KAREN]. GREENBERG
83
to keep his newspaper in print.
It
had been Carla's choice to stay with
him. Now, because she had made the wrong decision, she could never
allow herself to remember those years. There was no way to come to
terms with the fact that her son had perished because of her. After Mar–
tin disappeared and she tried to leave, it was too late. They got Stephano
before her plans for Mexico were finalized. They took him one night
after a protest at the Plaza de Mayo about the abduction of his father.
Every day since then, Carla had awakened steeled against the memo–
ries of the years she thought of as her first life, the years before Martin
joined the
desaparecidos
only to be followed by the disappearance of
their son, breaking her soul in two.
"I drew myoid house from memory... " Alvaro had told her on her
last visit to the sanatorium. "Even the blue shutters. And the paint went
on like always." Carla had bitten her lip. "Only I can't seem to visual–
ize anything I painted in the past."
Though it was only an avocation, Alvaro's painting was distinct
among Argentines. Instead of portraits of mourning-pairs and pairs of
hands symbolizing dead children, tombstones made of bed frames,
mothers shrieking in horror, open-mouthed and suddenly aged, all
mostly in black and white and shades of gray-Alvaro always painted
romantic scenes in bright colors. Like his portrait of two lovers on Inde–
pendence Day. Carla could feel his arms around her every time she
looked at the painting whi2h hung over her bed, which would always,
no matter what, remain watchful as she slept. There was a military pre–
cision to his work, as if his paints were an army with orders to obliter–
ate the enemy entirely, to leave not a trace. This is in part what had
drawn Carla to him. Comfortable with his own past, he had silently
promised to help keep her thoughts away from the part of their lifetimes
they hadn't shared.
"What do you remember about us?" she had asked on that last day,
empowered by the knowledge that, as this was their last conversation,
she could begin, ever so delicately, to ask what he might not want
to hear.
He had looked back at her, blank-faced. And then his tears started.
As they always started when she visited. "It's like always. I'm just wak–
ing from a dream and trying to insert myself back into it, to orient
myself, to give color and shape to my miserable feelings. When I do
sleep, it's better. Victoria, my new nurse, tells me I say your name in my
sleep all the time. I mumble it. I yell it. But at least I know where I am
in my dreams. I am with you, Carla ."
Carla shut out the memory and turned to Jorge.
