The Invisible Mountain (33 page)
That night, as she fell asleep, she thought of boxes, doors, lecture
halls, the mouths of shoes, and of how much—how very much—she longed to know.
Che’s lecture ended in violence. They heard it on the radio at breakfast the next morning. Someone fired a shot, a riot erupted, dozens were wounded by the end of the night. Abuelo complained about socialists becoming too unruly, stirring trouble. Mamá drank her
mate
without looking up.
Leona didn’t come to school for two days. Salomé pictured her with broken bones, lacerated skin, welts, bruises. But when she came, she was in one piece, and even smiling. She passed Salomé a note in English class:
Let’s talk
. At lunch, they sequestered themselves beneath a eucalyptus tree at the corner of the lawn. Salomé was so greedy for the story that she couldn’t eat her sandwich.
“It was incredible.” Leona took off her glasses and cleaned them with the edge of her skirt. Her eyes were bright and naked. “He said so many things. That the struggle in Cuba is all of our struggle, that it’s something spiritual, beyond borders, that will spread wherever people are hungry. He was wearing a black beret, and his arms danced the whole time he was speaking, and even from far away you could tell he’s more handsome in real life.” Leona paused as three older girls walked by, hands cupped over their mouths in mid-gossip. “He said we shouldn’t hate the imperialists, because then we become like them, and instead we can stay strong, he said, and keep our eyes on victory—
¡Victoria!
Like that he said it:
¡Hasta la Victoria! And
when he said that, the whole auditorium broke into applause.”
Salomé longed for that applause—to be inside it, carried by it. “So when was the fighting?”
“Soon after that, but listen, the newspapers lied. Che didn’t cause it. We were on our feet, cheering, and then we heard a shot, a bullet flew toward Che. The crowd panicked, the police came in, as if breaking up a fight—but nobody was fighting except them. They beat people who were trying to get out. They broke my sister’s arm. I only got a few bruises.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed Salomé a round, sallow, half-purple mark. “A small price to pay.”
Leona and Salomé spent long hours beneath that tree. They ate their lunch, watching students cluster on the lawn, or set up camp to study after school. Sometimes they closed their textbooks and discussed books they’d been reading, not the ones assigned in class, but the ones Leona borrowed from Anna’s shelf. Anna had Marx’s
Das Capital
, Trotsky’s
My Life
, various histories of Latin America, books and essays by Bolívar, Artigas, Batlle, Bakunin, Lenin, Castro, Che. Salomé wrapped the books in paper from the butcher shop, so teachers would not see their titles and intervene. The texts were dense; she was grateful for Anna’s ink marks, which indicated where the words were so important they should be underlined, or starred, or—strongest of all—underlined and starred with “
¡Sí!
” scrawled in the margin. At first, she tried to bring Mamá’s poetry, but Leona read it only out of politeness.
“Poetry,” she finally said, “isn’t utilitarian.”
Salomé fingered her mother’s book (hearing Abuelo’s voice,
you cannot eat a poem)
and returned it to her satchel. She met with more success when she brought Tío Artigas’ letters: every time a new one arrived, Leona pressed Salomé about its contents, until finally she took to copying the letters, word for word, when the family wasn’t looking. Such letters. You could almost smell the sweat and shorn-down sugarcane, the muscle and the hunger of his days. After thirty-three years a widower, Tío Artí had found love again, with Constanza, an octogenarian from Matanzas who could make pans and saucers move with her mind. The first time they kissed, he claimed, the kitchen table veered toward them and pinned their bodies to a bright yellow wall. They agreed to spend the rest of their lives together. He spent some days in Havana, others out on the land, always wielding something—schoolbooks, machetes, rifles, medical gauze. The government was strict, he said, but there were reasons for it. Leona read each word voraciously. Salomé loved her for her hunger. This was friendship, true and sparkling, able to meet her longing with full force, to sense where it bent in concave hollows, where it
swelled in search of meaning, how it pressed and scratched and burned against the inside of her skin. Leona’s longings bent and swelled and scratched right along with her. Words were not necessary to know this. She knew this as they sat, quiet, shoulder to shoulder, watching the branches’ shadows creep along the grass.
