The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos

by Margaret Mascarenhas

  “Carlos Alberto!” says Luz. “How is it that you know so much about Maria Lionza? Could it be that the surgeon’s son is a secret devotee?”

  Though Luz is fond of Carlos Alberto, it is her nature to be provocative, and Lily wants to avoid an upset. “Don’t you remember, Luz?” she says palliatively. “Carlos Alberto has been working on a novel about a girl who is possessed by the spirit of the goddess. And your mother has been helping him with the details.”

  “Of course I remember,” says Luz, an avid aficionada of soap opera news. “It was a more literary version of his radio novela called Maria del Sorte. That new actress was supposed to read the role of Maria. If I recall, she was a blond bombshell and the casting director said she exuded sensuality, which is code for Big Tits. No wonder you became so interested in the subject, Carlos Alberto.”

  Two circles of red have appeared high on Carlos Alberto’s cheeks. “My dear Luz,” he says stiffly, “whether an actress is a bombshell or not is hardly relevant on radio. But for your information, I never had the chance to meet and personally observe the physical proportions of the person in question; I never even knew her name.”

  “Coromoto Sanchez, that was her name. Yes, I remember now,” says Luz.

  “Lo que sea; I couldn’t care less,” he says. “My interest in Maria Lionza stems from my research for my novel. And my present involvement in the novela business is purely financial. Some of us still have to earn money, you know; we can’t sit around all day, listening to Passion Radio and waiting for someone to write the next episode.”

  He has touched a nerve, and now Luz is livid, her eyes flashing dangerously. Lily herself has never suffered from the Latin American addiction to soap operas; her father had forbidden them when she was growing up, saying they were for imbeciles who had no lives of their own—an opinion shared by her husband, who has never witnessed the enactments of his own scripts. But Luz is no imbecile, and her interest in novelas extends beyond that of spectator—she is a senior shareholder and coproducer at TVista. Before the discussion heats up further, Lily, who cannot bear quarrels, nervously interjects. “It’s a good thing you are both so good at this telenovela business. Because Soledad paid for the construction of this house, and Amor sin duda has paid most of our bills for more than two years.”

  Fortunately Marta returns with the candles and the discussion comes to a close. Though Luz and Carlos Alberto are still glaring at each other, they are quiet as she begins the rosary to Maria Lionza, which, Lily observes, is just like the traditional rosary if you don’t pay attention to the words. Afterward, Marta says, “Now we must offer the baby’s spirit a happy memory. Someone has to tell a story.”

  “Lily should do it, since it’s her baby,” says Luz sulkily.

  Lily, who is relieved that Luz has decided to be participatory instead of disruptive, says, “All right, then. I will tell the story of how I fell in love.” She eyes her husband mischievously. “You are not obliged to listen. Perhaps you’d like to find something more manly to do.”

  But Carlos Alberto says, “Show me the Criollo, man or woman, who can resist a good love story, and I’ll show you a dead Criollo.”

  It is true that all through high school and even through college, Lily kept her word to her mother not to get into trouble with boys or allow them to distract her from her studies. Nevertheless, her fascination with them remained undiminished for the duration of her college education.

  Between the beginning of her first year and the end of her senior year at the Universidad Central, Lily double-majored in architecture and in men. Handsome, intelligent, eminently eligible young men who believed they could change the world armed with their education and their wit, and with Lily beside them. When they held her close, undulating to an irresistible salsa beat, and raided her generous mouth with their tongues, she felt her body respond ardently, with a quickening of breath, an acceleration of the heartbeat, a fluttering in the lowest recesses of the belly. But when she examined her heart, she found it floating, a seagull on perfectly still waters. And so, on moonlit nights, when her enamorados pressed themselves hard and feverishly against her and moved their hands to her breasts, she reached and covered them with hers, entwined her fingers in theirs, and pulled them gently away. So tender and apologetic was the resolve with which she repelled their advances that never once was the sobriquet tease applied in her regard. Which drove her girlfriends crazy.

