them in dreams—for fairies or ghosts or witches who might open sudden doors in the thin air.
She won a scholarship to a private school. So did Roberto. She didn’t know about the application until Mamá showed her the acceptance letter.
“You’re happy, aren’t you?”
Salomé nodded. She thought of Crandon, a big white building crawling with ivy. She had seen it only through iron gates.
“Come here,
hija
.”
She let her mother hold her. Her hair smelled like sweet almonds. They both pretended she was not too big to be gathered on a lap.
“When I was your age, I left school. Did you know?”
She hadn’t known.
“I worked in a store.”
She tried to imagine this, young Mamá, selling carrots or blouses or toys while lessons went unattended.
“But you. You can be anything.”
Her hand traced slow arcs along Salomé’s scalp.
On her first day at Crandon, Salomé woke to an old tango, sung in
her mother’s tawny voice. She got out of bed and followed the strains. She peered into the living room and was stunned by what she saw: Mami was ironing. Meticulously. At five-thirty in the morning. She wore the same blue dress as the night before.
Y un rayo misterioso
, she sang,
hará nido en tu pelo
. She danced the iron forward, across the crisp white blouse of the new uniform.
Florecerá la vida
. She smoothed the collar and the cuffs and sleeves and now the narrow spaces between buttons.
No existirá el dolor
. Salomé sensed a deeply private conversation between woman, iron, cloth. She retreated quietly and curled back into bed. The sky outside was the color of a very old woman’s hair.
She and Roberto rode the bus across town. Her pleated skirt scratched at her knees. Inside the iron gates, slick-haired boys and pearly girls swarmed over a perfect lawn. The classrooms had the artificial lemon-smell of a place that’s been scrubbed clean. The windows made polished boxes out of the sky. She had an English teacher now, who did not wear a sweater made of wool she’d spun and knit herself, but a tailored jacket and matching skirt. She spoke English with slow effulgence.
“You will learn … to speak … like a citizen of … the United States. What is the United States? Class?”
Homework piled on. There was absolutely no talking out of turn in class. The halls echoed her footsteps and the footsteps of the slick-haired boys and pearly girls.
“Well?” Mamá asked that night. “How was it?”
“Great,” said Roberto.
“Fine,” said Salomé.
“Lots of studying to do?”
“Yes.”
She studied a whole new language, angular new words for the same familiar things. She studied the United States, the country to the north of the north itself, memorizing its states, fifty of them, from Alabama to Wyoming, gargantuan states, many of them larger than the whole of Uruguay. She studied dollars, how to turn them into cents, their bulk compared to pesos. She learned the capitals of European nations. She learned that there were foreign companies that might hire Uruguayan girls if they were smart, tidy, and adept at typing and English. She
learned biology, geometry, and all about the World Wars. At home, she learned how to iron skirt pleats, and how to speak in English for Mamá, saying
please
and
of course
and
what a lovely pair of shoes, Mother
. Mamá cheered and clapped each time.
“I thought you wouldn’t like English,” Salomé said.
“Why on earth not?”
“It’s the language of
the yanquis
.”
“So?”
“It’s against revolutions.”
“That’s silly,” Mamá said quickly. “A language can’t be against anything.”
They stood still, looking at each other. It was late afternoon; glyphs of light hung low along the walls.
“Anyway, you have to understand. It’s the language of opportunity.”
Roberto made a friend, Edgar, a freckled boy obsessed with chemistry. He came home sometimes for dinner, cleared his plate no matter how many times Abuela filled it, and politely answered all of Abuelo’s questions. Yes, my father’s a lawyer; no, we live in Malvín; I guess I’m okay at soccer; of course Peñarol is my team. Salomé wondered what it might be like to bring a friend home. Most of the girls at school were nothing like her. Their hair was perfectly in place; they had swimming pools in their backyards; they wore a different gold necklace each day; their giggles were delicately calibrated. To her relief, they tended to ignore her. They also ignored Leona Volkova. Leona always sat with her knees together, but not crossed. She never smiled in class. She was the only Jewish girl, soft-spoken and courteous—until the day she shot up to say that Trotsky had not been a madman.
The air in the classroom tightened like a bridle. All eyes turned to Leona, who stood with her hands clasped in front of her.
Miss Magariños looked like she’d just been given a suppository. “Excuse me?”
“He wasn’t a madman,” Leona repeated.
“Young lady, you weren’t called on.”
“Yes, Miss Magariños. But still. Thanks to him my family got out of Russia alive.” She stared at her teacher, who stared at the wall. She sat down clumsily.
After class, Salomé fell into step beside Leona in the hall.
“That was brave.”
Leona didn’t look at her. Her dark curls seemed about to burst from the rubber band at the nape of her neck. “You think so?”
“Of course.”
“That’s nothing. Not compared to other people.”
“Like Trotsky?”
