¨But she had no memory of how to be brave¨
I have found it, with certain maple tables, heart-backed chairs, slung back against forlorn walls. Cafe Brasiliero, overloaded with American music making waves, Uruguayan friends implanted in windown seats, shaking with lust.
I spent an entire day walking: I could say (lie) exploring, spitting forth with fire to find something, somewhere, somehow wonderful. In reality, a poor reality perhaps, I was searching for an outlet, my Montevidean perching place. I found it, too, in the smallest hour, but out of curiosity, wonder, the wickedest of wants, spurned it and moved on. Like most wonders, lovely life nooks, it slipped into my past upon return, fastly forgotten. I regressed and found only open streets, sighing with my whole: sidling upon these split-upon sidewalks, simply wanting, wanting...
I have found it again today (can breathe easy), and the cafe, itself, a stone ledge of my final hours here, is less than warm. But here my fingers can walk in horrid ren pen (never again!), can sip milky coffee (spurning my stomach) and fall into a world that is not, entirely, my own. That is entirely not my own, in fact.
¨There was in the air that kind of distoration that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility.¨
I am glad that it is almost raining, a racket of awakening. Although I wanted to lie on a bench in that rose garden, slide my tongue over sugary cashews that always smell better than they taste and admire old women and their mean Mates (not dogs), it is the streets that inspire me, the city, not foreign but fact, that roars within (the most livid and learned of lions), lies beneath my toes, gurgling like 10 newborns bursting blue with life.
I want to thank my father for inspiring a love of the Spanish language. I want to thank my mother for listening to my stories outloud for years. And my sister--a beautiful writer who did not choose that path--for showing me the words. I think always of her first short story, Blueberry Hill and my following copy-cat (copy-Kat) moves, Cranberry Mountain, Strawberry lake, Blackberry Mountain...the most irritating of complements, awefully inspired, making me hers. I also want to thank her for telling me my first descent poem in primary school was beautiful, despite being about overtaking devils. And I want to thank my parents for smiling wildly at my 8th grade graduation when I read a piece about two people dancing. Naked. On a bed. Even when my dean´s face turned the reddist of reds and I beamed with pride and clicked my heels and knew that I was home.
Of course, I wrote about things, places, people I didnt know and now, too, write about the unknown: or better yet, how I come to know through the smallest of moments, the most miniscule openings of the sky.
This sounds like a prologue to some unwritten book, but it is not. It is a coming home. Another sort of falling in love. ¨I feel alive and relevant, living my life this way...¨
How will I describe Uruguay, what I have seen, sipped into my eager eyes. Colors are certain, civil but blown open. The streets are red with little yellow life lines, veins stepped upon proudly and in protest, pitied and broken open by motoscooters and waspy taxi cabs (the fire, the force, the submarine-night shade). So many men carry guitars, yearn to play the drums (not dance but devour the dancing). I do dance, for hours, to Brazilian music that sucks me in, Nicole at my fingertips, singing songs my ears are virgin to. Last night, at this place (Pony something), a man whispered in my ear in Portguese and while I kept on dancing, while I did not understand anything other than the word girl repeated raw a dozen times, it was something beautiful, something to hold tight in a single breath.
What strikes me the most here are the young boys riding mountains of carted trash, attached to thin, spotted horses: urban grim-reapers, sporting only Orpheus eyes, but no music, no madnessin tow to call back from the underworld, any kind of true (or even chalky, forged, erasable) love.
The streets, the gray of pigeons confirmed, overlapped, lapping up the faded Caribbeans facades (as only a port city could do), has slipped inside of my heart. Everything feels at once divine and moderate: moderated by the miniscule population. (A belly not empty but impossibly airy: a certain city where there is always room to dance).
The waitress here could fit, fold into the spine of any story, hardback book. She wants to be a rockstar, or so speaks her hair, cut jaded, sharp but sure, like a good Uruguayan woman who speaks in ustedes and saunters so. She wears all black, less uniform than show, staring defiantly into the corner where I lean over my book: all done up in red like a failed exam.
This is a place to which I will return: hatted men selling small packaged knives; far too many street children; and those middle aged women with slinkly necklaces, sophisticated glasses, brown shawls that are everywhere. Those transnational mtohers: impossible not to spot even with the blindest of eyes, who make such a cold as there is in this old cafe, such a shivering, slip off, slip under their shawls, their worn breasts, their patterned parakeet steps. They give warmth. They are the heart. They are the bearers of the beauty I so treasure in every moment of living, bearing, breaking, bellowing, beaming: of a borrowed belonging.