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Steps Under Water is a remarkable novel-at once deeply inventive, passionate, and alive with searing truth.

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Steps Under Water

University of California Press

Sara climbs: she climbs the stairs running and once at the very top she looks out, over the patio of her parents' house. And in front of her, the terrace. Everything is at once firm and slippery, it's there and then it vanishes. Easier to turn it into one big lie: like a circus, for example. She settles on this new space with elephants and equestriennes. She imagines them and wonders if they would eat geraniums or sunbathe as she did, years ago, in that very spot.

Maybe this time her escape hasn't worked out. Escaping is an involved process. The more expert you are in the field, the easier it is to fail. To escape upstairs is to run smack into the question of how to get back down. Anyway, already busy with the task of physical recognition, she escapes, but throwing caution to the wind. Except now her circus vanishes as well and she can do nothing more than stop and hold onto the floor tiles, onto the faucet that pokes out of the wall like a snake's head. Onto the hose.

How many footsteps, she asks herself? By how many millimeters had her mother's feet worn down the thickness of the floor tiles during those three and a half years? How many insects had been worked into the porosity of the floor by footsteps that ground them into that same spot, day after day? To know this would be enlightening. To ask, but to ask what. Why bother computing stupidities? I get so sick of thinking about everything in terms of numbers. Besides, nothing can ever be answered unless you've been there. You have to see, and then you get the answer.

What am I doing here, my body seemingly stuck to this terrace, to this faucet, to this geranium, to this blue sky that's only meant to go with a riverb all doing their best to convince me they're real when I know it's possible to block them out for years. To keep them suppressed.

And now what? Try to flex my imagination that's been narrowed by absence. Take another look at the way to appear in the world. In the car, on the way to this terrace, nobody asked me what I thought about the sun and the streets. The light or the rhythm of people's feet as they walk. The sounds of motorcycles, the name brands that were so ingrained in the minds of certain personsb what did this stir up deep down? And I ask myself what my father and mother might think about what was beginning to circulate through my brain and my blood. I wonder what they imagine it's like to regain something all of a sudden, to fill the emptiness with sounds that have never been forgotten? They probably think there's nothing new about that. Or even better: maybe they feel like you can't recuperate what you never really lost. They just don't believe there was ever any danger in being left with nothing. Nor would they believe I'm so

resistant: resistant because everything that's surrounded me in the past few minutes chokes me with happiness and numbs me with anguish.

And that guy. The same one. But they wouldn't understand that either. It was the same one, only with different hair. It was no accident that he came through that door. In the summer, with Hugo's jacket. Wearing it. They all know who's being released. And they don't forget anyone, even though each one of them has a thousand to his name. The guy didn't even bother looking over at me, but he left wearing that jacket, just so I'd see him. And my parents don't believe that, they don't understand what that means. They don't want to recognize that vulnerability is a daily fact. And that it's not easy to neutralize it. Defend against it. But there's nothing to explain. What I have inside of me is all mine. And it takes me away to a solitude that I neither pursue nor resist.

Sara walks to the ledge and peers over and sees the street. Buses, people inside. Wonder where they're going. How many times they must have taken that same bus while I was away. Once again the numbers. And what good are they anyway.

She turns around. She wants to take in the full extension of the terrace. Why does it seem so small, she still insists with the questions. My sight got used to other spaccs. And what does this matter.

Just then she hears a mewing and her nerves crackle. She doesn't scream out: she can't.

A cat. I wonder where it is. What do I do now, where do I hide? In which corner? She looks around, squinting her eyes. Why bother finding out.

There is a corner of the terrace where the sun doesn't reach;

the two yellowing walls and, at a right angle, you can see the tawny flagstones and the tubs holding the geraniums. She sits along the edge of the tub. My pants'll get dirty. So what? Now I'll try to think about cats. More and more I'm having fewer doubts about their existence.

They used to be soft. I'm sure they still are. Warm, strange. Their tails would swish back and forth. You could stick a cat in a box and observe it. Watch all its reactions, I'm sure my pants are covered with dirt. Now I'm just beginning to settle down. A flagpole. A cat is like a flagpole. Always stretching toward the sky, its eyes like a flag floating in its head. Cats live, die, then come back to life. Or they don't die and instead are spared from every kind of possible danger. Well, almost. Because I have seen dead cats. What a horror.

That first time, when Papa was carrying me around on his bike, on that little seat he'd fastened to the handlebars. I couldn't have been more than three. We were going to Alberdi, over to the house of my uncle, who back then was very much alive and who couldn't possibly imagine he'd get cut down in the street, just like so many cats, though from paramilitary bullets instead. We were passing by the power plant and I saw a dark shape moving around in the middle of the street. I asked my father what it could be and he told me, two newborn kittens, probably sick or dying. Right then I wanted that bicycle to go at death's speed. For the first time in my life I felt that horror invade me. Or maybe the first time was that baby sparrow clown the block, around the same time. I don't know.

And that other white cat, at the door of the butcher shop, which was on the way to the piano conservatory in Laboulaye. Snow white. I must have been seven or eight. It was winter. Its

mouth open. I ran like crazy. Every so often I turned around just to tell myself that I was far enough away not to see it anymore.

During that lesson I played the piano with abandon and got into a fight with the teacher because she made me follow along shamefully with the music in the books, and I told her, I want to improvise. I want to play what comes out of me. Last night I made up a song and now I want to play it. And the old shrew hollered at me. I got up from the bench and she sat me back down with a shove.

It's hot here. This terrace is burning up. But it will be nighttime soon. These geraniums are streaked with different colors. I didn't know they were out here. I knew the red ones were. I remember those and the white ones.

And that one by the post office. Its eyes bugging out. Big and yellow. I saw it and couldn't bear it. I got sick to my stomach and collapsed. The old women who helped me up must have thought that only an idiot would faint at the sight of a dead animal. What could two old women know about the kind of things that go on inside a...