  “How do you get away with it?” they asked, eyes large with admiration and envy. Lily did not think of herself as “getting away” with anything. And although she did not reflect on it at the time, she now supposes there must have been a number of boys taking a lot of cold showers.

  In any event, it went on like that until her senior year in college. And then, one dazzlingly bright and crisp spring day, at a street café in the sleepy mountain village of Colonia Tovar, a beautiful stranger sat awkwardly across a table from her. He leaned in, elbows bent, his hands folded on the red-checkered tablecloth with the diamond-shaped mustard stain. And, as Lily observed him staring morosely into his coffee cup, a lock of tousled dark hair hanging beguilingly across one eye, the seagull took flight.

  Everyone except Luz agrees that the baby is lucky to have such a poetic storyteller for a mother.

  “You are most definitely your father’s daughter,” says Consuelo.

  “Hah. There is no meat to that story, only bones,” says Luz, taking a long drag off a cigarette.

  “Ay, Luz,” says Marta, “why do you always have to criticize?”

  Luz shrugs her shoulders, ignores both her mother and the ashtray Marta has placed beside her, stands and flicks her ash out the window. At which point Dr. Ricardo Uzoátegui, who had examined Lily at the hospital, arrives, examines her again, and pronounces her better, but advises continued bed rest.

  After dinner, Carlos Alberto takes up position at Lily’s bedside, stroking her forehead until she dozes off. While she sleeps, a young mestizo boy with blindfolded eyes, and a smoldering fat cigar in his left hand appears to her in a dream.

  “Have you seen my mother?” he asks.

  He moves closer, until he is standing only a foot away. He holds the cigar to his mouth, inhales deeply, and blows out an enormous cloud of smoke into her face. He vanishes in the smoke cloud, which swirls, condenses, solidifies, and takes the form of her childhood friend, Irene. She is wearing the red shoes.

  We had fun, didn’t we, Lily? Gozamos una bola.

  We did, whispers Lily.

  We were fresh and fearless.

  We were.

  What happened?

  I don’t know.

  Lily begins to cry. She cries silently and continuously, with her eyes squeezed shut, a steady stream of saltwater running down the sides of her face and dampening the pillow. Stricken, Carlos Alberto asks, “Where does it hurt?” But Lily cannot pinpoint the precise location of the wound, which is not so much a wound as a hole through which the remembered enchantment of her childhood slowly seeps. Right now, Lily misses Irene more than anybody in the world.

  She can hear Carlos Alberto telling her mother that they should have stayed at the hospital. She can hear him slapping his hand against his head, as though her tears are somehow his fault and the fault of everyone on the planet. When Carlos Alberto has finally gone, cursing, from the room, and her mother after him, her father brings in some juice and spoons it into her mouth.

  After a few sips, Lily finally speaks. “Papi,” she says, “I have a wish.”

  “And what is your wish, my darling?” says Ismael.

  “I wish to find out what happened to Irene. Will you help me?”

  Before her father can answer, there is a shriek from the study, where Marta is listening to the radio. Luz, Consuelo, and Carlos Alberto come running from different parts of the house, thinking something has happened to Lily. But Lily points to Marta who now emerges from the study pale as chalk, wringing her hands.

  “You’ll never imagine what has happened!
” Marta pauses dramatically while all regard her expectantly.

  “What in God’s name is the matter, Mamá?” says Luz.

  “The statue of Maria Lionza in the capital—this morning it cracked in two! All the radio channels are carrying the story.”

  Like all plants, passiflora grown in a pot is likely to have the nutrients washed out of its soil during watering. If these nutrients are not replaced, the plant will die.

  Efraín

  On Monday morning, more than two hundred kilometers from the city of Tamanaco, Efraín rubs the sleep from his eyes as a beam of light from a hole in the palm-leaf roof of the hut falls upon his face. He tries to remember what he has been dreaming, but his awakening is too abrupt; a fragment, the image of a vast expanse of blue-green ocean, is all he can retrieve. He is disappointed, for he is fond of recounting his dreams in their entirety to his grandmother, La Vieja Juanita.

