IN HER LAST DAYS IN MONTEVIDEO, Malena couldn’t stop thinking of herself at fourteen—how she split in two, what split her, the wholeness before that—so ferociously that it seemed as if time itself had collapsed and dropped her into its rubble. Fourteen. A fiery girl, Malena on fire, that’s what she’d been at first, caught up in the spectacular illusion that the world lay open before her. So long ago now. Centuries ago, or so it felt. It was a lie that time healed all wounds. A vicious lie. Some cuts never seal right, and the best you can do is layer things over them—noise, days, love like a false skin—and turn your attention anywhere and everywhere else.
She’d tried to escape it all these years. The pain, but also the brightness before it, which was even more cutting because it gave measure to the loss.
How possible the world had felt. How clear. Fourteen, and before that, since the beginning of memory. At four years old she’d run on the beach and the wind had loved her hair; at eight, she’d sat on a park bench eating an ice cream cone and feeling alive in the most delicious animal way, marveling at the pigeons and the way she could kick her legs while the statue of some fancy man could not: he was large and male and important, everything she wasn’t, but she was the one who was alive and she would kick and kick because of it. At eleven she’d been shaken to tears by a sad book whose title she no longer recalled, only that there was a sick girl in it with big dreams and a tragic future. For days, she wept, remembering the book, and after that her own dreams came into focus: she’d become a doctor one day and discover the cure for cancer. Why not? She was good at math and ravenous for life. Her parents always seemed a bit afraid of her, of her wildness, which did not fit into their strict ideas of how a girl should be, but they approved of her goal of becoming a doctor, as long as she also became a goodwife. So she was happy, she was normal, she was whole.
The first sign of trouble came when she was twelve.
She was in church, bored by the sermon, staring at a painting of the Virgin during the Annunciation. Her family was more devout than others; her mother took her children to Mass every Sunday and taught them from an early age to pray. To love the Virgin and be humble before her. The Virgin was pure. She was holy. And yet, gazing at this painting, Malena thought that the Virgin was also beautiful, flushed with ardor that was presumably for God, who, she’d just learned, was going to put his seed inside her body. Her hands were crossed over her breasts, her eyes half-closed in pleasure as the angel Gabriel told her his news. Malena wanted to be the angel Gabriel, the one to cause this heat in the Virgin’s cheeks, the rapture on her face. Dimly, she understood that this was not the right way to love the Virgin, but it was too late. At night she dreamed of growing wings and flying to the Virgin’s home to tell her of the seed that would be entering her, to watch her slow surrender to the entering.
Then, at fourteen, Malena met Belén.
She was a year older than Malena, fifteen, though so shy that it felt the other way around. She lived three doors down. One day, Malena had stolen a glance at Belén and found her staring too. It had grown slowly, the hum between them, at the delicious pace of honey spreading across a rugged table. The first kiss had been hurried and electric, in Belén’s bedroom with the door open and her parents watching television a few meters away. The second time was in Malena’s living room. Open heat. As natural as singing to the trees. As impossible as trees who sing back. It was obvious that these were things you were not supposed to do, and yet they felt so right that Malena did not question, did not stop, any more than she would stop herself from breathing. Belén’s skin was full of songs, Malena made music against it with her fingers, and it all should have been perfectly safe because it was cards night and her mother always stayed out late when playing canasta at her sister’s house, the house of Tía Carlota, and her father was working late, her brother studying at the university, so the house was theirs, or so they thought, the world should not have ended that night, her mother should not have come home unexpectedly to see her daughter topless with her hand up the neighbor girl’s skirt. Later, Malena’s brother would explain to her that Tía Carlota had sent her guests home soon after they arrived because her daughter Angelita had had the bad manners to show symptoms of coming down with the flu, that is to say, she’d vomited right into the bowl of green olives. For this reason Malena’s mother had come home early, enjoying a leisurely walk through the streets after dark. It was 1965 and there was nothing suspicious, then, about walking after dark, or about congregating in a group of five or more to enjoy a game of cards. You could just walk, back then, or gather and play, and no one even thought to see these freedoms as precious things, possible to lose. Malena’s mother, on that evening walk, had not yet heard of Tupamaro guerrillas, nor had she heard of girls who put their hands up the skirts of other girls; one of these forms of innocence was broken when she burst in on her daughter in the living room. Years later, as a thirty-five-year-old woman attempting to escape the life she’d built, Malena would look back on that night and wonder fiercely what would have happened if her cousin Angelita had not vomited into the olive bowl and thereby set in motion a subtle yet violent shift in destiny. Would she, Malena, have continued as the curious, expansive girl she was before? Would she have kept meeting secretly with Belén, long enough to feel the treasure between her legs without that thin cotton that barred and thrilled her fingers at the same time? Would she have become a doctor? Would she have been happy? Had there ever been a chance for her of such a thing?
Her mother in the doorway. Sharp intake of breath. A gasp as if fighting not to drown. No, Malena thought, and then, wildly, you’re not here. She pulled her hand away from Belén, and Belén shrank from her, a double retreat, but it was all too late.
“I have to go home,” Belén said, reaching for her coat as if for a life raft, head down in shame, and when Mamá said nothing Belén rushed past her and was gone.
Her mother didn’t speak to her that night, and woke her the next morning for school with a tight face. Malena might have thought it had all been a dream, if not for her mother’s brusque movements as she made mate and toast, and her father’s refusal to meet her eye. He also knew. She kept her eyes down on her toast. Her stomach in knots.
“Why is everyone so quiet?” her brother asked. And then, leaning toward her conspiratorially, “For goodness’ sake, Malena, what did you do?”
His joking words fell flat at the center of the table.
