The Woman from Uruguay Read online

  Who is responsible for this? I thought. Who’s put me here in front of these two nutcases who say things that cut straight to the heart of my own crisis? Does everyone pay attention only to the things that apply directly to their own lives, taking from the infinite daily chaos just the snippets that specifically have to do with their situation? Or do such serendipitous things sometimes happen? Was I supposed to forgive you, Catalina? Was that going to liberate and unblock me? Here I was, laughing to myself about the Evangelist and the Jehovah’s Witness when, without intending to, without even noticing me, they suddenly schooled me, made me really reflect as I observed the outskirts of Montevideo sliding by. The ramshackle houses, some trash dumps, the hustle, the carts carrying bottles, people sitting talking in the doorways of their shacks, the hill in the distance.

  Or was it myself I had to forgive? But forgive for what? I hadn’t done anything. Yes, I went with Guerra to Cabo Polonio, but I’m not sure that what happened between us would count as infidelity. Maybe—I don’t know. The morning after the party, we met at nine thirty at the old store, our appointed meeting place. I saw her coming in a sarong, a light blue bikini, sneakers. “I didn’t think you’d be here,” she said. I didn’t say it, but I had thought the same thing about her. She was even prettier by day. Wasn’t she a little bit out of my league? If I had a shot, I figured it would depend on sucking in my gut and trusting in my dubious aura as an Argentine writer. It might not work.

  We didn’t kiss at first. We walked side by side, avoiding groups of people sleeping around extinguished campfires. She was wearing a good pair of sunglasses. I hadn’t quite figured her out yet: rude snob or lumpenproletariat? Was she acting like a thug or was she one? I didn’t really know Montevideo’s sociolects, I couldn’t distinguish the nuances. We walked, with long stretches of not talking, smiling at each other every now and then. I didn’t want to rush a kiss. I liked that sort of new beginning, sober and in the light of day. We reached a stream. We could either swim across or go by rowboat for a couple of pesos. We decided to swim across because we were committed to having an adventure. We put my backpack and her bag inside a plastic sack that we tied shut. Guerra warned me that we should cross a little bit upstream because the current could drag us out, toward the sea.

  It wasn’t hard, but she was right that the current was strong, we had to really swim, and we reached the other side almost at the farthest corner of the mouth of the stream. We sat panting on the shore. I took longer to catch my breath than she did.

  “You’re not going to die on me, are you?” she joked.

  “I think I might,” I said and threw myself on top of her.

  Both of us soaked, like in a romantic movie. But just before I could give her a kiss, she whispered into my ear:

  “Let’s go farther.”

  There are two or three of Guerra’s phrases that continued to echo in my mind for months and made it through the winter without fading. That was one. Let’s go farther.

  When you’re writing, I think, it’s hard to convince the reader that a person is attractive. You can say that a woman is beautiful, that a man is good-looking, but where is that dazzling spark, that incandescence in the narrator’s gaze, in the obsession? How to show in words the exact configuration of features on a face that bring about an insanity that is maintained over time? And what about her attitude? Her gaze?

  I can only say she had an Uruguayan nose. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that. Those noses from the East, carried well, that slight warp, the high bridge like the Rs in her name, the insurrectionist defiance of her Basque heritage, in her nose. Not one degree more or one degree less in the angle—that was the mathematical secret of her beauty. And those gigantic green eyes, that mouth that was always positioned for a kiss? Yes, they amplified the sexy, but without the elevation of her battle-ready snout, Guerra wouldn’t have been Guerra.