  Sitting up, he swings his legs down from his hammock, his toes barely touching the dirt floor. He looks across the cylindrical one-room thatch hut and he is greeted by the familiar sight of his grandmother preparing breakfast on the wood-burning stove. Though there is no one in the doorway, he imagines he sees his mother in the open frame, brushing her long hair. Efraín forgives the sun for stealing his dream, as it is replaced by the vision of his mother’s long mane spilling into the sunshine.

  “Buenos días, mi cielo,” says his mother-memory, turning at that moment, “and what did you dream last night?”

  “I can’t remember,” says Efraín mournfully to his mother in his head.

  “Don’t worry, perhaps it will come back to you later. And, if not, there will always be other sueños.” Her eyes are filled with love and tenderness, no longer the deep tristeza that had consumed her after they had fled Santa Marta.

  It is almost two years to the day that, in the dead of night and with soldiers hot on their trail, they had made their way from the coast to Castilletes. In the terrifying pandemonium of flight, Efraín and his mother had been separated from Manolo at a river crossing on the border. They had traveled to a Guajiro refugee settlement near Escondido, where they had rested, but only for a few hours. The next day they left for San Felipe, where La Vieja Juanita waited to accompany them to their final destination—an illegal Quechuan hut in the Yurubí forest. But Manolo had never rejoined them, and after a year and a half of waiting, his mother, Coromoto, had gone to look for him. At least that is what Efraín believes. One day she was there, brushing her hair in the doorway, the next day she was not.

  Neither Efraín nor La Vieja Juanita speak of those who are missing, for fear of jinxing their destinies. Yet, nameless, they are always present.

  Efraín checks the position of the sun in the sky and concludes that he has overslept by more than an hour. On most days La Vieja Juanita wakes up first, Efraín last. Earlier, it had been his mother who woke up last because she worked nights as a bartender at a truck stop thirty-five kilometers away. Since there were no longer any buses plying her route by the time she got off work, a waiter called Gustavo would give her a lift on his motorcycle to the hole in the fence on the road past San Felipe that borders the Yurubí. Then, exchanging her sandals for the sneakers she carried in a fraying tote, she would walk for half an hour. By the time she got back to the hut, it would be nearly two in the morning. Even in his sleep, Efraín could feel her lips on his when she kissed him on her return. He misses her kisses.

  “Levántate, muchacho,” says La Vieja Juanita.

  He climbs out of his hammock, goes outside. He pisses against the guava tree and walks back into the hut, where he sits on a stool next to the slightly lopsided wooden door held up on two sides by wooden fruit crates. It serves variously as a dining table, a cutting board, and the work space where his grandmother makes her delicate mobiles of papier-mâché. Suspended by nylon thread from pieces of natural wood that Efraín gathers from the surrounding forest, they are delicately crafted human forms with wings of exotic bird feathers, arms exuberantly outstretched, giving the impression that they are flying. No two mobiles are the same.

  “Anyone would think this was a five-star hotel, the way you lounge about,” says La Vieja Juanita. “I’ve been slaving at this maldito stove for over an hour.” Efraín smiles at the daily refrain, inhales deeply the aroma of fresh ground coffee beans, shuts his eyes. A few minutes later, she places two fragrant cups of black coffee and two steaming bowls of Pizca Andina on the table. This is their usual breakfast before heading to Sorte, a favored tourist destination believed to be the home of the Indian goddess Maria Lionza. During the tourist season, which is most of the year, Efraín and La Vieja Juanita pack up the vibrant mobile representations of the goddess and her court and walk through the forest to the main road, where they catch a bus to the town of Chivacoa. There, they take another bus to the flea market at the foothills of Sorte Mountain, where they set up their stall made of cardboard. When they leave, Efraín folds the cardboard carefully and leaves it in the care of Fernando, the owner of the only place of business on this stretch with actual walls.

