The Invisible Mountain (27 page)

He was here, again, on the street: the man in the dark fedora. Hat pushed low, swathed in his long coat, as if it weren’t the humid height of summer. As if the street held something that he’d lost. What drove a man to haunt a street for three years running? He could be a tortured artist; a lover with a broken heart; a criminal on the prowl; a madman with no other place to go. Or just a drifter in a world that sends souls drifting, that unmoors the soul without warning or reason or so much as a match to light the darkness. She returned to her bedroom, with its bare, husbandless bed. She slid under the covers and closed her eyes. Zolá Zapateada, she fell asleep thinking, what kind of name is that?

She made an appointment for the following week. Zolá lived in a stylish high-rise, where the elevator operator’s uniform gleamed with freshly polished buttons. She stepped off on the fifteenth floor and knocked on door 1555.

“Just a minute,” a creamy voice called from the other side.

A tall, sleek woman opened the door. “Buenas—” She froze.

“Zolá?”

“Yes. Do come in.”

Eva entered and scanned the room, the marble counters, ivory walls, a crystal vase alive with flowers. Zolá wore pearls and violet silk and dark red lipstick. She was staring at Eva with an intensity bordering on rudeness.

“What a nice apartment.”

“Eva. Don’t you remember me?”

“Remember?”

There was something familiar about her features. Sharp, pleasing. She could not place it. She searched her memory, searched the face, hair, eyes. Eyes. Her throat cinched closed; she couldn’t speak. They stared at each other.

A long moment passed. Not possible. Eva’s face and hands grew hot. Her hostess was the first to look away.

“Shall I make some
mate?
”

“Please, make yourself at home.”

Eva sat on the crushed-velvet sofa while Zolá disappeared to boil water in the kitchen. The room was large and airy, with floor-to-ceiling windows, gold-framed paintings, exuberant potted plants. To her right, the hairdresser’s chair faced an oval mirror; to her left, the view stretched over the tops of buildings to the river. She pictured herself falling, out of the window, out of her reality, all the way down to a twisted underwater world. Zolá entered, bearing a tray of
bizcochos
and
mate
.

Eva wanted to laugh, to weep, to shout. “I can’t believe this.”

Zolá offered her the tray without looking at her.

Eva took a pastry and stared at it. It looked perfectly normal. “How long have you been cutting hair?”

“Seven years. I studied in Buenos Aires, after the Change. It’s competitive there, so I came back.” She handed Eva the
mate
. “I’m one of the best in Uruguay.”

Eva drank from the gourd. The bitter liquid filled her mouth. “And this is what you left me for?”

“Cutting hair?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m sorry. I do. I entered the hospital soon after we parted. I didn’t want to leave you, but nobody could know.”

“What did they—I mean—”

Zolá smoothed his (her his her his) skirt. “There’s an operation. It was all very new. In Berlin there was a painter who was the first to have it done. That was back in ’31. I heard about it from the boys at La Diablita. You can imagine they weren’t singing its praises. But it told me that it could be done, so I went to Argentina. You know Buenos Aires. Always trying to be on the cutting edge.”

Eva nodded. The next question caught in her throat.

“Go ahead. Whatever it is.”

“Why do such a thing?”

Zolá said nothing, and Eva feared she’d offended her. She searched for something she could say to fill the silence. Everything she thought of seemed unsayable.

Light poured copiously, in this high home, glinting on crystal vases, shaking the dust off memories, rearranging the known world. She passed the gourd back to Zolá. She watched her (her!) pour water into the leaves, and place red lips where Eva’s had just been.

“And all this time I thought you’d run off with another woman.”

“Really?”

“Of course. I found a tube of lipstick under your dresser.”

“Whose do you think that was?”

Eva stared.

“I worked in a cabaret. Remember?”

“Oh.”

“But it’s a sleazy business. I’m better suited to this profession.”

Eva thought of the first walk they’d taken home from La Diablita, how ethereal Andrés had looked to her in the moonlight, like a creature from another world, ill matched to the butcher’s block. “You have no idea how much I’ve missed you.”

“Clearly,” Zolá said, “the converse is also true.”