  We went up a dune, the first of many, and then down the other side burying our feet in the sand up to our calves. Two hours of this? I thought, but I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it. Another dune, and from the summit of that one we watched the sea crash, the gleam of atomic explosion. Now I did kiss her. I put my arms around her waist and pressed her to me. A kiss with tongue, an ensnaring kiss, a kiss of perfect intimacy, as though the enormous dome of the sky were coming so close it created our own run of silence. Heat and desire. My hand slow over her hips, flush against her stomach, her bronzed skin and the edge of the thong of her bikini, already at the point of no return, a little farther, she was waxed, and suddenly with the tip of my finger I touched something that wasn’t human. Metallic. A tiny extraterrestrial point. A piercing. I looked in her eyes and saw she was amused by my bewilderment. Then my finger vanished into her wet hot pussy, her gorgeous pussy that was wet for me, a wetness that stayed with me as a physical memory that, despite everything that happened, I can locate whenever I want, and that continues to immediately whip up in me a kind of solar revolution that sweeps through the whole network of my arteries and veins.

  Guerra was panting, gently biting my mouth as I touched her, and she said:

  “Fuck, I want you to fuck me.”

  Another phrase that made it through the icy winter without losing its heat.

  And there was a shriek, or a whistle: people were coming. More pilgrims on the way to Cabo. They were far away, but they still interrupted, and the sky opened back up like a blue eye we couldn’t escape. We held each other trying to calm down. It made us laugh, made us euphoric. We kept going. I took out the croissants I’d bought around the corner from the hostel. They were glorious. We devoured them. The sun was intense. We tied our T-shirts around our heads like Bedouins. We had to cross a green valley, and every time we took a break to hold each other, lying in the grass, people would come, pass close by, shouting, and we would have to sit up, pretend, get up and go on. That pedestrian file looked like an exodus, spaced out but there, a nuisance, witnesses, ruiners of intimacy, tramplers of Eden, noisy contingents. I hated all of them and each and every one of them, with their ostentatious faux poverty, their studied display of summer squalor, their high-school-graduation-trip tone, backpacking through Bariloche. And I heard accents from all over, compatriots from Córdoba, Corrientes, Buenos Aires, lots who hadn’t gone to Brazil that year because the exchange rate made it too expensive.

  Close to Cabo Polonio we hid between the rocks. We were frenzied. Prehistoric rock formations. Nooks, crannies, crevices, slots. That was what we needed.

  “I don’t have a condom,” I told Guerra in haste.

  “I do,” she said and took some silvery little packets out of her bag.

  Guerra undid my swimsuit looking me in the eyes, grabbed me, pulled me toward her, said:

  “What a beautiful cock.”

  Perhaps I am a simple creature, but I’m almost certain that there is nothing in the world a man likes more than being told that. It’s better than being told he’s a genius, or that you love him, or whatever. And it’s such a basic and effective phrase, so easy to lie through. I put on the condom and when I was finally about to put it in we heard a shrill voice:

  “Hey, quick question, are we almost to Cabo Polonio?”

  A woman’s head peeked around the big rock. She didn’t realize. From that angle she could only see us from the waist up. Guerra deftly, without any abrupt movements, bent one leg against the rock and closed up her sarong. I pulled my swimsuit back up. I fastened its Velcro. I wished death upon that lost woman then. If I had psychic powers I would have slain her, spontaneous combustion. Now a number of children, all very curious, came springing up out of the rocks.

  “You have to keep going a while, and you’ll get to the lighthouse,” said Guerra.

  We were surrounded, laughter, voices, kids hopping from rock to rock.

  We kept going, both in a bad mood now, no longer finding it funny. The more people there were around us, the more we cast each other frustrated glances, making serious
, complicit, desperate faces. We made it to Cabo, meandered among the picturesque houses, ranches, shacks, got in the ocean to cool our desire, drank beer, and shared a basket of fried fish at a beachside stand. We were silent, and we were calming down. If we couldn’t, we couldn’t. We mulled over upcoming itineraries: I was going back that evening, and she had to get back, too. The sadness of fresh, just-discovered love. Great confluence of emotions. I remember that, and I remember that there in Polonio I called her Guerra for the first time:

  “Guerra, I’ll get hold of you soon enough.”

