“Dios mío, it seems very complicated!” said the woman, who clearly did not see at all. At which point Coromoto suddenly seemed to lose interest and began staring into the sea of brightly dressed tourists who floated past like large, colorful fish. Efraín held out different representations for the lady’s closer inspection, and finally she selected the white version, paid for it, and went away. The customers that followed were less inclined to ask for explanations. Mostly they picked up the first mobile that attracted their fancy without really seeing it, nodding disinterestedly when Coromoto pointed out a special feature, their eyes already seeking out the next stall, the next tourist attraction.
In the glaring heat of the afternoon, when the flow of tourists began to dwindle to a trickle, Coromoto left Efraín in charge of the stall, saying “Ahora vuelvo.” She walked toward a man standing near the shop that sold Pepsi and cheese tequeños. The man handed her something too small for Efraín to see, then both disappeared behind the shop. When she returned, her blouse was buttoned all wrong, her eyes had acquired a brightness that seemed somehow false, and she spoke too fast.
A few days later, when Efraín returned to Sorte with La Vieja Juanita, it was dull and slow at the stall. Taking pity on him, she said he could go and play until it was time to leave. Efraín used this opportunity to follow the man from the tequeño and Pepsi shop, who was heading over the bridge. His mother had forbidden him to cross the bridge to the foothills of the Sorte mountain, but Efraín could not contain his curiosity about the man, and so he followed him. On the other side of the bridge was a shrine of the author Andrés Bello, who, according to the words of a stone plaque at the foot of his plaster statue, belonged to the Maria Lionza court and was the saint of Arts and Letters. Scattered about the shrine were framed copies of diplomas from Marialionceros who believed they had received them with the help of Andrés Bello.
While he was reading the diplomas, Efraín forgot about the man he was following, and by the time he remembered, the man was gone. Following a group of Guajiro kids, potbellied and stick-legged, their hands and knees stained with the rust of the Yaracuy earth, he wandered into a small Marialioncero camp at the mountain base, where a healing ceremony was about to begin. At first he felt like an intruder, but the feeling evaporated when everyone there welcomed him, invited him to stay, offered him strong, dark coffee, and explained why they were doing this and that.
Efraín crouched on his haunches and watched while a man who said he believed there was a curse on his fields lay on the ground on a black sheet. Two young women and one old woman covered him up to his chin with a white sheet. In the dirt next to him, they drew lines in white chalk powder and lit candles of many colors. Across the middle of his body they laid two lengths of black ribbon and began smoking big handmade cigars. As they smoked, they chanted and blew the smoke over the man’s body. Then they drenched the man in sugar cane liquor. When the man stood up, he smiled and paid some money to the women.
Efraín got up and walked a short distance to another camp, where a man stood within a chalk circle while a squat, bowlegged brujo called Banco smoked and chanted nearby. Several men dressed like gypsies tied the man in the circle upside down to a pole, using soft rope. They washed him in sugar cane liquor while the bowlegged man blew smoke on him. After he was released, he offered tobacco to the brujo.
At the next camp Efraín visited, there was another brujo called Banco, drinking from a coffee mug and speaking in a strange high-pitched voice. A dwarfish man with many tattoos stood by to refill the coffee mug as soon as it was emptied.
“What is he drinking?” Efraín whispered to the old man standing next to him, for he had observed that no one in the camps minded questions. The old man whispered back that it was rum, that no matter how much a Banco drank while in a trance, as soon as the spirit left the body, the Banco would be stone-cold sober. Only then did Efraín understand that all the Marialioncero brujos were called Banco, and he was quite pleased at having figured this out all by himself.
A few hundred feet away, on a higher level, eight people lay in a circle, their feet touching, like the spokes of a wheel. Efraín nearly jumped out of his skin when one of them, a mestiza girl, let out a couple of bloodcurdling shrieks. The presiding Banco, an enormous, bare-chested black man, spit on the ground and the screaming girl was suddenly silent. “Wash her,” the Banco commanded. Three mestiza women from the crowd of spectators came forward. Together they lifted the girl, whose body was rigid, and carried her to the bank of the river.
Efraín had witnessed many similar ceremonies before he remembered the time of day. La Vieja Juanita would be angry if because of him they missed their bus. On his way back to the bridge he passed an old woman lying in a hammock under a ragged piece of tarp. She wore a dirty white cassock that was frayed at the neck. Mountain dust had settled into the wrinkles in her face. She stank of rum. She called out, huiii, huiii, and beckoned to him with her skeletal hand. When he approached her cautiously, she said:
“¿Qué quieres saber?”
He remained silent, shuffling his feet before her.
“Don’t worry, there are ways to find the answer even to unasked questions,” she said, and lit a cigar. After it had burned halfway, she threw it on the ground. It fell, spreading ash in a straight line before it, which fanned out like the wings of a small bird at the end.
“What does it mean?” Efraín asked, his voice hoarse with apprehension.
The old woman looked surprised. “If the ash falls in the shape of a sickle, it means your wishes for your future will be granted; if it falls straight, they won’t. Your result is unusual, not sickle-shaped, not straight. I cannot give you an answer.”
