The Woman from Uruguay Read online

  “Montevideo?”

  “Yep,” said the chauffeur.

  “Should I wait for the next one?” I asked in the hope they would have me board an emptier, roomier bus.

  “No, no. There’s room in the back.”

  I got on again, resigned. Those faces. I didn’t see a single empty seat. Then in the back I saw one, just where I wanted: by the window on the right side. I said excuse me; the man sitting in the aisle got up and let me by. When I sat down I realized why it was empty: it was the seat where the back wheel takes up most of the space for your feet. I was going to have an uncomfortable ride, but I’d be looking out at the highway in the direction I preferred; even if you couldn’t see it, you could still sense on that side of the landscape the nearness of the sea.

  The bus started up, left the port, and got on the highway lined with palms. What was it about those gigantic trees that delighted me so much, flashing by, inexhaustible, repeated, like a portal to another place, transit to the tropics, an African spark? What combination of things triggered that attack of happiness? The whiter light, the bus that wobbled, the crossing of large swathes, the friendly, broken, undulating landscape, so far from the fucking metaphysical pampa of Argentina, the morning, a pony grazing, giving in to that state of non-being you get into when you travel, the clouds … Over the window it said “Emergency Exit,” just those words against the backdrop of the sky. It seemed like a metaphor for something. The possibility of escape into the blue.

  It wasn’t exactly the sea you could divine behind those undulating fields, it was still the river, the end of the estuary that went on to be the sea, but you could sense it like something that was just about to happen, a glint in my mind where Guerra was, too, in that other brightness among the dunes the summer I met her in Rocha. It was on that horizon that the whole memory took place, and it was closer and closer now.

  I met her at the festival in Valizas, where I’d been invited to read. It went from Friday to Monday, the last weekend of January. You had stayed back with Maiko at your sister’s place in the suburbs. The trip was fun because there were other writers there. The whole place was fairly hippie-ish, with bunkbeds in the rooms and shared bathrooms. The schedule of readings and roundtables was just an excuse to meet people, to walk around between the dunes, to smoke, to hear people’s opinions, their ludicrous theories, to laugh, to swim in the ocean, to get caught up with the latest gossip from the literary world. The readings were good, but I was more interested in the periphery. Meeting Gustavo Espinosa, for example, drinking yerba mate with him, discussing his book Las arañas de Marte …

  We wandered. The place was full of rich kids playing paupers for a month. Shabby blondes, Rastafarians at expensive universities, temporary artisans, half-time musicians, full-time jugglers. The place had its charms, and you could walk around it hearing people playing the guitar, singing “Let’s step up the hope, muchachos” or that Radiohead one where they say “You’re so fucking special.” And there were yerba mate sessions, cannabis circles, groups playing drums. Some people did all that at once. Lots of scraggly beards, braids, hair that was salty from some weeks-long impasse with shampoo, girls with long hair and primordial attitudes and surprising green eyes, dressed in a mix of gym sweatshirts and ethnic fabrics, a Bali vibe, a Bombay vibe, Buddhist allusions, overacted Africanisms, tents scattered in the sand, camps, the pinnacle of homeless chic. Marijuana made me feel like I belonged there. A fortysomething hanging around with kids in their twenties.

  I wasn’t the only one there who was elderly and eclipsed. There was Norberto Vega, there was Marcelo Luján … I hung out with those two the most. Vega was amazed by the hygienic conditions—or the lack thereof. When I went to take a shower in the shared bathroom, he warned me: “Don’t you shower here, Luquitas, the smallest fungus on these hippies is the size of a Smurf house!” I showered anyway. And Marcelo had this smile I hadn’t seen on him for a while: constant, in a state of grace. It was the drugs, of course, but also the fact that he was absorbed in a world without obligations, without any need for responsibility of any kind, no family, no work, no schedule, no city, no cars, no danger of accidents, just soft sand everywhere, heat. Beach hedonism, pure and simple. When we suddenly couldn’t take it anymore, we’d go to the bunk beds to nap for a few hours in the middle of the day, covered in sand, just to hide from the yowl of the sun.

