The Invisible Mountain (8 page)
Amazing, Pajarita thought, how much the world could change. How accustomed she could grow to electricity, high stove, high chairs, high bed. How land could disappear beneath homes and rock-hard paving, and how men could turn into husbands who then turned into—what? What was Ignazio becoming? Someone different from the
joven
she met years ago; a man she sometimes barely recognized. It began with the birth of their first son and deepened with the second. Something inside him—pale and pained—had swollen to unmanageable size. It bulged. It never showed its naked face. It sank into the sea of all the liquor he drank. It kept him far away from her: in an era of eight-hour workdays, Ignazio came home later and later, drunk, face drawn tight like reins on an unpredictable horse—or, other nights, face loud, loose, unfettered. I don’t deserve you. You don’t love me. How could you. Why wouldn’t you. Did you did you yes you did. She tried to answer but there weren’t enough words and he never really posed a question. He grew obsessed with the idea that she had a lover. They fought over this phantom man’s existence. There were nights when they fought until they collapsed against each other, and only in those hours could she reach for who she was and who he longed to be and open them toward each other, strain to fuse them in a crucible of heat. On other nights she woke to feel Ignazio rustling into place beside her and he reeked so strongly of drink and women’s musk that she sent him out to sleep on the living room floor so she could lie alone, free of his scents, and miss his body.
The pile of pesos Ignazio brought home each week slimmed down. It was too thin, barely stretched to feed the boys. She cornered him on a Sunday morning at the kitchen table.
“Ignazio. You’re not bringing home all your pay. You have three sons,
querido
. You have to stop.”
She had thought, she could have sworn, that he would fight; that his jaw would tighten, his voice would raise, his fist would crash on the table. Instead he stared at her, then out the window, toward the lighthouse hidden behind the prison-almost-finished. He was quiet. She waited. His profile stood crisp against striped wallpaper.
“Remember,” he said, “when we first came to the city? How we walked along the shore of the river? As if it had no end. As if we could walk and walk and find only more waves, more sand, more water. I always wanted to put gondolas on that water. I’m going to do it. A peso per ride. We’ll have more than enough for all of us.”
Pajarita let her hands rest on her lap. They grasped each other. “How much would it cost to build them?”
Ignazio shrugged. “A sum.”
“And where would that sum come from?”
“Leave that to me.”
That night he was voracious with her, even more so when she dug her nails into his back and broke the skin.
Three days later, the prison across the street opened to great fanfare.
Montevideanos
from all parts of the city came to see. El Penal de Punta Carretas, it was christened. The mayor appeared on the steps and cleared his throat.
“My fellow
montevideanos
, we are here today to celebrate progress, to celebrate this formidable new building, but above all to celebrate this city.” He wiped his forehead, rich with sweat, and adjusted his wool suit. “Montevideo is one of the most beautiful and modern places on the continent.
Our climate, our beaches, our literature are unparalleled, and in the past twenty-five years, we have become a world-class city. Immigrants from Italy, Spain, France, and other nations have found a home here. We have established a democratic system inspired by the highest humanitarian ideals—the ideals of
batllismo
, the ideals at the heart of Uruguay.” The crowd clapped, and the mayor paused, his chest puffed out like a sparrow’s. “Yes, yes, we have accomplished this—while our giant neighbors, Argentina and Brazil, only dream of such stability. We may be small, but we are an exemplar of a nation; we are claiming our place in the world!” He pointed his index finger vigorously at the sky, and held it aloft as applause washed over him. “And so, my dear
montevideanos
, as we mark this day, as we open this state-of-the-art facility here in Punta Carretas, let us also look to the future. With all we have achieved in this century so far, just think of what awaits us in the rest of it. Our children and our children’s children will stand on the foundations we have built for them, and carry us forward to our destiny. We are a city of the future. The future belongs to Montevideo!”
He sliced the red ribbon that hung across the gate, dripping sweat, beaming in a deluge of applause. Sarita Alfonti shouted behind Pajarita. She felt the crowd’s excitement, its hunger and pride. Champagne corks popped. An accordion pushed out chords. El Penal’s cream-colored walls loomed, high, clean, unmoved.
