The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos

by Margaret Mascarenhas

  Lily had cried and promised, and after a lukewarm resistance had adjusted well to convent school. Despite the intermediate tragedy that had been Maquiritare, she had completed her high school education with flying colors, she had graduated from college with honors and a degree in architecture, she had chosen an appropriate life partner, she had appeared to be in every way a well-adjusted, wholesome, happy woman, the envy of many mothers. But even so, Consuelo knew that in the few hours of memory that Lily was missing, something had been irrevocably altered; a shift in the structure of their family foundation, a pillar of confidence dislodged. Minus Irene, Lily seemed in some way less confident, less radiant than she might have been.

  These are Consuelo’s thoughts as she watches her daughter dozing on the daybed, oblivious to Marta’s clashing of pots and pans in the kitchen. Lily tosses and turns, moaning softly. When Consuelo takes her hand in an attempt to comfort her, Lily cries out in her sleep, shakes her hand loose, defensively covers her belly. Carlos Alberto runs in to see what is wrong, sees that Lily is sleeping and that Consuelo and Luz are with her, returns to his relentless pacing on the terrace. Ismael is quietly writing verses at the kitchen table, respecting the void of silence and longing between them. Consuelo feels her throat constrict.

  What if love is not enough?

  The phone rings. It is Amparo returning their call. She will arrive from Miami tomorrow. She will bring a nurse.

  Pending Amparo’s arrival, Dr. Ricardo Uzoátegui has come each evening without fail. He examines Lily, takes her blood pressure, studies the output and color of her urine, which has been kept for his inspection in a jam jar. To the relief of everyone in the room, especially Carlos Alberto, he announces that over the past three days, her kidney functions appear to have returned to normal. Even so, he says, bed rest and observation are still recommended. Consuelo finds it maddening the way he uses the passive voice when making his recommendations, as though they come from some unknown but incontrovertible source, as though they come from God. But, at the same time, her heart goes out to him for coming all the way to check on Lily every day. He doesn’t have to; it is not his job. She believes his intentions are pure, that he is only manifesting the symptoms of a rigid medical training. She can afford to be gracious because here in her daughter’s house he is both overpowered and outnumbered; he can express but not impose his views.

  “Maria Lionza, be praised,” Marta mumbles, attributing the good news to the power of the Novena.

  Luz, an unusual color high on her cheeks, offers Ricardo a glass of passion fruit juice from a tray, which he accepts gratefully and gulps down before appealing one last time to Carlos Alberto. Even under the best of circumstances, he says, delivery by a midwife is ill-advised in this day and age. The words make Carlos Alberto grow a shade paler, but he says nothing in response, merely nods, pulls out his wallet.

  “How much do I owe you, Ricardo?” he says. But Ricardo Uzoátegui waves his hand dismissively.

  Consuelo’s heart hurts for Carlos Alberto, for the way he is ready to suppress everything he has learned, all his instinct to control the situation, in order to support Lily’s desire to have Amparo deliver their baby. Consuelo could not have wished a better partner for her child.

  “She’s a very modern midwife, Ricardo,” says Lily.

  Ricardo Uzoátegui shrugs his shoulders, picks up his bag.

  “In case you need to reach me,” he says to Luz, who is nearest, handing her his card. Then, shaking his head, he turns toward the door. Luz hurries to open it for him.

  “I think the handsome doctor likes you,” Consuelo whispers to Luz after he is gone. “Did you notice how he blushed when you approached him with the tray?”

  “¡Tonterías! You are imagining things.”

  “Did I imagine that the beverage you chose to offer him was passion fruit juice?”

  “As if I believe in love potions. You are confusing me with my mother,” Luz scoffs, but she is smiling.

  Consuelo is glad because Luz has mourned the end of her failed marriage long enough. She hopes for Luz what she hopes for Lily, what she has had in abundance herself, someone with whom to share both the pleasures and pains of life. And god knows Ricardo could use a woman like Luz to bring him down from his high horse.