“Yes. Like Leon Trotsky.”
They walked out to the lawn, freshly mowed and fragrant. Leon. Leona. “Were you named after him?”
The sun reflected in Leona’s glasses, obfuscating her expression. “How did you know?”
Salomé shrugged. She adjusted her books in the cradle of her arms. “My middle name is Ernestina. My mother says she gave it to me after Che.”
“How can that be?”
“She says she met him in Buenos Aires, in ’51, when I was born.”
Leona laughed. She looked different when she laughed, almost pretty (and years later, fearing for her life, Salomé would remember Leona this way, a grinning child with sun caught in her glasses).
“Do you believe your mother?”
“On some days. Do you believe yours?”
“Yes.” She was serious again. She lowered her voice. “You know Che’s coming to speak at the university.”
“Of course.”
“My sister, Anna, studies there. We’re going to see him speak.”
Leona’s eyes were wide, her stance was straight, she smelled of tangerines and toothpaste. Standing there, at the lawn’s edge, in a starched and pleated uniform under the heavy sun, Salomé could think of no better fate than friendship with this girl.
Leona glanced around her at the flock of white blouses. “Do you want to come?”
“Of course.” The blouses headed down toward the lawn, where they glared in the high-noon light. “But I’ll have to ask.”
When Salomé asked, her mother’s comb sliced hard against her scalp.
“Of course you can’t.”
Her hands took half of Salomé’s hair, divided it in three, and braided briskly.
“But, Mami, why not? We’ve gone to lectures—”
“This is not an ordinary lecture. It’s controversial.”
“So?”
“So!” Her fingers tugged the braid tight. They were quick; they were nimble; they knew this weave so well. “There will be police, and a lot of—feeling.” A rubber band closed over the braid. Mamá dropped it and started on the left side.
Salomé wanted to shake the two hands out of her hair. “Are you going?”
“No. It’s Tía Carlota’s card night.”
The final rubber band tightened its noose.
On the night of Che’s lecture, they ate dinner without Mamá. Abuelo told them stories over the meal, old, familiar stories, embroidered in new places. A man gambles his way into a carnival magic act. A girl reappears from death at the top of a tree. It seemed unreal, absurd, larger than life. But then, Salomé thought, what is gained from smallness? Surely resonance—or the yearning for it, the pull to shout your soul in all its voluble explosions—was no crime. And perhaps Abuelo’s tales weren’t larger than life at all. Perhaps, during the century, the world itself had changed, its scope diminished, its proportions shrunk, its fantastic edges pulled in at the horizon.
She was clearing the table when Tía Carlota called.
“Where’s your mami, Salomé?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
She hesitated. “Playing cards.”
“What? With who? Who serves better
picadillos
at their game nights?”
“No one, Tía, I’m su—”
“That’s right,
pues nadie
. You really don’t know where she is?”
“No idea,” Salomé lied.
“Well, tell her to call me.”
She hung up and stood in the corridor with the long-moaning telephone pressed against her ear. She had gone. She must have gone. This moment, her mother was in a vaulted room with Che, while Salomé heard only the drone of this empty line. She listened to the drone until it began to sound aggressive. She went to the kitchen. Abuela Pajarita was washing a cast-iron pan. Her silver-and-raven braid swung ever so slightly, as if its tip were brushing her waist clean. Salomé dried plates, drawing moisture from their curves, clinking them into the cupboard. It seemed so easy: wash, then dry, then stack into place. No trace of what’s been done.
When she was finished, she crept into her mother’s room and closed the door. She did not turn on the light. The moon reached through the window with silver arms. She was tall enough now, and strong enough, and she was not afraid of transgression—or if she was, she would not let that fear command her. All she needed was a chair, like this, dragged up to the closet, to the box that was still there, so she could move it forward, patiently, on tiptoes. It was still heavy; it filled her arms; she brought it to the floor. She smelled eucalyptus when she opened the first flap. Another flap, another, and there they were, exposed in the pale moonlight. Shoes. Children’s shoes. Her strappy school shoes and Roberto’s oxfords, the ones they had outgrown last year. Each stratum held smaller shoes than the last, until, at the bottom, tiny baby shoes emerged, some with flowered designs, some boyish and plain, and every shoe of every size contained three eucalyptus leaves—no more, no less. She wanted to dive into the shoes, swim through their darkness for a clue to Mamá’s mind, for a clue to eucalyptus, or for a clue to anything at all. She brought a leaf to her nose and smelled it, then rubbed it between her fingers as though it were the first leaf she’d ever really felt, as though there were a secret code in the fine veins of its surface, but she pressed too hard, it broke in half, and she recoiled from her own act of destruction. She put the leaf back in its shoe and put the shoes back in their places, the flaps back with one another and the box back on its shelf, the chair against the wall again, no one saw this, no one did this, no one knows.