The only sequence of events in her childhood that stands out with clarity in her mind is the time she traveled to Havana with her mother and they visited the big fancy whorehouse, Las Quince Letras, though of course she hadn’t known it was a whorehouse at the time. She must have been around nine years old, the eldest of four children. She remembers all the women in the big house, beautiful women wearing beautiful clothes, fussing over her, taking turns holding her on their laps, and calling her “little pecado de juventud,” with tears in their eyes. She remembers the soft rustle of silk and the heady smell of perfume. She remembers Señora Ramos feeding her delicious chocolates, the first she had ever tasted, and handing her mother a packet with money in it. She remembers her mother’s desperate gratitude, and that her father had been angry when they returned and had thrown the money on the floor.
Maria Inocenta’s ability to inspire confidence in her eldest child about her origins must have been extraordinary, for Marta feels no shame about her mother’s story or her own illicit conception, and tells of it often. Carlos Alberto had been so taken with the story that he asked and received her permission to turn it into a telenovela. It was called Soledad, and Marta had watched the dramatization of her mother’s early life with pride and fascination. That the names were changed mattered nothing; on the contrary, being privy to the secret of the story’s origins was a titillating enhancement to her viewing experience.
Marta likes to say that just as Abraham and Sarah exploited and abused the slave girl Hagar, so too her mother had been exploited and abused by Churchgoing people who took advantage of her. Her mother was like Hagar. The spring she found in the desert, where none existed before, is what enabled Hagar to survive. This is how Marta sees her mother: as a woman who miraculously found a spring in the desert.
She acknowledges that it was the fierce determination and force of her faith in La Virgen de la Caridad that had empowered her mother, who could neither read nor write, to make a way out of no way. In the depth of her soul, though she knew not how to articulate it, Maria Inocenta had understood the essence of theological ethics from the sidelines, and the role the Church has played in keeping the poor in their place. Maria Inocenta’s response, to rely on a female deity that always provided the psychic resources to meet the harsh realities of life, made complete sense. She composed no grand thesis on the subject but taught her daughter this concept via her oft-stated aphorism: “La Virgen, she is not like the Church. She squeezes, but she does not choke.”
It was in that spirit that Marta had put Humberto’s life in the hands of La Virgen de la Caridad. But to her profound shock, La Virgen had betrayed her, failing in her mission to protect Humberto from the paranoiac wrath of a tyrant.
Maria Inocenta had written to her grieving daughter, saying that everything in life was part of a divine plan, and Marta knew that her mother believed that it was Humberto’s lack of faith in a power greater than the revolution that had contributed to his destruction in the end. But Marta thought that her own fervent faith and thousands of Novenas should have softened La Virgen toward her husband, who, in spite of his atheism, was a good and compassionate man. Marta never told her mother that she had subsequently acquired a more benevolent and powerful patroness who did not insist on martyrs, for it would surely have broken her heart. So Maria Inocenta had gone on consoling her daughter with holy pictures, reminding her to say a prayer on the feast days of various incarnations of the Virgin, especially that of Caridad. And Marta had gone on letting her mother believe that she continued to be faithful.
Maria Inocenta’s life had drawn to a close two decades ago today. And on the seventh day of the Novena to Maria Lionza, Marta remembers to thank Maria Lionza for her mother’s vibrant life.
Everyone present has already told a story, Consuelo, Amparo, Lily, and herself.
“Someone will have to go again,” she says.
“You tell, Marta,” says Lily. “The last time you told us the story of Maria Lionza. This time why don’t you tell us your own story and how you came to this country?”
And so Marta begins.
When Marta was fourteen, the villagers of Matanzas became fearful that their lands would be snatched away by a powerful sugar farmer they called Papa Grande. For a time, Papa Grande alternately threatened and wheedled, and finally doubled and tripled his offers, making it difficult for small farmers to resist his advances. Marta’s father, one of nine farmers who had managed to survive Papa Grande’s onslaught for a whole year, was on the verge of capitulating when the intrepid Humberto Galano arrived in Matanzas.
