Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  She filled whole notebooks, and lost them repeatedly in the periodic searches that happened when she went out to service a client. She didn’t worry too much about her notes’ disappearances; they weren’t there to be kept or read by anyone else. They were just a way of forgetting her fate, and sometimes of exorcising the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of some particularly cruel or violent individual. She always wrote in Croatian to keep the meaning secret, but her conjugation and syntax ended up following Spanish grammar. Once, one of her captors asked a cook from Zagreb to read a few pages of one of Milena’s notebooks he had taken, and the man replied that it was a barely comprehensible mishmash. They went on taking them from her, but they didn’t go to any special trouble to make her stop writing them.

  Her luck got worse as time began to erase those Lolita-like features that turned the customers on. By the time she turned twenty, some of her regular suitors had moved on to younger bodies. Inexorably, her gaze grew hard, professional, ill-suited to satisfying the requirements of men who showed up looking for adolescents or women who looked like them.

  At first, Milena was happy for the change. More and more, it disgusted her to dress up in schoolgirl skirts, braid her hair, or fake silly smiles intended to look innocent. But her entry into adulthood brought disadvantages: with the loss of her earlier clientele, her market value declined and along with it, some of her privileges. On busy weekends she had to do more than one client a night, and even worse, they decided to remodel her physique.

  Her almost flat chest, which had earlier been a plus, was a handicap in adult prostitution. To take care of it, they sent her to a clinic that brought her bust up to a round 34C, and even though her ass had always looked good, they pumped it up until they turned her into a blonde with a mulata’s figure. Now, Milena was again the clients’ favorite in Marbella’s sex industry: her exuberant, hypersexual body contrasted with her elegant, aristocratic face, reminding people of Greta Garbo.

  Even so, her triumphant return and the recovery of a few privileges didn’t console her. In fact, it made her even angrier. She had survived for four years thanks to the conviction that the friction of flesh and the fluid exchanges she was forced into each night didn’t affect her body, let alone disturb her soul. To take care of the first, when she got back home, she would always take a long bath. For the second, she stifled her emotions with the stories she threaded together while the men rammed her between her thighs. But the surgical disfigurement of her figure destroyed that unblemished physical purity she had managed to fool herself into believing she felt. On the horizon of her flesh, where all had once been vertical, she couldn’t recognize those new protuberances as her own. For weeks, she couldn’t look at herself in the mirror. She couldn’t bear the look of the slut staring back at her.

  For the first time, something like hatred began to overtake her spirit. Up to now, she had felt numb, as if this life wasn’t hers and somehow, at any moment, destiny, which had turned her into a victim, would give her back her liberty. Forkó, Bonso, and the Turk would be left behind, like a hazy, dark, and terrible dream. But the transformation of her body made her descent indelible. Now, she knew she would bear its scars, buried inside her flesh until the day of her death.

  The hate burning in her breast, hard as the silicone implants that had just been put inside her, turned more on her clients than on her masters. She was aware that the pimp and the gorillas who watched over her were like her and the other girls, pieces in a well-oiled machine devoted to servicing those men who came every night to smear her with their viscous liquids. The next day, each of them went on with his normal life, beyond the boundary of that hell they financed, thinking they had integrity and that paying a stack of euros got them off the hook for any wrongdoing.

  She promised herself that one day, she would take revenge. The next August 23, the day when she turned twenty-two, she decided to run away.

  ‌16

  Claudia, Milena, and Tomás

  Tuesday, November 11, 11:30 p.m.

  The high-pitched ring of the doorbell made the two women jump. When she got up to open the door, Claudia noticed her body had gone numb from sitting so still and listening for so long. Her jaws were clenched and sore, and her hips had grown tenser and tenser as the narrative went on, as if her own body were withdrawing from the aggressions Milena described.

  Tomás came in, followed by Vidal, Luis, and Rina.

  “Hey,” the new arrival said, “you must be Milena. I’m Tomás, I’m a friend of Claudia’s, and the director of Don Rosendo’s newspaper, for now. You already know everyone else, right?”

  She nodded and shook Tomás’s hand timidly. Men in general, but especially men that age, had never brought her anything good.

  “It’s a little late for all of us,” Tomás said, excusing himself and turning to Claudia. “We need to take some decisions about your safety. Can I speak to you for a moment?”

  They walked to the kitchen.

  “A few minutes ago, they informed me some men broke into your father’s house in Las Lomas. They held down the staff and turned his office inside out. It’s not clear what they were looking for, but they left the place a wreck.”

  “Thank God my mother is at my place, she wanted to spend these days with me,” Claudia said. “Did they hurt anyone?”

  “No, they shut the gardener and two maids in a closet. They’re fine. The authorities posted a unit in front of the main door.”

  She took a few seconds to calm down. Their eyes converged on Milena, and they asked themselves once more what this woman was hiding. She looked back at them suspiciously from the other end of the room. The secrets she and Claudia whispered in the kitchen had dispelled the feeling of complicity that had grown between the two of them over the past two hours. The Croatian’s features hardened.

  Claudia tried to push aside the news she’d just heard and walked over to Milena, took the girl’s hand, and led her back to the sofa she had gotten up from.