As he was leaving, she handed him two small golden feathers. “For you,” she said.
“I don’t have any money or tobacco to give you,” he said.
But the old woman had fallen asleep. By this time it had begun to rain, and within seconds to pour. Efraín quickly tucked the feathers under his shirt and began to run toward the bridge. By the time he reached the crossing, the river was rising. He joined a stream of people rushing across the bridge. But, within minutes of his crossing, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the sun shone through the clouds, and Efraín was just in time to help La Vieja Juanita pack up for the day.
On the bus to Chivacoa, Efraín reached into his shirt and touched the feathers.
“And what did you learn from your trip across the bridge?” La Vieja Juanita asked.
Efraín was startled. How had she known? Dots of perspiration began to form on his upper lip.
“Anda, tell me. I won’t say anything to your mother.”
Taking a deep breath, Efraín said, “Besides Maria Lionza, the Marialionceros venerate Simón Bolívar very much, and the brujos say they can see him and have seen him many times. They paint his figure on wooden sticks, which they wave over people. They worship many other spirits whose names I cannot remember. The brujos are called Banco and everyone goes to ask the Banco what is going to happen: whether it will rain, or whether the crops will be dry or abundant, or whether they should put a curse on their enemies or not, things like that. Some people go to be cured of an illness or bad feelings. And the Banco says he will reply, after having a consultation with los espíritus. After that he blows smoke on them, or washes them with rum, or sends them to the river. And for this work they give some money to the Banco, or sometimes not money but tobacco. Sometimes the Banco is a woman who can tell about wishes and the future with her cigar ash.”
“Ah. And did she tell you anything?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“She told me my future was neither straight nor sickle-shaped and gave me two Maizcuba feathers.”
“Hah! What did I tell you—all these Marialionceros are bogus. Just like their false goddess.”
Efraín, who knew he was not expected to answer, stared down at his feet. They rode in silence for the rest of the way.
How was it possible that La Vieja Juanita, who made more beautiful representations of the Immortals than any Efraín had ever seen, did not believe in them or their powers? Why did she believe that dreams were messages and Mamá not? He pondered these mysteries frequently, but never voiced his thoughts when his mother and grandmother were quarreling about worlds. He knew that when it came to such disputes between them, it was best to stay out of the crossfire.
In spite of her repeated assertion that dreams were nothing more than dreams, Efraín’s mother had not been able to resist asking her son to recount them. When he did, she had listened to him, spellbound, like someone who is parched being offered a long, cool drink. She had been riveted even when the dreams were full of impossibilities, especially when they were full of impossibilities. Afterward, the light would fade from her eyes and she would say, “But you know it is only a dream.”
In Efraín’s favorite dream he is standing on a rooftop looking out at a mountain. He has climbed to the rooftop to escape the people on the ground. He can see them waving at him, urging him to come down. But he does not want to come down because the people talk too much, they have too many opinions that they all express at the same time. Their screechy voices hurt his ears. Efraín decides to ignore the waving people. He looks straight ahead instead of down. From his position on the rooftop, the mountain appears smaller, accessible. He is sure that if he takes a running leap, his arms will become wings and he will land on the mountain. But he always awakens before he can find out.
His mother had been frightened when he told her this dream, insisting that he must never, ever, climb any rooftops, much less try to jump from them. “If you do something like that, you will only break your arms and legs, and maybe your neck,” she said. “Boys are not birds.” She had been bothered for days about this dream. For weeks afterward, she would wake Efraín in the middle of the night to remind him about the dangers of jumping from high places.
The only thing that bothers Efraín about the dream is that he never found out whether he could fly to the mountain or not.
For the first year in his new home, some of his dreams had been nightmares. He never told his mother or La Vieja Juanita about them. Whenever he awoke from a nightmare, he would simply lie quietly in his hammock, clenching and unclenching his teeth. The nightmares involved mostly the same set of circumstances, with one variation. In one version, he was running hand in hand with his mother’s boyfriend, Manolo, through the forest. Someone was chasing them, crashing through the undergrowth, gaining on them. He could smell his own susto. He worried that his own shorter legs would slow Manolo down. If they were caught, he knew it would be his fault, though Manolo would never say that. His chest hurt from the effort of running. Just as he felt his lungs could take no more, there would be a shot fired from behind. As Manolo fell, Efraín would feel his hand slip out of his father’s. “Run, Efraín, run,” Manolo would shout. That was the end of the nightmare.
In the other version he was running with his mother, and it was his mother who would be shot, just as they reached a river. “Swim, Efraín, swim,” she would say, pushing him into the river just before she fell.
Luckily, the frequency of these nightmares decreased with time, and finally they stopped.
Although he is only eleven, Efraín understands that the nightmares were because of their trouble with the militares. They had run like hell and they had escaped together. Manolo urged them to get into the first car with La Vieja Juanita, saying he would follow with Catire. But he did not follow and Efraín’s mother had gone to look for him, and so far neither had returned. Because of this, every now and then, Efraín feels a shard of misgiving pierce his consciousness. Because what if the dreams are true? If both his mother and Manolo fell in the dream and disappeared in real life, what did it mean? When these questions come to mind, he tries not to think about answers. He has found that the best way to achieve not thinking too much is with smoke.