Humberto Galano was the first communist Marta had ever met and the most beautiful and electrifying man she had ever seen, with his red, wide mouth, laughing eyes, wild, curly hair and large gesticulating hands that seemed to have lives of their own. He was part of the Sierra Maestra movement and had come to Matanzas to help the small farmers resist the sugar baron. Son of a wealthy banking family, he financed much of his activity with his inheritance, which he had received at the age of twenty-one, when his idealism was at its peak. He brought twenty armed men with him to help in the resistance, and he stayed until his mission was accomplished two years later. Then he asked Ernesto and Maria Inocenta Torres for the hand of their eldest daughter, Marta.
It had been a strange courtship. Humberto seduced the farm girl with quotes from Marti. He wooed her with stories about the leader of the revolution, about his courage, about how he defended the poor and strove to release them from misery. And the way he spoke, the way his eyes shone, made her want to embrace his struggle, for on some level she realized that he and it were one and the same. She wanted to prove to him that she could contribute in some measure to his cause, even though she didn’t understand it, even if it only meant following Humberto to the ends of the earth, if he would let her.
Ernesto and Maria Inocenta recognized the call of love in their daughter’s eyes. Humberto had impressed them with his selfless work on their behalf, and they had grown to love him. They agreed readily to the union. There was neither time nor money for a wedding, and, in any case, Humberto was an atheist. But to please Maria Inocenta he promised to say a prayer at the shrine of the Blessed Virgen de la Caridad before taking Marta with him to a village in Oriente province, where he had a modest house.
In Oriente, Humberto continued his work as an advocate for agrarian reform, offering assistance to other groups of small farmers in the surrounding areas.
By the end of their first year together, Humberto had also become a courier for the Rebel Army. Now the couple’s nights were frequently broken by sudden clandestine meetings held by candlelight. While the rebels pored over rough maps, discussing whether they should camp here or there, attack first in this place or that, Marta cooked and served them platters of food, hoping to fill the hungry hollows in their cheeks, and cups of rum or hot coffee until, thanking her profusely, they dropped, exhausted, on mats on the floor, or left under cover of night to prepare for another day of battle with the enemy. It was during this time that Marta saw Che, who was already a legend throughout the Americas. He arrived on the back of a donkey, his figure drooping. He was smaller than she had expected, and seemed fragile. She mentioned this to Humberto. But Humberto told her later there was nothing fragile about Che. He was as tough as steel and an inflexible disciplinarian. According to Humberto, any and all disorderliness of men in his charge was severely punished by Che, because La Disciplina was critical to a guerrilla’s survival.
“He doesn’t even take a lover,” exclaimed Humberto, with admiration coupled with disbelief, “that’s how dedicated he is to the cause.”
Marta replied that while Che was undoubtedly handsome, he was also apparently sexless. Unless they were blind, men generally observed Marta, who was full-bodied and sensuous, with a great deal of appreciation. “He didn’t even notice me,” she said.
“Just as well,” said Humberto, patting her bottom. “I wouldn’t want that kind of competition.”
Whe
n Humberto began traveling as a courier for the Revolution, he shaved and dressed in faded but clean country clothes. A knife hung from his belt and he carried a gun. During his travels he often slept in ditches by the side of the road, pulling a broken tree branch over himself for camouflage. Weeks later it would be another Humberto who returned to her with clothes tattered and filthy, hair long and scraggly, a deeper line etched in his forehead. He left Marta alone for weeks at a stretch with only a semiautomatic rifle as company. She was good with it, for he had taught her to shoot. But it was then that she began to hate the Revolution a bit.
After a particularly lengthy absence, Humberto returned with horror and revulsion in his eyes. On the way home he had seen a murdered woman in the tall corn grass near Guisa. “Her skirts were above her waist,” Humberto told his wife, “her left leg bent at an impossible angle, her eyes staring without sight at the summer sky.”
It was after he saw the dead woman that he decided to send Marta to the mainland. She did not want to leave him, and she begged him to come with her. They could start a new life together, she said, a life away from all this killing. But in her heart she knew he would not be tempted away from his grand mission, and in the end, because she loved him, she had no other option but to accept his verdict that discipline and sacrifice came before personal desire in times of revolution.
“Then let me stay,” she pleaded. But he said he must not be distracted in his work by a constant concern for her safety.
