The Invisible Mountain (13 page)
In the winter, in the thick of August rains, Eva discovered a trick, a way to leave the house without leaving the house by diving into words. Each thing, after all, had a name; and each name was a word that could imprint the air, becoming larger than the thing itself. The letters rose one by one, a tall-as-the-ceiling presence in the room. Anything could
start it: like the slam of the front door and her father lurching in, hat wet with rain, wool sweater dripping.
Mamá at the edge of the hall. “Where have you been?”
“Out.”
Eva sat on the rug, next to the rocking chair. Chair, SILLA. The letters were huge and graceful. S—snakelike, slipping, an enormous, coiled blue boa (S is blue, always blue).
“I noticed that. It’s been three days.”
The drops from Papá’s sleeves made two dark spots on the rug. “Leave me alone.”
(I, a high stone tower, the kind where maidens languish under spells. The kind with pirate treasure.)
Mamá said, “You’re drunk.”
Papá said, louder, “Leave me alone.”
(LL, two high brown walls with a hiding place ensconced between them. Safe and dark but tricky to climb out of.)
Mamá stepped forward, back straight, arms crossed. She was much shorter than Papá. “How could you? How could you? When we don’t have enough for the children.”
“Money!” (A is very strong. A, a letter in a class all its own. A, a mountain with its top half steeped in snow.) “That’s all you care about, the lack of money.”
“No.” Mamá’s arms uncrossed. (Look at those slopes in A, so steep. They could be unclimbable. Who has scaled them?) “It’s the lack of you.”
In the silence that followed (sour and sticky), and even once her father had stormed out, Eva looked them over and over, these shapes that filled the room—snake and tower, walls and mountain:
S-I-LL-A.
They shimmered with the mystery of words stripped down to essence, down to parts, without which there could be no names or stories. She crawled inside the letters, scaled their heights, tried to find their center, the hidden core that made them throb with meaning. She never found
that core but she kept conjuring letters anyway; they rose up for her over and over again. There were, after all, a million things with names to them—as Eva discovered that winter, as the names of things
(book
and
basil, quilt
and
door
, cow
bone
and oil
lamp
and itchy woolen
sock)
came to floor-to-ceiling life.
In the spring, Eva heard her name through her parents’ bedroom door. She was walking down the hall to pee. It was two-thirty in the morning. She heard her mother first.
“Eva?” Mami’s voice was loud, and Eva stopped as if she had been called.
“Shhhh, Pajarita—
sí
. It’s for Eva.”
“Ignazio—”
“Now wait a minute,
mi amor
. Just listen. You’ve asked me to look, I’ve been looking. Please sit down.”
Pause. Shuffling. In the hall, Eva’s bare toes curled into the rug, little hooks keeping her in place. She leaned against the wall, thinking, not for the first time, WALL.
“
Bueno,
” Mamá said. “I’m listening.”
“Pietro explained it all to me. The work he has is best for someone younger. It’s spring: the port might need me again soon. His store is doing well, so he can use extra hands and he can pay us. He knows how much we need it.”
Eva’s toes were cold. She had to pee. No corner of her pink nightgown (sewn by Mamá) was allowed to rustle.
“But why Eva? She’s only ten.”
“Probably so the boys can stay in school.”
“Eva’s in school too.”
“Yes.
Pero mi amor
. Marco could become a doctor. Eva, a wife. Think. This could be a good experience.”
Silence. The backs of Eva’s calves were cold. Arms too. Her pink nightgown was not enough, on this night, in this hall, where she should not be standing.
“Pajarita,” Papi said, “don’t start. Think what this could do for the family.”
“She will.”
“You can’t force her, Ignazio. I won’t let you.”
More silence.
“At least let me talk to her.”
Rustle, rustle, no more muffled words. The bedsprings creaked. Eva had lost the urge to pee; she padded back to bed on quiet toes and lay staring at the ceiling, which hid behind the dark.
The following afternoon, when Brunomarcotomás were outside playing soccer in the tentative sun, and when Mamá had left for the
carnicería
, and Eva sat at the kitchen table dividing fractions, she heard Papá call out her name.
