The Invisible Mountain (43 page)
The taps went down the row, then returned. O-K
She would live. She had to live. She was not an empty hull.
In fact, just the opposite: she was fuller than she’d ever been in her life, fuller even than her early days as a Tupa when she almost let her secret burst out fresh and raw on the bus. Now she had a secret that made her cling to life, made her eat every drop of the sad soups, made her greedy for food, motion, rest, cushions, more food, and perhaps the hungers weren’t hers but rather came from something deeper; in any case the source didn’t matter, not the source of the hunger nor the horrifying source of the child. She turned her mind from sources, over and over. What mattered was that she was hungry and that made her more alive, she wanted real flesh on her bones again, she could have killed a man for a bowl of ice cream, dismembered him for a plate of
milanesas
, fresh from the pan, still sizzling, oil and beef and crushed-up bread she needed it, she wanted it, and even though she couldn’t have it there was power—fierce, unfettered—in the sheer appetite. The other Tupamaras were on their way to freedom, making plans, guiding those outside as they dug a tunnel from the sewer. She would not be with them. Her future held unknowable unshaped things she couldn’t see and didn’t want to see. She didn’t look at it, looked only at the brimming-over present. In the yard, Leona seemed sorrowful, pitying almost, Salomé the trapped, Salomé the burdened, and if they could have sat down together under their eucalyptus tree, she’d have said, Leona, stop it, I am full. Full of fullness. It made no sense, she made no sense, she was a crazy woman all the more insane for being willing to succumb to her own madness. She let her mind roam free. It roamed to her mother. Mamá, I want to see you, I’m so fucking sorry, I put myself at risk but never meant for this to happen and least of all to do this to you, whatever it is my absence is now doing, and now the most obvious fact in the world strikes me like a slap, that
you carried me inside you, long ago in Argentina, and you felt things and I was born and you held my head up when I couldn’t and I wonder what you thought when you were doing it. Whether you thought about your own mother and what she thought and felt when she carried you inside and then gave birth and held your head up for the first time in that very house we all lived in together. It’s strange to think of the woman who carried you inside her when you yourself are carrying a child, a child-almost, a child-becoming. No words to explain—not in this language, we’d need expanded language—the feeling of stark air, the sudden consciousness of womb not surrounding you, the exposure and aloneness you’ve been living with since birth. The warmth, gone. The warmth, remembered. Remembered or reinvented by history repeating itself inside.
Winter approached. Even the rat shit froze. The walks grew less frequent with the rain. Salomé grew bigger. When her belly showed through her loose dress, the guards avoided it with their rifle butts and with their roving hands. There was one baby in the prison, as far as she knew. It lived in its mother’s cell for two months, and cried when its mother was beaten. It died in the growing cold.
She wanted what she couldn’t have—to surround her child forever. Starkness would come all too soon.
Salomé tapped: L-E-O-L-A-T-E-R-C-O-M-E-F-O-R-B-A-B-Y
O-K
T-A-K-E-F-A-R-A-W-A-Y
O-K
Y-O-U-S-W-E-A-R
I-S-W-E-A-R
They escaped at the end of July. She lay awake all night, in the dark, following the women with her mind, through sewer tunnels, sludge and slips and sloshing, urging them on, go, go, soon there will be oxygen, don’t stop, don’t give up, just think of what you’ll have on the other end. She saw Leona and Anna and thirty-six other Tupamaras, covered in feces, crawling through the fetid river. Without her. The child-almost inside her kicked and clawed.
“
La puta madre,
”one guard said, down the hall. “The director’s going to want our balls.”
Another guard grunted agreement. “He’s going to string them up like fucking Christmas lights.”
“I’m in no rush to announce this.”
“
Mierda
. Let’s have a
mate
.”
The first guard laughed.
“No, I mean it. Here, drink, collect yourself.”
She listened to them drink and talk with shakier voices than she’d ever heard them use. She felt proud and victorious and immensely alone without Leona and the others, but how could she think that, she was not alone, inside she was constantly accompanied by a hungry little creature who was stronger ever day, whose feet and elbows danced to jagged music Salomé couldn’t hear, wet music, womb music, a song free of gravity.
