Short war, p.12
Short War, page 12
Ofelia returned to her room, but Caro waited a moment to resume talking. When she did, her voice was even smaller than before. “It could be nothing,” she said.
“But?”
“But I was supposed to get my period last week.”
Gabriel’s whole body tightened. His half erection vanished. Salt sprang to his tongue. The dark rose around him. The soft, unified burr of Nico and the generator rattled in his head.
“Last Monday,” Caro continued. “So, twelve days ago.” She made a choked little sound. “I keep track.”
“Twelve days,” Gabriel echoed. His whole body was buzzing with alarm now. He felt as if a second self were breaking its way from inside him, like Athena bursting through Zeus’s skull. His new self wasn’t wise, though. Wasn’t powerful. This new Gabriel was head-to-toe animal fear.
He had to concentrate. Not on terror. Not on Greek myths. Not on his chattering teeth or cold sweat. Not on his erection, which had roared back for Christ knew what reason. On Caro.
“How bad”—he tried and had to pause for air—“how bad is twelve days?”
“Bad.”
Gabriel screwed his eyes against the darkness. The place behind his balls ached. His many lists of distractions flocked into his head. Carlos Caszely’s best goals. Patagonian snake species. Sunken Chilean warships. Andean birds. He couldn’t have a baby. It was impossible. If, faced with the prospect, he went to thoughts of outdated gods and headers across the Huachipato goal box, then clearly he was unprepared.
Again he dragged his focus back to Caro. No soccer. No birds. Pregnancy. How could Caro be pregnant? He had always pulled out in time. Hadn’t he soaked up the results with hay behind barns, with already-stiff cleaning rags, with a San Pedro Nolasco scarf he’d then had to abandon? Once—behind the brush pile the first day of Trabajo Voluntario—he’d cut it close. Too close, apparently.
Gabriel tightened his hold on his girlfriend. He wanted so badly to see her, but he saw only black air. “If it’s real,” she said, and hope spiked in him, “I have to keep it.” Her voice twisted and dipped. “For God.”
There was no possible reply. The alternative hadn’t entered Gabriel’s head. It would be—would have been—so easy. He was certain his parents could arrange an abortion in hours. Pay for it without blinking. Get the first Chilean Lazris sliced or scooped or hosed from Caro’s womb.
A small and fervent gladness bubbled in him. If he had a child here, he’d have roots. A valid claim. He could propose to Caro. They could move to Patagonia, raise their baby in some mountain town. Let the country collapse around them if it had to, let their old futures pass them by.
He knew better than to propose now. He knew that he had to apologize and that his apology would be worthless. What words were the size of a baby? What would he ever be able to say?
Gabriel shucked the heavy blankets off and stood, shivering, as his collected heat fled. He guided Caro across the icy floor, hands stinging with newly mobile blood, Nico somehow still gurgling peacefully at their backs. Panic fluttered at the top of Gabriel’s head. The heavy darkness—how had his eyes not adjusted?—made it worse.
But the kitchen’s concrete walls glowed faintly. A bitten hunk of moon shone in the window. Black-coffee light fell on the floor. Not much, but enough to show him the blond wood table, the gas tank, the tear tracks on Caro’s face.
She sat, and he knelt before her. The moon glanced from her wet cheeks. It caught the zip of her outermost sweater, the button of her fly. Gabriel undid it, guided more by light than thought, and tugged at her waistband till she shoved her pants to her calves. Then she pushed him back.
“No hands. I don’t want your rash.”
Clumsily, Gabriel pressed his mouth to her cotton underwear. She had never let him lick her before. The fabric—should he remove it? Or would taking her underwear off count as hands?—was wet already. Caro angled her hips closer as he tried kissing, tried sucking, tried pressing the flat of his tongue to bone. Caro tightened her legs, and he licked harder, imagining talking to a baby who might yet not be real. He saw himself from above, hunched shoulders and curved back, a ball of a person on a moonlit floor in the middle of fields, of vines, of packed red dirt to which his child would belong.