“
¿Sí, Papá?
”
“Come here.”
In the living room, light glazed the bookshelf, the framed photograph on the sill, her father’s hair, as if God had picked up the things in the room and dipped them, one by one, in a pot of sun. As she sat down on the sofa next to Papi, she savored a picture of him dangling upside down in the grip of God’s enormous fingers, top of the head submerged in liquid light.
“You know, of course, how much we love you.” He smiled. The smile was sincere, but a little sad. “Don’t you?”
“
Sí, Papá
.”
“When I was your age, I could build a gondola. Tables I did with my eyes closed.” He glanced out the window. “With my eyes closed.”
Eva waited.
“My friend Pietro has offered you a job. In his shoe store. It’s a great … how do you say, opportunity, not to be found in Montevideo, just like that. Your mother thinks you won’t take it—but I think you will. You know why?”
Eva shook her head. Papá leaned closer. She smelled his semisweet cologne.
“Because you’re a smart girl. So you know that learning happens in a lot of places. Not just in school. Just think what you could learn at a job.” He put his palm over Eva’s hand. “But that’s not the biggest reason. You know the biggest reason?”
Eva shook her head. She didn’t know.
“You love your family. And you want to help your family. Don’t you?”
“
Sí
.”
“Of course! We all do. And here’s your chance.” Tiny pearls of sweat had formed on his forehead. “But of course it’s up to you.”
Eva looked at the framed photograph on the sill. Her parents—young, just married, freshly moved into the city—stood side by side in front of a plain backdrop. Her father’s smile cocked to one side; her mother’s face was clear and serious. When that picture was taken, even her brothers had not been born. Mamá put the picture up when Eva was five and her papi had just come home (she hazily remembered meeting him, a wet man with flowers, stooping down and calling himself Papi). For years, Eva hated that picture; it reminded her of the strange fact that she once did not exist.
“Would I have to leave school?”
Papá nodded. Eva stared at the photograph. She wanted to smash it; she wanted to burn it; she wanted to wrap it in silk and stow it in a high stone tower, under a spell, where no harm could reach it. Her father—not the father in the photo but the real one—ran a hand through graying hair. The light had mellowed. Sun no longer glazed his head.
She said, “I’ll go—”
“Eva, that’s—”
“If you promise to stop drinking.”
“What?”
“Only if you don’t drink.”
He looked around the room as if it had just appeared around him. “But do you know what you’re asking?”
“Do you?”
This opened her father wide—in the mouth, in the eyes. His lips worked around words he did not say. He closed his mouth. He opened it. He made a snorting sound. “
Carajo
, you’re like your mother.” He shook his head. “
La puta madre
.”
They were silent for minutes that felt like hours. Papá looked out the window. Finally he turned back and reached out and she flinched, but all he did was stroke her hair, hand warm and rough from years
of hauling cargo at the port. Eva leaned toward him, let her body melt against his.
“All right,” he said.
“Promise?”
Through clothes and skin, she felt the pump and push of blood inside him. “I do.”
Late that night, in bed, Eva couldn’t stop thinking. She saw her mother, standing over steaming pots, pretending not to wait for her husband. She saw Señorita Petrillo, with her sharp face and tenuous bun, the day her class had taken a trip to the river’s edge, and the water had seemed to wear a ruffled brown dress. Another trip was planned for next month but Eva would not be there.
Cierre. Cielo. Cerrado. Siempre
. Lock. Sky. Closed. Always.
She rose quietly, so as not to disturb her brother Tomás’ sleep. She stole a stubby candle from the living room, sneaked into the bathroom, closed the door, struck a match, and opened the drawers of her heart. She fingered what she found there.
Tomorrow
, she wrote,
is the end of school
. Words spilled from her pen, one after another, before she could think them, before she could know them, before she could sense their source.
I want to eat up all of life
. The pen kept moving, faster, faster. Her hand rushed to catch up.
Hold on tight. Hold on tight
. It was done. She stroked the page in wonder. It felt smooth and full, like a glass brimming with water. She had poured it there herself. She felt a little lighter; she would be all right; she had this thing—a poem? could she call it that?—a string of words, at least, that could be rolled on the tongue, wrapped in the mind, stashed in drawers she would learn to hide.
