The Invisible Mountain (42 page)
She had admitted, it seemed, to a list of crimes. The hood was removed so she could sign the confession. The light cut into her eyes, and she winced, but hands dragged her back over the table. The document was many pages long, but she saw only the last page, where her hand was guided to the empty line that waited for her name. She glimpsed the date below it. Nine months had passed.
She was moved into the Women’s Prison, an edifice on the outskirts of the city. She had heard about it in cell meetings, but whether it looked anything like the men’s facility in Punta Carretas, she couldn’t say, as she saw nothing until she was deep inside. When the hood came off, she was in a cell: three gray walls, one wall of bars, the room just large enough for its single bed. She was wearing a rough cotton dress that reached to her calves. She was not wearing underwear. Her feet were bare on the cement floor. The guard closed the iron door, bars slamming against bars. The limp hood swung in his hand. “No talking,” he said, mechanically.
There were sounds down the hallway, women’s sounds, murmurs and steps and one shrill, aborted laugh.
She had eyes again. She could see, though day brought only the suggestion of light, a charcoal creep from somewhere down the hall. The cell was icy cold. It was May already, winter was fast approaching. May, she thought, it is now May, I missed the rest of it, October breezes, hot January, heavy February, gentle March. There was no gentle where I was, wherever I was, except the gentle that was worse than the rest of it. The underworld. The not-world. And aren’t I still there? Now I can see, and I have some things, today at least—a dress, a bowl, a pillow. It seemed shocking, almost profane, that there should be a pillow in the underworld.
She could sit or stand or lie down, whatever she felt like doing. The freedom was overwhelming. She sat on the bed. The mattress was thin and sharp with springs. She didn’t move. She couldn’t think. Her first meal came, cornmeal porridge in a bowl. She began to reach for the bowl on her floor, thinking the food would be transferred there.
“Want to eat out of your shit-bowl, do you?”
She pulled her hand back.
“You’re disgusting.”
She sat alone with the bowl in her lap. She didn’t want to eat. She couldn’t feel her body and was grateful for it. Hunger can’t touch me, nothing can touch me, not this minute and maybe not the next one. The cornmeal looked thin and pale, but still, there was something shocking about the yellow. Strange, to see your food before you eat it. You start the eating with your eyes. I am almost full, almost sick from looking. She put the bowl down on the floor. Down the hall, she heard a woman raise her voice, saying, Álvaro, Álvaro. Salomé didn’t want to think about Álvaro, whoever he was, or about anybody else who had a name and lived outside these walls, had lived the spring and summer in rhythms she’d missed, slow normal rhythms that belonged to the other world, the sunworld, and who now had thoughts about her, who knew what thoughts, no, she couldn’t let them in, not any of them, stay out there, I am alone, I want to be alone. I can’t exist for you. Don’t want to exist, perhaps I’ll die in here, just stop eating, just fade off, I’m halfway there
already and wouldn’t that be better? Like pulling the scab all the way from the skin. Better, better. Let the skin be smooth without it.
A rat entered through the bars and scurried to the cornmeal. It sniffed the food and began to eat.
“No,” said Salomé, before she could stop herself.
The rat looked up. Its eyes were bright and alert.
“
Hijo de puta
.”
She took the bowl from the floor. The rat, unafraid, followed her toward the bed. “No,” she said again, and suddenly she felt that she could kill the rat with her bare hands or feet to keep what was hers. She kicked at the rat, hard, so hard that it should have bitten back, but instead it backed away and left as if it simply wasn’t worth it, the food not good enough or too much of a bother.
She looked down into the cornmeal. She’d fought for it, now she had to eat it. It was tepid and tasteless, but she ate it all, slowly, dutifully, thinking, mine, little bastard, mine.
