The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos

by Margaret Mascarenhas

  Next, she had volunteered at a local hospital, saying she wanted to assist with deliveries, but the hospital officials had told her that while they would welcome her help with the babies after they were born, during the birth only the doctors and nurses could be present. Foiled once again, she had finally given up, vowing to devote herself fully and exclusively to the role of wife and mother. It was a vow she fulfilled brilliantly and competently for a decade, when Ismael had introduced her to Lucrecia, a Guajira midwife who was looking for an apprentice.

  Lucrecia was older than Amparo had expected, the skin of her face like soft, worn leather, her eyes acute in their perception. She made it clear from the beginning that position and wealth were of no consequence whatsoever, and Amparo realized she would have to use alternate means to make a favorable impression. As the wife of a powerful businessman, making favorable impressions had become one of Amparo’s specialties, but she rightly sensed Lucrecia’s immunity to her social charms and graces, and stood before her like an awkward schoolgirl, wracking her brain for a way to gain approval.

  “Why do you want to become a midwife? What makes you think you deserve to bring babies into the world?” Lucrecia asked.

  “I don’t know whether I deserve it,” Amparo said. “I only know that almost as long as I can remember, I have had no compelling wish to do anything else.”

  Though it seemed an eternity to Amparo, it took Lucrecia only seconds to make up her mind. She said, “Well, you’re not quite what I had expected in an apprentice, but you have given me a straight answer, and you come highly recommended by Ismael. I’ll teach you, but you should be prepared for a lot of hard work and mess you’re probably not used to. Menos mal that you have maids and cooks to take care of your home and family, because from now on, you are going to be spending most of your time with me. You’ll have to live in Valencia, at least during the week. And don’t you come down there with your fancy outfits and high heels—the women I work with need to feel comfortable with you and you need to feel comfortable in order to work properly—bring loose-fitting clothes and flat shoes. And make sure you trim those claws. Long nails have no place in the birthing business.”

  “Agreed,” said Amparo, weak with gratitude and relief that she at last had a foot in the door of miracles.

  Oblivious to the scandal her newfound vocation would incite among her social peers, she began to spend five days a week with Lucrecia in Valencia, an hour’s drive away, returning to Tamanaco only on the weekends. In compensation for her absence during the week, she gave the cook the whole weekend off, insisting on preparing the family meals herself, calling her children into the kitchen to keep her company as she chopped, peeled, tossed, steamed, and broiled. Her exuberance was both evident and contagious, and, for the first time in years, Alejandro made himself unavailable to his office during weekends. He purchased matching red aprons and joined her in the kitchen, performing such tasks as she directed, mostly the washing up—just as he had done during the first year of their marriage, when they were nowhere near wealthy enough to afford a cook or a maid. In fact, the family now spent more time together than ever before.

  For Alex and Isabel, this new lifestyle was something extraordinary, and they could hardly wait for the weekend to arrive. Though surely they knew they were deeply and abundantly loved by their parents, there had been little opportunity to spend time with them, except on holidays. They had never before seen their mother in the kitchen and had rarely been inside it themselves. To watch her cooking up a storm, while their father helped, kissing her each time he passed her on the way to the sink, to watch their parents laugh till tears spurted from their eyes—this trumped every other weekend activity, and the children began to make excuses when their friends called them out to play. During these boisterous kitchen reunions, they listened raptly while their mother recounted what she had learned each week—the use of gravity and bathtubs in birthing, how to turn a breach baby, the proper way to sever an umbilical cord, the unparalleled delight of ushering new life into the world, and the humbling privilege of laying a newborn upon the breast of the mother. So vivid and unusual were her descriptions, for each birthing story took unexpected twists and turns, that afterward the children, ordinarily fastidious and fussy in their eating habits, polished their plates with gusto, as though gobbling up life itself. Their flesh grew rosy and plump with contentment. As for Alejandro, a blaze of honeymoonish passion consumed him, and he couldn’t keep his hands off Amparo when she was home.

