The Invisible Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

laborers Ignazio worked with—even the immigrants, of which there were many—spoke of Batlle the way Italians spoke of the pope. These men were also obsessed with
mate:
a brew of shredded leaves and hot water, concocted in a hollow gourd, then drunk through a metal straw called a
bombilla
. They drank it as if their lives depended on it, and maybe their lives did, sucking at
bombillas
on their high steel beams, pouring water while awaiting the next crate, passing the gourd from hand to calloused hand. The first time he was offered
mate
, Ignazio was shocked by the assumption that he should share a cup. He was eighteen, after all, a grown man. He thought of refusing, but didn’t want the others to think him afraid of tea. The gourd felt warm against his palm. The wet green mass inside it gleamed. The drink flooded his mouth, bright and green and bitter, the taste, he thought, of Uruguay.
He was able to find morsels of Italy: fresh pasta, good Chianti, the reassuring cadence of his language. El Corriente, the bar downstairs from his dingy rented room, brimmed with the sweethard liquor
grappa miel
and music from an out-of-tune piano and the company of immigrant men. He headed straight there after work. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he crept downstairs to hear Italian spoken in loud and slurring voices. He needed them. They filled something even whores could not fill.
    Pietro worked for a brilliant but arthritic shoemaker. He met Ignazio at El Corriente a few times a week until, three years after their arrival, he married a Sicilian girl with placid eyes and solid bones. Ignazio stood by him at the altar as the organ sang and the silky bride approached. The priest mumbled, made signs in the air, and gave his blessing for a kiss. Outside, on the steps, Ignazio threw raw rice at them and called his congratulations as the couple ran to their carriage. They rode off without looking back.
    He saw less of Pietro after that. Some nights, loneliness and exhaustion wound together in a slow noose around Ignazio’s neck. He lay on his thin mattress, hour after hour, staring into blackness, forcing canals from his mind. He had food, cash, work, a room, everything he needed to survive, and yet his days felt like mollusk shells with the bodies scraped out—empty, useless, ready for the trash bin. It was not what his grandfather had sent him for. He tried to recall his grandfather’s face, painting it on the black canvas of the ceiling. Its details had grown hazy but he could not let it fade. He reconstructed it with his mind, hovering, enormous, sometimes young and angular, sometimes absurdly scarred. The face shifted with the seasons, with the texture of the nights, and Ignazio fell asleep watching it, as a man underwater watches light on the surface of the sea.
One November night, as the rays of his fourth Uruguayan spring swept the chill from the air, Ignazio met a group of men at El Corriente. They were playing a raucous game of poker when he came in. He was struck immediately by their bright clothing and odd appearance: a burly giant with a curled mustache, a man in gold hoop earrings and a red bandanna, two robust, blond identical twins, a hairy Spaniard in ostentatious jewelry, and a shark-eyed midget who stood on his chair to reach the top of the table. The laborers at other tables pretended to ignore them. The midget looked up and caught Ignazio’s stare.
    “In the mood to gamble?”
    Ignazio pulled a chair up. The giant dealt the cards with delicate precision. Ignazio felt the Spaniard’s dark eyes resting on him, the way a man sizes up flanks in the market. He did it subtly, but Ignazio noticed. He had learned to notice everything when gambling: the shift of eyes; the drop of temperature around the table as cards were cast against it; the exact tautness of muscle and breath in fellow players. They were his secret weapons, and his thrill. He spread his cards on the table. The giant, having lost the most, grunted