  “Are the people after you the same ones who held you prisoner before my father met you?” she asked softly.

  “Yes.”

  “How far do you think they would go to find you? Will they give up if they can’t do it soon?”

  “I don’t think so. According to their code, I committed the worst crime possible, and now I’m condemned to death. They won’t rest until they find me. Remember what I told you about Natasha Vela? That’s what will happen to me if the Russians catch me. Or something worse.” In fact, Milena had no idea what would happen if the Russians caught her, but she didn’t expect anything better than what happened to Natasha.

  “It seems like they’re looking for something, because they ransacked the apartment where you lived in Colonía Azures and now they’ve done the same to my father’s office. Do you know what it could be?”

  Milena buried her head between her knees. Slowly, terror gave way to confusion. Did they want her, or just the notebook? What was the point of destroying the places she had been?

  “I won’t let them hurt you,” Claudia said, and laid her hand over Milena’s. “Do you trust me?”

  Milena didn’t answer. She just squeezed Claudia’s hand. That was enough for Claudia to get up and walk back to the other end of the room, where everyone else was waiting. She told them what Milena had told her.

  “She can stay here in the apartment,” Rina proposed. “I’ll say she’s a cousin who’s come to visit.”

  “A cousin with an Eastern European accent?” Tomás asked. In fact, the Croatian’s Spanish was quite good, save for a slight rasping sound when she pronounced her r’s.

  “Look, I’ll say she’s here from Montreal. Luis says we look like relatives, right? Besides, no one ever comes over. An interior decorator friend was fixing up the apartment for me and she just turned it over.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Luis said. “As far as these mafiosos know, there’s nothing tying Rina with Milena. There’s no way for them to trace her here. It could be
just for a few days, till you get her out of the country or find a permanent hiding place for her.”

  “Or while we neutralize those sons of bitches,” Tomás affirmed.

  “Of course,” Claudia added, excited. “If my father kept them in line, I don’t see why we can’t do the same.”

  “For now, we need to let her rest,” Rina said.

  “I don’t want her to be by herself, otherwise she might get scared again and bolt,” Tomás hinted, looking at Claudia suspiciously. Her optimism seemed misplaced to him after those goons had broken into her father’s house.

  “We can stay here,” Rina said.

  Luis nodded while Vidal looked down. Tomás realized his nephew hadn’t opened his mouth since his arrival.

  Claudia told Milena what they’d decided and assured her she would come back the next day, maybe to have lunch together in the apartment. The Croatian nodded. She just wanted to be alone.

  Tomás got into Claudia’s car, but first he asked the driver the newspaper had assigned to him to drop Vidal at his home. Vidal accepted the offer in silence. On the way to Campos Elíseos in Polanco, where Claudia lived in a top-floor apartment with her husband, they talked over the situation briefly. The bad guys were interested in more than getting the prostitute back.

  “Any news about the goddamned notebook?”

  “Nothing yet, we’re still getting to know each other. But I think I’m going in the right direction. It’s just a matter of getting her to trust me. It’s clear we’re all she has, at least in Mexico. But how do we guarantee her safety? We don’t even know who’s after her. What was she talking about when she said the thing about the Russians?”

  Tomás described the phone call he’d gotten from Jaime Lemus on his way to Rina’s apartment. Lemlock had information about the identity of the mafioso chasing after Milena, a guy named Bonso, of Romanian origin. Everything indicated he was working for the Russian mafia, which dominated human trafficking. He proposed the three of them meet early the next day to catch up and work out a strategy to protect the Croatian and get hold of the black book.

  Claudia told him she wanted to spend some time with her mother in the morning. She had to find a way to convince her to leave the country after what had happened at her house. She would ask her to go relax a few days at the apartment the family had in Miami. They made plans to meet the next day at ten thirty in the offices of the newspaper. When they got to her home, they waited in the car until Tomás’s chauffeur returned from dropping off Vidal, and talked over the most important issues at the newspaper: the invitation to lunch at Los Pinos, the deputy director’s moves against him, the need to find an honest and capable general manager to take charge of administration. Chatting about those problems at the newspaper was a relief after the previous hours in the shadows of the world of mafiosos and pimps.

  Before he stepped out of the car, Claudia put a hand on his thigh and said, with a hint of affection, almost in his ear, so the chauffeur wouldn’t hear: “Thanks for everything.” Tomás waved her off, but the pressure of her hand lingered a few moments.

  ‌17

  Vidal

  Wednesday, November 12, 12:10 a.m.

  He didn’t hear the question Silvano Fortunato, Tomás’s chauffeur, had asked him, even though he was in the passenger’s seat next to him. Vidal still couldn’t process what Luis and Rina had said to him moments before on the sidewalk.

  “Where will the young gentleman be heading?” the driver asked again.

  “Oh, sorry. La Condesa, by the Glorieta de Popocatépetl,” he answered, emerging from his reverie. “You know where that is?”

  “Piece of cake, kid. Buckle up, this thing’s a rocket, I’ll have you there in no time.”