  And so it was that Amparo’s life took an entirely new shape. She dropped out of society, appearing rarely, if at all, at her husband’s business dinners, where she would be ill at ease, distracted, impatient to return to the fascinating business of bringing new life into the world. She studied diligently, learning everything the Guajira midwife had to teach her, all the while marveling at the sheer physical force of a woman’s labor, with its attendant pain and joy. Amparo’s teacher was a practical woman who, though she insisted that natural birth was best for the baby, found nothing edifying in pain for the sake of pain. She carried with her always a pouch filled with coca leaf, which she generously administered whenever a woman begged for strength and relief.

  At the end of her third year as an apprentice, Lucrecia told Amparo she was leaving and would not be returning. “I have spent too many years bringing other people’s children into the world. I have two sons; it is time I paid more attention to my own children.” The prospect of working without the benefit of advice from her mentor terrified Amparo. Observing the panic in her pupil’s eyes, Lucrecia touched Amparo’s cheek, saying she had nothing more to teach her.

  Amparo returned home with blessings and a suitcase full of medicinal herbs: Anamu leaves and Manacá root for stimulating the uterus, Pata de carnero for relieving muscle cramps, Abuta to regulate blood pressure, Anise to chew during labor, Sangre de grado to stop bleeding, Uña de gato for recovery from childbirth, Para toda to restore hormonal balance, Catuaba for stretch marks, Amor seco to increase breast milk yield, flores de naranja for soothing the mother of a stillborn, coca leaf for labor pain, Parchita to fortify the heart and ignite passion.

  With exhilaration tempered by trepidation, Amparo began offering her services through bold advertisements in the newspaper. However, this move turned out disastrous. Threatened by even the smallest amount of competition, several leading obstetricians, encouraged, and some said financed, by the insurance companies, filed a criminal suit citing fraud and negligence, asking that the court intervene and obstruct Amparo from practice. It was a famous case, inflamed by thundering editorials in all the newspapers, mostly in support of the doctors, since much of their advertising revenue came from the insurance companies.

  “We must fight back,” said Alejandro, incensed over the ambush.

  “But how?” Amparo asked, disheartened.

  “With your own voice,” said Alejandro, who by then owned a regional radio station in addition to a number of shares in TVista.

  And so Amparo went to war with the Asociación Obste-tra. On national radio, and then on television, to the charge that she was medically unqualified to deliver babies, Amparo said, “Pregnancy is not a sickness.”

  Over a period of two weeks, the tide turned in the court of public opinion; letters to the editor poured into the bureaus of all newspapers, an overwhelming majority in favor of a woman’s right to choose a home delivery with a midwife over an expensive stay at the hospital with an obstetrician, usually male, who only arrived in time for the birth, and frequently not even in time for that. Hundreds of pregnant women demonstrated in front of the courthouse holding signs that said, “¡No somos enfermas!”

  In the court of law, forty-eight women who had been assisted in childbirth by Lucrecia and Amparo testified on Amparo’s behalf, and Alejandro’s lawyers threatened to call another hundred or so if necessary. On the other side, the doctors and their insurance associates were unable to prove that pregnancy was a medical condition requiring medica
l intervention, except in special circumstances. Finally, the judge dismissed the obstetricians’ case for lack of evidence, noting that as far as he was concerned, an oral undertaking by Amparo to refer her clients to a hospital in the event of medical emergency would suffice.

  Amparo hired trainees, whom she paid with competitive salaries underwritten by Alejandro, until she broke even. She began earning a profit in spite of the numerous free deliveries she assisted for poor women. The trainees were predominantly social workers or emerging feminists, or single, unwed mothers from the barrio who were grateful for any kind of job that would help them to feed and clothe their children.

  Long before the advertisements began to appear, long before the court hearing and verdict, long before the official inauguration of the first Amparo Birth Center, local society women learned of Amparo’s foray into the business of birthing the usual way, by word of mouth, the story first transmitted in a horrified whisper by Lupe Neri, the wife of an oil baron and a retired opera singer. The news spread exponentially, and with each recounting the story took on ever more scandalous implications in the minds of the tell-ers. “¡Imagínate!” the listeners would invariably exclaim, eyes widening. “Has she taken leave of her senses?”

