The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos

by Margaret Mascarenhas

  “We would make terrible journalists,” says Carlos Alberto, smiling.

  “Yes, but we’d make excellent bank robbers,” says Luz. “Have you noticed you’ve started to drive as though you’re at the wheel of a getaway vehicle?”

  Early the previous morning, before she left with Carlos Alberto and Ismael for Yaracuy, Luz did something she knew was bad and for which she now feels guilty. All the others in the Quintanilla house were asleep—even the nurse, Alegra, who was snoring softly in the leather recliner in the living room. Luz drew another chair next to the daybed where Lily lay, placed her lips near Lily’s stomach, and whispered the true story of the Macuto and the silver charm bracelet. It took over half an hour, during which Lily, deep in slumber, did not stir even once. When Luz finished, she was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open.

  “How’s that for a story, baby?” she murmured.

  As she dozed off, her head resting against the side of Lily’s daybed, she felt a repetitive pat on her shoulder and heard a voice, softly crooning her to sleep. From the time she was a child, Lily had always patted her on the back and sung to her when she was unhappy or upset or couldn’t sleep. When Lily started singing to her, Luz tried to open her eyes, but her eyelids were too heavy.

  “I’m so sorry Luz, please forgive me,” she thought she heard Lily say. Except it sounded like Irene.

  As Luz drifted deeper into sleep, she felt the light feather touch of a kiss brush across her lips, like a summer breeze. And then fingers, playfully pulling at her toes. And the thick, dark thing that had clouded her spirit for so many years began to lift and dissipate in the predawn light.

  She awoke to her mother’s touch upon her shoulder.

  “You need to get up and get ready if you are going with los señores,” said Marta.

  “It was so strange, Mamá,” said Luz. “I dreamt that someone was pulling my toes.”

  “¿Ah, sí?” said Marta. “Pretty soon it will be me pulling your toes if you don’t get up and get going.” Luz regarded her mother with sleep-filled eyes and a smile, thinking that the one thing she could be certain of was that her mother would never change. But then Marta unexpectedly reached down and hugged her roughly. And for the first time in years, Luz did not pull away.

  Now, as Efraín mourns the execution of his family in his dreams, while she rocks him in her arms, she thinks she may have discovered something about a mother’s love. She wishes she could tell him it is only a dream.

  Passion fruit mousse is easy to prepare. Cut in half lengthwise and scoop out the seedy pulp with a spoon. Boil down to obtain syrup. Serve cold, like revenge.

  Marta

  When Marta dreams, she is back in Cuba. In some of the dreams she is a young child, sitting at the table with her parents, eating a steaming plate of yuca, rice, black beans, and fried plátano. In other dreams she is a grown woman sitting in a cafetería called La Esmeralda with Humberto. Always, when she visits Cuba in her dreams, she is happy. It is only when she is awake that Cuba becomes the enemy.

  Marta’s understanding of, and interest in, politics is limited. As far as she is concerned, a good leader is one whose enemy is her enemy. And though she loves Ismael like a brother and savior, she still thinks he was crazy to have fought against El Colonel, who not only opposed the Communist leader of Cuba but gave Maria Lionza the recognition she deserved, raising her status to that of a national symbol. Wasn’t it true that his government was blessed by the goddess, that people were safe in their own houses and on the streets? These days no one can walk in a public place without fear of atracos, or park a car in front of a restaurant without wondering whether it will still be there by the time the meal is over. El Colonel had been a real Presidente, not like this one, who behaves like the primogénito of the island tyrant, constantly running there like a propio payaso to seek his advice, and importing his vile ideas to the mainland. No wonder the statue of Maria Lionza has broken in two.