That night, Ignazio did not come home. Pajarita awoke at 4 a.m. in a still-empty bed. She stared at the ceiling until it grew pale with dawn. Then she rose and made breakfast for the children: toast and warm milk and what was left of butter. Today was Ignazio’s payday. When he arrived, more butter would come.
But he didn’t arrive that day. Or that night. Or the next. Onions—she had onions; she could fry them for dinner and serve them on bread. More bread with mayonnaise for lunch.
He arrived on the sixth night. He looked ashy and haggard and did not meet her eyes. He smelled as if he had just been spit out of a war zone. He slouched in silence at the kitchen table. It took Pajarita two hours of pouring
mate
to coax him and discover what he’d done.
After his last night at home, Ignazio asked his boss for an advance on
the next two months of work. He was a faithful employee, and so the request was granted. The loan constituted a third of what he needed for a fleet of gondolas. He took it straight to El Corriente, to triple it at the poker table. It didn’t triple. He lost it all.
How smooth the wooden table was between them. Solid, it seemed—and yet one bite of an ax could, at any moment, break it open. Send halves reeling. Pajarita gripped the table’s edge as though that act alone were keeping it in place. Gone. Two months of pay. And days yawning in front of them like mouths.
“What will we do?”
No answer.
“Ignazio—”
“Shut up, woman!” Ignazio stood so suddenly that the table knocked from her hands and fell. “Shut your stupid fucking mouth.”
Pajarita stood too. “Don’t shout at me.”
Ignazio tightened backward in an enormous bow and arrow and the force of him flew forward in a fist that crashed against her face so that she fell against the wall, toward the floor; she curled around her burning face—the world was turning turning, full of shouting, full of stars, full of silence. Silence. Pain ebbed slightly. She was alone. No, not quite alone; his sounds came from the living room. She should go to him. She would not. She would stay here, furled on the floor, while he wept. But she was bleeding. She stood and sought a rag to wipe her face. The taste of iron tinged her tongue. She wet the rag and wiped again. Thank god thank god the children were asleep. She lifted the table into place, back onto four legs, and cleaned blood from the floor. Dizzy. She listened for living room sobs. None. She went to look. There he was, her husband, tear-streaked, drunk, fast asleep in the rocking chair. She walked past him to her room, to bed, to sleep.
The next morning, when she woke, the rocking chair was empty. No Ignazio. She used the last of the flour for bread that day. Crackers. There were still crackers. The days went by. No Ignazio. The crackers ran out. Only a quarter jar of mayonnaise left. Her hands (scrubbing, folding, brushing Bruno’s hair, opening her blouse for hungry Tomás) shook.
Coco saved her with free meat, and an idea.
“I have no way to thank you.”
Coco continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Secondly: your plants. They’re strong. You should sell them.”
“Sell?”
“To women in the
barrio
. You can start in the store, behind the counter with me. Look, once word spreads about your cures, better than a doctor and cheaper too, you’ll be putting food in those boys’ bellies.”
It had never occurred to her, but she couldn’t think of a reason not to try. She took her children and a basket of leaves and roots and barks to the butcher shop. The boys resumed an epic pretend game of gauchos-in-the-
campo
, riding imaginary horses among the chunks of flesh that hung from the ceiling. In one corner of the room, between the chopping block and meat hooks, Pajarita arranged two small wooden stools and sat down on one. Ignazio, she thought, I want to kill you, to kiss you, to carve you like a flank; just wait and see how I’m going to live without you by my side.