After eating, sensation began a slow return into her body. Against her will she became, again, a brittle receptor of cold and pain. She lay awake that night, taking stock of the aches in her body. Body. I have one still, and if this body is to live I need to feed it, close its eyes for sleep, squat to let the piss out, lie it down and stand it up, I don’t want to, I’m exhausted just thinking about it. She could not recall a reason to stay living, could not find one in the searches of her mind. The world outside, with all its streets and doors and voices, seemed unreal to her, irrelevant, unreachable. The past was hazy, shattered, a train demolished in the fog. And yet, if she were ready to die, if she really wanted to let go, why couldn’t she let the rat eat? Where did it come from, the will to crush its body with her naked soles? Cold, my hands are cold, my feet. The coarse sheet gave no warmth. She bent her knees so she could press her hands to the warm flesh and thaw their frost. The will to live, she thought, is a strange thing, a beast itself, with its own teeth and mysteries, living inside us with such grace and quiet that we don’t even notice it until it flees, goes, leaves you an empty hull, or so you think until you find its footprints somewhere inside you where you least expected them, indentations on your soul, I longed to live once, it was here, right here, the longing, this
was where it nested, until dontsayit drove it away, but didn’t I see its teeth glint today, couldn’t it be roaming somewhere close, or even far, but not so far that it could not return?
She slept. In her sleep, large men stood over her, pressed in, too many.
Five days came and went in which she managed to eat, squat, open her eyes and close them. On the sixth day, guards came to take the women to the yard. The women formed a line in the hall. A woman in front of her started to walk too soon.
“Stop,” a guard said, unnecessarily since the broad side of his rifle had already swung against her.
The woman moaned strangely and returned to the line.
“Now walk. Heads down.”
Salomé kept her head down, but she was an expert at looking while seeming not to look, and as she walked she glimpsed other women’s bunks in the corners of her vision, cells for two, cells for four, even for six.
They reached the outside. The ground was wet with recent rain, the sky gray and thick with rain to come. Still, to be outside, to feel the weight of sunlight, however distant and filtered through clouds—sun, you still exist, you’re on my skin again, my skin was parched for you and I didn’t even know it, greedy skin, it was too much and she squinted, whether from the glare of light, or to keep from weeping, she couldn’t tell. Scores of women’s bodies walked slowly in a circle, heads bent down, as directed. Those who walked too fast or slow were beaten with a rifle, but there was very little beating, really, they were experts at the pace, the speed, the collective shuffle. In their hour of exercise they became one body, one great ring of flesh, each woman just a muscle in the whole, see, move like this, pace yourselves, there you go, step in time, if we do it perfectly the guards won’t care about a slight raise of the glance, a furtive gaze at the gray dresses and gray faces, look at the faces, women, women, faces shut, revealing nothing, closely holding whatever is inside, that’s the trick, there you go, hold it in, that one too, and that one my God I know her, across the circle, Anna’s face, Anna Volkova, tall and gaunt, jaw tense with dignity, and the outside world blasted into Salomé before she had a chance to steel herself against it—memories
rose, images exploded in and she saw oil lamps, cramped rooms, Tinto’s chest, the sweat at his temples, the growl of cars, closed doors, open windows, plates of food, a rocking chair, her mother’s eyes. She looked down again, at the gray hem in front of her. The hem was not a prisoner’s hem; it was her mother’s hem, Mamá in front of her, in slow motion, in arm’s reach, back turned to her. No. Stop. Gray hem, prison hem, Mamá would never wear that; it was not her dress, not her spurning back. But Anna, that was Anna—she hadn’t imagined it, she was not alone in this place.
After the yard came showers, in groups of four, no heat, no soap. The water woke her skin and made it sing in silence. The guards watched.
That night, she lay in bed with her eyes open. It was dark, but dim light crept in from a bulb somewhere down the hall. She wondered where Anna was sleeping, and what other Tupamaras were here too. Tupas. I am a Tupa, now, still, here on the inside, I must think of my sisters, my brothers, the others who have given what I gave, lost what I lost, been where I was. Not alone. The thought roused and scared her. Leona. Tinto. Guillermo. Orlando. She didn’t want to know, she had to know. She had to find Leona, if she was here, and talk to Anna also, somewhere, somehow. To link back up, to hear any news, perhaps even to find a way out. Impossible. But hadn’t Tupas done many things that seemed impossible? Hadn’t they arranged a jailbreak from this very prison? She remembered, she’d helped make the plans. But that was a long time ago, when the police were only amateurs, torturing haphazardly, unschooled, ambivalent. She couldn’t know what was outside now, but things seemed different. Nine months. Things had changed, Uruguay had changed, who knew what kind of nation was out there now. She couldn’t fathom what lay beyond the concrete walls, and didn’t want to, couldn’t let in the existence of a certain sand-colored house where too much was known and where the doors and windows might be closed, closed, closed. Instead she thought of Leona, obstinate, rich-haired, a serious child behind her glasses; God what if they took your glasses, Leona, I’ve got to find you.