  Marta was one of the first of an estimated seventy thousand Cubans who migrated to Venezuela during the revolution. Why she left her home and her dashing revolutionary husband of only two years, Humberto Galano, never to return is a question she has been asked by employers, friends, acquaintances, and even total strangers. Over the years her answer has evolved. At first it was because Humberto was involved so deeply with the revolution that it put their lives in danger. He insisted that it was best and safest for her to remain in exile until Cuba was free—which, he said confidently, was only a matter of a couple of years at most. Then it was because once every two years, when Humberto came to visit her in her adopted country, he left her preñada, and she was either pregnant or nursing whenever the opportunity to return arose. Then it was because of the children, because of financial security, for in the early years, one thing was clear: she and Humberto could not support their growing family in Cuba under the crushing economic conditions that prevailed. Then it was because of democracy; it was better, Humberto said, to wait until elections were held and a democratic government was in place. Finally, it was because her husband was dead.

  Most recently Marta has taken to saying that it is not a question of why she left Cuba, but why she will never return. Then, relishing the expectancy in the eyes of her interrogators, especially if they are prorevolution, as so many are these days, she says, “Because He [she can never bring herself to say the name] finds it more expedient to sacrifice others for the revolution than to die for it himself.” She says the last word as if it should be accompanied by spit. No. She cannot return, she says, because the only way to return is with a sharpened machete for cutting a smile in His thick neck. And then her children would lose a mother, as well as a father, before it was time.

  Although she is seething with rage over the present, Marta often remembers her childhood with longing.

  “Do you suffer from terminal nostalgia? You were dirt-poor, it couldn’t have been that great,” Luz snapped at her once, as though she were jealous of it, this period in her mother’s life when she did not exist. It is true that Marta prefers the past to the present. Her family had been poor, but they had been happy. It had been another time, another place. But when you have perfection, the gods remind you what it is like not to have it. Now she is rich, or at least her daughter is, which amounts to the same, but neither is happy.

  For generations, Marta’s Andalusian ancestors had endured the cruelest forces of history in conditions of unrelenting scarcity. Their only escape was through making love and the telling of stories, stories about themselves embellished by their hopes and wishes, stories in which they had the power to create a miraculously happy ending, even if happy endings were rarely a part of real life. Marta’s mother, Maria Inocenta Usoa, was especially gifted in the art of invention, and it is from her that Marta developed her taste for exotic cuentos. When Marta was a child Maria Inocenta had held her daughter spellbound with accounts of the long winters she spent growing up as a poor peasant in Andalusia, an experience made beautiful by the embellishments she added to her tales.

  The only daughter, among many sons, of a farm laborer, Marta’s mother had fled Spain at the age of sixteen, just two years before the military coup that would spark off a social revolution. A cousin who planned to get out on the next boat claimed that it was easy for young women to find positions as housemaids in the New World, a better prospect than waiting to be raped by insane revolutionaries.

  “That damned Basque woman will be the death of us all,” she said in reference to the Marxist revolutionary Dolores Ibarruri.

  With tears in her eyes, Maria Inocenta accepted the small money pouch that contained the sweat of her father, her mother, and her brother and crossed the Atlantic Ocean, as thousands of poverty-stricken Spaniards were doing, their hearts nearly bursting with hope of a better life and the means to send money to their families in the old country.

  Maria Inocenta’s arrival in the port city of Havana was dramatic: the flimsy craft that was carrying her from the ship to the s
hore capsized, sinking all her belongings in the bay, including a few ropes of smuggled Andalusian chorizos.

  She was illiterate, but whatever she lacked in education she compensated with fearlessness and spunk. What she did not know when she left Andalusia was that Cuba was suffering an economic recession almost as severe as the one in Spain. Like so many other European refugees whose hopes were soon dashed on the shores of the New World, Maria Inocenta did whatever had to be done to survive, including, it turned out, trabajo de jintera. After striking out at all the fancy restaurants where she had begged, once even on her knees, to be given work as a waitress or cook, she finally knocked, her stomach rumbling stridently with hunger, at the door of Las Quince Letras in the San Isidro district of Havana.