At school that day, she couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t eat. Belén was not in class. What would she say to her parents that night, if given the chance to speak?
The chance came after dinner, washing dishes, Mamá’s back to her. “How could you? How could you do something so—disgusting?”
Her hands trembled. “I’m sorry,” she said, flooding with shame, not for what she’d done, but for this lie, a betrayal of Belén and of the butterfly thing they’d fleetingly become.
“This is not how we raised you.”
Pray for us sinners went the Hail Mary, which her mother sometimes murmured as she stirred tomato sauce or breaded meat for milanesas.
“You promise me that you’ll never do anything like that again.”
Malena froze. Her mouth would not move to form those words. Stubborn mouth, rebelling against the mind, insisting on shapes of its own.
Her mother turned to look her in the eyes for the first time that day.
Malena tried to hold her gaze. That look. The deepest revulsion. She hadn’t known her mother was capable of such a face. She hung her head and stared at the floor tiles.
“Malena.” Her mother’s voice was shaking. “You have to promise.”
“Look what you’re doing to your mother.” Her father, from the doorway, how long had he been standing there? “She’s trying to give you one last chance.”
A crack in the floor tile. Hair-thin, right in front of her feet. She’d never seen it before. She traced it with her eyes. Silent crack. Silent Malena. One last chance for what? One last chance, or what?
Her mother started to cry.
“I told you, Raquel,” her father said. His stout body seemed tense, like a wire, like an arrow in a bow. “Sin has taken hold in her, it’s no use.” His voice, too, was unfamiliar. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”
He left.
Her mother followed.
Two nights later, Malena and her mother boarded a boat to Buenos Aires.
Her mother didn’t say anything about why they were crossing the river, or for how long, and Malena didn’t dare ask. They rode across the Río de la Plata all night, and Malena didn’t sleep, nor did her mother, who kept her eyes closed, but Malena knew her mother so well, the way her chest and eyelids settled heavily when she slept, the deepsea rhythm of it, and knew this was a different kind of closing. Pretended sleep. The boat cut the black water, drank the starlight. Malena had no jacket, no hat. I’m cold, she thought of saying to her mother, into her ear, shaking her arm, but she didn’t dare. After the way her mother had looked at her in the kitchen, she would rather brave the bite of night air.
Once in Buenos Aires, they took a taxi through the city, and she watched the proud streets blur by through the window. It seemed a grand city, majestic and sprawling, an unlikely place to seek atonement. Maybe her mother was visiting that old high school friend who’d come to live here with her diplomat husband. Maybe she wanted to do some shopping at the boutiques that everyone knew had more to offer than anything in Uruguay, fashions fresh from Paris, something to distract her from the horrible pain of having a disgusting daughter, but then why would she bring that disgusting daughter along? To keep her from getting into trouble? As a way of forgetting? Wipe the canvas, begin again, nothing happened here. Maybe.
The taxi pulled up in front of a nondescript building on a tree-lined street. Only later would Malena realize that she hadn’t caught the name of the street, or the name of the neighborhood, had no idea where she was in the maze of the city, and how can you plot escape when you don’t even know where you are? Everything was large in this city, startling. Larger than anything in Uruguay. She’d thought she knew big cities, having grown up in the capital of her country, but Buenos Aires made Montevideo look miniature, almost toylike. They entered the building and a clean, polite nurse led them down the hall to an office. Malena followed, thinking, why a nurse? Her mother was sick? And hadn’t told her? In that case she’d burdened her ailing mother with more problems. Shame burned her. She’d be a better daughter, she would find a way to help.
“In here,” the nurse said brusquely, looking right at Malena.
Malena entered and put her suitcase down. Her arm ached from carrying it.
“Sit there until the doctor comes.”
Malena did as she was told. Just as her weight arrived in the chair she heard the office door shut behind her and a key turn outside in the lock. She was alone in the room. And trapped. Her mother had not come in with her. Why not? Mamá, where are you?
She knew what she was going to do, and knew, even, that it wasn’t Romina and the paraguaya’s fault, not really, it was all more complicated than that, much more complicated than anybody wanted to know. Including herself. She was tired of hearing her own mind. She took a room in a drab hotel at the outskirts of the city so she could put her suitcase down and find a bar. She walked. It didn’t take long to find one. She ordered a whiskey and cupped her hands around it in a posture of prayer. A liquid rosary, she thought as she drank. What would the nuns from the Convent of la Purísima have to say about that?
Everyone else had been lifted by democracy, allowed somehow to expand the edges of their lives. Political prisoners were free. Exiles were returning. Journalists exercising their right to harangue. La Venus had picked up her paintbrush, Flaca’s father loved her as she was, Paz had opened a bar for cantoras and maricones, one fucking miracle after another, and now this, Romina in love, everybody finding room to breathe. Everyone but her. The world pressed down on her unbearably. It had surprised her, at first, that the more the dictatorship faded into the distance, the more bleak she felt inside, when the rest of Uruguay seemed to be swimming in the opposite direction. As if she were dragged by currents only she could feel. When the battle had been everywhere, the bleakness around them all, she’d at least been able to connect with others in the stream. Carrying Romina had given her meaning, a way through the world. Romina had needed her, and this need had made Malena matter, given her a corner of the world to tend. It was more than that, too. They had merged souls, or so she’d thought. She, at least, had surrendered her soul to the merging. Loving Romina had completed her, given her refuge, streaked her days with blessing. She had been home inside Romina’s arms. Romina and the Prow: the only two homes she’d ever known. With all that gone, she’d lost her anchor, and there was no replacement; nobody wanted to carry Malena the way she’d carried others, nobody wanted to see what she’d seen, she was useless, exhausted, a burden on the world, every day a fight against drowning.