  Though it is their only livelihood, Efraín is always sorry when La Vieja Juanita’s works of art are sold at the flea market near Sorte, for they are far too beautiful to be given away for only three hundred bolívares. He thinks that most of the purchasers, with their absurdly festive tourist hats and fat wallets, don’t appreciate the time, love, and skill that go into each piece, and he is sometimes rude to them. Then La Vieja Juanita makes him apologize. When he is silent and gloomy afterward, she ruffles his hair and changes the subject. She asks him to tell her his dreams.

  Efraín can remember his dreams as long as they are not interrupted. Once in a while his dreams have a component of presentiment. According to La Vieja Juanita, this is a marvelous thing; it means he is in touch with the spirit world. La Vieja Juanita places great store in the spirit world. She says all Indian boys listen to the messages from the ancestors in their dreams and that is why they know who they are. “It is the mestizos who try to live in two worlds, white and Indian, who are in danger of losing themselves in the commotion of life.”

  “And what about your son, Moriche?” Efraín’s mother had asked with a drop of acid in her voice. And La Vieja Juanita hadn’t replied to that because the last they heard of Moriche, he was running guns and drugs for whichever side of the cross-border conflict—rebel or military—paid him the most, and even La Vieja Juanita had called him a malandro sin vergüenza.

  Efraín’s mother, who could never remember her own dreams, had said La Vieja Juanita’s ideas were made of straw, that she should stop filling Efraín’s head with fairy tales.

  “Fairy tales?” the old woman had snorted. “And what about that time when he was three and refused to get into the bus because of his dream? Didn’t that bus drive right off the road and into a ravine a few hours later? And wasn’t everyone on the bus killed? Is that a fairy tale?”

  “He was having a tantrum. He has never liked buses. It was just coincidence,” his mother said.

  “There are no coincidences,” said La Vieja Juanita.

  But Efraín’s mother had not believed in the power of dreams any more than La Vieja Juanita believed in Maria Lionza. She had worried that her son’s dreaminess would make him vulnerable and weird, and said she wanted his feet planted firmly in the world.

  La Vieja Juanita had scoffed, “People live in the world they choose.”

  Efraín is not sure which world his mother had chosen.

  One day La Vieja Juanita said her legs hurt and could Coromoto go to Sorte instead. And so Efraín accompanied his mother, which was completely different from accompanying La Vieja Juanita, who was a mostly silent traveling companion. His mother, on the other hand, liked to talk to him.

  “When Manolo returns we will move to a city and I will go to the university. I think I would like to be a historian.”

  Sorte was congested because it was one of the feast days of Maria Lionza. A well-dressed woman touris
t with European features approached their stall almost as soon as they had set it up. She couldn’t make up her mind about which mobile she wanted.

  “My daughter will kill me if I don’t bring her the correct one to hang in the children’s room. Why are they all so different?” she asked, and Coromoto explained.

  “First of all,” she said, holding up the mobile of a blond goddess, “Maria Lionza has more than one form. In this one, she is Maria, accompanied by two members of her court—El Negro Felipe, and El Indio Guaicaipuro. Together, they are called Las Tres Potencias, and they represent the nation and the three races that make it up—white, black, and indio.”

  “But I thought Maria Lionza was mestiza,” said the woman, confused.

  “She can be white and she can be mestiza. And she also can be india, or negra. More than one form, remember? When Maria Lionza is in her white form, she is depicted as a blond bombshell. When Maria Lionza appears in her mestiza form, she is equally voluptuous, of darker skin, but she is called Yara. Often she is depicted as an inversion of the best-known image of El Libertador, the one which is found in the middle of every Plaza Bolivar in the center of every village, town, and city. For example, Yara rides a tapir, El Libertador rides a horse; Yara is naked, Simón Bolívar wears an army uniform; she holds a human pelvis, he holds a sword. It’s two sides of a coin—female, male; nature, civilization; birth, death...You see?”