As yet under the influence of her mother’s beliefs at the time, Marta, too, continued to set great stock in La Virgen de la Caridad. Humberto had indulgently allowed her to erect an altar in their home, though he said he didn’t care for the idea of a virgin staring down at their bed while they made love. He made her move it to the kitchen, where Marta prayed daily for the success of the Revolution. It was later, after her husband was assassinated by the Revolution, a perfidious beast that consumed its own children, that she eschewed La Virgen de la Caridad and Cuba forever. In exchange, she pledged her allegiance to her adopted country, and to Maria Lionza.
Marta was frightened and alone when she arrived in Venezuela with her small, worn suitcase. But the thought of her mother’s bravery when faced years ago with similar circumstances steeled her backbone. She was determined to be open to face anything and everything head-on during her exile from her homeland. After spending a week with a friend of her husband’s in a horrid, filthy place called Petare, just outside the capital, she saw an ad in the newspaper for a room to rent in the nearby city of Tamanaco. The ad read “Gentleman preferred.” But she went for the interview anyway because the rent was cheap, and she was confident of her powers of persuasion. After taking three different buses, she found herself standing dubiously in front of a dilapidated building near the Sabana Grande. Taking a deep breath, she marched into the building and took the dirt-stained stairs to the second floor. A man in a bathrobe opened the door of the apartment. The place was as gaudy as anyone could imagine, and everywhere there were images of Marilyn Monroe—on the shower curtain, the lampshades, the toaster. There were three men living in the two-bedroom apartment. A couple and a friend who lived on the sofa in the living room. The second bedroom was the one available for rent.
At first the atmosphere was uncomfortable. But when the residents invited her to have a drink with them at the kitchen table, she accepted, and after a toast and a couple of sips, everyone relaxed.
Gentleman preferred, explained Pepe, the man in the bathrobe, was a kind of code, since they couldn’t possibly have advertised for a man of their persuasion publicly without being arrested, beaten, or killed. The inhabitants of the flat were the most genuine and attractive personalities Marta had encountered since her arrival on the mainland. After establishing that she did not care a whit what they did with their night lives, they invited her to move in.
Living with them was an education in and of itself. Pepe, who had originally leased the apartment, was Puerto Rican. He slept till noon, and at night he put on extravaganzas in some of the seediest bars in the poorest and most run-down areas of the city. These were outrageous, colorful, highly staged erotic shows in which he played many different roles. He had hired a group of women dancers who formed part of his popular burlesque escapades. Pepe conducted his rehearsals in the afternoons, and it was not unusual for the living room to be filled with half-naked girls who politely covered themselves.
The man who slept on the sofa in the living room was José Naipaul, a tattoo artist from Trinidad and a devotee of Maria Lionza. At first, Marta was baffled by the Maria Lionza pantheon, a celestial court of disembodied spirits of people, real and imagined, native warriors, ex-slaves, political leaders, writers, doctors, crooks. Even Simón Bolívar was there, reputedly very useful when seeking employment with the government, and other things, too.
Marta spent most of her time after work chatting with José Naipaul and learning from him how to make mouthwatering Indian curries with aromatic herbed rice. His tattoo business was far from flourishing, and to pay the rent he also drove a taxi around the city. On weekends he took people on tours to Sorte Mountain, where the biggest shrine of Maria Lionza was located. A believer in Maria Lionza more for the romanticism of it than anything else, José told Marta to think of Maria Lionza as the Mother Mary of the marginalized, especially the mestizos.
“Maria Lionza is not dead,” José had insisted. “All Marialionceros speak of Maria Lionza in the present tense, because, according to them, she is immortal.”
The complexity of the belief system and the ever-expanding pantheon of the goddess made Marta’s head spin. There were so many Immortals who belonged to one or the other of the seven courts of Maria Lionza. José explained that each court was led by one of the more important Immortals, starting with Maria Lionza herself. Marta knew what the most important of them looked like because most of them were figures of either history or legend, and statues and figurines representing them were to be found everywhere at Sorte and in the perfumerias and the tiendas dedicated to the goddess all over the country.