A man sat down beside her, bought her a drink. Yes, she thought. Enough thinking. Try to be normal, isn’t this what a normal slut would do? He was middle-aged, hunched over from years of office work, and didn’t seem unkind. Sadness beamed from him. Also longing. If she were a normal woman, would she want him back? Could pretending to want him make her normal?
They didn’t talk much.
It was all so easy.
She let him walk her to her room. He seemed kind enough, but as he thrust his way toward climax, she saw that the question she was asking her body could only have one answer. The disgust she felt for him was slight, and tinged with pity, but the disgust she felt for herself was so intense it took her breath away. The man sped up, mistaking her reaction for arousal. She should have known better. Than to think. That she could not be. What she was. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she would get on the bus and head northeast.
The man collapsed against her in a sweaty heap and stroked her shoulder with a tenderness or gratitude that made her ache with sorrow.
Her name was taken. Stripped away. You’ll have your name back, Dr. Vaernet said, when you’re ready to be discharged.
I’m not sick, she said, still thinking that her mother would burst in any moment and somehow explain the mistake, even though, by then, she’d already been held down by three nurses to be injected with she didn’t know what, even though she was restrained, now, by belts on a bed in a bare white room.
You are.
I don’t feel sick.
His eyes were a cold blue. He had a thick accent she couldn’t place. That, child, is exactly the problem.
Call my mother. Please.
That’s enough, Fourteen ninety-one.
That was her name now. 1491. The patients wore their numbers on the insides of their forearms, written in permanent marker that the nurses refreshed each morning along with breakfast and medications. It was hot in the clinic, despite the season, because the windows were tightly sealed and the air was thick, so the patients all wore short sleeves that left their numbers exposed. She didn’t see the other patients for the first few days, which she spent restrained in her room, but she heard their shuffling footsteps in the hall. Later, she’d see that they were mostly male, one young woman. Speaking between patients was forbidden. Her mind was a thick fog, so that it became more and more difficult to hold on to time, to think of her mother, to formulate sentences that could insist on release, to remember the reasons for kicking and struggling against her restraints. The world blurred. The nurses called her 1491, and she wanted her name back, wanted her name to fill her ears, chanted it to herself quietly in the night, Malena, Malena, but not during the day as when she said it with nurses in the room they slapped her and said, 1491. Time melted, so she didn’t know whether it was on her third or fifth or thirteenth day that she was wheeled to the Room for the first time. The Room had gray walls and black machines. The light was dim. Two doctors stood in the shadows, the one from the first day and a younger one, both with the same cold blue eyes. Her mind was a slow beast, she couldn’t understand, why were they attaching wires to her forehead, armpits, the meeting of her legs? Why were they reaching up her gown as if into a bag of potatoes? Fingers that attached the wires and lingered there, slithered against her where nobody had touched her except herself when she wiped, the younger doctor’s clammy hand. She could not close her legs, they had been tied apart. The shocks began. Time shattered. Rubble of it everywhere. She tried to scream. Something over her mouth. Survive it. Shards of yourself, grasp them. Live through the instant. Now this one. This one. Seconds too long, minutes unthinkable. Finally it pauses and the voice comes. You will answer our questions. We are here to fix you. Her mouth is back. She says call my mother call my father. The man’s voice says your parents asked us to do this, it’s their will and laughs a little before saying a little more. She says No says no no no but the wall swallows her voice and the pain takes her skin and shreds it into pieces.
Later, she would learn that the worst part of electroshocks was the way they burrowed into your flesh and stayed there, ready to spike without warning hours later when you were alone in your room, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of sleep. Electricity, intruder. Stowaway in the hurt ship of her flesh.
Later she would see many things.
She must be changed.
She was plagued by aberration.
It must be expunged from her.
The doctors, they knew how to do that.
They had methods. Machines. Surgeries they spoke of sometimes in triumphant tones.
Her mother had brought her here. Her father had sent her. It was their will.
She had to be broken.
She had been so wrong, the way she was, that she needed to be broken.
She struggled to rise over these thoughts toward another place, the one she’d known before, in which she could be alive, in which she had a name.
But she couldn’t reach it. She was in too many pieces and before she could gather them they flung apart again.
She had been left here.
There was nowhere else to be.
She tried screaming.
She tried begging.
She tried praying to a God in whom she could not believe, a God who must surely hate her to have flung her so far away from what He saw as good; prayed to nothing; prayed to the void yawning around her.
She tried submission, made herself as pliant as the surface of a lake. An outer calm that would stay with her for many years to come.
A psychologist came to her room twice a day. Asked her a list of questions, about her impure thoughts, when they had started, how often, what they entailed. She never knew what she was answering. What her voice would do next.
The doctors had the same last name. Father and son. The son was already beginning to go bald. He came into her room at night without his clipboard. You have to learn how to be a woman, he said, though very quietly, as if he didn’t want anyone outside her room to hear, and then he put his hand under her hospital gown and touched her in places that had been electroshocked and places that had not, and then he took her hand and wrapped it around his sex and moved it back and forth until he finished on her nightgown, which stuck to her after he was gone.
You wet yourself in the night, the nurses said in the morning, disgusted. And she had no reply.
But one of them, one morning, stood looking at the stain for a long time. She had moonlike eyes in a gentle face, and when she looked up at Malena her expression was sadder than anything Malena had ever seen.
The following night, the nurse with the moonlike eyes appeared in her room. “Fourteen ninety-one. Are you awake?”
She nodded, afraid to speak.
“Are you—all right?”
She shrugged. It was not a full answer but it seemed dangerous to say more.