  To the society women of Tamanaco, it was not clear what was more shocking, that any mother and woman of social standing would choose to get involved with such a messy, unmentionable negocio, or the idea that a woman would choose to go into any negocio at all, unless forced by desperately adverse circumstances.

  Any scandal will automatically fade into oblivion, given enough time and incentive. In this case its demise was expedited by the fact that Alejandro and Amparo Aguilar had been the trendsetters and incontestable stars of society in Tamanaco for years. And the power wielded by Alejandro was such that no one could afford to ignore it. Besides, who would want to say no to their lavish dinners and fancy dress balls at Lagunita, attended by the most attractive people—famous actors, poets, artists, musicians, foreign dignitaries, ministers of state, and even presidents of the republic? Eventually society determined it was best to ignore, if not embrace, Amparo’s chosen vocation.

  In any case public attention was soon diverted by the unsuccessful suicide attempt of Passion Radio’s most popular novela reader, Alegra Montemar. It seemed the man with whom she’d been having an affair had threatened to return to his pregnant wife, the daughter of Lupe Neri. The day the story hit the headlines, Lupe’s daughter went into labor early, in the middle of the night. The frightened young woman had phoned her mother, and Lupe in turn had tried in vain to locate her doctor, who, it eventually turned out, was vacationing on the island of Margarita. Finally, in sheer desperation, Lupe phoned her old friend Amparo. Amparo, who was short of assistants that night, said Lupe would have to help. All night and part of the next day, while the young mother-to-be struggled, Lupe and Amparo took turns wiping the perspiration from her brow, assisting her in her ceaseless quest for a more comfortable position, until it was time to push. Then Amparo took over, coaxing her, guiding her, encouraging her, and finally catching the plump baby boy in her arms.

  From the moment she set eyes on the wrinkly wet bundle of new life, Lupe’s conversion to Amparo’s methods of child delivery was complete. Not only did she begin recommending Amparo to all her friends with pregnant daughters, but she even asked whether Amparo would consider training her as a midwife. Before long, many bored society women had begun to take an interest in the business of birthing. They asked for and accepted jobs at the Amparo Birth Center, as secretaries, administrators, accountants, and, of course, midwife trainees. It took a good many years of hard work and hard knocks, but Amparo turned out to be an astute businesswoman as well as an excellent midwife and teacher. By the time she learned of Lily’s pregnancy, there were Amparo Birth Centers in three major cities, which offered extended services, including day care for working mothers and shelter placement for homeless ones.

  No matter how busy she is, Amparo never fails to blow a kiss to Ismael in her mind for making her dream come true.

  Amparo always says it could only have been written in the stars that her best friend Consuelo should fall in love with Alejandro’s best friend, Ismael, binding the four of them together in a rare and intimate alliance.

  Alejandro Aguilar and Ismael Martinez had met at a meeting of a group known only as P.E., an underground movement of allied tribes whose objective was to oppose the dictatorship of El Colonel and its usurping of tribal lands and rights. Alejandro, an ambitious junior television executive for the government broadcast station at the time, had been trying to obtain an interview with any of the movement’s leaders for months. But he had been unable to ascertain who they were, so closely was this secret guarded.

  And then just like that, out of the blue, one of the leaders, Diego Garcia, turned up in his office (though Alejandro hadn’t realized who he was at the time). By the end of the meeting, Diego Garcia had invited Alejandro Aguilar to an underground gathering of political dissidents.

  Later, when Amparo asked him why, Diego Garcia could not explain what gave him the courage to take such a risk. After all, Alejandro worked as a reporter for a station controlled by the government. Perhaps it was because he perceived that this was a straightforward man, a man with certain sensibilities, a man who could imagine a world outside his own. A man, in fact, not unlike himself. Whatever the reason, Diego Garcia sought out the very man who was seeking him and said, “Hombre, I will give you an exclusive interview with the leader of P.E. if you will come with me to a meeting. But the condition is that you will have to come blindfolded.”