Marta accompanied him to Sorte on occasion, though she was not yet a believer then. She was lonely for Humberto and the company of men in general, having spent so much of her life surrounded by Humberto’s compadres, who had been, for the most part, male. So her association with José afforded her both a safe way of passing time with a man, as well as an exotic, strange, and colorful experience. It was only later, after she had rented a small one-bedroom apartment in La Florida, when her boys, Juan Pedro and Jorge Luis, were lost and then found, that she believed.
She had been shopping in the familiar (and cheaper) district of Sabana Grande with her boys in tow, when she realized she couldn’t see them. Dropping her bags of purchases on the street, she had hurriedly retraced her steps through the busy marketplace, calling out their names, stopping people and shouting in their faces, “Have you seen two boys, have you seen my boys?” For two hours she combed the streets and bylanes, then, frantic, she ran to her old apartment. Only Pepe was at home. He had danced till dawn in a cabaret the night before, and at first he ignored the bell, pulling the bedclothes over his head. But when he realized it was Marta, pounding and screaming, he leapt out of bed with bloodshot eyes and ran to open the door. Then, still in his pajamas, which consisted of boxer shorts and a tight woman’s T-shirt that ended above his belly button, and shoving his feet into furry bunny slippers, he grabbed her hand and, together, they rushed back to the market. Compassionate shoppers and shopkeepers spread the word about the missing boys, and soon shouts of “Juan Pedro! Jorge Luis!” could be heard on every lane, but to no avail. It was as if the boys had simply evaporated into the air.
Finally they went to the local police station for help, but when the police saw Pepe, they laughed their heads off and said maybe the children had run away in fear of this fag. Don’t worry, they said to Marta, whose swollen eyes reproached them, boys run away all the time, but when their stomachs hurt from hunge
r, they return to their mothers. By this time, José, who was returning to his apartment for his wallet, which he had forgotten on the dining table, had heard the news on the street. He ran up the steps of the police station, taking them two at a time, and nearly collided with Marta and Pepe as they emerged. Marta collapsed in his arms and began to weep uncontrollably. “Mis niños, mis niños,” she wailed, while Pepe stood by, shoulder hunched in defeat, tears and mascara making tracks down his face.
“Stay here,” said José, and ran back toward the apartment. A few minutes later, he pulled up in his taxi. They drove to the capital, twenty-five kilometers away. Stopping opposite the statue of Maria Lionza on the Avenida Francisco Fajardo, he said, “Go and tell her about your boys.” At that point, such was Marta’s derangement and desperation, that even if José had said, “Climb up a tree and screech like a monkey,” she would have complied. As if there were no cars whizzing by at a hundred kilometers per hour, she had charged across the highway without stopping or looking. Standing before the statue, she had prayed with all her corazón. Give me back my boys, she said over and over, with her head in her hands.
When she raised her head, a woman handed her a flyer. One side had a likeness of a bald monk in brown robes holding a child; the reverse had a child figure in a blue cape with a shepherd’s staff in one hand and a little basket in the other.
When Marta returned to the taxi and showed the flyer to José, he told her that many Catholic saints were included in the pantheon of Maria Lionza, and that those on the flyer were representations of San Antonio and El Santo Niño de Atoche. Both, he said must be approached in different ways. According to José, in order to get San Antonio’s immediate attention, it would be necessary to scold and threaten him, and in extreme cases such as Marta’s, bind his statue with rope and place it in a dark place, until that which was lost was found. To appease El Santo Niño, he said, she should fill a small basket with dried grasses, candy, toys, rum, and cigars. Next, she should write a letter to El Niño, asking for the return of the boys. Finally, she must carry this basket offering to high ground, where she should offer prayers and light candles. Under José’s careful tutelage, Marta complied with all the requirements, trussing her porcelain statue of San Antonio and locking him in her cupboard. Then, accompanied by both Pepe and José, she hiked halfway up the Avila mountain to present her offering to El Niño. When they returned to her apartment in La Florida, it was dusk, but even in the dim light she could make out the figures of the policeman and her two boys, standing by the entrance to the building. “They were playing poker with a drunk in the back of a bar,” said the policeman.
The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos Page 21