The nurse sighed. Her voice went quiet, secret. “To be honest, you don’t seem like a bad girl.”
The rough covers made her legs itch but she didn’t dare scratch.
“That older girl, she must have pressured you. I heard your story. Poor thing.”
She couldn’t breathe. There had been a girl. Her name. Her name. Belén. A wisp of brown hair in the darkness. Ache.
“Listen. I’ve got something to tell you. You’re on the surgery list. For the brain procedure, the lobotomy.”
Brain procedure. Not a good. Think, damnit. Not a good thing.
“Your parents can’t help you, they haven’t been told. Dr. Vaernet is eager to try it out on a female, you see”—she broke off—“but you’re too young, don’t you think, who knows, you might be able to change on your own, with the right guidance, but not if at night—” She paused. Took out a pack of cigarettes, fumbled to light one. “Anyway. I can’t let it happen, can I?”
She couldn’t see the nurse’s face. Her silhouette a plush darkness in the bare room. She had to think. Shouted at her own mind to wake up. Awake. This could be a trap, a complicated ruse set in motion by the doctors: see which patient agrees to rebellion, then report to us. A spy. But if it wasn’t? If this nurse, who was also a young woman who lived somewhere in Buenos Aires and was also, try to see it, a human being—if this nurse sincerely wanted to help? Cigarette smoke filled the room, the scent of the outside world, and she opened her mouth to gulp in what she could.
“Honestly,” the nurse went on, “he just wants to keep on doing surgeries. He doesn’t even know whether it’ll work. It’s all experiments to him, the way it was on those poor people in the camps—” She clamped a hand over her mouth. “I’m talking too much. Did you know about that? About the concentration camps?”
She shook her head, though the gesture was shrouded by the dark. Horror beginning to creep through her.
“Of course you didn’t, why would you know?” She took another drag, blew out smoke. Her hand shook. “Dr. Vaernet was a Nazi. Is a Nazi. He worked for the concentration camps in Europe, operating on homosexuals—they let him do whatever he wanted—let him—” She stared at the wall as if it hid the missing words behind it.
Her limbs. She could not feel her limbs. Body cold against the bed. Her mind went lucid and she understood two things: first, she was in a worse place than she’d known; second, the longer this nurse’s visit went on, the less chance that the young Dr. Vaernet would come tonight. Keep talking, she thought. Go on, go on, even if into a nightmare.
“Then after the war, he was going to be tried for war crimes but he got away and came here, and so, those bastards at the Ministry of Health what do they do? Send him back? No, why do that when you can give a monster money to keep hacking people up?” The nurse was weeping now. “They don’t know I’m half Jewish. I shouldn’t be telling you. My mother—her family—she escaped as a girl but they—”
Malena had never seen an adult cry like this. Sobbing and ferociously restrained, all at once.
“I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t, when I took this job. Only later did I suspect. So I went through his papers and—oh, child, I’m sorry. We’ve got to get you out of here before—” She broke off again.
She turned her face up to the nurse. One word she’d said hung in the air like a rope. Out. She pushed herself to speak. “What do I have to do?”
The bus ride northeast to the town of Treinta y Tres was green and open, fields and low hills dotted with occasional huts. Malena had never been to Treinta y Tres, and didn’t plan to stay for long. She wanted to see Belén. Thirty-six-year-old Belén. She didn’t know what she’d do if she succeeded. She wasn’t even sure whether Belén was still there. It had been about a year ago, soon after the democracy began, that Malena had run into a childhood classmate at the grocery store and had learned, in the course of their brief chat (Malena always tried to keep such conversations brief so as to avoid too much probing), that Belén was now married to a hotel manager in Treinta y Tres. Malena had stored that information in a deep recess of her mind. But it surged up without warning, sometimes, pushing her toward her third or fourth drink of the night. What was Belén like now? The last time Malena had seen her, she’d been running out of the front door in shame. And in that moment, that Belén-running moment, Malena had still been whole, not lost, not yet split in two, still the seed of a future woman that she, Malena, would now never become. A woman who’d never set foot in Buenos Aires, though perhaps she might visit for the theater or the architecture, the cafés, the bright lights of Avenida Corrientes, the bookshops that never closed, the city’s famous pleasures. A woman who only knew of electricity as a source of light (and yes, that woman-she-could-have-been would still see electricity become a source of horror in her country, but even that was different from the clinic because government torture, at least, would one day be known by the masses, people like Romina would gather testimonies, survivors would be held in reverence, stories would be told and decried, and this telling, this decrying, would give the horrors room in the fabric of the world). The woman Malena could never become would have finished school and gone right to college. Become a doctor. Fulfilled the whole-girl dreams. Lost-girl dreams. Where was she, now, the lost girl? The one who’d touched Belén’s thighs with a pure joy? She wanted to find her. Wanted to search for her in the face of this older, married Belén.
Treinta y Tres was a plain, sleepy town. She’d thought she’d have to do some detective work, but there was only one hotel, which, she learned, was on the main plaza. She walked there, carrying her single suitcase, working up a sweat. There was no trouble with booking a room. That night, she sat in the plaza, where she was thankful that none of the locals tried to talk to her, so she could stare in peace at the statue at the center, which depicted the thirty-three men for which the town was named, who’d bravely fought for Uruguay’s independence. Revolutionary heroes. Their faces frozen into expressions of bravery and pride. Only five of them in the statue, to represent the thirty-three, because, she thought, the country they’d fought for was still poor and could not afford a bigger statue. Five, for Uruguay, was not so bad. The sculpture sang of action frozen in time, arms raised in every direction. Though the men were all the same dull greenish color, she could tell that one of them was black from the form of his nose and the tight curl of his hair, and she could hear what Virginia would say, we’ve been written out of all the histories, which made Malena think of her old living room and Flaca with her arm around Virginia and Paz passing the mate gourd around and La Venus painting and clucking her tongue at the unwriting of histories and the pain of it stabbed Malena, that she was gone from them now, from the only real family she’d ever known, and they probably hadn’t even noticed, had they, she washed away the question with a long swig from the whiskey bottle in her hands.