  For God’s sake, I’ve got Cantinflas behind the fucking wheel, Vidal said to himself, and tried to ignore the man, who went on rattling off clichés and corny jokes while they sped through the cold and almost-empty streets.

  Vidal wanted to cry, to hit someone, to smoke pot for days on end, or get in a truck and flee the city: anything but be shut up there on his way home, driven around like a kid by this flap-jawed chauffeur.

  “At Paseo de la Reforma, we’ll take a little detour, my young friend. It’s the safest thing, given the crime these days. The streetlights scare off the weirdos, and that way I’ll get you home safe as a turtle in its shell,” the driver said. His passenger continued to ignore him.

  When they reached the house, he left the man with a laconic goodnight. But that couldn’t keep Don Silvano from one more of his surreal commentaries.

  “Goodnight, kid, and get home safe. Stay in the shadows,” the man said, even though he’d dropped him off ten feet from the door and it was impossible to walk beneath anything but darkness with the moon barely shining.

  When he entered his room, Vidal remembered that he had finished all his weed. He decided tequila would be as good as marijuana. He got a bottle downstairs and returned to his room, where he looked at his phone. Maybe he was waiting to see a last-minute message from Rina trying to make up, or at least one from Luis asking for some kind of forgiveness. But what he found, as he downed the first swig of alcohol, was an email from Jaime: “We need to chat. I want to show you some things at Lemlock. Can you come tomorrow? I’ll get in touch early and we’ll set something up. This stays between us for now. Take care.”

  The second drink of tequila sent a wave of affection for Jaime surging through his body. He was the only one in his circle of friends who treated him like an adult. His parents, Tomás, and Amelia still saw him as a little boy, and Luis and Rina had stabbed him in the back.

  Everyone knew there was something special between him and Rina. They hadn’t seen each other much, because they’d both studied outside the country, but they had written constantly after the Alcántara family’s tragedy. He was the friend she had turned to in her worst moments. More than once, she had said that he was her soul mate, that they were kindred spirits. When she came back to Mexico, Vidal took it for granted that their friendship would evolve into something more. Just a week before, she had asked him what he thought of the apartment she was moving into: he remembered her nervousness as she looked at his face while they passed through each room, trying to read his reaction. Vidal took this as a clear sign that she was imagining a life for them together in that space that she was showing off so proudly. Now he saw that what he had believed would be his love nest was actually the graveyard for all his dreams.

  When Luis called to say he and Rina had found Milena that morning, he had the feeling something didn’t add up. The day before, they hadn’t even known each other. He went to his friend’s apartment filled with dark premonitions, but he never imagined the confession he would hear: worse, it wasn’t even a confession, but an expression of gratitude for introducing them to each other. Luis hugged him, and Rina gave him a sisterly kiss on the cheek. He would have liked to explode and throw their betrayal in their faces. The twenty-four hours of love they’d experienced, whatever pleasures they might have shared were a pathetic fling compared to the eleven months he’d spent idolizing Rina, the depths she and he had plunged to together, the emotional summits they’d scaled, each one pulling the other when times became tough. It wasn’t right that Luis got to keep her: he probably didn’t even know her family nickname, let alone her hatred for everything that began with the number nine, the meticulous way she spread dressing on every leaf of lettuce, her aversion to penguins, or her inclination to pick at the wax in her ears when something got on her nerves.

  He wanted to pound Luis with his fists and reject Rina’s hug, to turn around and never see either of them again. But instead, he accepted their thanks, feigned a happiness he didn’t feel, tried to smile, and sank into silence.

  For years, he’d questioned his father’s emotional subordination to his three friends, always worrying about other people’s needs, never about what he was missing. Mario mapped his life out according to other people’s whims, and his son swore he w
ould never follow in his footsteps. But now he was surprised to find he’d inherited that tendency, and was left holding the bag while Luis and Rina were in love. He was the hapless go-between for an affair that tore at his insides.

  He told himself his passive acceptance was an intelligent strategy: that the union of those two would end sooner or later, because he was the one who truly loved Rina.

  But then he remembered the intense exchange of glances between his two friends: the way their bodies engaged in an invisible choreography, like planets subject to a gravitational force that only existed for them. A solar system with two stars—them—and one satellite—himself.

  Not much later, it occurred to him that his inability to react had nothing to do with strategy, but was mere cowardice: his fear of renouncing Rina once and for all, the need for affection that made him satisfy others’ expectations, his emotional dependency on those he admired.

  How did other people travel through life without screeching to a halt when they saw the trampled flowers? In that hug between Rina and Luis, was there some little crack where a drop of remorse might squeeze through for the pain they’d inflicted on their closest friend? Or was the selfishness of their love just blind, and did every other feeling ricochet off of it?

  After the third glass of tequila, Vidal had worked up a number of resolutions. He would stay close to his friends, but he would never lose his dignity again. He would thicken his skin. He would stop being the unconditional support taken for granted.

  And then he remembered Jaime’s message and knew the path he needed to take. Maybe he had always known it, even when the repulsion his uncle provoked in Luis had pushed it out of his mind. Now Luis himself had dynamited any obstacle. He wasn’t doomed to be Mario if he could be Jaime instead. He opened his email again on his phone and typed out a response.