Caro sighed and shivered. Her thighs tensed. She dropped herself to the chair’s edge. Gabriel told himself that of all the omens he had sought and found, this was the truest. If he made Caro come, it meant that their future was possible. It meant that their life and the emerging life inside her were not only real but fated, that his destiny had always been here.
She dug her nails into his shoulders. He felt her buck, then go limp. He promised himself, this time correctly, that he would never forget this sensation, this combined feeling of arousal, terror, gratitude, and good luck. He remained in place for a moment. Only when he stood, wet-chinned and giddy, did he see the long shadow on the linoleum. Ofelia cleared her throat from the kitchen door.
“I think I mentioned I was a light sleeper,” she said.
Caro buried her head in her hands. Gabriel resisted the urge to seal his eyes shut. He straightened his back and looked at Ofelia. Someone had to take responsibility. Face reality. Accept the consequences. He had skated through life long enough. No more, he swore silently to Caro. From now on, he’d assume the weight of their actions. He would shelter her. He was, after all, American. He could offer her all the protection in the world.
INTERPRETATION
Buenos Aires, Argentina, February 2015
Nina Lazris met her husband in the week between arriving in Buenos Aires and discovering the book that punched holes in her personal history. Besides that, she did little of note. She unpacked her bags, set up a writing space in her newly rented apartment, took long walks in the summer heat. She worked, though less than she should have, on the dissertation she had flown halfway across the globe to save. She spent too much money on fancy prepared foods before realizing she’d miscalculated the exchange rate. It didn’t matter—Nina had resources to fall back on—but she tried to live within her grad-student means. It was part of being a serious person, which she worked hard at. Before she stumbled on Guerra Eterna, it was arguably the project of her adult life.
Nina wasn’t positive her presence in Argentina qualified as serious. It was neither fully stipend-funded nor fully planned. In fairness to herself, she could only have planned so much. She’d come to Buenos Aires to study the protest movement arising from the suspicious death of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman, and he’d barely been dead three weeks. Hard to blame herself for not organizing her trip while he was still alive.
If somebody had told Nina a month earlier that she’d be spending her spring semester here, she would have laughed in their face. She had never been to Latin America before. Never traveled alone. Never imagined that, four and a half years into her doctorate, she’d wrench the scope of her dissertation open, shifting from social-media-driven dissent in the United States to social-media-driven dissent in the Americas. Of course, if that same clairvoyant person had added that she’d be making a chaotic last-ditch effort to rescue her dissertation—and with it her poor, shredded belief that she belonged in academia—she would have retracted her laughter. Fine, she would have said. Great. Cross your fingers it works.
She crossed her fingers at her sides now, waiting at the light on Avenida Santa Fe, the main commercial strip in her new neighborhood. Chic girls buzzed past in their giant earrings, hip-length hair flickering in the breeze. Sun bounced off the polished hoods of taxis, glared from bus windows, turned the street itself into a lake of glossy tar. The air smelled like hot asphalt mixed with warm fruit, dog shit, and the pleasant burnt-wood scent that wafted constantly from the pizzeria across Santa Fe. Nina had tried it two nights ago: not awful, but also not good.
She was en route to coffee with Ilán Radzietsky, a graduate of her program who now taught at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Nina was working on a PhD in communications, but instead of getting funding from her department, she got it from her university’s Center for Media and Social Impact, which adopted a doctoral student every few years. Ilán had been its first. Now he was a rising academic star who researched multilingual online identity formation.
Nina wished she knew what type of coffee this would be: semiprofessional? Full professional? Casual but platonic? Or would it be one of those first dates recognizable only in retrospect? She had no reason to even imagine the latter. Her stubborn hope that it would be a pre-date pointed, probably, to her fundamental unseriousness. She’d never met Ilán in person. One of her bosses had introduced them, which led to a flurry of emails, and then Ilán invited her to a welcome-to-the-country coffee. All very ordinary. Nina was thinking in date-or-not-date terms only because (1) she hadn’t had a nontransactional conversation, barring phone calls with her dad, since she landed in Buenos Aires five days ago, (2) she hadn’t had sex since Thanksgiving, and (3) Ilán was hot. In the headshot on his departmental profile page, he glowed like some kind of Modern Orthodox sex prince in his yarmulke and open collar. His mussed curls practically lifted from her laptop screen. His smile was crooked, his skin perfect. Since Google Imaging him, Nina had devoted far too much time to sexual and marital fantasies in which he was the star.