  The previous night, Marta had announced that everyone needed to be better educated on the subject of Maria Lionza. So, instead of a happy memory, after the rosary she had recounted the legend of Yara, Maria Lionza’s first incarnation. It had been, Marta said, Luz’s favorite bedtime story “until she got too big for her boots.” Luz had sighed and rolled her eyes. But while Marta was telling the story of Yara, Consuelo had observed Luz perched on the edge of her seat, captivated, as if she were hearing it for the first time, her mouth open in wonder like a child. Perhaps, thought Consuelo, their nightly storytelling time together would prove to be as good for Luz as it was for Lily.

  On this third night of the Novena, Marta begins by threatening San Antonio with kicks and blows because, according to her, he likes rough talk. It is, she says, the job of San Antonio to mediate with the goddess on behalf of anything that is lost, including lost souls, and it is best to have him on your side.

  After seven decades of the rosary, Marta concludes with an exhortation to the goddess of the mountain to “inundate their minds with a river of happy memories.” Then she says, “And who will tell today’s story?”

  There is a broad smile upon her face. Plainly, Consuelo observes, she is deriving immense enjoyment from her role as the mistress of ceremonies.

  “I will,” offers Consuelo.

  “Make it a long one, Mami,” says Lily. “I’m not sleepy at all, and neither is the baby, from the way he or she is punching and kicking.”

  “San Antonio had better sit up and take notice,” says Ismael.

  And then Consuelo tells of how it took Lily over nine years to come into the world.

  With the exception of a brief stint in the rough and tumble neighborhood of Carmelitas, and in the absence of responsibility for anyone but themselves, Consuelo and Ismael had spent the first nine years of their marriage like gypsies, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs, relying on the kindness of those who harbored them in the course of their travels. Whenever they visited Tamanaco, they resided with Amparo and Alejandro, who would go out of their way to give them every comfort and luxury.

  The village of the Que, located in the vast region of Maquiritare, was so small that it had never been placed on a map, and to get there they had to travel by water taxi canoe down a swift river the color of tea that emptied into a smallish lake in the middle of the forest. The lake was called Encanto, and it was filled with pink dolphins and sideneck turtles. It was here, in the forest by the lake, among the jaguar and puma, the blue and yellow macaws, the scarlet ibis, the purple orchids, that the couple spent most of their early married life, for it was here that the Que had built their huts and it was to the Que tribe that Ismael belonged.

  While her husband went to the river to carve canoes or rode out on a hunt with his uncles and cousins, Consuelo spent her days with the women, hollowing calabash gourds, weaving geometric shapes into baskets, making handmade paper and natural dyes, items the Que bartered for cloth in the town of Santa Elena. It was here, in this remote part of the Gran Sabana, where she began to experiment, hesitantly, with the dyes she made with the other women, and to use them to record her experience. Her first subject was the fire goddess, Kawa.

  According to the tribeswomen, the goddess Kawa had owned fire from the beginning of time. She hid it in her stomach and would not show it to anyone, not even her husband. When her husband went out to hunt and she was alone, she would turn into a frog, open her mouth, and spit out the fire to heat her cooking pots. When her husband returned, hot food would be ready for him to eat. What Kawa did not know was that when her husband left the house, he turned into a jaguar, for he was the god of the hunt.

  Initially, Consuelo painted on the
inside of bark, or lengths of wood, or even on flattish stones collected from the lake bed, and only much later, when she had developed more confidence in her abilities, did she begin to draw and paint on handmade paper. At first her painting and drawing tools were feathers and sticks, but the Que applied their ingenuity to create for her special brushes made of horsehair and driftwood sculpted by the river. In the evenings she would join Ismael and their hosts for an exchange of stories and songs. She had never been so happy.