She didn’t see Belén that night in the plaza, nor in the hotel halls the next morning or the morning after that. Finally, on the third day, she said casually to the man at the front desk, as she renewed her room for another night, “And, are you the manager?”
“No, señora.”
It irked her, this señora, made her feel old and worn. When had she stopped being señorita? “May I speak to him?”
The man looked worried.
“Just to give him my compliments.”
“Ah, of course. As it happens, he’s away on business.”
“I see.”
“I can give him the message.”
“Thank you.”
“They’ll be back the day after tomorrow.”
“They?”
“He traveled with his family.”
“Of course.” His family. So she wasn’t here either. “How nice, that he has a family. Do they live nearby?”
“Right in this building, señora.”
“Isn’t that lovely.”
Two days more in Treinta y Tres, and there was no anonymity in this little town but no one asked her what she was doing there and for how long, even though she now knew every crease on the faces of the waiters in the hotel restaurant and the bartender down the block and corner store clerk who now rang up her grappa bottles with an easy smile, and she could guess what they thought of the sad thirty-something-old woman who was not a señorita and who didn’t smile because, for fuck’s sake, she didn’t have to, and she also knew every crease now on the faces of the five frozen revolutionary heroes in the plaza of Treinta y Tres.
On the appointed evening, she sat in the shabby little lobby with a book in her lap, pretending to read. The poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The book had been a gift from Paz, and for this reason she couldn’t bear to focus on it. The black letters were simply a place for her eye to land. She waited. She turned a page. Sor Juana had been a nun, in Mexico, centuries ago. A verse of love to a woman. What did that mean? What was she saying? What did this Sor Juana know about women and love? Absurd question, she didn’t know a thing, she was dead. Dead people know nothing. Dead people rest. Finally the door opened and a family entered. The man in front, a woman and three children behind. The woman was plump, stern-faced behind heavy makeup, exhausted from the journey or whatever life had thrown at her, overseeing the children like a sea captain bent on squashing any mutiny. She looked steely and capable, like so many matrons found throughout Uruguay, her unhappiness only visible in the tightness of her jaw and the blankness of her eyes.
The children were bickering breezily about something. The mother swatted one of them, raised her gaze, and saw Malena. Their eyes met.
It was not her.
It was a woman called Belén but there was nothing left in those eyes of the fifteen-year-old girl she’d been.
Malena went cold inside, then hot. What was she doing here?
The woman stared at Malena, as if trying to complete a puzzle whose pieces had flung to the winds.
“Mamá! She won’t stop!”
The woman turned to her daughter, and in that moment Malena slammed her book closed and escaped the lobby before the woman could approach, because the hunger to speak to her had vanished now, replaced by the need to escape.
She reached her room and closed the door, heart thumping in her chest.
She crumpled to the floor without turning on the light.
The carpet smelled of mold and rain and artificial lemons.
Almost a relief. To know that it was done. No escape left from the tunnel, just the passage through.
Still she lay there in the dark for a long time. Through loss of time. Through a long dark melting of time. Half-waiting to see if a knock might arrive at the door, a question from the past, but nothing came. Grappa. The bottle on the nightstand. She crawled toward it, sat up, drank. Tomorrow she would go. She longed to go. She was done with everything and everyone.
And yet, that night, at four in the morning, she found herself picking up the phone and calling Flaca, dialing numbers as familiar as her own name.
The plan was as simple as it was dangerous. The following night, at 2:30 a.m., Adela—for that was the name of the renegade nurse—would unlock 1491’s bedroom door and leave it shut. Fourteen ninety-one would wait at least half an hour, then slip down the hall past the dozing guard, through another door that Adela would secretly leave unlocked, and out into the night, where Adela would meet her two blocks down. From there, she didn’t know what would happen. She couldn’t think beyond the night. Her whole future collapsed into the coming hours of darkness and a vision of two doors. Two waiting doors.
She lay awake, not daring to doze and miss her cue. It wasn’t hard to stay awake. The challenge was not to succumb to the fog. The younger Dr. Vaernet did not come. No way to know why some nights no and some nights yes. She filled her mind with the two doors, and thoughts of a brain cut beyond repair. Before and after. Click. The unlocking. Soft steps, moving away. Had anyone else heard? Electric bolt through her limbs, through the core of her. So much electricity had run through her by now that she could generate her own. It rose without her calling it. Shock. Shock. Silence in the hall. Safe for now. Half an hour, wait. She had no watch, there were no clocks, how would she know? Time had melted in this place, gone sticky. Viscous time. Try to think. Try to count. A minute. Another? What if she waited too long? What if Adela gave up and left their agreed-upon corner, abandoning her in this maze of a city with nothing but a drab hospital gown to her name? She sat up in bed. Go. To the door and down the hall on feet she willed to float.
The night nurse was in fact asleep—she brimmed with thanks—and she poured slowly down the stairs, aching to run, holding back into silence. She reached the doorknob, which chilled her hand and turned smoothly and push! she was out on the street. Bare feet on pavement. Night air a sweet whip. Never had she been so happy to be cold. Two blocks sped by as if her legs were jaws, opening and closing, ravenous.
Adela was at the corner, huddled in a coat and scarf. She draped a coat around her, gave her a pair of shoes that were too big but still a relief, and interlocked arms with Malena. “Let’s go.”