A block from the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Nina paused to lift her hair from her sweating neck. She checked her reflection in the plate-glass window of a store that seemed to sell only compressive underwear: girdles, control panties, distressing Velcro-sided bras. She reminded herself that, even if she was not a serious person, she was gifted at small talk, proficient in Spanish, and neither as dumb nor as ill-prepared as she felt. She had read every scrap of Nisman news since he died on January 18. She had educated herself on his eleven-year investigation into the 1994 car bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, or AMIA, Buenos Aires’s biggest Jewish community center; she’d read his allegations that the sitting president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had concealed Iran’s involvement in the attack. Not even a week after he levied his accusations, he was discovered dead in his bathroom. Online, it had seemed to Nina that all of Argentina was in an uproar. Now that she was here, she couldn’t gauge how many people cared.
She could ask Ilán. In a normal way, not a help-me-my-dissertation-is-dying way. She did not plan to tell him that if her research failed here like it had been failing in D.C., she would quit academia. She would be confident. Not socially starved. Not a freak. She would not ask insensitive or ignorant questions. If she flirted, she would do it subtly. She smoothed her hair, tugged her skirt straight, and texted Ilán that she was close.
In her two weeks of feverish predeparture planning, Nina had imagined herself working in the facultad library. Looking at the building, she had doubts. It was old and mildly crumbling, with a tiny brown garden, a drooping Argentine flag, and air conditioners dripping from every third window. An engraved stone over the door confirmed that it really was part of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, not a run-down office block. Neon-green flyers wheat-pasted to its walls declared TODOS SOMOS NISMAN; matching hot-pink ones demanded ¡JUSTICIA YA! Beneath them, long black streaks of spray paint declared the pope a fascist and Cristina Kirchner a traitor and suggested that both go suck dicks. Nina was idly considering Cristina’s facial flexibility—she’d plainly had both Botox and a face-lift; could she open her mouth wide enough to admit a penis?—when the facultad’s iron-barred door swung open and Ilán appeared.
He was, unfortunately, even hotter in person. Significantly hotter. Nina wished she hadn’t just been contemplating oral sex. His shoulders were broad, his prayer-fringed hips narrow. The fringes themselves were somehow seductive—flickering little banners of religiousness, reminding Nina that he was almost certainly off limits. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing hairy forearms and delicate hands.
“Nina?” he called.
She waved and banished all sexual thoughts, though she did permit herself to appreciate how good he smelled when he kissed her cheek hello. A standard greeting here, but she’d assumed—ignorantly, she guessed—that an Orthodox Jew would skip it. She hadn’t been prepared.
In English, he said, “I have a very serious question to ask.”
“Already?”
He grinned. “You said your apartment is on Azcuénaga, right?”
“Right.”
“Have you been to Rapanui?”
Rapanui was the ice cream place on Nina’s corner. Every time she walked by, cold, sugary air rolled over her, heavy with the smell of caramel or baking sugar cones. She’d vaguely planned to take herself there for academic rewards: first set of research aims written, first interview completed, first real idea.
“Not yet,” she said.
Ilán looked extremely pleased. “Would you like to fix that?”
“Fix?”
“You’ll see.”
He led her down Azcuénaga, past the frightening underwear store, two parking garages, a Subway, a delicious-smelling Lebanese restaurant. Drum-machine cumbia poured from car windows. Persimmons, at the fruit stand, were DE OFERTA; Nina would have to remember to come back. She hadn’t had a persimmon since her best friend, Hazel, moved from California, where they were abundant, to New York.
“Are you liking the neighborhood?” Ilán asked.
“I like it a lot. The buildings are pretty, there’s great people-watching, it’s easy to get groceries, I’m near public transit. What else do I need?”