Coco served as a living advertisement. Women began to come. Some of them just needed to be heard; they told sprawling, unkempt tales of death in the family, brutal mothers-in-law, financial pressures, wayward husbands, violent husbands, boring husbands, loneliness, crises of faith, visions of Mary, visions of Satan, sexual frigidity, sexual temptation, recurring dreams, fantasies involving saddles or bullwhips or hot coals. She offered them teas for comfort, luck, or protection. Other customers came with physical conditions—pain in their bones, a stitch in their side, numbness in hips, ears that rang, forgetfulness, sore knees, sore backs, sore hearts, sore feet, cut fingers, quivering fingers, wandering fingers, burns, headaches, indigestion, excessive female bleeding, a pregnancy that wouldn’t come, a pregnancy that had to end, cracked bones, cracked skin, rashes no doctor could diagnose, aches no doctor could cure. There were housewives, maids, sore-handed seamstresses, sweaty-handed adulteresses, great-grandmothers swaying with canes, young
girls swooning with love. Pajarita listened to them all. She sat still as an owl as she listened. Then she handed them a small package and explained what to do with its contents. Word spread. Women came to see her from all corners of the city. She could barely keep up with harvesting from cracks in the sidewalk, nearby parks, and the pots in her own house. To Coco’s delight, the seekers often picked up their daily beef along with their cures. Pajarita set no price. Some gave her pesos, others fruit, a basket of bread, a ball or two of handspun wool. Anonymous gifts appeared on the Firielli doorstep—baskets of apples, jars of
yerba mate
, handmade clothes for the children. They had enough.
She had developed a peculiar sort of fame. Her name was whispered through the kitchens and vegetable stands of Montevideo. Pajarita, she cured me, you should go see her too. And when I almost. You saw me then. If it hadn’t been for her. Strange, she thought, that all of this should grow from something as familiar as plants, such ordinary things, opening new worlds, drawing the souls and stories of this city to her doorstep, unveiling a startling thing inside her: a reach, a scope, adventures with no road map, forays into the inner realms of strangers where she roved the darkness in search of something that bucked and flashed and disappeared, slippery, evasive, untamable.
One sweltering afternoon, as a hunchbacked woman who smelled of garlic confessed her infatuation with the new priest, Pajarita felt something stir inside her body. Her mind reached in to feel. She was pregnant. A girl. She filled with the memory of conception, that final night, the clawing, Ignazio’s torn and hungry skin. And he was gone. She almost imploded from the sadness.
She let the garlic woman finish and offered her sympathy, a package, and instructions. She crossed the curtain.
“Coco.”
“Sí
.”
“I’m stopping for the day. I’ll take the children upstairs for siesta.”
“All right, Rita, I’ll join you soon.”
She returned to the children. Bruno crouched behind the chopping block, a soldier in combat, cow-bone gun aimed at his brother Marco.
“¡Paf!
You’re dead!”
In the corner, apart from the game, Andrés Descalzo sat drawing a stick of a person, a square of a house. Plenty of green and orange and purple lines everywhere. Finally a son, Coco had shouted when he was born two years ago. People called him El Carnicerito, The Little Butcher, born to carry on the family store and save it from the fate of sons-in-law. He even looked like a miniature man, with his earnest face, as if he were always cracking the most important code.
“Time for siesta. Put the bones away.”
They did as they were told in a burst of noise. Andrés returned his colored pencils to their box. Pajarita pulled an apple and a knife from her basket, and whisked off slices. She gave slices to her sons. Andrés was ready with an outstretched hand, the only son, just as the one she carried now would be the only daughter, and for one instant, as his hand touched hers and took the fruit, she flashed to a story, an old story, of an apple and a woman and a garden.
Eva, she thought, as she followed the children up raucous stairs. That is your name, and who can help it—no matter what you want to choose, the name chooses the child.
The year Eva Dolores Firielli Torres was born, the Rambla’s construction began on the shore of El Río de la Plata. The loud growl of machines lined the city. They carved a sidewalk along the beach, a curving path with cream and maroon tiles where
uruguayos
could walk the edge of things, the line between water and city.
Eva was an acutely curious baby. She had pale skin, like her absent father and Marco and like the city women, but her hair was as black as her mother’s, thick from the day she pressed out into the world. She loved things that glowed or glittered, like Pajarita’s jade bracelet, bright bits of sun on water, the beam of the lighthouse as it slunk along night rocks.