They looked each other in the eye. The gaze was intensely foreign and familiar.

“You look good.”

“So do you.”

Eva looked away. “Are you afraid of being recognized?”

Zolá smiled, a little proudly. “You didn’t recognize me, did you? But I stay out of Punta Carretas. Most people I knew in Montevideo don’t come to hairdressers like me. My clients are mostly—well—”

“Like me?”

“Yes, Señora Santos.” She added ironic emphasis to the name. “Like you. So tell me. Who have you become?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Why not?”

“I have no clue.”

“Tell me what’s happened, then.”

“So are you happy?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

Zolá raised an eyebrow. “Yes. But there have been some terrible losses.”

“Like what?”

“Like my mother.”

An imprint of Coco thickened the room—blood-and-soap hands, a brassy laugh, hips like fortress walls.

“And you.”

Eva looked across the room at the mirror. Inside it she could see the clouded sky.

Zolá stared at the coffee table as if it fascinated her. “Are you disgusted?”

Eva gazed out the window. The light was growing golden; shards of it had fallen on the river. The river glistened, long and wide, the same river as always. She had wanted to ride its back for years before she crossed it. She could almost see herself, down on the water, in a boat at dawn, twenty years old, with her best friend, longing for his body, longing for much more, sure of what she longed for, sure of nothing. Perhaps that girl, the ghost of her, still wandered the low waves. A gull soared over rooftops and out of sight. “No.”

Zolá looked, for an instant, relieved like a child.

“But. I have one more question.”

“Well?”

“Did you give up poetry?”

“No. I have a pseudonym. A poetess persona.”

“She’s a country girl, from the pampas.”

“No.”

“And she’s blind.”

“Zolá, wait. You’re not Soledad Del Valle.”

“You know me?”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Just think. A hermit, demure, blind, in the country—how could she ever make a city appearance?”

Eva took a
bizcocho
from the plate, but didn’t eat it. She peeled the layers of pastry, exposing soft, pale insides.

“What are you thinking, Eva?”

“That the world is a joke.”

“Are you laughing?”

“Who knows.”

Zolá smiled. Behind her, the sky seemed to gather like a mantle. “Shall I wash your hair?”

It became her secret treasure, that ride up to the fifteenth floor. Up up toward heaven, toward Zolá’s aerie, where there was so much to love: broad streams of light; star-gazer lilies yawning with fragrance; smooth marble and mirrors; tufts of hair, her own, black and slender, falling to the floor. Every time she came it was a different kind of falling. Zolá’s hands returned again and again to Eva’s hair.

“Eva?”

“Mmmmm?”

“How does that feel?”

“Perfect. The best hair wash in the world.”

“I call it a scalp massage.”

“Call it what you want. I call it heaven.” She sank into her chair and let her head relax further into warm, soft water that smelled of rose and almonds. Skilled fingers sifted through her hair as if in search of specks of gold.

“No wonder women can’t get enough of this. You’ve got to let me pay.”

“But your business?”

“Some things are more important. Sshhhh … relax …”

She closed her eyes and Zolá engulfed her head with gentle hands and water soft with nut-and-blossom foam. She was a blossom, an animal kind, a sea anemone, slick, unfurling, undulating, full of slippery urges. “
Ay
. Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For … making me feel like a mermaid.”

Zolá laughed. “Perhaps you’ll grow a tail.”

These hands were the same as they’d always been, even though the nails could now dig red tips into skin. She had seen them sift imaginary gold, turn pages, fill pages, stroke tears from her cheek. She knew these hands, and they knew her—better, it sometimes seemed, than she knew herself: they felt past the string of pearls, the earrings, even the curls, to glide along the hidden, naked contours of her scalp. It felt excruciating to let those fingers know such pale and private skin: as if all the armor she had ever formed could dissolve in a basin of fragrant water; as if nothing could stay concealed from such fingers or would want to. On some days, she did not care about exposure and plunged freely, hungry to be stroked, sculpted, washed, reborn, rebaptized in a secret sea.