Lately, Efraín has taken up smoking loose-leaf tobacco with a little coca paste mixed in. The raggedy Guajiro boys he sometimes hangs around with over at the Children’s Park in Chivacoa introduced him to it last year, on his tenth birthday. He meets them whenever he and La Vieja Juanita go into town for supplies. The boys are older than Efraín, teenagers. Most of them, like Efraín, have never been to school. None of them have regular jobs; they lie in wait for unsuspecting, gullible tourists and wide-eyed Maria Lionza cult types, and offer to be their guides, carry their luggage, find them a hotel room, whatever. The rest of the time, which is most of the time, they hang out at the Children’s Park, playing cards, or arm wrestling, or talking about girls. Way to go, carajo, they say, when one of them tells of making it with a girl or fucking a puta. Give it to me, they say, jutting their hips and punching each other in the arm. It seems to Efraín that their feeling of accomplishment is the same irrespective of whether the act has been consummated with a girlfriend or a puta. Sometimes the Guajiro boys refer to women in general, and even to their own girlfriends, as putas, which only compounds Efraín’s confusion. It seems to him that according to the Guajiro boys, the only women who are not putas are their own mothers. Mothers are out of bounds; none of the Guajiro boys talk about their mothers. Unless they are making a vow. When one of the Guajiro boys wants to convince someone that he is telling the truth, he swears on his own mother’s eyes.
La Vieja Juanita thinks it is good for Efraín to be around other Indian boys; she lets him chew the fat with them while she shops. She knows about the tobacco but not about the coca paste. She has warned the older boys that if they give Efraín coca, she will make them impotent. Because of La Vieja Juanita’s connection to El Negro Catire, the Guajiro boys do not question her ability to fulfill her promise; they never enlist Efraín’s services in the cocaine business. They make him swear upon his mother’s eyes that he will never breathe a word about the coca paste.
The Guajiro boys treat Efraín like a mascot, sending him on errands—to fetch them some soda pop or rolling papers from the kiosk on the corner. They are genuinely fond of him. Because they are fond of him, they have never told him the rumor. That before El Negro Catire found her and cured her, the hottest puta in Chivacoa used to be his mother; that for a gram of cocaine, she would give them a blow job. Besides, people who disappear are presumed dead, and even these boys know it is dishonorable to speak ill of the dead, not to mention bad luck.
Even though he hasn’t been to school, Efraín knows how to read and write because his mother, who had studied through the tenth grade, taught him. When one of the older boys needs to write something, he is sure to ask Efraín to help him, even if it is only graffiti on the wall of the Mercado Costa. The Guajiro boys repay the favor by giving Efraín tobacco, coca paste, and rolling papers. They tousle his hair and tease him, asking what he thinks about women. The only women Efraín knows well are his mother and his grandmother, and while he is certain that the Guajiro boys don’t mean them, he is not quite certain who they do mean.
The day before Efraín’s mother disappeared, La Vieja Juanita said she had a plan to guarantee food on the table. Her plan was simple: Coromoto, who looked surprisingly like commercial depictions of Maria Lionza, would start having visions of the goddess in public and create a commotion. People would pay to talk to her, yes they surely would, the Marialionceros were ripe for a miracle.
Efraín’s mother had scoffed at first, but La Vieja Juanita said, “Isn’t it better than serving drinks to ruffians in a bar, Coro? Think of it as acting; pretend you are starring in a telenovela. If not for yourself, then do it for the boy.” And she kept on about it until Coromoto had finally agreed, though Efraín thought it was mostly to make his grandmother stop talking.
The next morning, Efraín and La Vieja Juanita had traveled by minibus from Sorte to Chivacoa to make purchases from the only store open on Sundays where they could find the supplies required—feathers, beads, scraps of cloth, and natural dyes that La Vieja Juanita would convert into paint. She also
selected some material—three meters of handwoven Wayuu cotton—to make an appropriate costume for Coromoto. The store was crowded, and it took longer than expected to collect their supplies and pay for them. The copper-skinned mestiza girl who was operating the cash register, and who Efraín thought was pretty, said there was news that more Guajiro rebels had escaped across the border. El Negro Catire was reported to be with the rebels and headed toward the Western provinces. Four rebels were accused of murdering twelve paramilitary troops in their beds, and it was certain the trackers would try to hunt them down until they found them and killed them on the spot, without trial. Then the rebels would retaliate. It was all about land.
“It is the gringos who are adding fuel to the fire,” opined the man in line behind Efraín and La Vieja Juanita.
“Those gringos,” said the mestiza girl, handing Efraín the change, and a piece of candy gratis, “who made them the policía of the world?”
There were rumors that as a countermeasure to the anticipated cross-border posse activity, El Presidente had ordered the Guardia Nacional to the Western provinces, that a curfew might be imposed. Everyone was in a hurry to make their purchases and get home before dusk.
Night had fallen by the time the old woman and the boy reached the thatch-topped shack of their one room in the forest. But the moon was bright and as Efraín pushed the door, he thought he could discern the shape of his mother in her hammock.
The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos Page 5
