The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos

by Margaret Mascarenhas

  Her disappearance marked the beginning of Don Rafael’s end, for it was then that he began to consort with ghosts.

  Here, the Que version has something to add. On the day Luna vanished, children playing near the stream on the Que side claimed to have seen, only for a moment amidst the trees, a creature with the head and torso of a woman and the body of a tapir.

  Ironically, it was his education at Don Bosco that equipped Ismael for a life far richer than his paternal relatives could have imagined, since riches for them were appreciated exclusively in terms of acres and bank balances. While in his last year at the lyceum, a young priest lent Ismael the novel Cantaclaro, by Rómulo Gallegos, about a singing cowboy with incurable wanderlust in his heart, which sparked in Ismael the irrepressible urge to follow suit.

  Upon passing out from the lyceum, his aunt Estrelina (though he was never allowed to address her as “Tía”) gave him one hundred bolívares, a new suit of clothing that included shoes, and a letter of recommendation in which Ismael was portrayed as an orphan and she his benefactress, all of which was delivered by way of her houseboy, for she had no wish to look into his eyes as he went off alone into the world. But instead of looking for work in the town of Las Tres Marías as expected, Ismael had other ideas. He gathered his belongings—a small valise containing his few articles of clothing, his school certificate and letter of recommendation, a rosary, and his precious copy of Cantaclaro, which his teacher had bequeathed to him as a parting gift—and set off in search of his mother’s village. He arrived after a day and a night of walking on dusty roads and through the forests. Dusty and parched, he was welcomed by a laughing group of people who looked familiar, and they celebrated his arrival as if they had been waiting for him.

  And so, albeit a bit late in the day, Ismael was finally taught the things a Que man needs to know: how to hollow a log and make a canoe, to dig for roots, to build a hut, to hunt and fish, to craft and play the cuatro, to compose poem-stories with featherpen and cocksblood. Most importantly, he learned to safely cross the smoke bridge between reality and dreams.

  His last lesson would serve him well in difficult times, not the least of which was the six weeks he was under detention in the Ministerio de Defensa, not so much for perniciously interfering with the oil companies in the Delta, an insurrection of unarmed indios swiftly and brutally put down, but for writing a song that had incited even soldados to rebellion, a danger far greater to the regime. In the end his incarceration and punishment had been an exercise in futility and meaningless cruelty, for “Como crecen las frutas de la enredadera” was a song that could not be unsung.

  At first his interrogators in the secret prison at the Ministerio de Defensa behaved in a faux-friendly manner, complimenting him on his musical talent and legendary cocksmanship, and even humming a few bars of “Como crecen las frutas de la enredadera,” before saying they just had three simple questions, and if he would oblige them with the answers, he would be home in time to celebrate the birthday of his lovely wife.

  The first question was: “What is the real name of El Negro Catire, and what is the name of his organization?” Followed by, “Who are the organization’s other leaders and sympathizers?” And finally, “Where can we find them?” But, receiving no answers to their unimaginative queries, they began the slow and inevitable tightening of the screws.

  The tightening of screws was figurative at first; with each passing day, the interrogations became longer, the light on his face brighter, the interrogators’ voices louder, the questions became statements of accusation alternated with threats, the water glass now conspicuously absent. When these measures failed to produce the desired effect, they soon moved on to something else. On several occasions his head was submerged in a metal bucket filled one day with icy water, one day with hot water, one day with their own piss. From such immersions, they graduated to beatings, electric shock, sleep deprivation, isolation in a space the size of a child’s crib. And finally to the use of a contraption simply known as El Vicio, in which the tightening of the screws became real.

  “White men go crazy because they attempt to discover the secrets of life without crossing the smoke bridge to ask the blessings and guidance of the Great Maizcuba,” said Ismael’s grandfather nine days before his initiation.

  “Who is the Great Maizcuba?” Ismael asked.

  “The Great Maizcuba is Imawari, the creator bird of the dawn, and without his permission, you can neither cross the abyss of nothingness, where a hungry caiman lives, nor escape the claws of the jaguar of knowledge that awaits you on the other side.”