Salomé turned thirteen. Uruguay was changing: jobs were lost, factories closed, pensions slashed. Montevideo opened its arms to an onslaught of strikes. Butchers, farmers, cobblers, phone workers, oil workers, wool workers clogged the streets. Salomé did not see them, but she saw the photos in
El País
, crowds with shouting mouths and high-held banners. The government set curfews, censored the press, beat strikers, opened fire, made arrests. On the radio, President Giannattasio called his actions Prompt Security Measures. Flyers littered the university in support of the strikes. Roberto, newly enrolled there, complained at the dinner table.
“They’re everywhere. On the floor, on desks, taped to the wall. It’s a nuisance.”
“But the strikes are for good reason,” Mamá said. “The Measures steal our civil rights.”
“Isn’t that what Castro’s doing too?”
“It’s different there.”
“Why?”
“It’s for the Revolution.”
Roberto said nothing; he heaped more rice onto his plate.
“The boy is right.” Abuelo Ignazio lifted his fork as though it were a scepter. “The university should only be for studies.”
Mamá frowned. Her hair was swept into a stylish beehive, which Salomé, with her own drab strands, could not imagine carrying on her head. It was strange that Mamá indulged in fancy hairstyles when money was so tight. It seemed rather bourgeois of her. She’d tried to ask once, but Mamá shot back,
I get a discount, she’s an old friend
, and dropped the subject. “Perhaps the current world is worthy of study too.”
In the spring, in the time when the Beatles first sang over the radio, Leona called, breathless and urgent.
“Salomé.”
“We’ve broken ties with Cuba.”
“What?”
“The government. It’s broken diplomatic ties.”
“Oh.”
“It’s serious. U.S. officials told them to do it. Our government owes them money, so they did as they were told.” The line rang with static. “Cowards.” The sound of shuffling. “Wait. I’ll read it to you.”
“Of course I’ll wait.”
“Okay. This is what the United States said: ‘Your government is condoning the intolerable presence of communism on this continent.’ Can you believe it? Hang on.”
Salomé heard Anna’s voice in the background.
“Look, I’m going out. I’ll talk to you later,
¿sí?
”
“Sure.”
“See you tomorrow.”
She hung up before Salomé could say good-bye.
A protest swelled in the Plaza de Independencia. Salomé listened to the radio and pictured it, the shouting, nightsticks, shots, arrests, Leona and her sister on those streets, risking their lives. It occurred to her to sneak away and join them, but it was impossible—Mamá watched her keenly and would not leave the living room. She pretended to do her homework. Two hours later, Roberto burst in, face flushed. He looked old, not like a boy at all.
Mamá said, “You’re not in class?”
“I couldn’t go. It’s occupied.”
“What is?”
“The university.” They stared at him. Roberto raised his hands. “There are hundreds of them—students, and I think professors too—they’ve taken over all the buildings. They’ve got banners, they’re shouting. It’s this thing with Cuba.”
Mamá blinked. “And the police?”
“They’ve surrounded the buildings.”
“Obviously.”
Mamá rose slowly, and she looked pale, red-lipped, black-haired, Snow White after the poisoned apple. “That’s it. You two aren’t going out until this whole thing is over. Salomé, no school.”
“But—”
“You heard me. You’re staying home.”
Salomé bent her head over her books. No school meant no Leona, no updates, no time under the tree receiving stories from the streets. The algebraic formulas stared back at her, stubborn little hieroglyphs with no relevance to this night. From the kitchen, she heard Abuela slicing carrots, or potatoes; she smelled onions frying on the stove. Outside these walls, the world was turning, spinning, whirling on its axis pushed by many hands, fueled by all the cries and chants and marching feet and crowded rooms and burning dreams—and she would not be part of it. She wondered what it tasted like out there.