In September, when the men escaped, the guards were still so unsettled that they discussed the details right in the hall, and Salomé stayed quiet so she could hear them: it’s amazing, absurd, the whole city is aflame with it, one hundred and six men got out through the sewers of Punta Carretas. There were distractions for the police last night: a flood of emergency calls, a knife fight on the other side of town. The symphony in the church beside the prison played abnormally loud. The tunnel surfaced at the floorboards of a butcher shop across the street—and this news made Salomé laugh, before she could stop herself, and the guard called out Shut up in there, but only halfheartedly; she was the crazy pregnant woman after all. There was only one butcher shop across from that prison. Its worn old sign glowed in her mind, vivid, peeling, nailed up by hand. She could see just how it happened: Coco and Gregorio, gray-haired, stooped, in matching bathrobes, shuffled downstairs to gape at the floor as it cracked open. Every tile on that floor was familiar, was scuffed from Mamá’s childhood games, from Abuela’s stool, from the shoes of women seeking verdant cures. She could smell the
floor perfectly, as if she were there, the smell of meat and knives and the cycles of animal life, except of course it must have smelled quite different that night, when the tiles burst upward and the sewer burst too and the Tupamaros, Tinto among them, there you are my Tinto, rose from underground, spurting up, one after another, one hundred and six of them, filling that room of flanks and meat hooks, rising under the gaze of an old couple, returning to the map of the living, covered in shit, surging toward light.
Five days later, during birth, that same image returned to her: the bursting floor, the surge from filth, the surge toward light.
The baby was a girl: Victoria. She was too light and too fragile and cried all the time. There was not enough heat. There was not enough milk. There was cloth for diapers but she had to trade for it, in front of the baby, and more was always needed.
Still, those were her best three weeks in prison. Different from being pregnant—now she could hold and see and touch and smell and hear the girl, and every sensation amazed her. Victoria’s skin was nectar against her body. Her voice the music before music. Her every scent incredible and perfect, even the sour ones, especially the sour ones, because they were so strong.
Be strong
. For the first time in years, she sang: softly, under her breath, wandering tunes,
Viqui, little one, dearest treasure, live, live, live
. The baby was so frail, so delicate, her fingers splayed, her eyes squeezed shut, her eyes would forget this place, forget this woman making a cradle out of her arms. No. No. Yes, for the best. Salomé memorized each moment, each toenail, each clumsy-perfect gesture, praying for Leona to keep her promise, for Leona to forget her, for her to succeed, for her to fail.
When Victoria was three weeks old, a guard came for her. He was an older man, and not unkind. He’d never touched her.
“The baby is going on a little trip,” he said. “For a proper baptism.”
Salomé tightened her arms around her daughter, instinctively, but the door opened, hands reached in, and she loosened her hold.
“Her name’s Victoria,” she called as the bars slammed shut.
The next morning, she woke to the sound of two guards’ conversation down the hall.
“You hear about the baby?”
“No.”
“Goddamn Tupas stole it. Right out of its grandmother’s arms.”
Seasons turned, heavily, exhausted as soon as they arrived. At first, she hoped they’d come for her. Arrange another escape, building on their record of thirty-eight women and one baby. Or perhaps they’d hold something or someone for ransom and the president would cave this time, or even go to court for her and argue that she’d had no trial, she’d done her time, wasn’t it enough yet? and if not how much longer? and if it happened, if they saved her, she would go outside and feel the sun and see her baby while there still was baby to see.