They walked in silence for a long time. The streets were quiet at this hour; it was a sleepy neighborhood, residential, with majestic trees and little corner groceries, bakeries, and butcher shops interspersed among the apartment buildings and ornate houses. All these people, sleeping and dreaming just a short walk from the nightmare. They couldn’t know—and if they did, would they care? She began to flag. Electricity, call it back. Shout it through the body. Wake up.
“What’s your name?” Adela said.
A sting of fear as the name poured back into her tongue. “Malena.”
“Malena.” They walked on. “I can’t take you home with me. You understand.”
“Yes,” she said, though she understood nothing, not even her own breath.
“If they find you there—I’d lose my job, and, worse, you’d get dragged back.”
Their steps rang out. A car growled by.
“You have to leave Buenos Aires.”
“Of course,” Malena said, though she hadn’t thought that far ahead. Out, she was out—it was all she’d been able to see.
They turned onto a wider street: cars, cafés, music spilling out to the sidewalks. Adela flagged a taxi and pulled Malena in with her. They drove to the port, where it was still dark. The ferry station was closed. A sign said it wouldn’t open until 6:00 a.m.
“Your boat is at six twenty-five,” Adela said. She handed Malena the bag she’d been carrying, a ticket, and a wad of bills. “It’s not much,” she said apologetically, “but it’s all I could do. You’ll be dwarfed by my clothes, I’m afraid. But you’ll be all right—you’ll be home soon.”
Malena stared down at the bills, ashamed, flooded with alarm. Home. Where was that place? If she went to her parents’ house, would they send her back to the clinic? She saw her mother’s face, that night in the kitchen, bathed in disgust. Heard the voice again, Your parents asked. Their will.
Adela gave Malena her ID card, stolen from the clinic files.
“You won’t mind if I leave you here?” She glanced around her. “We can’t be seen together.”
She looked so panicked that it suddenly occurred to Malena that the nurse might change her mind, drag her back to the clinic, report her. As long as she was on this shore and Adela knew where to find her, she was not safe. “Of course. I’ll be fine.”
Adela nodded, then opened her mouth, as if compelled to speak. But then she turned and walked away without another word.
The ferry terminal opened and the boarding began and even then Malena kept seeing Adela running her way, shouting madly, or police officers in angry hordes, or the two Drs. Vaernet with lab coats rising around them like pale wings—but none of that happened. She set foot on the ship. From a sign on the wall she learned that it was a Wednesday, and that over four months had passed. The unhitching from the dock set off tremors in her belly. Water folded around her, black and sleek as the night sky. She watched it from the window until sleep rose up and mauled her from within.
She woke to the sound of chatter around her, from her fellow travelers. It was evening; the trip was almost over.
As soon as she saw her city—or, rather, the city that had once been hers—the thought arrowed into her chest: she had nowhere to go. The port teemed with people. A few women stood along the edge of the dock, scanning the disembarking men for possible work. Mujeres de la calle, she thought. Women of the street. That was how she’d heard them spoken of. They stood tired and erect in the growing darkness. She shouldn’t be staring, they could glance over at any moment, she should avert her eyes, but before she did a thought tore across her mind.
You could become one of them.
It was a way to live, wasn’t it?
A place to go.
Dr. Vaernet the younger’s hand, forever closing in.
She hurried past them, averting her eyes.
She walked and walked that night, through all the city, thinking of calling her parents, afraid to call, afraid to be sent back. She had only two goals: to stay alive, and to stay free of the Drs. Vaernet. If she went home she could not meet the second goal. Which meant she could not meet either one. She walked her city, Montevideo, avoiding the eyes of strangers. She was a fourteen-year-old girl alone. Show me, she shouted in silence at the city. Show me there’s a shred of space for me somewhere.
The only building that spoke back to her was a church. Its doors opened just before dawn. Look, it said. Look at my doors, how tall and wide they are, when so many doors are closed.
She went inside, crossed herself with holy water as she’d learned to do, and sat down in a back pew. Her legs were tired and she welcomed the rest. But she also felt tense with fear. House of God. And she with so much shame and so many sins she could not speak.
But where else?
There was a convent in the back of the church. She’d seen it from the street, the small cluster of nuns through the window, like the cluster of women at the port only turned inside out. She would lie to them. She stared up at the crucifix over the altar, at Christ’s painted blood, as she formed her plan. She would tell them she’d been pressured into prostitution and had run away from the room where she’d been left with her first man. She would be vague and weepy about what had and had not happened in that room. She would be sinful and suffering, stained and innocent, all at the same time. She would tell them she was sixteen, a little older, and that she’d always felt a boundless love for God. That last lie was a slippery one, shot through with a new horror, for hadn’t the Nazis embraced Christianity? Hadn’t there been a crucifix on the wall of her room in the clinic, and even in the Room with the machines? But she would have to find a way to make the lie believable. To infuse the word God with enough passion for the nuns to take her in. She leaned forward in the pew and stared at the red slash on Christ’s torso. When she said the word God she would replace it in her mind. She would tack another word beneath it like the lining sewn beneath the surface of a dress. Every time she said God—or Christ or Holy Spirit—she would secretly, in her own private code, be saying the word forgetting. Oh, Forgetting, hear our prayer.
Flaca answered with a thick, groggy voice. “Hello?”
“You used to be up at this hour.”
“What? Who is this?”
The hotel room swirled. She’d opened another bottle of grappa. Another swig. “You don’t know me?”
“Malena? Malena.” Rustling. Audible breath. “Where are you? We’ve all been looking for—”
“I’m not in Montevideo.”
