Cantoras

by Carolina De Robertis

She was only seventeen years old but she’d been watching men for a long time, the way they acted as if they knew the answers to questions before they were asked, as if they carried the answers in their mouths and trousers.

It had never once occurred to her to think of a woman the way one thinks of a man—not consciously, not with the serious part of her mind—until she saw that look in Flaca’s eyes as she handed over the skillfully wrapped package of raw meat. That linger. That message of hunger, a declaration of wanting, all in a look. She hadn’t known that women were capable of it. She expected it from men, saw it in them every time she walked down a city street, but—from a woman? It caught her off-balance.

The ocean glistened, vast, majestic. Something about it hurt her.

So this was how they were together. Now that they weren’t surrounded by strangers—in the city, on the bus down the coast—this was their language.

“That your hands on me are like food. And I didn’t know I was starving.”

as if a gaze between women could wrestle a man’s insults to the ground.

There, the lighthouse, its tall body like a finger held, ssshhhhh, to the closed lips of the horizon.

He drank her bitterly.

To compensate, Paz had developed a habit of turning back to the beginning of a book the moment she finished it. As if a story were a circle, its ending 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.

or she could claim a space and demand it be her home, the way one demands water from the desert, juice from a stone—and why not here.

That’s how it was. How the world was. Even when loved, you were never fully seen.

the child rose up in her, the little girl who’d watched him rake the embers in the grill as if he were the King of Fire, wide-eyed, absorbing lessons that usually went only to sons, and before she could stop herself she said, “And what do you think of it?”

She wrote, sometimes, but it was scraps—her love of books never quite translated into writing of words of her own. She’d come to believe that her creative work, her truest art, was held in three things: her nights with lovers, the hut on the beach, and the bar in the basement, all of them perversions according to the world. But she couldn’t speak this. It would become laughable the second she did. “I’m not a real poet.”

“Suffering has no measure. There are no scales to weigh it. There is only sorrow after sorrow.”

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.

Romina had come to see secrecy as a kind of poison that eats people’s lives from the inside, all the more so when it festers into shame.

Death hovered close now, every waking hour, despite her good health, a presence that had no need to seduce you in order to slide between your sheets. A presence that grazed your flesh like a promise, the only one that would definitely be kept. Coming fast or coming slow, it was coming for her, as it did for everyone, whether you ran from it or hurled yourself in its direction

“What is love,” she said, “if it can’t hold all the channels of the spirit?”