  Then I had to get into the sea to clear my head and be alert for my roundtable. The cold saltwater revived me. At first when I spoke into the microphone I think I was fine, somewhat on autopilot, but eventually I started really saying something. Vega was slumping down in his chair, yawning like a lion at the zoo. Marcelo, while others were speaking, wore the expression of someone possessed and remote-controlled, or someone who’d just been informed by text message that he was adopted. Still, I think we did a good job, we held on to our dignity, we were slightly polemical and maybe even slightly funny. It was in a big barbecue area with a table, audio equipment, chairs for the audience and behind them a number of tables for an expo of independent publishers. It was a friendly atmosphere, and it was full, with people leaning out the windows. We talked about realism, verisimilitude, new technologies, the nineties, post-dictatorship Argentina … There we were, Latin American intellectuals putting on our dog and pony show, talking to ourselves at a beach resort. People were looking at us, I don’t know how much we were getting across, I felt like they wanted us to read something, more story, less theory, although they all applauded enthusiastically. After that there was a party, and that’s where Guerra came in.

  Now the bus was passing through some yellow fields that were almost phosphorescent on account of the flowers of something I don’t know the name of. The palm trees were behind us now. You could see off in the distance little farms and eucalyptus clusters. Every now and then, right by the highway, there would be a house with a neatly kept and decorated lawn. One with a cement horse, plaster swans, and antique carts. Another with the bodies of trucks from the fifties. That quasi-Cuban element you see in rural Uruguay, with the old Chevys and stripped Lanchesters, some that still work, others that remain makeshift chicken coops until some fanatic restorer comes along.

  I wanted to get out into the aisle to stretch my legs, but for that I’d have needed to say excuse me to my seatmate and I preferred to hold out a little longer. Toward the middle of the bus, across the way, a guy answered his cell phone and started screeching into it. He was explaining something to his secretary, coordinating shifts: he was a doctor. He was imposing his bellowing on the sleep and daydreams of all the other passengers, his scheduling issues, his abuse of that woman who was just trying to put his messy commitments in order. “You can put off the Medical Group thing until October! For the love of God, Isabel, don’t plug everything into the same week, give it just a tiny bit of thought!”

  I’ve never liked male doctors, with their air of overgrown children in overalls, chronic gigantic schoolkids, the bald show-offs in the class, pretending to be serious in the office, using big anatomical words, oversexed, libidinous the second they shut their office door, all of them fucking their nurses in the staff-only back of the ER, restricted access, authorized personnel, hospital-bed sex, debauchery in some unlit corner, between the oxygen and the carts of surgical equipment. Overalls hiding erections, physicians with priapism, huge knowledgeable cocks, revered cocks, Hippocratic phalluses surrounded by pussies as available as pink little butterflies in the air, satyrs in white, with a few gray hairs that make the female patient sigh, “And now take a deep breath for me, now another, good, raise your shirt a little, deep breath, good …” Sons of bitches, rapid-fire predators, insurance butchers, accumulating commissions on unnecessary C-sections, postponing the operation until after their little jaunt to Punta del Este, serial abusers, time thieves, health thieves, I hope they get a hell that’s a waiting room that has magazines with their pages all stuck together, those exploiters posing in their Greek colonnade, just apply the ointment to th
e pruriginous area, you son of a truck filled with bitches! “The pruriginous area,” why wouldn’t you just say “the place where it itches,” you sisterfucking grandiloquent piece of shit …

  Luquitas, you used to want to be a doctor, you just quit on the way to becoming one, whispered the opposing council, the Greek chorus that always traveled with me, you dropped out in your first year, remember? Yeah, so? What does that have to do with anything! And now a doctor is fucking your wife. What an irony. The great scriptwriter has done it again. What a fantastic goal they scored on you, man. Curling it right into the corner. You’re the goalie in the air hearing the ball bounce off the net. It hurts, it hurts, but it, too, will pass.

  I’m going to give you a prescription for a topical you’ll apply to the clobberwhipped area, to your EndoBag, and that lomlopiratic irritation, it’s really terrific, it’ll reduce your cranial cornea, cure your chronic hinditis, release your cuckoldean knot … You’ll see. You’re going to be just fine. Just take a deep breath if you would, lower your pants a little more … There you go, and it didn’t hurt at all, now did it?

