The Invisible Mountain (5 page)

“These are real gaucho nights,” Cacho assured him.

It seemed like magic, to Ignazio, that you could put a culture on like clothing, button it up over your body as if it were sewn for you, as if nobody would notice the disguise.

In the third month of travel, Cacho woke in the afternoon with a hangover so acute he couldn’t stand, let alone lead El Mago Milagroso’s magic show. It was their first night in Tacuarembó. Scores of townspeople waited in a throng at the door of the tent.

“Damn him!” the Spaniard swore behind the stage curtain. “If we have to cancel I’ll—”

“You won’t cancel,” Consuelo, Cacho’s wife, assured him. The pink sequins on her leotard winked as she spoke. “Gondola can take his place.”

Ignazio stared at her. “What do I know about magic?”

“What does Cacho? What does anyone? You’ve watched the show plenty of times. And you’d fit into his clothes.” Since she was the resident seamstress, her claim on this was irrefutable. In the tents they called her Mistress of Disguises. She tilted her head to a sensuous angle. “I’ll whisper instructions from the coffin while you cut me in half.”

“She’s right,” the Spaniard said. “You’re the best we can do. Get into costume. Hurry.”

Twenty minutes later, Ignazio parted the velveteen curtain with trembling fingers. Hands applauded; trumpets blared. The stage felt infernally hot, and the reek of sweat and peanuts almost overwhelmed him. The crowd blurred into a sea of color. He raced his way through the opening speech, attempting the jokes and dramatic flourishes he’d seen Cacho use night after night. To his surprise, laughter and shouts rose from the audience. Consuelo joined him onstage and winked in encouragement.

His nascent stage presence began to crumble. He stuttered. Three boys snickered in the front row. It was time to solicit a volunteer from the audience. “Who can help me?” Many raised their hands up high, front-row boys included, but he pointed at the girl in the back. “How about
esa morochita
in the corner?”

She came to the stage. Years later he would not recall the murmurs of surprise, arms crossed in disappointment, the peanut shells that grazed his calves, but only that she came to the stage. He placed a yellow silk scarf in her hand. The trick was simple. He would impress her. The scarf would disappear and he would retrieve it from her ear, and then his sleeve. He waved his arm and the scarf disappeared. The crowd moaned appreciatively; the young woman gazed in a still, unsettling way. She stood so close. Ignazio leaned toward her (oh her smell) and pulled the scarf out from behind her ear. The crowd clapped. The young woman smiled—slightly, a soft tug of the lips, but she smiled. The scarf disappeared again. He drew himself up and said, “Where do you think it is?” His volunteer cocked her head. He grinned victoriously and reached into his sleeve. Nothing there. He reached again, fumbled. Nothing. The spare yellow scarf, hidden in the lining, was gone.

He heard giggles, mutters, he saw bodies leaning forward in expectation. He looked at the young woman in panic. Opening his mouth, he could not speak. She stepped close and reached into his sleeve with fingers that scalded him and left too soon with a yellow scarf captured between them like limp prey.

The room erupted. The crowd laughed at him and praised the girl, called to her by name. Pajarita. The name flew from their mouths, up his empty sleeve, into the middle of his hollow chest. Pajarita. It roosted there for the rest of the show, through the sawing and the rabbit and the pigeons careening from their box. It fluttered as the sea of people finally ambled out. It flapped and furled between his ribs as he lay under the stars, trying to sleep, eyes wide open. Pajarita.

The next morning, his mouth twitched as he gulped his bread and
mate
. He wandered distractedly about the camp. He groomed horses that evoked her carnal grace. He hauled ropes that launched his mind toward sleek black braids. He pressed poles into deep sleeves of earth—he had to find her.

This was not difficult; it was a very small town. That afternoon, Ignazio knocked on the crude opening of the Torres hut with hat in hand, praying he looked calm and respectable. A woman with a weathered face and pendulous breasts emerged to meet him.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

She gestured him through the doorway, past the leather curtain, into her home. She gestured again to offer him a seat at the table. He moved to accept, then saw that all the stools around the table were not stools at all, but animal skulls with hard, pale faces and black pits for eyes. Flames shone from a pit in the dirt floor; the skulls leered at him in the flickering light. He didn’t sit. He tried not to shudder. The woman eyed him, then crouched down at her cooking fire.

Silence swelled between them. The woman broke it first. “You’re here for Pajarita.”

“Yes.”

“She’s at the market.”

Ignazio scratched his nails against the rim of his hat. “Will … your husband be home at some time? I would like to speak to him about your daughter.”