  “Do you know how to please a man?” asked her prospective employer, Señora Conchita Ramos, one eyebrow elevated. She was wearing a Chinese silk kimono, open almost to her navel, and held a slim cigar in her hand, which she brandished with a certain flair that to Maria Inocenta, dazed by hunger and exhaustion, appeared impossibly exciting and attractive. She had never seen a woman with so much confidence. But what appealed to her most was the fact that Señora Conchita appeared extremely well fed.

  “Back in the old country I was the favorite girl in the most famous and busy brothel in the city of Granada,” said Maria Inocenta, even though she was a virgin and had never even lain eyes on a city before arriving in Havana. She could not be sure at the time whether Señora Ramos hired her because she believed her story, or because she liked her, or because she simply wanted a fresh face. And what did the reason matter? She had a roof over her head and food in her belly. She would not die like a dog on the streets.

  Devoutly Catholic and hence resistant to the loss of her precious virginity, she insisted that her specialty was hand work. And, upon hearing this, a sensation both sharp and sweet struck a chord in the breast of the jaded Señora Ramos. This dark Andalusian beauty, with her quick wit and defiant youth, reminded her of herself in years gone by. And so she told Maria Inocenta that she could stick to hand work but would have to undergo training in mouth work as well. She could keep her virginity until she turned eighteen, and then they would see.

  Las Quince Letras was a high-class establishment. The wealthy and exclusive clientele of Señora Ramos followed her rules, paid her extravagantly, and behaved like gentlemen. In turn, Señora Ramos could afford to take excellent care of her girls, and it made business sense to protect her investment. Maria Inocenta was given free room and board, lovely nightclothes made of lace and silk, and an evening gown for each day of the week. Plus, she was allowed to keep forty percent of her earnings, better terms than any other whorehouse in the city, half of which she dutifully sent back to her family in Spain. In her spare time she helped out in the kitchen, and it was there in the brothel kitchen that she learned how to cook and discovered she had a knack for it.

  Life was almost too good to be true, until the night one of the clients broke the rules and impregnated her. It wasn’t all his fault; Maria Inocenta admitted later that she was as much to blame as he, having somehow lost herself in a world of the senses while entertaining the young man in a game of strip poker, where the rule was that the winner not only got to choose the clothing item to be removed but to remove it. When his hand gently slipped into the waistband of her silk underwear and then slid slowly down into that place, she swooned, and before she knew it he was inside the forbidden gate.

  Señora Ramos, who had grown maternally fond of Maria Inocenta, said she could continue working as a hand-and-mouth girl because, believe it or not, there were some men who would pay a great deal to be so serviced by a beautiful pregnant woman. She said Maria Inocenta could keep the baby, that a baby would bring joy to all the members of the household. She would treat it as her own grandchild, she vowed. But Maria Inocenta thanked her benefactress for her kindness and said she would leave the brothel and take her chances, because what kind of life would a baby have in a brothel? Conchita Ramos was disappointed but not in the least bitter, and she did what she could to help.

  Only barely beginning to show, and on the recommendation of a friend of Señora Ramos, a rum baron who frequented Las Quince Letras, she applied for a job as an assistant cook in the household of the rum baron’s niece, a villa in Calzada del Cerro.

  “I write down the menus in the morning. Can you read?” the woman asked.

  “But of course! I have a high school diploma from the old country,” Maria Inocenta replied with confianza, though she had never been to school and could barely scratch out her own name with a stick in the dirt. In reality, she had simply memorized some important phrases found on the menus of the most popular restaurants and made them into pictures of lines and curves and dots in her mind. Sofrito. Rabo encendido. Picadillo. Lechón asado. Dulce de leche. But take the letters apart and she would have no idea what they represented. However, so convincing was her pronunciation that it never occurred to la Dueña that she was faking it. She got the job and moved into a small but well-ventilated room at the back of the house.

