I remember my first walk along the docks. Agda wanted to come with me, but I wanted to go alone: the calm of that ocean, the clearness of the air, the sharp colors, the rolling ships. I walked to the bridge that crosses to Skeppsholmen and the beauty stopped me short. My nose touched the uncertainty of my future, as if uncertainty were a wind carrying the scent of the sea and pushing me onward. I wanted to keep that island for later. I saw a mother running a brush through her daughter’s hair. With what care, with what sensitive slowness, what infinite love. And the little girl’s long, blond, almost white hair takes on life and brilliance. Did my mother ever brush my hair like that?
I arrived in September, and the weather was often good. At lunch-time I took my sandwich to Kungsträdgården Square, and the yellow leaves from the oaks softly grazed my hair or my shoulders as they fell. I picked them up from the grass and they were damp, and I sat looking at their veins, persisting still.
FIFTY-ONE
Roberto was six years younger than me. A tall, handsome Brazilian. We met in the Berlitz cafeteria. It turned out he was friends with Agda and that made things easier. You know, I actually can’t remember when we started dating. How odd. That says something. I remember his first gift to me: an amber perfume. Of course, I’d already told him about how that mysterious substance had fascinated me since I was a little girl and how it was linked in my imagination to the Vikings and the Baltic Sea. Later, he would give me a beautiful necklace with stones that shone with an internal light. Roberto. . with his Portuguese-accented Spanish, so full of tender eñes, such soft, kind sounds.
I brought him to the Kungsträdgården and talked to him about the yellow oak leaves that kept me company during the solitary lunches of my first weeks, and how they healed me when, as they fell, they brushed against me for a moment. Now those leaves were light, luminous green, and in the grass wild blue and white anemones were growing. His voice warmed and protected me. What more could I want than to love him and for him to love me? We liked to walk, to lose ourselves in the streets, talking and laughing. I like men with a sense of humor. I think it’s more important than looks, you know? When you have a man you can laugh with, the doors open by themselves.
And with Roberto I crossed over the Skeppsholmen Bridge for the first time, clattering over its wooden slats. That’s where we first kissed. We were walking along, our arms around each other, toward the Moderna Museet. Roberto was talking to me, and he would suddenly interrupt himself to kiss me. He was telling me about what we were going to see, about the brilliance of the Brillo Boxes by Warhol and about the incredible power of the color orange in his electric chair; no one, he said, before Warhol had ever seen an orange like that, because the chair’s mossy green made it into the orangest of all oranges; and about the feeling of movement in the face of Picasso’s La Femme à la collerette bleue, about his drawings of birds — a running ostrich, a truly chickenlike chicken, a hawkish hawk, an unforgettable dove in flight — and about Rauschenberg’s embalmed goat encircled by a tire, its look of primitive masculinity broken by civilization, the symbol of sexuality and tragedy, of Dionysus, god of abandon, transformed by the tire into a victim, the sense of unease conveyed by its suppressed instincts and the nostalgia of its paint-spattered head. We took a long time, because he would be in the middle of telling me about Picasso’s unforgettable dove in flight or the tragedy of Rauschenberg’s billy goat in modernity, and we would stop again and again to kiss with Dionysian passion. When we finally got to the museum it was already closed. We made do with more kisses, running and embracing and running again among the happy, colored sculptures, those round, restless, powerful women by Niki de Saint Phalle. I think they’ve removed them now. Someone told me that. I hope it’s not true.
For months, we devoted a weekend each to the archipelago’s islands. It was a wonderful period, that time with Roberto. He took me dancing, and I’ve never seen anyone dance like him. He danced to every rhythm with a spontaneous joy, graceful and contagious, that always made me want to dance with him. He danced standing up sometimes, almost without moving; he danced sitting down, moving only his head and shoulders. But the fact that he was younger than me made me nervous. Of course, he couldn’t understand my past. I couldn’t either, to tell the truth. He was a man with taut skin, mulatto. He loved me.
FIFTY-TWO
There were plenty of exiled Latin Americans in Stockholm, all victims of the horror. I made friends with some of them. Mireya, a survivor of the Tupas’s struggle in Uruguay; Claudia, whose husband had been taken prisoner and never heard from again; and María Verónica. All three of them had been taken prisoner and gone through hell. We gave a wide berth to that subject. Instead we talked about our children, our latest pap tests, and Mireya talked about her menopause, which had started recently. The rest of us listened to her and tried to mask our dread. And, of course, we discussed politics. One approach, we said, was to join in the ecumenism of the human rights movement. The battle of stamped papers, of lawyers and their endless court cases.
“What other weapon do we have besides moral denunciation?” María Verónica said. And, turning red from passion mixed with a half-ashamed laughter that was very particular to her: “We were going to start the revolution in the only way possible: with blood and firing squads. You all, military bastards, got ahead of us and screwed us over. Now you have to pay. Because the blood you spilled, your cruelty, there’s no pardon for that.”
And Claudia, interrupting her laughter and looking at her seriously: “But no, it’s not like that. We would never have done to them what they did to us. Anyway, for me it’s not just about a weapon, it’s about something higher: truth, justice.”
Mireya objected, folding her hands together: “The price is to break with Che’s example. His sacrifice doesn’t die. Neither does Santucho’s, Inti Peredo’s, Miguel Enríquez’s, so many others. .”
And Claudia, frowning: “I don’t think all that pain has made the poor any less poor. It hurts me, but the truth is I can’t believe it anymore.”
And Mireya: “For shit’s sake! His gesture lives on; it lives on because of its moral generosity.”
And Mario, a history professor who had been beaten to a pulp in ESMA: “Vos, Claudia, you want us to subscribe to the cause of universal and ahistorical human rights, no? And for real, not as a tactical position. Great! Who am I to argue. . The problem is, you see, they are situated beyond the class struggle, in a metaphysical beyond. It’s idealistic claptrap, my love. .” And he put his hand to his black beard sprinkled with white. “Look, the first case of interrogation under threat that’s recorded in literature is in Homer, in the Iliad itself. Don’t believe me? It’s a Trojan spy named Dolon. Ulysses and Diomedes capture him. Once Dolon has talked and is begging for mercy, Diomedes breaks his promise and thwack! Dolon’s head rolled in the dust as he was still speaking, says Homer. That mother-fucker, man, that’s how power is, it’s ruthless.”