“Then where?”
In Treinta y Tres, which is sleepy and boring but also a sweeter place than you’d imagine, and I’m spending the night in the same building as my first love but, ha-ha, it’s not what you think. “Outside.”
“We’re all worried about you.”
“Oh, really?” She was shamed by the bitterness in her own voice. “Romina’s crying all day?”
“She’s worried too, Malena—of course she is. We all are. Please. Come home.”
She gripped the phone cord. “I can’t.”
“Are you in trouble?”
She wanted to laugh. What did that mean, trouble? Where did trouble begin and end? “Would you care?”
“¡Chica! Of course I would!”
Malena waited. Raw inside. Suddenly she imagined Flaca bursting through the hotel room door, shouting that’s it, you’re coming with me, and carrying her in her arms all the way back to Montevideo. Whether that was a dread or a wish, she couldn’t tell. Her eyes stung. She blinked.
“Malenita, have you been drinking?”
“Fuck you, Flaca. Like you don’t drink.”
“Not like that.”
“Who cares?”
“Malena, please. Tell me where you are.”
Malena crouched against the wall, a cornered cat. “None of your damn business.”
“It is my business.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you, Malena.”
“Bullshit.”
“Come home.”
But there was no home to come back to and it had been a terrible idea to call. Flaca was sobbing into the phone now, saying something through her tears, but she was somewhere far away from where Malena was and even further from where she was going, and there were no words or Uruguayan highways that would ever close the distance. “Goodbye, Flaca,” she said with her finger on the cradle, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth she pressed down to hang up. When she let go, the dial tone blared at her. She listened to it for a long time.
The nuns were good to her, and after two years at the convent life began to occasionally feel bearable, but in the end she could not bring herself to make the vows. There were too many lies layered over lies, and she knew that her God was not the same as theirs. They loved the Virgin, and so did she, but her own love of the Virgin was now shot through with fear, tangled in danger, not enough to carry her through a lifetime of wearing the veil. The nuns helped her find her way beyond the convent, recommending her for her first job in the secular world, helping manage the books at a local cemetery that held handwritten registries of the dead. Malena had tidy, elegant handwriting, and she did well in the dusty back office where she could spend hours at a time in silence. The pay was not very much, but the groundskeeper let her sleep in the back room of the office until she saved enough to rent a room. He took pity on her because he believed what the nuns had told him, that she was an orphan rescued from the streets, and, in fact, this was not exactly true but not entirely a lie. Her parents were alive but she could not go back to them. She’d called home just a few times over the years. The first time was two months after fleeing the clinic, which was as soon as she dared. She’d had to wait until after all the nuns were asleep to sneak down the hall to the Mother Superior’s office, and had dialed with trembling hands. Her mother picked up. Her mother stayed up much later than the nuns, and she sounded normal, awake. It’s me, she’d whispered into the phone, and her mother had hesitated, as if wondering who me could be.
Where the hell are you, her mother had hissed.
Somewhere safe.
You don’t know what you’ve cost us. In money, in shame.
I’m sorry.
Come home.
The pull inside to comply, to see her childhood home again, to melt into her mother’s arms. Will you promise not to send me back there?
How dare you?
I can’t go back, Mamá. I can’t!
The doctor didn’t finish his treatment. He says you’re a terribly hard case.
You still speak to him?
Of course. He’s your doctor.
He’s a Nazi.
That’s enough! Malena!
Where’s Papá?
Out. And then, you don’t know how you’ve made us suffer. Her voice rising with pain.
Malena hung up quickly. She stayed in the darkness of the Mother Superior’s office until she could breathe normally again and sneak back to her cell.
The bus route from Treinta y Tres to Polonio was complicated, requiring an overnight stop in the coastal town of Rocha, where she spent the evening in a café writing a long letter that she left with the hotel concierge the next morning, to go out with the day’s mail. Once she arrived at the Polonio bus stop, she waited again for a horse cart to take her over the sand dunes, as she didn’t have it in her to hike to her destination and in any case there was no reason to pinch pesos anymore. She walked to the Prow and paused outside, but didn’t enter. If she entered she might lose her resolve.
The Prow stood dwarfed by the gathering twilight.
A shack at the edge of the world.
Ocean enfolding it on all sides.
Still shabby, and still beautiful.
A perfect home.
So many pricks of happiness over the years, like tiny points of light.
But still, when she looked at the Prow, she also remembered what she’d done for it. How they hadn’t had enough pesos between the five of them, and she’d promised to take care of it. And gone down to the docks. It hadn’t been as hard as she’d thought it would be, though she made less than she’d hoped and the work was more laborious than she’d imagined. Still she went through with it, every time. The other women of the docks glared at her for invading their turf but didn’t chase her away. She didn’t go more than once a week because she couldn’t bear to, it took her all week to feel her skin as her own again. And she tried to dissemble herself, hide, so that no one would ever connect the woman down at the docks with the Malena of her ordinary life. She had so many hidden layers now, the girl from the clinic, the girl who escaped, the girl who joined the convent to avoid the docks and because she had nowhere else to go, the woman who returned to the docks so she could scrape out a place for herself in the world with her bare fingernails, and not just for herself, but for her friends. A place to love. A place for love. For years, she’d feared being recognized, found out as a puta. In a small country, that was always a danger. The men you’d put inside your mouth roamed the same streets as you did. She’d been lucky, though, except for that one awful day in the café with her Polonio friends, when the man had put his hand on her shoulder and said she looked familiar. She’d recognized him too. She hadn’t gone with him; he’d wanted a lower price than she was willing to accept, and he’d groped her brutally and left in a huff. When he recognized her in front of her friends she felt the keenest panic, followed by equally sharp relief at seeing that they suspected nothing.