  In spite of her disreputable beginnings in the new world, and the illicit seed in her womb, Maria Inocenta had remained throughout a staunch Catholic. She wanted to baptize her child and so, before the Mass one Sunday, confided this desire to the elderly parish priest, Padre Delgado. He listened quietly while she told him that her husband, a fisherman, had drowned off the coast, victim of a terrible storm. Afterward, he advised her to come regularly for instruction and promised to help her. But to her mala suerte, a gentleman frequenter of Las Quince Letras had recognized her at Mass and, indignant at watching her receive the Host with the same mouth and sip the Blood of Christ with the same lips that, only a few days before, had caressed his manhood, had waited until she left and done his sacred duty by informing the priest. When she returned the following day, Padre Delgado scolded her for telling such monstrous lies. He said she had severely jeopardized the safety of her soul. He said that under the circumstances, and until she had confessed and been purified of her sins, he would not be able to baptize her child.

  Maria Inocenta was a girl who had never learned to hold her tongue. She tried to explain that if she had always remained virtuous, she would be dead. No one, she said, could fill their belly with chastity and honesty. For her, living on the streets was the reality she faced and against which she fought so that she could meet her basic needs, and now the needs of her child.

  “Which is better for the soul,” she asked the priest, “giving a man five minutes of pleasure and telling a small mentira here and there that hurts no one, or living on the streets and starving like an animal?”

  The aging priest, who was essentially a kindly soul, though somewhat restricted in his ability to express it by his doctrine, had felt pity for her plight but insisted that she renounce both men and lies. He said it was most definitely better to starve and die than to lose one’s soul to the devil. Then he prescribed a penance of three rosaries per day along with her promise to visit each person to whom she had told a lie, confess to them, and apologize. He said that given her unmarried and sullied state, she would not make an appropriate mother and that when the child was born, she should give it up for adoption. He said that although her own soul had a stain on it, there was still a chance for the newborn.

  As though, Maria Inocenta said later to Marta, this old childless padre with his poor, shriveled private parts could know anything about the soul of a mother, whoever she may be and however she may have come to be with child. For that matter, what could any man know about it? Only a woman could understand what it means to carry new life in her body for nine months. She decided that to bring her child safely into the world, she would tell any lie that would keep her alive. From then on, she gave up the idea of baptism, and directed her prayers exclusively to la Virgen de la Caridad, patroness of Cuba. La Virgen, blessed be her name, was a woman who would understand, and it was La Virgen alone in whom she would confide and from whom she woul
d seek solace.

  Meanwhile, she continued to work in the home of the wealthy Trujillo family, where she met the man who would become her husband, Ernesto Torre.

  Ernesto Torre was the gardener for the Familia Trujillo. He nurtured and talked to his thriving plants, flowers, and bushes as though they were his babies, and this is what Maria Inocenta first loved about him. When she offered to take his lemonade to him in the garden one midmorning, the elderly head cook had smiled perceptively and handed her the tray. And that is how their courtship began.

  Ernesto was the first to notice when Maria Inocenta began to show and immediately asked her to marry him. He claimed he did not object to raising another man’s child as long as he could have Maria Inocenta by his side. He would raise this child as one of his own, and he expressed the hope of having many. Together they saved their money, until, in Maria Inocenta’s sixth month, they calculated they had enough to purchase a small plot of land. They found one near Matanzas, where they grew black beans and yuca, and where Marta was born—kicking and screaming, according to her mother—on an Easter Sunday.

  Marta remembers the details of her mother’s stories better than the details of her own childhood. Of her childhood, she mostly remembers sensations. The succulent taste of black beans and yuca. The wind on her skin when she climbed the mango trees with her sister, Yolanda, and their two younger brothers, Angel and Lucio. The rich smell of her father’s tobacco pipe.

  She knows, looking back, that her family was poor, barely eking out a living on their crops, but poverty is not what she remembers. Since she had never lived any other life, never had any source of comparison, how could she have known the difference between poor and rich? Love and warmth is what she remembers, with one hot day blurring into another, and another.