  And just that morning I’d looked at your earrings in the bathroom, dangly, silver, expensive, discarded as soon as you got home and took off your makeup, the mascara I never saw, and I remembered that Caribbean expression: she’s off swinging her earrings with just anybody. Who were you swinging your earrings with, Catalina? Your Ricciardi earrings swaying from that sexual gallop, your Quintana Avenue jewelry jangling in the frisson of your affair, sounding like the crystals of a chandelier in the middle of an earthquake. The director of development of the Cardio Life Foundation grinding her pelvic pelt on the member of a member of the executive board of the same. Some stuck-up little doctor, nice car, a Catholic, mass in the burbs, an ex-rugby-player cardiologist, thick neck, baptism certificates of every kid in his wallet, English-style office, a green lamp with a bronze horse, boiserie, kind of dark in the waiting room, fox-hunting prints, a horse leaping over a fence, a rowdy pack of hounds, burgundy wallpaper, an older secretary, approved by the wife, trying to cover and coordinate his unexpected obligations.

  Finally the guy shut up.

  I’ll admit that I was anxious, that my nerves were fried, that I was agitated, urging onward. Now you really could see, past the fields, a blue horizon. We were about to cross the bridge that went over the Santa Lucía River. The sea! The landscape opened up, some ravines, the land ended for a second, and the water appeared, the coast of the Atlantic, she was already there, on my fingertips, in the air in front of my face, her haughty face, the challenge in her eyes as she squinted slightly, serious and then with a half-smile in the corners of her lips, mischievous, fierce, everything at once, how she looked at me when I saw her in Valizas for the first time and asked her to dance. There was a jukebox where the barbecue was, and they were playing cumbias and salsas, and somebody put on “Overdose of Love, Overdose of Passion.”

  I had already been dancing in the tumult, a little tease with the Chilean poet, but she was dancing more for Vega than for me, and there was Guerra to one side with a friend, chatting, a glass of beer in her hand, and I took her by the other hand and brought her to the dance floor, she’d wanted to, she’d already seen me, she told me later, she’d heard me speak, she smiled, she held my gaze, she twirled around and looked at me again, our eyes locked, and I felt the strength she had, the strength in her hands, skinny with a terrestrial energy, nothing flighty about her, dancing to the fullest, when I took her by the hands and twirled her, or when I spun her like a top till she was wrapped up in my arm, a girl who packed heat, ready for battle, Bettie bangs, wet hair, denim miniskirt, T-shirt loose over her bikini bra (her “soutien,” she would have said), and barefoot. Barefoot all summer long. What a gorgeous girl, and what a fire demon exploded inside me and rampaged through my blood. “What’s your name?” “Magalí.” “I’m Lucas.” We went to get more beer.

  There was a kiosk that sold drinks off to one side. I don’t really remember what we talked about. I know I got all puffed up like a cobra in front of her, with questions born of genuine curiosity, so many questions. I made her laugh. She talked to me. We danced more. We drank more. She hadn’t read my books or taken notice of my name. She was there because her friend ran a poetry press. She told me she had started on a degree in social science, dropped out, and that she was now working for a newspaper in the afternoons in Montevideo, that she was in Valizas for two weeks—with some friends, she said, a little evasive on that subject. The next beer we had to venture farther for, to a store down the street, a dark stretch, and on the way there I took her by the hand, and she put her arm around my waist, and I gave her a kiss, we gave each other a kiss. A long one. I was dead, and I resurrected myself. I was blind, and I could see again at last. I was anesthetized, and all five senses came back in full force. “I have to be careful,” she said into my ear. “Why? Do you have a boyfriend?” “Something like that,” she whispered. “I’m married, I have a kid.” “I know, you mentioned your kid at your talk.”

  I loaned her my sweater, because she was cold. I told her where I’d been that day, on the beach, to one side of a stream, and that I had seen a line of people on the other side, climbing a dune. “They were going to Polonio,” she said. “You can get to Cabo Polonio from here?” “Yeah, it’s a couple of hours on foot.” “Want to go tomorrow?” I challenged her. She hesitated, calculated incalculable things in her head, got serious, said: “Yeah, tomorrow I’ll show you, we’ll need to go early.”