When Zolá took to cutting, Eva felt a different self take shape. She entered as an unfinished woman, strong but blurry at the edges, like a photograph taken with a softened lens. Zolá’s cuts deepened her definition and sharpened her edges. Anything superfluous, she realized, could be shed. Snip, a layer of weight eased away. Snip, and she was incrementally freer than before. Snip, snip, the scissors sang in brisk, low moans as they danced at the curve of her neck.

After the first cut, Eva walked the Rambla as if her feet stepped on pure gold. After the second, she went home and wept for seven hours. Quietly, so the children wouldn’t hear her from their rooms, or from the table where they ate under the half-watchful, half-petulant care of Señora Hidalgo from downstairs. Once an hour, Señora Hidalgo knocked on Eva’s bedroom door.

“Doña Eva? You’ll still be needing me?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Yes, Señora. Thank you.”

She heard the widow’s slow creak away from the door. More tears.

After the third cut, Eva came home and exhumed every poem she could find. They emerged from drawers, socks, purses, the dark under the bed, the hulls of neglected shoes. She spread them on her bed and started sorting, in search of patterns in the chaos.

She took them to Zolá.

“Read me another. Go on.”

“Zolá, I have to go.” Reluctantly. “I’m late for my babysitter.”

“Of course.” Zolá seemed reluctant too. She curled on the sofa with her chin on her arms. “They’re lovely. Why on earth did we become poets?”

“Because we were reckless.”

“Because we love life?”

“Because we couldn’t help it.”

“That must be it.” She gestured at the papers strewn across the table. “Can I keep them for a while?”

“All right.”

Autumn approached, with its cool winds and early showers. The season seemed enchanted. Eva could walk down the street—one child-hand in each of hers—and be struck by a fierce and sudden gale of happiness. It made her want to skip and run and kick up puddle water and pursue the sensuous crunch of brown leaves beneath her boots. So much opulent sensation on one sidewalk. “Salomé, you get that one!” Small galoshes crushed a leaf, another, and two giggles (a three-year-old’s, her mother’s) mixed with the crackling sound. “Roberto? How about you?” A head shook, a wool cap (made by his abuelita) swung its pom-pom. How did he get so very tall? and how so solemn? Many splashed puddles it took to make him smile, but it was worth it for the dawn-break way it came.

Untethered joy rarely goes unnoticed.

“What’s going on?” Xhana folded her arms across her apron.

“What do you mean?”

“Please,
prima
. Just look at you.”

Eva took a healthy bite of her empanada. Steam unfurled from its pastry shell.

Tío Artigas played a drum roll on the tablecloth. “If I didn’t know better … I’d say … she’s fallen in love!”

Xhana raised her chin in triumph.

“That’s scandalous,” Eva said.

Artigas said, “Is it?”

Eva looked around, hands spread out, an innocent facing her accusers. She scanned the room for saviors. Oil sizzled in a pan on the stove; a woman rose from the sea in a picture on the wall, stars falling from her hands, the script above her reading
Iemanjá;
drummer and daughter stared at her. No reprieve. She hung her head in mock defeat.

“You’re right. I’m in love … with my wonderful children.”

Shouts railed at her from both sides.

“That’s all right,” Xhana said. “You don’t have to tell. Not even your own family.”

“Sure.” Artigas leaned toward her. “But we have eyes in our heads.”

She wanted to say more; it was impossible. There were new realms in her life that she had no words for. Astonishing how many realms existed in one city, even a quiet city where you could not find a mountain. There were so many Montevideos, behind the myriad doors. Perhaps women were like cities, full of darkened rooms, able to find new worlds down hidden hallways.

“Eva.” Zolá’s voice slid through the water. “I have a confession.”

Eva pulled herself back from reverie.

“I gave your poems to Señora Sosoma.”

“The publisher’s wife?”

Zolá looked penitent and amused. A drop of water had made a small, dark circle at the breast of her lime-colored blouse. “She’s a regular. She loved your work. They both did. I’m afraid they want to publish you.”

Eva had never met the Sosomas, but she knew of their collections, elegant volumes published out of Montevideo, with a focus, in their own words, on lifting the voices of women. “You’re serious?”

Zolá nodded. “Am I forgiven?”

“Just this once. But I’ll have to watch out. You’re too good at keeping secrets.”