“Her father will come.” She threw chopped parsley into boiling water. “You want to marry her.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

The woman looked into his eyes as if they were tubs of dirty linens she could wring dry. “What else?”

Her eyes did not leave his face. “Pajarita will be home at dark. You can wait here.”

He sat on a log outside the house and watched the light deepen slowly over the landscape. Chickens everywhere, clacking terribly, pecking the air in his general direction. One hour. Two. Or was it more? He shifted, stood, walked a few steps and came back again. Dust gilded his only pair of patent-leather shoes. He was ridiculous, a man whom boys saw fit to accost with peanut shells. An impostor. A sad and lonely man. It was stupid to wait here, he would leave, any moment he would leave.

He stayed.

She came.

She carried woven baskets at the flanks of her horse. The green bows were gone from her braids, and her dress looked like it had been made to fit a woman twice her size. She swam in it. She swam in the air. She was perfect.

Ignazio stood and removed his hat. All the brilliant things he had thought of saying were gone. She was closer now. An ache rushed through his body as he watched her dismount. He wanted to leap forward and crush her to his hips, but instead he bowed and said, “Good evening, Señorita.”

Pajarita stood with the dusk gathering around her like a darker and darker skirt. She looked at the woman, who had appeared in the doorway. “Tía Tita, what’s this man doing here?”

Tía Tita, Ignazio thought, must have been born before humans learned to blink. She wiped her hands on her apron. “You bested him at magic, and now he wants to marry you. Maybe you should let him stay for dinner.”

The father came just before dinner, sat down on his skull, and looked at the stranger in his house.

“Good evening, Señor, my name’s Ignazio Firielli.”

The man nodded. “Miguel.”

Ignazio waited for him to say something more, but he said nothing.

Dinner was served. Ignazio had expected a boisterous country family, bustling with children whose favor could be curried with card tricks. There were none. The four of them ate, their silence punctuated by questions from Tía Tita—what’s Montevideo like? how far is Italy? what can you possibly mean, water for streets? Ignazio’s answers were simple at first, then grew more embellished, and he was in the midst of a description of the unrivaled pragmatic grace of gondolas that surely would persuade the father to look up and see his guest in a new light, or so it seemed, when the father stood and left.

Ignazio stopped in midsentence. He heard Miguel’s horse snort and lope away. The women said nothing. He could have punched the wall, only it looked as though it would break and crash if he did, and then where would his bid for marriage be? He had lost the chance to speak to the father, and yet it had begun to occur to him that this family’s rules did not adhere to the standards he’d imagined, or to any standards he had ever fathomed.

The fire in the cooking pit had faded to an ebb. It was time to go. He rose, hat in hand.

“Thank you so much for dinner.”

Tía Tita nodded.

“May I call on you tomorrow?”

Tía Tita looked at Pajarita, who cocked her head and stared at him. He felt exposed under her gaze. She nodded.

He left and walked through the grass toward the carnival encampment. He turned back for a last look at the
ranchito
, and glimpsed—he was sure he glimpsed—a face in the doorway, an exquisite face, before it darted back behind the walls.

This, Pajarita thought, is not the world. It is home: over there is the table, and here, to my side, the breaths of family sleeping. There, through the window, the soft slash of the moon. There it falls, making silver light on the ground. This place is home. And it is good. But it is not the world.

The thought surprised her. It felt fresh, an unknown herb against the palate of her mind. The world held many things that were not Tacuarembó, and Pajarita knew this: that Tacuarembó was only part of Uruguay; Uruguay just a sliver of the continent; the continent one of many to be found across those waters called The Seas—and she had always known about The Seas because her abuelo, El Facón, had ridden to their shores and traded for exotic things that came from other lands. She had a bracelet, inlaid with jade, that he had brought for her abuela. She knew, she had been told, that Tacuarembó was a forgotten speck that did not even merit a dot on maps of the world.

And yet, in the rhythmic shapes of days, there was little need to recall this. The world, on a normal day, held the same paths through the same fields and smells and hums and crackles, each season, as a turn of the seasons before, and that was her world, her lived one, the only map she needed.

But today was not a normal day. This man had come to her door. She couldn’t sleep. It must be the moon, spilling in light, keeping her up. What a strange feeling: dizzy, thrilling—like those times when, as a child, she had spun and spun until she stopped and looked around at a world that whirled before her eyes. All things danced, nothing stayed still. The man carried another country in his mouth. His Spanish emerged in odd shapes and sounds. He knew about faraway places, like that city riddled with rivers for streets—who could believe it? And his pink skin had gone pinker as Tía Tita launched her questions. But he answered.
For me
.