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.

She’d picked her husband out of a flock of men who would have married her in a heartbeat. She was the prize, back then. Now, five years later, she felt old, used up at twenty-seven, her life already shrunken and defined until she died. She wanted to escape that.

would ever know what that felt like. To love so openly even for a minute of her life. And if the chance did come, would she be able to take it? Even if the other two miracles fell into place—a woman who would love her, and a place where she could love—would she have it in her to love back?

there are other versions of how the cape got its name, but those 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.”

Histories tend to grow richer with time, gathering details as they pour down generations.

Then under the surface of all of that, you’re alone, and so, on the inside, it’s quiet. You start to hear yourself inside the quiet.

Scared to leave. Scared to stay. She hovered in the space between fears.

It was strange, she thought, how you could live all your life in a home defined by people who loved you and took care of you and shared ancestors with you and yet did not entirely see you, people whom you protected by hiding yourself.

“You do not owe your parents your life.”

Italian proverb he who doesn’t know where he comes from doesn’t know where he’s going

They’d never understood it (though, to be fair, she sometimes felt that she didn’t fully understand it herself). There were things about her they’d never fully see. That’s how it was. How the world was. Even when loved, you were never fully seen.

It seemed, at times, that this was the only way the world would be remade as the heroes had dreamed: one woman holds another woman, and she in turn lifts the world.

milanesas, chorizo, spinach buñuelos, mountains of spaghetti, canelones, alfajores, chocolate cake frosted with dulce de leche, pebetes,

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

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.

“That the silence of dictatorship, the silence of the closet, as we call it now—all of that is layered and layered like blankets that muffle you until you cannot breathe. For many people it is too much.