She walked to La Ciudad Vieja, past proud old buildings, Spanish balconies, carved stones heavy with history. She paused in front of Cabán’s Cigar Shop and breathed in the Old City, with its smell of cars and frying oil. Noise and movement swarmed the street; electric trams moaned past on high-flung lines; men called to one another and tipped their hats while striding, purposefully, somewhere; broad buildings stood like aging sentinels, keeping quiet watch over the city’s central veins.
Pietro appeared from behind the racks, two pairs of boots in hand. “Eva. Welcome.” He gave her a quick greeting kiss (he smelled like spearmint). “I’m just clearing up from the last customer. Make yourself at home.”
She sat on a plush chair next to the window and waited as Pietro gathered boots and shut them into boxes. He was a tall man with an easy smile. He whistled off-key, along with the tango. She relaxed a little. Her memory of him had been hazy, though she knew he had a wife, three daughters, and her father’s undying loyalty (“That is a good man,” he said last night at dinner, “
bueno, pero bueno”);
he was her father’s oldest friend, the friend from the Italian steamboat. She harbored an image of Papá and Pietro laughing at the helm of a ship, gripping the rails, wearing long capes that flapped in the wind as they raced across the Atlantic, like superheroes from the
yanqui
comic books her brothers liked to read.
“
Bueno
.” Pietro approached her. “Let me show you around.”
That afternoon, Eva learned the basics of the store: the racks of shoes, standing at attention in tidy soldierish formation (boots, buckled loafers, laced-up oxfords, slim-heeled pumps); the cushioned chairs where customers tried on wares (elegant hems at Eva’s forehead as she bent to slide shoes on); the storeroom lit by two naked bulbs, with its narrow walkway lined with shelves and shelves of boxes. There was plenty to be done. There were feet to serve shoes to, and questions to answer from people attached to those feet. There were boxes to sort and rearrange, standing on the storeroom stepladder (high high up, like standing on a table, which was forbidden at home). There were floors to be swept at the end of the day, while Pietro counted cash at the desk in the back room, spreading bills beside the crooning phonograph, sipping his evening
mate
. “How did you like your first day?”
“It was good, Señor, thank you.”
“Call me Pietro. We’ll have fun, I think. You seem like a very special girl.” He tilted his head in the direction of the phonograph. “You like the tangos?”
She nodded.
“You know how to dance?”
She shook her head.
“I can teach you. Tomorrow after we close. Would you like that?”
Eva nodded, still sweeping, eyes on the head of the broom.
Throughout dinner that night (how was work?—good, Mamá) and breakfast the next morning (don’t forget your cardigan—no, Mamá), Eva thought about the tango, with its sharp, urgent grace. Walking to work through Parque Rodó, on Avenida San Salvador, she heard a phonograph and stopped to listen. The voice of Carlos Gardel, the king of tango, crooned a melody in one long caress, a sound she could feel on her skin. It came from a blood-red door. A brass sign on the stone wall beside it read
LA DIABLITA
. Eva fingered the engraved letters. She had heard of this place from Tío Artigas. It was a fashionable café where artists and the elite gathered to lounge and laugh and say smart things, to savor pasta and poetry and wine, to bask in music and clouds of pungent cigarette smoke.
You seem like a very special girl
. Gardel’s voice rose to a wail. The air felt cool and clear around her. She wished she could dissolve her skin and slide into the café, into the smoke, into the howling motion of the song.
Pietro kept his promise that night. He turned up the volume and danced down the aisle, arms stretched around a woman made of air. “Ready?” he said, and clasped her hand. They sailed around the room and her feet followed his smooth steps and the instruction,
BA pa pa pa
, of his voice; the curves of music pressed him closer, a hand caught her back, not like a little girl but like a lady, grown and gorgeous, vital, infused with borrowed grace. The song ended. They stopped, out of breath. Pietro’s shirt was dark with sweat. She pulled away.
“You have natural talent,” Pietro said.
She didn’t know what to say. The air was thick and shimmered strangely.