Montevideo shook and surged for days. Salomé followed the action closely on the radio. The university occupation kept on. On the third day, the Cuban ambassadors dragged their hasty luggage to the Carrasco Airport. A crowd gathered to show their solidarity and wave good-bye. Salomé heard about the violence on the radio: the police used clubs, did not stop when people fell, there was blood on the street, there was blood on the polished glass doors of the airport. Leona still hadn’t called. Perhaps she was at the airport, perhaps her blood now streaked the windows. Perhaps revolution was arriving in Uruguay, circling lower and lower like an enormous hawk, something spiritual, without borders, casting a long shadow as it sought a place to land, and history would remember those who cleared space for it. She wanted to clear space. She wanted to be brave. She wanted to experience the axis of the world. Today I can’t, she thought, I’ve been forbidden, I can’t find a way to escape. But you, long shadow, circling thing, I promise I will give myself to you. When I am remembered, if I am remembered, it will be for helping the change. If I hold my breath for thirty seconds now, that seals the promise. She looked at the clock. She held her breath.
The phone rang in the hallway. Abuela picked up.
“
¿Hola?
What? César, yes. Oh. Of course … I’m sorry. Is she—? Of course.”
Mamá’s voice. “What is it?”
“Xhana’s at the hospital.”
“Is she all right?”
“Fractured ribs. Cuts to her head.”
Mamá made a low, guttural sound.
“They were at the airport.”
“I’ve got to see her.”
“Go—I’ll watch the children.”
Salomé thought of Tía Xhana, bones cracked, head bleeding, slammed onto the asphalt by an officer’s club. She hoped, absurdly, for Mamá to come in and invite her to go. Of course it didn’t happen. Restless, churning, trapped inside the house, she listened to her mother grasp her keys and hurry out.
Xhana spent five days in the hospital, and once the university reopened and classes resumed, Salomé was allowed to visit. Tío César sat beside the bed, looking more tired than she’d ever seen him. Xhana lay propped up on pillows, and lit up when she saw the carnations in Salomé’s hands. “How nice,” she said, smiling, and Salomé saw she’d lost two of her teeth.
Throughout the following year—while she studied chemistry and Hemingway and art, while she whispered with Leona in the eucalyptus shade, through bustling days and nights in the Punta Carretas house—Salomé listened to all the conversations she could find. She was a spy now, surreptitious, urgent, determined to trace the shadows to their source, to see the world in all its tangles and pry herself a space amid the chaos. There were many conversations, hushed, loud, worried, furtive, brash, contemplative, excitable, didactic. She pricked her ears and made herself invisible. In Crandon halls, out on the street, at Coco’s butcher shop, in Xhana’s kitchen, in Abuela’s kitchen, behind Mamá’s closed door, at the
bus stop, on the bus, she gathered words and pieced them together like a jigsaw:
Everything’s changed.
It’s temporary.
It’s disastrous.
This is practically a dictatorship.
Oh, come on.
You
come on. Look at the police.
True.
See?
Our economy is a disaster.
We’ve always bounced back.
This is different.
We’re a tenacious nation. A stable nation.
The Switzerland of South America.
That’s in the past.
The past never dies.
You’re out of touch.
The unions are strong.
So is poverty.
So is police violence.
Honestly, I can’t believe their violence.
It’s not Uruguayan.
It is now.
We’ll rise up in protest, like the rest of the world.
Look at Cuba.
Look at Europe, China, Vietnam.
Look at Mississippi.
Look at the Tupamaros.
Tupamaros? Who the hell are they?
I’m not sure, but they left flyers around the university.
I think they set off a bomb the other day.
Yeah, in front of the U.S. Navy building.
Hm. What nice men.
I heard they wrote
gringos piratas
on the wall of the building.
I heard they’re named after Túpac Amaru.
I heard they rob banks.
I heard they have guns.
I heard they’re saving up for the revolution.
I heard they give spoils to the poor.
I heard they’re an arm of the Socialist party.
They’re lawless.
They’re heroes.
Our lawmakers are lawless, so really, who cares?
You’re exaggerating.
You’re naïve.
They’re beating up strikers.
Well, they
are
getting too wild.
Too wild for whom?
Reporters are getting fired.
So? Everybody’s getting fired.
We need a revolution.
Of course we don’t.
We’re on the brink of dictatorship.
Come on—we’re not that kind of country.
It’s already started.
It can’t happen.
Sure it can.
It won’t.
I’m telling you, it’s happening.
If people are just patient, things will turn around.
But if they don’t?
Then …
Then what?