Cantoras

by Carolina De Robertis

The dunes rippled out around them, a spare landscape, the landscape of another planet, as if in leaving Montevideo they’d also managed to leave Earth, like that rocket that some years ago had taken men to the moon, only they were not men, and this was not the moon, it was something else, they were something else, uncharted by astronomers.

The world was more than she had known, even if only for this instant, even if only in this place. She let her lips part and the breeze glided into her mouth, fresh on her tongue, full of stars. How did so much brightness fit in the night sky? How could so much ocean fit inside her? Who was she in this place?

She buried that obsession under a mantle of friendship—best friendship, fast friendship, tell-each-other-all friendship—for a month, until finally, one night, they kissed in the bathroom of a nightclub in Ciudad Vieja after dancing with a string of hapless young men. She was stupefied to discover that this could happen, that a girl could kiss her back. It was as good as in her dreaming. Better. The world turned inside out to fit her dreams. Between the world of boy and the world of girl, they’d found a chasm no one spoke of. They fell into it together.

“I’m dead here in the city. Everybody is, we’re all walking corpses. I have to get out of here to find out whether I can still be alive.

How long had she had it in her, this hunger to expand, this need for space? This need to breathe all the way into the bottom of her lungs.

Aching flames unleashed, spilled out into another body. The vigor of desire. The heave and stab of it. Like eating the ocean and still wanting more. Dissolving into ash, and then, when your body returns, when the room returns, she is still there, woman, girl, gazing at you with animal eyes. All of it shrouded in a shawl of quiet. They were perfect together, or, more accurately, together they shaped perfection out of nothing and cradled it in their arms. Romina was happy.

They were the sounds of the world tearing open, into a wider form than it could ever have had before.

Even if all the political prisoners are freed, even if all the exiles come back, what do we do with them? What do they do with themselves? We’d have to start taking stock of the ruins, of what’s broken in our country, and it won’t all be sun and rainbows—it’s when our work will begin.”

“I don’t want to die,” said Romina. Pleasure spread across her chest as she realized that, in that moment, it was true. She was here, on this rock near the beach, reddening the cloth between her legs, the cigarette burns almost faded from her limbs, her ears full of ocean and women, and she wanted to live.

playing out a dance of two bodies happy to be aging by each other’s side.

Maybe she too bit back the stories of her life and pushed them down, pushed them out of view, to survive, and maybe that was why they saw so little of her inner world, which could in fact be as vast as anyone’s.

Anything can be a comfort if it smells like home. It was her eighteenth birthday and all she wanted was to be here. The air was thick with afternoon light. Sweat clung to her from the long hike over the sand dunes, on which every step had been an incantation, I will, I will. She would what. Live. Survive. Do whatever she had to do. Belong. What did that mean? How to belong? How can you be of a place and also unsafe there? How can you be of a place when soldiers could pull you from it at any time?

This room. And also, the land below this room. Land older than the soldiers, the generals, their wives. Older even than the country’s name and borders. She tried to reach down with her consciousness, under the packed dirt floor, to the layers of sand and bedrock beneath. If she could reach the land directly, would its own mind rise to meet her? Could they tangle roots and claim each other?

She was at home between the legs of women. 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 was this rite in which she plunged into women until they begged for mercy or wept with savage joy? Some of the women—not all of them—reciprocated, but nowhere was the pleasure more intense than in the giving. Strange rite. Lone believer. Cosmically alone,

She didn’t believe in God anymore, didn’t believe in her country, and wasn’t even sure she believed in the fundamental goodness of human souls, but she could believe in this, the shimmering power they generated collectively by being awake and together in this room.

I’ve always had it in me, she’d told Paz, it’s just that no one thought to look. I married an artist, ran off to Brazil with an artist, always somebody else’s Muse. Was I drawn to artists because they mirrored something inside of me, something I couldn’t dare to claim as my own? Well, to hell with all that, I don’t want to be the Muse, not for a man and not for a woman, I want to be the artist and to find a thousand Muses hidden in the wrinkles of the world.

The past versions of us could be here in this very room, listening.” “I’m sure they are,”

In telling stories that are largely absent from formal histories or from the great noise of mainstream culture, I never forget that there are thousands if not millions of people whose names we may never learn, whose names are lost in time, who made our contemporary lives possible through acts of extraordinary courage. Their stories have all too often gone unrecorded, but I am here today, and able to speak, because of them.