She’d always wanted them to suspect nothing.
Oh, Forgetting, hear our prayer.
Perhaps she’d done it all wrong, this living, but it was too late now. She was tired and had nothing left. She turned her back on the Prow and walked toward the rocks. Night had fallen but there was enough moon to see the way. Her last victory had been to get here. To not end her story in Treinta y Tres, in Rocha, in a drab hotel room. She had almost done it; but the pull of Polonio had been strong. She’d thought of this so many times, over the years, looking out at the water and picturing it swallowing her whole. Had walked these very rocks so many times, imagined the leap, taken its measure.
Which was why she now arrived at the right place with startling speed. The lighthouse loomed at her back but no one was there, no one could see her, she was alone. She was high on a jagged outcropping, and waves crashed roughly below. They seemed otherworldly in the moonlight, rising ferociously, over and over, colliding against the rocks. Without shame. Without tiring. Without cease. Water could break and split from itself and in moments return to wholeness.
Or rip away and never return.
She couldn’t linger. Couldn’t change her mind.
In the last moment before she jumped, she saw her mother’s face twisted into a scowl of disgust (and her father, behind her mother, staring past Malena as though she were not there, as though she didn’t exist, had never existed) and she saw Romina too, blank-eyed, indifferent, the faces blurring into each other as one united truth, a thesis confirmed, this is this, this is not that, will never be. Spring, release, away from all that, into the ocean, the living ocean, the great blue arms of the only one she knew would never hate her, and she’d been planning for so long that she had no right to be surprised at the willing coil of her knees, the forward leap, her legs obedient and ready. Still, the air shocked her as she hung aloft, suspended so gracefully that it seemed for an instant that she’d been freed from the rules of gravity, that she wouldn’t fall after all, that the sumptuous night would hold her in its embrace forever, and in that instant the urge to live rebelled in her chest and hammered criminally at her heart right as she began to fall, eyes wide open, wide enough to see infinity in each second as black night slowly collapsed all around her.
The body was discovered the following evening by Javier, the teenage grandson of El Lobo, as he snuck a cigarette among the rocks. The identification of the body was not difficult, thanks to the wallet in the pocket of her jeans. Paz was the first to receive the news, as their shared address was on the identification card, and though she did not have Malena’s parents’ phone number, she knew their first names and was able to find them in the phone book and convey this information to the police. To Paz’s relief, they did not insist that she be the one to make the call. She learned, from the officer in Castillos, that the death had been deemed either an accident or a suicide. “Though who can trust the Castillos police,” Paz had said through choked sobs, and everyone remembered her time in that tiny jail under the same rural jurisdiction. She called the police station again the following day and was shocked to learn that Malena’s parents had declined to have her body brought to Montevideo for burial, that they weren’t even paying for a headstone.
“But that’s not possible,” Paz said. “She has to come home, I’ll pay for her transport if I have to.”
“You can’t do that, señorita.”
For a fleeting moment Paz thought how strange it would be if she’d met this man before as his prisoner, or perhaps how ordinary, since there could only be so many officers in Castillos and where else would they go? Focus. Stay calm. “And why not?”
“Because you’re not family. Only close relatives can authorize transport.”
Paz went to Castillos to argue her case, speak to superiors, and try to bring Malena home. It was no use. She was nothing more than a housemate and a friend. La Venus and Flaca were with her, and La Venus tried her classic strategy of showing cleavage and lowering her voice to a purr, but even this failed to secure anything except a discount on a headstone in the local churchyard, which at least was better than the unmarked grave to which Malena would otherwise have been consigned. They attended the burial together, the three of them, along with the priest and a few of the good people of El Polonio: Benito, Cristi, El Lobo, Alicia, Óscar, Javier, Ester, and Lili. Malena’s parents never came, nor did her brother, who lived somewhere abroad, Sweden, or Switzerland perhaps, no one could remember exactly. It was Romina’s absence that cut Flaca the most. The night before the burial, she’d called Romina from the dingy little inn that passed for a hotel in Castillos, and begged her one last time to come.
“We were her family, Ro. We were all she had.”
“I know. I know.”
“And don’t you care?”
“How can you ask that?” Romina sounded strangled, though it could also be a bad connection. “Of course I do. But what if her parents come?”
“They won’t. They want nothing to do with this.”
“But we don’t know for certain. And we wouldn’t be welcome.”
“Who cares about—”
“And anyway, I don’t need to go, that’s just a body in that box, it’s not Malena anymore.”
“Just a body? A body you loved.”
Romina was weeping now, but quietly, fighting to stifle the sound. “I know.”
“How can you be so cruel?”
“Please stop.”
“Me?”
“Yes, I can’t bear it, Flaca.”
“You’re glad she’s gone.”
The line went silent. Flaca thought she felt Romina on the other end, gathering her rage into a weapon. But instead, she began to wail. It was the most terrible sound she’d ever heard. She wanted to comfort Romina, though she also for an instant had the deranged thought that, if Romina suffered, Malena might come back. She sat frozen with the receiver against her ear. Waiting for Romina’s wailing to subside. Waiting for the ache to stop. “Please come,” she whispered.
“How dare you,” Romina said, just before a dial tone swallowed her away.
For the second time in their lives, Flaca and Romina did not speak for a year.
Three weeks after the burial, Malena’s letter arrived: a missive penned by the dead, defying the river of time. It had crawled through the postal system from Rocha to Paz’s house, which was also La Venus’s house and La Piedrita’s house and even Malena’s house before she disappeared. The envelope named Paz as the recipient, but the letter inside opened, simply, with one word.
Friends—