Read Perla for Free Online

watched him breathe for a few minutes, taking in air, expelling it, his mouth slack. I wondered how old he was. In the morning sun his hair was still black with hints of green, his ash-white face unwrinkled—he could be my own age, twenty-two, or perhaps a couple of years older, twenty-five at most. But then again, he had been somewhere that could have changed his skin, darkened his hair, shifted his constitution in ways I couldn’t grasp. I was trying to fathom him, the bare essentials of his being; trying to open my thinking, my world, to contain what he claimed to be: one of the disappeared. One of the people who left for work and never arrived, or arrived at work and never came home, or went home and never emerged. People who left holes more gaping than the ordinary dead, because they can’t be grieved and buried, forcing their loved ones to carry their perpetual absence as though the absence itself were alive. Like Romina, with her missing uncles, andher involvement with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, with whom she marched in sight of the Presidential Palace, a white kerchief around her face in protest. In the single year that we were close friends, I had always imagined the uncles’ absence as a dominating current in her house, sweeping the walls along with sunlight, murmuring under dinner conversations, lining the copious shelves of books. Of course that was all before we turned fourteen and Romina cut our ties in a single brutal gesture of disgust—or rage? or grief? or—after which there was no more speaking let alone dreaming between us, only glares at me in the hall that spoke with such ferocious naked force that I came to spend my high school years studiously avoiding Romina’s face. I imagined finding Romina now—an apparition in stern glasses, hovering in the hall—and saying Look, look, one of them is here, I don’t know how he got here but it’s true, he drips and stares like a human trout but he says he’s one of them, halfdead, undead, disentangled from the threads of nonexistence, he has not aged, could he be your uncle?
    The apparition of Romina scowled and said, That’s impossible.
    I know it seems impossible, but he’s here.
    Not that, bitch. It’s impossible that my uncle would come to your house.
    I stood, to dispel the vision, unsteady on my feet. I didn’t want to stay home, nor did I feel equipped to leave. I washed my face, but didn’t shower. Two cups of coffee for breakfast. For Lolo, boiled squash, which he picked at for a moment and then abandoned. I’d been boiling his food faithfully ever since I was old enough to be let near the stove. He hadn’t been able to eat lettuce in thirty-nine years, since before I was born, when he was my father’s turtle, and so mean, it is said, that my grandfather kicked him and broke his mouth. His mouth was still crooked from the injury. Occasionally he disappeared for days, and the squash I boiled for him would go untouched. I would worry about his hunger and demise until I saw him again, out in the open, alert, unperturbed, crooked jaw shut tight around the secret ofwhere he’d been. He was capable of immense stillness as well as a surprising gallop up and down the hall when the mood struck him. That bastard is strong, mean and strong, my father would always say, and shake his head in vexed admiration. Now, as I watched Lolo amble out, I wished I could crawl into his leathery head and dig up memories like buried stones. Because he was there when my father was a child, long before he became my father, when he was just a little boy called Héctor watching his own father kick a turtle in the face and break his jaw. A forceful boot, the rapid shatter of a mouth. Lolo had brought it on himself, or so the story went. What had he done? Walked too slowly? Too fast? Been too much underfoot? Perhaps he’d bitten his attacker first, though I’d never seen him bite anyone and could not imagine him doing so without provocation. And surely there were