  The clandestine meetings of the P.E. movement were held with increasing irregularity in different locations around the city or on the outskirts, so as not to attract the attention of the government, which had banned public meetings. Alejandro could easily have given Garcia and his entire organization away, and taken out all the leaders of the impending strike in one devastating blow. And, to be sure, the thought that this may indeed be his patriotic duty did cross his mind. At the same time, Garcia, his concentrated essence of individuality and purpose, was a like a breath of fresh air and adventure, reminding Alejandro of his idealistic university days, before he settled for the uninspiring government-paid job at the only station available to aspiring television journalists.

  Alejandro told Amparo that he didn’t know why he agreed to Garcia’s invitation any more than he knew why Garcia had invited him. And Amparo had known that this was something with which she could not help her husband. She simply held her breath as events unfolded.

  Alejandro told his wife that Garcia was clearly a man of considerable intelligence and talent, besides being charismatic and persuasive, and that he wanted to understand what would induce such a man to choose such a life—always on the run from the authorities. Whatever the forces that finally compelled him to choose one course of action over another, Alejandro’s decision to accept Garcia’s proposal was one that would irrevocably change his (and by association, Amparo’s) life.

  On the appointed day, while Amparo watched from the doorway, Alejandro was collected from his home at nine p.m. in a black sedan with darkened windows. He was driven, blindfolded, through the busy streets of Tamanaco for what seemed like a day, though in reality, he said, it was about an hour. When the car stopped, Garcia took Alejandro, still blindfolded, by the arm and led him up a rough and rocky path for about fifteen minutes, and it occurred to Alejandro that he might be walking to his own death. But the gentle pressure of Garcia’s fingers on his elbow, whenever he stumbled, took the edge off his apprehension.

  When Garcia finally removed the blindfold, Alejandro found that he was in a large clearing somewhere in the hills surrounding the city. The area was lit by kerosene lamps and candles, and he was standing amidst at least five thousand working men and women, a majority of whom represented the various tribes of the nation with banners—Guajiro, Wayuu, Warao, Pemon, Quechua, Puinave, Yanomamo, Que. He turned to his hos
t, but Diego Garcia had disappeared. While Alejandro was still trying to get his bearings, a man at the far end of the clearing took up a microphone before a podium made of two wooden crates stacked on top of each other. Next to the podium were speakers and a small battery-operated generator. In front of the podium was a banner strung between two sticks that had been embedded in the earth. The banner had no words, only a painting of a vine with flowers that looked, to his untrained eye, like orchids.

  A roar went up in the crowd, and Alejandro made his way toward the front of the crowd, observing with surprise that the man at the podium was Diego Garcia, who now held up his hands for silence.

  “Save your applause and enthusiasm for our guest of honor, a musician and poet who has given voice and vision to the resistance. I present to you Ismael Martinez!”

  A mestizo man with strikingly handsome features, of spare and wiry build, came to the side of Diego Garcia to thunderous applause that seemed to go on and on, reverberating against the trees surrounding the clearing.

  “Quiet, please!” said Diego Garcia, and Alejandro realized that Diego Garcia himself was the man in charge, for his words crackled like a whip and were like a command to the people packed into the clearing; almost instantly there was pin-drop silence. And, stepping smoothly into that expectant quiet, Ismael Martinez began to sing. His voice was melodic, mesmerizing, a sound even more captivating than the actual words of the song, and indeed it was the sound and feeling of the words that Alejandro would remember later—the roar of a river, the wind on his face, the smell of moist and fertile earth—and not the precise words themselves. Alejandro watched with rapt attention as Ismael invoked a simpler time when people sustained the land and took their sustenance from it. When he was finished, there was no applause. Instead, a collective sigh of longing filled the clearing.