  She held my gaze. We talked. I learned a few more things about her. She was twenty-eight. Guerra was the last name of her father, with whom she lived sometimes, and Zabala was the last name of her mother, who’d passed away a few years before. Her boyfriend was a roadie for a metal band that was famous in Uruguay, though I hadn’t heard of them. I told her a few things, too. She asked about my books. I told her I was going to send her a novel that took place in Brazil, but that first I had to write it.

  We went back in a truck that drove over the sand, then a bus took us back to Valizas. She fell asleep on my shoulder. At some point something started itching, making me uncomfortable, and I realized it was the condom that was still on the tip of my scorched prick.

  We were coming close to the bus station now. My very bent legs and my back were hurting quite a bit. My seatmate was asleep. The pastor and the Jehovah’s Witness weren’t talking anymore. I realized I was hungry. It was noon. Artigas Boulevard was under construction, and we moved down it slowly, with detours into the opposite lane. Since some people had gotten off at Plaza Cuba, I switched seats. I tried to go over my seatmate, but I woke him up without meaning to. I said I was sorry and sat down closer to the front.

  With the seat next to mine empty, it was easier for me to re-create the ghost of Guerra by my side in the bus getting into Valizas. I remember that she woke up because I was shivering, a mix of sunstroke and arousal. I told her everything was going to be okay. She said her stop was a little before mine. She wrote down her email on a slip of paper, and then we said goodbye.

  She got off at the entrance to a campsite, and I saw her greet a group of people, one guy with some gray in his hair and a dog in a muzzle who gave her a more extended hug. I reached Valizas just in time to gather my things and get in the writers’ minibus that would take us back. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to answer any questions about where I’d been or hear about whatever had happened that day. In the random lottery of the seats, I wound up next to a literary critic whose name I’d rather not remember. I curled up next to the window as much as I could, I wanted to dissolve into the setting-sun landscape, give myself over entirely to that sadness of not seeing Guerra again, maybe not for a long time. Suddenly the literary critic brought me back with a question, which went like this, word for word: “Lucas, have you had the opportunity to read what I wrote about the civilization and barbarism axis in your oeuvre?” I answered what I could and afterward, on the four-hour journey to Montevideo, I slept and pretended I was sleeping.

  THREE

  We arrived at Tres Cruces station. I took my time getting off the bus. I let others go first. The Jehovah’s Witness was a wide woman, with silvery hair, in tight jeans, around thirty-five years old, and the pastor, tall and gray, with light-colored eyes, carrying nothing other than a document wallet in his hand, must have been in his sixties. They both looked serious as they got off the bus, and they didn’t exchange a word.

  I left the bus and went to buy a sandwich. I like how Tres Cruces is kind of a mix between a bus station and a mall, with all sorts of stores on the second floor. I went up the escalator, and I remember immediately sensing the presence of difference. That drift between familiarity and strangeness. A recognizable air, similar to Argentina, in the people, in their speech, the way they dressed, but then suddenly some brands I didn’t know, a different word, a “tú” for “you” instead of a “vos,” a young couple and the guy with a thermos tucked under his arm and the mate in his hand, walking around with it outside instead of having it at home like we did, a beautiful girl with a little African in her features, and then another, and then another, a premonition of Brazil. Like in dreams, all things in Montevideo strike me as similar but different. They are and they aren’t.

  I still had some Uruguayan pesos from my previous trip, and an Antel phone card. I ate my sandwich and from a public phone inside the station, I called Enzo. It was like entering the past. I don’t know by what bizarre arrangement Enzo wasn’t able to receive calls from cell phones. You had to call his landline from a landline, and the strangest part was that he always answered. I had told him I was going to Montevideo, but I surprised him all the same.

  “The Dutch!” he said excitedly on the other end of the line.

  That’s what Enzo calls me, because he says I have a Dutch face, who knows, I don’t have even a drop of Dutch blood, but that’s been his nickname for me ever since I started going to the writing workshop he gave in Buenos Aires in the nineties.

  “Dutch, I’m on the verge of becoming a retiree—a nincompoop! You’d better get here quick before I forget how to get a sentence out.”

