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Romina stirred just as the water was approaching a boil.
"Good morning," Flaca said. "How did you know the mate was ready? You have sensors in your brain?"
"Mate antennae. I'm an alien."
"Of course you are. From Planet Yerba."
"Sounds like home to me." Romina squinted out at the ocean. "This place is so damn beautiful."
"I was hoping you'd say that." Flaca beamed. "How did you sleep?"
"Like a rock. Actually, on the rocks. They probably slept better than I did—the rocks, I mean."
"Maybe you'll sleep better tonight."
"Oh, that's all right. I've slept in worse places."
That shut them both up for a few moments. Flaca filled the gourd and passed it to Romina, who drank the mate down until the leaves gurgled. Then she passed the gourd back to Flaca, who filled it again and took her turn drinking through the bombilla, the metal straw. The grassy, bitter taste soothed her, woke her mind. This was the first time that Romina had referred to her recent arrest of her own volition, and it was a relief to see the ease in her posture, to hear her make a wry remark about it only two weeks after the fact. Flaca hadn't known how to broach the subject, trying out the varied approaches of affectionate words, righteous rage, and careful silence since Romina had returned to the land of the living, but no matter what she said or did, she was always met with the same blank eyes. The truth was that, when Romina was arrested, two weeks ago— on the Day of the Dead, no less—Flaca had been terrified. Most people who were arrested didn't return. There was a neighbor whom she hadn't seen in years whose daily existence she fought hard not to think about. And there was Romina's brother, of course, and others—regular customers from the butcher shop, a cousin of her sister's longtime friend—but none of the other people she knew who'd been taken were as close to her as Romina, who had been her best friend since they first met at a Communist Party meeting in early 1973, when Flaca was seventeen years old and the whole world still felt like a long story waiting to unfurl before her, largely because she didn't read the newspaper or follow politics, so that even with the occasional evening curfews and the sudden presence of soldiers on the streets, she'd been able to see the world as more or less normal, the country's problems as possible to fix in the long run. These had been the benefits of not paying attention. In those days she didn't see politics as having anything to do with her, or with her hopes for the future, which, at that point, involved finding a way to stay alive while also being herself. She'd only gone to the Communist Party meeting out of boredom and because the flyer had been handed to her by a pretty university student with glossy, intoxicating hair, and Flaca had wanted to see her again. The pretty university student was not at the meeting, which was interminable and chaotic, full of passionate monologues from young and old men who took pastries from trays without saying thank you to the women and girls who brought them. Communism, Flaca thought, must not be for me. The best part of the meeting was Romina, one of the enthused purveyors of pastries, eighteen years old. Romina's hair was not glossy— it was, in fact, just the opposite, a dark riot of curls. Also good to drown in. There was something about her, a kind of billowing intensity to her gaze that made Flaca want to stare at her all night and then some. Toward the end of the meeting, Romina finally had a chance to speak, and she did so with such a passion that Flaca became officially obsessed. 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. They met in their homes when their fathers were at work and their mothers out at a card game or the hair salon, the sex furtive, sharp with the danger of being discovered. On three glorious occasions, they saved up pesos for a cheap motel room where the bored clerks assumed them to be sisters when they checked in and where they never wasted a single hour on sleep. They took delight in each other in absolute secret. Then the coup happened, and Romina disappeared. Her parents disclosed nothing; when Flaca called, they hung up as soon as they heard Romina's name. Flaca didn't dare knock on their door. Romina, arrested: her dreams filled with images of Romina's body twisted or bruised beyond recognition. To distract herself, and to drown out the despair that droned through every waking minute, she took advantage of her after-school work at her parents' butcher shop to seduce a restless young housewife with acrobatic thighs and a full-lipped librarian who worked at the Biblioteca Nacional and demanded to be spanked with her gold-embossed edition of Dante's Inferno. It seemed to Flaca that both of them were gripped by a furious erotic charge unleashed by those days of chaos and danger, though neither lover ever referred directly to the coup. She had never seduced a woman who was so much older than her before; the thrill of it helped her survive the terror of her days. She was only seventeen years old but she'd been watching men for a long time, the way they acted as if they knew the answers to questions before they were asked, as if they carried the answers in their mouths and trousers. Her lovers seemed to forget how young she was, perhaps because they wanted to, hungry as they were for distraction and pleasure as the world spun out of control. For the rest of her life, Flaca would wonder whether this period shaped her into a Don Juan, or simply uncovered what was already inside. She would never settle on an answer. When Romina surfaced again—she hadn't been arrested, she'd been hiding at her aunt's home in far-flung Tacuarembó, where no one would have thought to look for her, she was in one piece—she quickly discovered these two dalliances, as Flaca made no attempt to lie. Romina exploded. She did not speak to Flaca for a year. Finally, one day, she came to the butcher shop, and Flaca's heart pounded in her chest. By then, the housewife had shrunk back into her marriage in a panic, while the librarian had expanded her repertoire of ways to mix books with sex. And Flaca had missed Romina every day.
Excerpted from Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis. Copyright © 2019 by Carolina De Robertis. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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