She found her on the seventh trip to the yard. She was five gray dresses ahead. Neither of them raised her eyes, but Salomé knew they’d seen each other, greeted with the same keen silence they had shared at
school. She looked thin, numb, as if she’d gathered all her spirit into some hidden net. She had glasses and she was alive.
Two friends nearby. It gave her the courage to wake up further. That day, she noticed things she hadn’t before. The guards, for example: that they were men, just men, full of shouts and beatings but men regardless, with their restless moments and distractions, the urge to be lazy, to chat with fellow guards, since they were, after all, just human beings, trying to do their duty and bring pesos home at night. They seemed to grow weary of their own thick skin. So if you played your part and walked your pace and kept your head down, you could not only obey but also coax them to relax, lean back, don’t worry, the bitches are behaving, did you watch the game? The yard was the best place for it; guards also feel the sun. If given enough impetus, and if in the right mood, they turned away and let the ring of women be. Then it was possible to adjust the shuffle subtly, more sluggish, more clipped, just a little difference, but enough to move toward a particular woman, and the other women would make way and hide your different pace with the sway of their dresses, because you did it for them too, because every time the rain and guards let up there was someone shuffling quietly toward someone else.
Salomé reached Leona’s side when the walk was almost over. She didn’t speak so much as shape her breath around a word. “
Amiga
.”
Leona heard it. “
Amiga
.”
“You all right?”
It was a stupid question. Leona took three incremental steps. “Yes. You?”
“Alive.”
They walked a few more paces. The guards stood upright, reluctantly; it was time to go in. The next day, Salomé approached Leona again, and they inched in silence. After that it rained for five weeks, there was no yard, there was only the inside, and on the inside, deep in the night, Salomé heard her body speak what she least wanted to hear.
When the ground dried and they were out again, Leona reached her early in the walk.
“We have news.” Leona slowed down for a gray dress trying to overtake her. “Tinto is alive.”
Salomé breathed a gulp of the white sky. There was so much inside
her, clamoring to be said, to be carried, to be named, but if she started she feared she’d never stop.
“I’m four cells over,” Leona whispered. “Listen for me.”
Salomé listened, every night, and on the third night she heard the taps against the wall. It was not the rats; the taps had a pattern. They came in groupings, taps, pause, taps, pause, and when she counted them the code became clear. It was simple, one tap for each letter of the alphabet. Twelve taps spells L. Five taps spells E. Fifteen spells O. L-E-O-F-O-R-S-A-L-O-M-E
Y-E-S-I-T-S-M-E, she tapped back, and waited while the woman in the cell next door moved to the other wall, to relay Y-E-S-I-T-S-M-E. Her neighbor was a woman whose face spoke of hard liquor, who never failed to groan at night. Salomé thanked her silently, in her mind, along with the two other women beyond her, faceless, tapping patiently, sending her message down the row.
She waited against the wall, hands resting on her belly. The taps began. P-L-A-N-N-I-N-G-E-S-C-A-P-E
She tapped back. H-O-W
She waited. Her fingers itched to tap and tap. The answer came. T-H-R-O-U-G-H-S-E-W-E-R
Salomé thought of her body pushing through an airless tunnel, swimming through shit, attempting to slither on her belly, the way her belly would be weeks from now. C-A-N-T-G-O
W-H-Y-N-O-T
Salomé tapped out what clamored to be said. I-M-P-R-E-G-N—her meaning was clear now, she could have stopped, but her fingers kept tapping until she’d fully said it, even though her neighbor had perhaps already left to relay through the other wall.
The silence lasted so long that Salomé wondered whether Leona, or someone between them, had fallen asleep. Then the taps returned. W-A-N-T-A-K-N-I-T-T-I-N-G-N-E-E-D-L-E
She knew what knitting needles did, how they could reach inside and puncture out a pregnancy, how women could survive it if they found a way to stop the flow of blood. She touched her belly. She could do it and should do it, perhaps, except the thing inside her already had an insect
strength, scraping her with tiny appendages, humming with hunger for the sun. N-O