  We went back to the party, and there was her friend, she took her hand, said she had to help her with some boxes of books. We said goodbye demurely, a kiss on the cheek, saying nothing of our date the next day. The music was still going, but no one was dancing anymore. I stayed, stood there alone with a glass in my hand, trying to take in the shock and thinking of how she’d told me she didn’t have a cell phone, how I had no way of contacting her. One of the organizers saw me and said, almost yelling over the music: “We canceled the table tomorrow at eleven, so you’re free.” When two people are attracted to each other, a strange telekinesis opens up a path between them that removes all obstacles. It’s that clichéd. Mountains are moved aside. It was three in the morning, and I went to sleep drunk on all of that, without an ounce of guilt.

  The rural emptiness of the road grew populated bit by bit. There were sheds with equipment for sale, a few factories, rows of low houses, schools. I started listening to an exchange in the seats just behind me. A woman was answering a question that I didn’t quite catch but could guess: the man wanted to know the reason she was traveling to Montevideo. Her mother had passed away after a long illness. That is always painful, he was saying, the death of a loved one, and he said that each of us has our own way of mourning. “If you’re a believer, you can assimilate it better.” “Of course,” she said, “you can keep up the hope that one day you’ll see them again.”

  I got caught up in that exchange that, as often happens in casual conversations between strangers, immediately turned transcendental. The beyond, being reunited with family members, resurrection, the immortality of souls, the mystery. “What is your religion?” asked the man. “Jehovah’s Witness,” answered the woman. “Ah,” he said, “I belong to the Evangelical Church, where I’m a pastor.” All the empathy that had arisen now evaporated, their voices getting hesitant and tense. Gently he attacked her dogma, provoked her on the point of the Holy Spirit, then miracles, he quoted from memory Acts 13. I couldn’t free myself now. I wanted to see where this tender confrontation would end, their divergences on the apocalypse, their battle of Christian apostates. She argued her side pretty well. The pastor kept saying “you people” when speaking to the woman. “You people have this attitude toward miracles that … well … because miracles exist. A lot of people in my church have been cured through prayer. I have seen people be cured of their flat feet. My grandson himself got rid of his flat foot through prayer. And this one woman’s legs had evened out, she’d
had one that was shorter before.”

  The conversation entranced me, the idea of a woman whose legs evened out. What if they’d evened out the wrong way, and the longer leg had retracted and gotten even with the shorter one, and she’d ended up shorter, and now she goes and lodges a complaint with the pastor because she lost something like four inches on her height, and she isn’t okay with that miracle, she and her mother come in to complain, “My girl was tall, sure, she had a limp, fine, but she was tall, and now she’s squat,” and the case winds up in a Brazilian court of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

  Then the pastor started talking about forgiveness. I wanted to see their faces. But I couldn’t work up the courage to turn around. He told her about how an older lady had come in for a wedding at his church with these stiff legs she could hardly move. There was a three-layer cake, they’d all pitched in to pay for it, which, for those people, was a pretty big deal. The stiff-legged lady wanted to talk to him in private, and they prayed together, her and the pastor, they said the Lord’s Prayer, slowly, and when they got to the part that says “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors,” he repeated the sentence twice, and the lady burst into tears and said she couldn’t forgive her son, and then she did forgive him, and she could move her legs again. Everybody at the ceremony was stunned. The pastor reached out to the family some time later, and the woman had died, but at that wedding, she’d been able to walk.

  He listed some more examples of people who, as soon as they forgave, improved their situation: kids got jobs, a son-in-law won a brand-new car, just about everything got unblocked. “Even I,” said the pastor, “took an awfully long time to forgive my wife. She’d come home late, she worked very unpredictable hours, she’d come back at eleven o’clock at night.” He went crazy with jealousy. The devil made him assume the worst. Every couple of hours he’d go crazy thinking about it, and he would pray, and it would pass. He called the devil “the enemy.” And in the end he forgave her, without really knowing if she was cheating on him or not, but he forgave her and was free. It used to be that she’d come home and he’d be mean to her, order her to get to cooking. Now he’d have dinner waiting for her with some white chocolate for dessert, because white chocolate was her favorite. They’d been together for thirty-five years.