Cantoras

by Carolina De Robertis

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Romina said. “I love you, and you’re my friend, but there’ll be no more chucu-chucu for us, not ever.” It was

just a few cigarette burns

She’d meant to lie to Romina, to keep this detail out of sight, but what was the use of lying to someone who could see right into you? It always caught up with her in the end. And,

murder waiting to happen,

They laughed over their macramé bowels. They

In Montevideo, the air itself was a hostile creature, lying in wait around you, breathing, invisible, a threat. People didn’t speak to each other anymore. The grocer didn’t smile or meet her eye as he wrapped her lettuce and measured out her rice. When the sun shone, outside, she barely felt it on her skin.

and airplanes that took exiles from the country, a time of timelessness, where life was bound to the rhythms of the ocean.

She waited. He didn’t go on immediately. Time was slower here. Time, slow and wide, unrushed, time a calm in which it was possible to float.

aren’t the true ones, because you know how it is, the truest story is always the one that endures over time and speaks the most deeply to the people.”

She kissed El Lobo’s forehead with a casual tenderness that made Paz go hollow inside.

to tame a land they thought needed taming.”

because she’d felt the blood arrive that afternoon as she was walking to the beach for a

without thinking she opened her legs wide underwater and bled into the ocean, an offering, a thank-you, a sealing of some indecipherable

Too soon, tomorrow night, they’d all have to face all that again: streets, tightness, thin walls, pretense. People who couldn’t see them. Even at home.

How often do we feel that way? Leaving someplace, some people, that you think the life you lead day to day is somehow not enough?

Plush lips, surprisingly warm. There was pull in Malena, a deepsea whirlpool, drawing her in for one beat, two, and then Malena drew back. “No.” She wiped her mouth.

Right here, I said “let these two be the romance that ends the story “

They don’t want to see the blood in the foam.” Her mind filled with foam,

wolf. Lobo marino, sea lion, seal. Named for the creatures he’d hunted.

bread. It was almost midnight when they finally gathered to eat, the moon high above them in a drove of stars.

“I went to see El Lobo today, and you won’t believe it, his nephew has an empty house—a hut, really, you know, for fishermen—right here in Cabo Polonio, just a short walk

The question was how to live here in the city without letting it crush you. The

her chance to have a child. She’d miscarried once

and it was the most intense sorrow of her life. Leaving her husband to go be La Venus, goddess

I’m not being childish, she wanted to say, just the opposite, but his hand was back and so was the rest of him, on her now, and suddenly exhaustion overcame her and she wondered whether it was worth the scope of the fight since her attempts to push him off weren’t working anyway, he was stronger than she, it was no use, he had her pinned and was doing what he liked, and maybe he was right and she was stupid, he was her husband after all, she belonged to him, and hadn’t he had another terrible day in a string of grim and terrible days, what was her problem, tell me that, what is your problem, stupid Anita.

Gutted me, just heartbreaking

At other times she thought she read torture in those around her: was that why the kiosk vendor never met anyone’s eyes anymore, or why the neighbor at the end of the block swept her porch steps brutally, as if they’d

maybe they were all part of the same vast, bruised body in the shape of a nation. A body groping for the slightest illusions of safety.

that had done it, or her days on the beach? The arrest showed her that no matter how much she kept her head down and obeyed, they could lock her up or assault her whenever they wanted. The beach, meanwhile, had shown her that another kind of air still existed

was generous of her, though sometimes Romina wondered whether Mamá only did this because Felipe was gone and there was no son to coddle, and then she felt guilty for her own cynicism. “No, Mamá, you’re the one who should rest.”

Her life was not solely her own: it belonged to her parents, who’d given her everything, and in fact it had begun before she was born, when

Ramins is a person whose family is always running,

resulted in their arrival here, in Uruguay, where she and Felipe were born as a new generation of hope, the pinnacle of all that suffering and sacrifice. And this had always been enough of a reason for her to stay locked up in her maze. Until now. Until Polonio.

“Never mind,” Romina said. “It’s nothing.”

secretly embedded in its opening line. As if a book were a long and unclasped belt, with the first chapter at the buckle and the last page the end tip, an extended supple thing she could bend and wrap around the waist of her mind, curved, fastened, solid enough to stay. Endings morphed into beginnings and new meanings were revealed. King Lear, raised from the dead, was haughty again, gathering his three daughters, responding to betrayals by returning for more. Dante, after seeing everything, returns to the lip of the Inferno and still feels its pull. Don Quixote dies and then promptly

clock time; you arrived when you arrived, and the best time to join the party was whenever you wound your way through timelessness to the door. Not so, now. Martial law

do,” Romina said. “I do,” Malena said. “Why on earth not?” La Venus beamed. “I do.” Paz could barely hear her own voice. “All right, me too, so that’s it, then.

They all turned to stare at her. She was perched at the edge of the bed, back straight, knees together under the pencil skirt she’d worn

in the city before, and at first they were tense and coded, referring to the house as church because it was the first thing that leapt to Flaca’s

They were wide open, liquid, full of the unspoken, full of mystery and she could stare into them all day, she realized, plunge into that darkness and be wrapped in it, enfolded, remade. She was fond of Malena, but had never seen her as sexy—mainly

Alive there. As if she were the sole member of some occult, forgotten sect, a persecuted devotee with no church in which to pray, the women’s bodies were the church, the site of consecration. Or was it desecration? What

in, so that now they stood together at the open kitchen window and banged their pots and pans together; on more than one occasion Mamá had broken wooden spoons against metal, and then kept on banging, Romina picking up the flung half of the spoon and using it to make more noise, because a broken spoon can also shout, oh yes it can. Sometimes Mamá wept as she banged, but she

Which they sometimes did. She never knew exactly why; it wasn’t necessarily when the Only Three pushed into her dreams, or when she felt the most frightened of the future. There was no pattern. Erratic tides. They left, then rose again, impelled by forces Romina could not explain. Only later, as their bodies merged, would she feel Malena’s own hunger under the surface, waiting, quiet, like a creature unsuited to the hunt. It was enough and a relief to Romina. It

always pocked with people lying in the sun, building sand castles, swimming, drumming,

Benito of the Rusty Anchor, who possessed the only known camera in Polonio, though he would deny this charge vehemently for the rest of his life. As the scandal spread, articles in Spain and South America referred to the beach in question, this Cabo Polonio, as a “perverts’ beach,” a “land of Sapphic urges,” a “paradise for tortilleras, maricones, and invertidos of all kinds.” The words were meant as insults. But the following summer, in late 1983, there would be new visitors, also castoffs. Cantoras. Maricones. Seeking the promised land of perversions.

“Potato masher!” Roars of laughter. “Mash my potatoes!” “Mash them well!” “Get that puree going!” “I

could make new friends, keep old lovers as friends, but Red belonged only to the original circle, her tribe, her family, the women of the Prow, and they were five and would be five forever

“Well, there’s never been one in Uruguay, not that we know of. We need that.” “But would anyone go?” “Why

the dictatorship, when those actions had, after all, been part of their jobs, and so shut up

over so she could meet her gaze in greeting, thinking, what I can’t give to Puma I will give to the Pumas of the world.

meeting of this woman’s eyes. This woman with a gaze that took in everything. Calm yet utterly solid. She was older than Romina, in her late thirties

given it scope and space. Romina felt a burning ache inside her and thought she might dissolve

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

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