Cantoras

by Carolina De Robertis

Here, now, she became aware of it only as an absence, like the hum of a refrigerator that you only hear when it stops.

Once, when Flaca was making love to her, Anita had imagined these childhood friends gathered against the far wall, awash in horror, and she’d come with a ferocity that had astounded them both.

They want to look at the beautiful waves but they don’t want to know what it really means to live out here, what it takes to survive. They don’t want to see the blood in the foam.”

To be seen, mirrored, from the very beginning of life? By the person who birthed you?

The land of the Yanquis had enchanted her: people there acted as though they were all born for big lives.

Here, in the majestic neighborhood of El Prado, with its clean streets and ample trees, it seemed that the Process didn’t reach as deeply into people’s lives. Neighbors were far-flung and kept to themselves, nestled in their large houses. In the land of the rich, there was more privacy, less surveillance.

Was Papá really so anti-Communist, or did he believe this because it was somehow easier to think that Felipe had sabotaged his own life than that all of this had been done to them?

“A country isn’t a plate,” La Venus said. “Maybe not. But it can break. It can go from being one large thing to many broken pieces.”

Instead, everyone learned how to balance cups and plates along the rugged landscape of the Polonio table, and though there were spills, though bowls teetered, the table stayed, always stayed, the right table for them, hunched low on all fours, alive with patterns, as strange as it was beautiful.

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.

“For some women, that’s the truth of their desire. What they want more than anything. To have babies, a man. To be a wife.

“It’s the power,” she said gently. “They want the power to be safe, and accepted. To have lives free of shame.” “And men give them that.”

It was the first time anyone had done this for her pain, removed it from comparison, given it scope and space.

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.

and she’d been planning for so long that she had no right to be surprised at the willing coil of her knees,