  We agreed to meet at his place at six. That way we’d have a while to talk before my return ferry at nine that night. Enzo always had some book in the works, or just out, he was always just about to go to Paraná, discovering some insane poet, following his curiosity, concocting Uruguay–Buenos Aires–Entre Ríos triangles, arts sections, prologues, readings, prizes, festivals. He was trying to talk me into helping him put together a lit mag that was going to be called N.o 2 because, according to him, it was only going to last two issues.

  I walked in between the counters of the different bus lines with names like Rutas del Plata, Rutas del Sol. I looked at the signs with their destinations: Castillos, La Pedrera, La Paloma, Valizas, and others farther away, Porto Alegre, Florianópolis. How many hours would it take to reach those beaches in the heat of Brazil, the turquoise sea, the caipirinhas? I approached the counter.

  “Good morning …”

  “It’s good afternoon, now,” said the girl, looking at her watch.

  “Good afternoon. I just wanted to know how long the bus to Florianópolis would take.”

  “It departs at nine at night and arrives at approximately three in the afternoon. Just one person traveling?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t … I was just asking out of curiosity. How much does it cost?”

  “One way?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Three thousand five hundred pesos.”

  “Thank you.”

  “At your disposal.”

  I went out of the terminal. I stood waiting for the light to change. The business day, with all its commercial activity, wiped out my Brazilian fantasy. The banks were about to reopen. I went across a little square with restaurants and artisans and the smell of pot in it, and then walked down a diagonal street until I reached 18 de Julio Avenue. My scant orientation in Montevideo depended on that avenue. If I followed it all the way down, I would reach Ciudad Vieja, it was like the central marrow of a peninsula, it ended up having coasts on both sides. And I could mentally place Parque Rodó off in the distance to my left, Cordón over there, Enzo’s house to the right farther up in Fernández Crespo, the four plazas, the Plaza de los 33, Cagancha, Entrevero, Independencia, the city center, the area where the banks were, La Pasiva, the music stores, the pedestrian area. That was about it. That was my mental and emotional map, because as soon as I turned, having reached the avenue, I detected that presence of an imagined Montevideo, assembled from my few recollections and the videos Guerra would send me every once in a while. Every couple of weeks she’d send me something over email, so as not to lose me, like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs, a song, a Tremble, Ye Tyrants clip, a few blocks of her city filmed by anybody with a pulse but that left me intuiting life on the other side. Now, for example, I turned onto the avenue and felt
like any of those doors could belong to the bar where Cabrera and Rada sing “I Held You in the Night.” I must have seen the video on YouTube five hundred times, and I’d been humming the song at home, and meanwhile you had absolutely no idea I was burning up on the inside. The camera goes into an empty bar and there are two guys singing that song, one plays the guitar in the most minimal way possible, a string every now and then that accompanies the voices that blend together, “I held you in the night, I was holding you goodbye, you were going out of my life.” Guerra would send me those things, and I would be broken, hanging on to that emotion that didn’t dissipate. That was Montevideo to me. I was in love with a woman and in love with the city where she lived. And I made up everything about it, or almost everything. An imaginary city in an adjacent country. That was where I walked, more than down real streets.

  It wasn’t cold. The display windows were already showing off summer wardrobes. A new flashy wave of color in the shopping arcades like textile markets. One little business after the next. In this first stretch everything was toned down, smaller, as if neoliberalism had never happened, no capitalist glamor, old awnings, charmless displays that fascinated me. There was that pastry shop I found so unnerving. I looked at the plaster-like cakes, the petrified meringues, as if they were orders from the eighties that still hadn’t been picked up, I found it incredible that they could actually be eaten, a soccer-field cake that looked like it was made out of reinforced concrete. Wouldn’t children die after consuming such a thing? Wouldn’t they choke on the stucco and glue? The marzipan and that kind of malleable ceramic, the rococo decorations, the flowers made of hard sugar, the frosted blue surfaces, kind of gray, the pearls, the legal coloring … all of it supposedly suitable for human consumption.