  During that time, she and Ismael slept together outdoors in a single hammock strung between two trees with nothing more than the moon and the stars above their heads. Well, perhaps slept is a euphemism, Consuelo says, since they rarely slept at all in those days, whether they were in a bed or a hammock.

  The only thing Consuelo missed in her life was a child of her own. After her first miscarriage, Ismael had rocked her in his arms and told her not to worry, that conception and birth were miracles that had their own time. And he had taken her to visit Amparo, who could always find a way to distract her. And because he filled her world with wonder and love, she did not dwell excessively on the absence; she rebounded quickly from the five miscarriages that followed, and the pangs of longing and loss she felt whenever she watched a mother with her child were brief.

  Consuelo is positive that it was on one particular starlit night, in their ninth year of marriage, that Lily was conceived.

  (How do you know for certain? We had so many such nights, says Ismael, smiling.)

  (Tell my husband that it is because just as he was finishing off his business, and growling like a wild animal, I saw a starburst in the sky, and felt another burst inside me, says Consuelo.)

  (Ay, Mami, not in front of the baby! I can’t even cover her ears, says Lily.)

  By the time she discovered she was pregnant for the seventh time, she had learned to keep in abeyance that bubbling stream of joy. But when she successfully entered her fourth month, her euphoria could not be contained.

  Ismael went to Santa Elena and cabled Alejandro. Within days he had found a suitable duplex in the residential district of Altamira, since being pregnant had changed Consuelo’s perspective on gypsy living, if only because she now hankered for a proper bathroom.

  “It’s a distress sale,” Alejandro said excitedly, “it’s going cheap for that locality.”

  The property had a large garden with fruit trees at the back of the duplex and a small rose garden in front. Consuelo was jubilant. Alejandro offered to advance the down payment. When Ismael declined, saying it was too much, Alejandro said, “Don’t be a fool, hombre, it’s not a gift. You’ll be able to rent out the top half and pay me back in no time, with interest, if you insist.”

  The women in her new neighborhood came to welcome her with a Torta de almendras the day after she moved in. Consuelo served it immediately, accompanied by coffee, and the women stayed long into the evening, admiring her paintings, sharing recipes, gardening tips, and affectionate jokes about their husbands. The bond was sealed by six p.m., when the other women returned to their own kitchens.

  Consuelo and Ismael now had, for the first time since their marriage, not only a home but a financial cushion, since within three days of their advertisement in the newspaper, an East Indian family of five fell in love with the first-floor rental portion of the duplex, and offered three months’ rent in advance. Thus, the couple had officially joined the bourgeoisie, a social condition Consuelo enjoyed and Ismael good-naturedly endured, securing his first job as an inspector of national parks and forests so as to ensure a steady income. The ordinary trappings of middle-class living—refrigerator, stove, telephone, hot water in the shower, and a flushing toilet—which Consuelo had not missed during her nine-year honeymoon with Ismael, now seemed indispensable, and within days that other slapdash life in the wild seemed like a distant memory as she set about building her modern-day nest.

  For the most part, with the exception of a need to constantly visit the bathroom, Consuelo enjoyed being pregnant, watching her body with awe as her stomach swelled, as her breasts grew to double their original size, as the skin of her face took on the luminescent sheen associated with pregnancy. She documented her bodily changes, week by week, standing before the mirror and drawing freehand on a notepad. From month four to month seven, she was ravenous for anything sweet and spent most of her time picking fruits from her garden and in the kitchen, where she would spend hours preparing exquisite delights for herself. Flan de auyama, Dulce de lechosa, Merenguitos con limón, Jalea de mango. She must have perfected hundreds of sweet dishes during that period. But, she had to admit, the last two months of pregnancy seemed like an eternity. No longer able to muster the energy or the enthusiasm to cook, or paint, or tend her beloved garden, she spent hours lying on the sofa, a resplendent beached whale, talking to Amparo on the phone, joyfully expectant and nervous at the same time.

