Excerpt of The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis
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Uno
THE GIRL WHO APPEARED
IN A TREE
When Salomé finally wrote to her daughter—by then a young
woman, a stranger, thousands of miles away—she said everything
that disappears is somewhere, as if physics could turn back time and
save them both. It was a maxim she'd learned in school: energy is neither
lost nor created. Nothing truly goes away. People are energy too, and
when you cannot see them they've just changed places, or changed
forms, or sometimes both. There is the exception of black holes, which
swallow things without leaving even the slightest trace, but Salomé let
her pen keep moving as if they did not exist.
Her skirts were wet and clung to her legs and her pen moved and
moved without her hand seeming to push it, forming the spires and
spikes and loops of cursive words, sharp t's and j's, y's and g's with knots
at their base as though to tie themselves together, tie women back
together, and as she wrote the loops grew large, as if more rope were
needed to bind what had blown apart inside her, and not only inside her
but around her, and before her, in her mother's days, her grandmother's
days, the hordes of stories Salomé had not lived through but that came
to her as stories do—copiously, uninvited, sometimes in an easy sprawl,
sometimes with a force that could drown you or spit you up to heaven.
Other stories had never come; they went untold. They left hollow silence
in their place. But if it was true that everything that disappeared was
somewhere, then even those still breathed and glittered, somewhere, in
the hidden corners of the world.
The first day of a century is never like other days, and less so in
Tacuarembó, Uruguay, a speck of a town, known for starting centuries
with some peculiar miracle or another. And so the townspeople were
primed that morning, ready, curious, tingling, some drunk, some praying,
some drinking more, some stealing gropes under bushes, some leaning
into saddles, some filling gourds of mate, evading sleep, peering at
the slate of a new century.
A century before, in 1800, when Uruguay was not yet a country but
just a slice of colonial land, huge baskets of purple berries had appeared at the altar of the church. They came from nowhere, succulent and
perfectly ripe, enough to feed the town twice over. An altarboy called
Robustiano had watched the priest open the door to find the gift sweltering
under Christ's feet. For years Robustiano would describe the
priest's face when he saw those berries sweating in the stained-glass sun,
three baskets as wide as two men's chests, the fragrance rising to intoxicate
God. Robustiano spent the rest of the day, and the rest of his life,
describing the way it happened. "He just turned white, white as paper,
then he went pink, and his eyes rolled into his head, and—páfate—he
collapsed onto the ground! I ran over and shook him, calling, Padre,
Padre, but he was like a rock." Years later, he would add, "It was the
smell that was too much for him. You know. Like the smell of a woman
who's been satisfied. El pobre padre. All those nights alone—he
couldn't take it, those berries hot from the sun, in his church, too much
for a priest."
Women, gauchos, and children came to feast on the berries. The pews
were not accustomed to such a crowd. The berries were small and bulbous,
ripe and tart, different from anything that had been seen growing
in these lands. As the town lay down for a digestive siesta, an octogenarian
stepped up to the altar and told the tale she'd heard in her youth, of
the miracles that came to Tacuarembó on the first day of each century.
"I'm telling you," she said, "this is our miracle." Her bearded chin was
stained with convincing purple juice. Miracles are miracles, she said;
they come unannounced and unexplained and have no guarantee of
giving you what you want; and yet you take them; they are the hidden
bones of ordinary life. She told them the story of New Year's Day one
hundred years prior, in 1700, exactly as it had been told to her, and no
one had a decent reason to doubt this: on that very day, songs in the old
native Tupí-Guaraní language had haunted the air, from one sunrise to
the next. Though most tacuaremboenses had native blood mixed in their
veins, even back then many had lost the tongue. But still, the sounds
were unmistakable: the guttural clips, the lilt like a stream shocked by
stones. Everyone could hear them but no one could find the singers; the
music rode, disembodied, potent, broken, on the wind.
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