But the flow of women seemed to run in the opposite direction: into, not out of, the prison. The population swelled with each month. There were women everywhere, new cots in every room, nobody had a solitary cell anymore. There were young ones, like her, just coughed up from La Máquina: Salomé could tell from their low chins, their flinching shoulders, the midnight screams cut off by slaps. She saw them in their slow walk in the yard, in the weekly showers, in the kitchen and laundry duties that she was now allowed and compelled to leave her cell for. She had to know what was happening out there, in the other world, the sunworld beyond the walls, to send so many women behind bars. She found a guard willing to trade for old newspapers; his name was Raúl, he had cigarettes too, it wasn’t so bad, he might have taken it anyway but he preferred it sweet, and her body didn’t seem to mind, didn’t even flinch. The newspapers announced that the Tupamaros were weakened, then crushed, then gone. Pulled out by the roots like weeds that had infested the city. They used those words,
weeds, roots, infested
. The military was to be thanked for stepping in, for doing the job right, fixing what the police and president couldn’t manage. They had cleaned things up and now they ran the streets. The streets relied on them for normalcy and order. She looked for a long time at a photograph of nine generals standing in a
stiff circle around the president. President Bordaberry sat below them, shoulders hunched, slouched forward, smiling the smile of a gambler caught in a bluff. The generals weren’t smiling. They stood as close together as you could without touching. The papers always came to her two weeks old; by the time she found out about the coup, she and everyone else in Uruguay already lived under a dictatorship. It was a small step, a formality, and so she couldn’t be surprised. The paper, when it came, read June 28, 1973. Yesterday, it said, the president closed Parliament, locked the building, and surrounded it with soldiers. Or the soldiers locked the building and surrounded it and the president announced that, yes, he was behind this, the soldiers were sent by him. In any case, the senators could all go home, there was nothing left for them to do. A new military junta would be formed. She studied the firm press of his lips in the photograph.
Necessary
, he said,
as is the case elsewhere in the world
. It was bloodless. It was civil. It was done.
Salomé leaned back against the wall. The woman in the other cot slept or pretended to be asleep. She had only been here a few weeks. She was young and seemed disoriented, as if caught in a bad film she’d missed the start of. Why had they brought her here? Was she a criminal, a Tupa, a voice of dissent, or just a person in the wrong place at the wrong time? What would happen to her and to all of them now, in this new Uruguay? If only, she thought, I had the strength of ancient women who tore their hair out by the roots in mourning, wailing out with love and grief for what had died. Surely the nation deserves to have us all stripping our scalps, bleeding for it, for what has proven breakable which is everything, a nation, a woman, a collective dream. If I had the strength of the ancients, and the freedom, I’d dress in black and tear my hair and scale a mountain in my mourning, I’d scale El Cerro, our humble pretense of a mountain, and all the way up I’d howl and keen for what cannot be forgotten. But I am neither free nor ancient, and I need my howls and keens to stay inside. They are a fuel that keeps me going. Long ago when I was still a girl but thought I was a woman, and when I thought I was a warrior but didn’t know how much I was, I learned to curl my shouting thoughts into a ball and hold them deep inside where nobody could hear or touch or take them. Keens, howls, elegies. I won’t let them go.
Things were scarce—food, water, warmth, space, air, light. She was lucky, she had Raúl, he brought her extra water when he was in a good mood, and she shared it with the other women in her cell. Three of them now. There was barely room to move. Salomé slept on a thin pallet on the concrete floor. Their names were Paz and Olga and Marisol. Olga and Marisol rarely spoke. Paz was a reporter’s wife, arrested for the crime of being married to a reporter. She was in her forties, and was not afraid to look guards in the eye. She learned to place her urine on the floor, in a thin arm of sun that reached through a metal grating. She moved it as the sun moved, until the salts settled and it became a drink that could be swallowed.
“Try it, Salomé. It’s not so bad.”
Salomé shook her head.
“Then try your own. It’s easier with your own.”
A week later, she admitted that Paz was right.
It took months for the women’s stories to leak out, slow and hushed, in the circle on the yard, in the laundry room, in the showers, in whispers across the cell, in the taps that had become nightly percussion on the walls: they were union members, university students, university professors, socialists, communists,
batllistas
, artists, journalists, or they were the sisters or daughters or mothers or girlfriends or wives or friends of the same. They’d been pulled from the street, from their beds, from the doors of cafés. In the new Uruguay, every citizen was under surveillance. Every citizen was classified according to his or her level of threat to social order. A or B or C. Only A’s were safe from losing jobs, family, the outside world. The regime had its hands full. Many, the women whispered, had fled the country.