  “How is it possible,” she asked Amparo, “for this body of flesh and bone to stretch so much and crack open so wide as to accommodate the carrying and birth of a child?”

  “It isn’t pleasant toward the end,” said Amparo cautiously, “but don’t worry, we women are stronger than we think.”

  “I read in a magazine article that you forget the pain once it is over,” said Consuelo.

  Amparo snorted. “I suppose it was written by a man. No. What happens is this: you remember the pain, but your forgive it every time you look into your child’s eyes.”

  “Amparo, what is an episiotomy?”

  “Ay, no, por favor. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about names. I like Azucena for a girl, and it’s probably a girl judging by the way she hangs so low in your belly,” said Amparo, who claimed she had learned this fail-safe method of discernment from her grandmother.

  “Por Dios, Amparo! Azucena is a terrible name, it is a name for an old maid. Other children will laugh at a name like that,” said Consuelo. Then, “Can you really tell whether it is a boy or a girl just by looking at my stomach?”

  “Of course,” said Amparo, whose grandmother had accurately predicted the sex of her own two children, Alex and Isabel. “Girls hang low, boys stay high. Promise me that I can be there when she is born.”

  “Promise? I insist!”

  Ismael returned late at night from a three-day expedition to the Delta on the last day of October, one day before Consuelo’s fortieth birthday. He curled himself around her on the bed, but not too tightly, since she had already told him that any sustained physical contact at this stage in her pregnancy made her feel unbearably hot and oppressed. In actuality, it would hardly have made a difference on that particular night, since Consuelo, who had taken a strong infusion of Manzanilla before bed, slept like a stone and was not even aware of her husband’s presence.

  Early in the morning on the first day of November, Consuelo awoke to a wet bed and contractions that were already seven minutes apart. She punched the slumbering Ismael in the small of the back with her fist, and he awoke with a start. “It’s time,” she said through clenched teeth. “We have to go to the hospital. Call a taxi and call Amparo.”

  “There is no time to go to the hospital,” said Ismael, lifting her nightgown and peering between her legs. He ran up the stairs to the door that separated their own living area from that of their tenants from India, a Hindu man and his Muslim wife, both civil engineers working for an oil company. He pounded forcefully on the door calling out, “Nati! Nati!” The woman of the house, Nathifa Kalidasa, opened the door in her bathrobe and slippers and allowed herself to be firmly commandeered by the elbow, down the stairs to the apartment below. She followed Ismael into the bedroom, took one look at Consuelo writhing and moaning on the bed, and, without a word, ran to the kitchen to put on a pot of water to boil. She returned with an armful of towels, and a porcelain basin from the bathroom, which she set down on a chair. She approached Consuelo, took hold of her hand, wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her bathrobe, and began to sing alien word
s of comfort in a high sweet voice.

  Ismael rolled up the sleeves of his pajama shirt and ran to the kitchen, returning with a clean, sharp knife and a bucket full of ice cubes, which he set down on the night table, before returning to the kitchen for the boiling water. He had forgotten to call Amparo.

  “Let me help you up,” he said to Consuelo. “You’ll do better in a squatting position. Gravity will help you with your work.”

  “Don’t TOUCH me, coñomadre,” shouted Consuelo at her husband. “What do you know about delivering babies, eh?”

  Ismael did not reply. He lifted his clawing, biting, howling wife, set her down on her feet, and pushed her into a crouching position at the foot of the bed. He placed her hands on the bedpost for support, put an ice cube in her mouth, and instructed her to clench it with her back teeth and breathe in short, quick gasps through her mouth. He wrapped some ice cubes in a washcloth, smashed it against the nightstand to crush the ice, and gave it to Nathifa, who held the washcloth to the back of Consuelo’s neck.

  An hour later, Consuelo was hurling abuses Ismael hadn’t known were in her vocabulary. “Hang on, mi amor,” he said, wiping his brow, “almost there.”