1989
All that summer the electricity went off for six hours at a time; government orders, because the country had no more energy, they said, though we didn’t really understand what that meant. Our parents couldn’t get over how the Minister of Public Works had announced the measures they were taking to avoid a widespread blackout while in a room lit only by a hurricane lamp: like in a slum, they repeated. What would a widespread blackout be like? Would we be left in the dark forever? The possibility was incredible. Stupid. Ridiculous. Useless adults, we thought, how useless. Our mothers cried in the kitchen because they didn’t have enough money or there was no electricity or they couldn’t pay the rent or because inflation had eaten away at their salaries until they didn’t cover anything beyond bread and cheap meat, but we girls—their daughters—didn’t feel sorry for them. Those things all seemed just as stupid and ridiculous as the power outages.
Meanwhile, we had a van. It belonged to Andrea’s boyfriend. Andrea was the prettiest of us, the one who knew how to rip up jeans to make fabulous cutoffs and wore crop tops that she bought with money she stole from her mother. The boyfriend’s name doesn’t matter. He had a van that he used to deliver groceries during the week, but on weekends it was all ours. We smoked some poisonous pot from Paraguay that smelled like urine and pesticide when it was dry but was cheap and effective. The three of us would smoke, and once we were totally out of our minds we’d get into the back of the van, which didn’t have windows or any light at all because it wasn’t designed for people, it was made to transport cans of garbanzos and peas. We would have him drive really fast and then slam on the brakes, or go around and around the traffic island at the entrance to the town. We had him speed up around corners and make us bounce over speed bumps. And he did it all because he was in love with Andrea and he hoped that one day she would love him back.
We would scream and tumble on top of each other. It was better than a roller coaster and better than alcohol. Sprawled in the darkness we felt like every blow to the head could be our last, and sometimes, when Andrea’s boyfriend had to stop for a red light, we sought each other out in the darkness to be sure we were all still alive. And we roared with laughter, sweaty, sometimes bloody, and the inside of the truck smelled of empty stomachs and onions, and sometimes of the apple shampoo we all shared. We shared a lot: clothes, the hair dryer, bikini wax. People said that we were similar, that the three of us looked alike, but that was just an illusion because we copied each other’s movements and ways of speaking. Andrea was beautiful, tall, with thin and separated legs; Paula was too blond and turned a horrible shade of red when she spent too long in the sun; I could never manage a flat belly or thighs that didn’t rub together and chafe when I walked.
Andrea’s boyfriend would make us get out after an hour, once he got bored or started to worry the police would pull the van over and think that maybe he had kidnapped the three girls in the back. Sometimes he dropped us off at one of our houses, or sometimes in Plaza Italia, where we bought that poisonous Red Dot weed from the hippies in the artisan market. We also drank sangria that one of the hippies made in a five-liter tomato can with giant pieces of fruit because he was lazy and always too drunk to cut the bananas, oranges, and apples into smaller chunks. Once, we found an entire grapefruit, and one of us put it in her mouth like a stuffed Christmas piglet and ran around between the stalls. It was night, and the crafts were illuminated with lights running on a generator that all the vendors shared.
We would go back home very late, hours after the market closed; no one paid any attention to us that summer. The authorities didn’t keep to the duration of the power outages, and we spent the longest nights of our lives dying of heat in yards and on sidewalks, listening to the radio using batteries that seemed to run out more and more quickly as the days went by.
1990
They’d forced the president to hand over the reins before the end of his term, and no one liked the new one too much, even though he’d won the elections by an impressive margin. The stench of resignation was in the air; it seeped from the twisted mouths of the embittered people, including the whiny parents we scorned now more than ever. But the new president had promised that from then on it wouldn’t take years to get a telephone line once you requested it; the phone company was so inefficient that some of our neighbors had been waiting a decade for the thing, and sometimes when the technicians showed up to install it—they never called first—there would be impromptu celebrations. Out of pure luck we had telephones, all three of us, and we’d spend hours talking until our parents cut us off, yelling. It was during one of those phone conversations on some Sunday afternoon that Paula decided we had to start going to Buenos Aires. We would lie and say we were going out in our town, but really we would take the early bus on Saturday and spend the night in Buenos Aires. At dawn we’d be back at the station and home in the morning; our parents would never even know.
They never knew.
I fell in love with the waiter in a bar called Bolivia; he rejected me. “I get around,” he told me.
“What the hell do I care,” I shouted at him, and I downed almost a liter of gin and if I slept with someone else that night I don’t remember. When I woke up I was on the bus home; it was already day and my shirt was covered in vomit. I had to go by Andrea’s house to wash up before I went to mine. At Andrea’s no one ever asked questions; her dad was almost always drunk and she had a lock on her bedroom door so he couldn’t get in at night. When we went to her house it was better to stay in the kitchen—her dad only went in there to get more ice for his wine.