Ilán shrugged. “There’s not much nightlife. A couple good bars, but no clubs.”
“I can handle that,” Nina said, with a spike of self-consciousness. “Not so much of a club girl.” She’d read online that Buenos Aires was a major clubbing city, but she liked drinking and talking, not drugs and dancing. Besides, who would she go clubbing with? Her seventy-five-year-old landlady? Herself?
“Same,” Ilán said. “I live a couple blocks over there.” He waved his arm loosely toward the facultad. “Which means I should be ashamed that I had to meet you at work to bully myself into going there.”
Nina laughed. “It’s summer.”
“Exactly. Time to write.”
She wondered if he was performing laziness—a favorite pastime of grad students; presumably young professors did it too—or if he legitimately had a slacker streak. She hoped it was the second. It seemed consistent with the ice cream excitement, somehow. “Writing is overrated,” she said lightly.
“My daughter tells me that every day.”
Disappointment shot down Nina’s spine. She willed herself to ignore it. Ilán carried himself like a younger man, but, per her Googling, he was thirty-nine to her twenty-eight. She should have predicted that he’d have a kid. “How old is she?”
“She turned five last month. She’s very proud of it.” Ilán had almost no accent in English, but, Nina noticed now, he hissed the f in “of,” holding the letter a second too long. Nina knew she had equivalent tells in Spanish: letters she stretched, diphthongs she shortened. Her r-rolling was unreliable, though her dad had drilled her throughout her childhood, rewarding her with Klondike bars when she cleared the great hurdle of “ferrocarril.”
She tried to conjure up a good question to ask about five-year-olds. People liked talking about their kids, she knew, but what did they like to say? The only parent in Nina’s life was her dad. She had no siblings, no cousins on either side, so her family was baby-free. Her friends were all childless. None of them even had dogs.
“Did she have a birthday party?” she tried.
“She wanted to have a fancy dinner instead. We called it Restaurant Party.”
Nina smiled. “I like that.”
“She’s a likeable kid. An odd one.” Ilán’s tone told Nina he was prouder of the second trait than the first, which she found charming. Before she could ask, he launched into a description of his daughter’s ideas and habits: she was obsessed with dolphins and all dolphin-related content, which manifested, in part, as avid Miami Dolphins fandom; she’d struck up an imaginary friendship with Lady Gaga; she thought monsters lived in her closet, but she welcomed them and loaned them toys; she had only recently learned to separate English, Spanish, and Hebrew, all of which Ilán spoke to her at home, and was delighted with herself when she successfully communicated in one unmixed tongue.
Nina whistled. “Trilingual parenting. I knew you did research in a lot of languages, but still, that’s hardcore.”
“Or crazy.”
She waved his self-deprecation off. A small corner of her mind suggested she ask why Hebrew: religion or Zionism? But if he was a Zionist, she didn’t want to know. “Impressive,” she said. “My dad raised me bilingual, and that was tricky enough.”
Down the block, two silky women slipped into a building that Nina had realized yesterday was a plastic surgery clinic. A taxi honked at a jaywalking girl in palm-sized shorts. She swanned serenely onward, as if the noise were tribute, not rebuke. Over the horn’s ongoing blare, Ilán asked, “English and what other language?”
“Spanish. I didn’t tell you I speak it?”
“You did.” His mouth spread into a smile. “But when I lived in D.C., I met a lot of Americans who”—he clawed his fingers into scare quotes—“ ‘spoke Spanish.’ ”
Nina laughed. “I know the type. Memorized every verb in AP Spanish but can’t carry on a conversation.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m terrified of people thinking that’s me,” she admitted. “Sometimes I pretend not to know Spanish to avoid giving the wrong impression. But I do speak it, I swear. I wouldn’t call myself fluent, but I’m probably as close as a nonnative speaker can get.”
“Is your dad a native speaker?”
Nina hesitated. She half-regretted bringing her dad up. On the one hand, she and her father were extremely close, and she missed him. Talking about him at length would be nice. On the other, parent talk was unsexy. If she wanted to begin flirting with Ilán, she should steer the conversation swiftly elsewhere.