  According to his grandfather, Imawari resided in the House of Tobacco Smoke, made out of solidified smoke in between the waking world and the dream world. To prepare for his initiation, Ismael received many days of instruction from his grandfather. He had memorized the steps:

  1. Present his grandfather/teacher with a gift of tobacco.

  2. Smoke a cigar with his grandfather/teacher filled with special leaves that were meant to “open the chest.”

  3. Fast for five days, smoking at mealtime instead of eating, and lighting cigars from a virgin fire, communing only with the insect spirits.

  4. After five days of fasting, observe a month of silence, and avoid strong odors.

  5. Swallow the two sacred sticks presented by his grandfather/teacher.

  Then it would be time to bathe in the river before undergoing nine days of fasting and chanting. After that he would enter the smoke hut, where he would smoke incessantly from an enormous cigar and drink ayahuasca at prescribed intervals. He would do this until he entered the world of dreams, where he would blow, with the help of the elders, a smoke bridge that led to the edge of the world. He had been warned that to interrupt an initiation dream is to sever the soul from the body, and to prevent this, his grandfather and several of the other elders would not only smoke with him, but they would anchor him to the earth with their hands and with their spirits.

  On the day of his initiation, Ismael’s grandfather offered his final advice: “Before blowing the smoke bridge you must first ask the blessing of Imawari. While crossing the smoke bridge, walk carefully with one foot in front of the other and your eyes straight ahead. Do not look down. When you arrive on the other side, you must blow smoke in the jaguar’s face, and pass quickly to the edge of the world. Crouch and pound the earth three times to signal your arrival. Only then will Imawari assign you a toll price that will allow you to roam the waking world through your dreams.”

  Moments after the tibia bone of his left leg cracks, he goes to a different place. A land of verdant hills and sunny valleys. He can see Consuelo running toward him and his heart rejoices. His tears, earlier of pain, now of elation, irrigate the rough terrain of his soul, which during consciousness had been a desolate, barren wasteland. Joyfully he cries out, and flowers of every hue and variety fall from his lips and to the fertile ground where they begin to bloom. And when he opens his hands, which had been clenched tightly in fists, sunbirds fly out of his open palms and soar high into the air. There is thunder in his heart. He longs unbearably for her lips, her eyes, the touch of her fingers on his skin. There is fire in his bowels, his loins, his throat; a wave of emotion rushes over him with deafening speed. And when she is finally in his arms, he thinks he must seek death to end a joy that cannot be borne. But then Imawari flies overhead, casting a golden shadow, and his spirit is restored.

  “Look to the north,” says Imawari. And Ismael obeys, even though taking his eyes off Consuelo means returning to the place from whence he has come.

  “Mierda, you’re not supposed to kill him, they want him alive,” said the stockier of the two interrogators, who Ismael thought of as el Gordo y el Flaco.

  “Shut up, marico, he’s still got a pulse,” said Flaco.

  Ismael observed the scene from the dream world as a military doctor was summoned to examine the prisoner slumped in the iron chair.

  “You’re not going to get any more out of this one
,” the doctor said. “He’ll have to be admitted to the infirmary if you want him to stay alive.”

  After he was released from the infirmary, Ismael was placed back in a cell with another prisoner, where he awaited further interrogations that never came. “The reason,” whispered his cellmate, whose jaw hung crazily to one side from his last beating, “is because they’ve decided to execute you for treason. Or it could be that you won’t even get a kangaroo court and will simply disappear.” So Ismael began to wait for his execution or disappearance, which never came, either.

  The fact of the matter is that no one had the stomach to order the execution of a figure as popular and respected as Ismael, the beloved composer whose song “Como crecen las frutas de la enredadera” during the months of his incarceration, had come to rival the national anthem—certainly not El Colonel, who had begun to face insubordination and outright insurgency in his own ranks.

  “Fool!” he had thundered when informed that the interrogators of Ismael Martinez had been unsuccessful in their endeavors despite the use of all tactics at their disposal. “Have I not brought unprecedented wealth, progress, and stability to the nation? On my watch, the welfare of the state always takes precedence over the whims of its people. Without me, this country would just be another banana republic. This resistance, were it to succeed in its effort for regime change, would only come to the fate of the one before, and the one before that, and the cycle would repeat itself. That cannot be allowed. Ismael Martinez is a symbol of the resistance; a symbol that must be broken or destroyed.” This is what his interrogators told their captive, for by then they had developed a fearful admiration, bordering on reverence, for the unbreakable Ismael Martinez, and were unwilling to pursue further interrogation, lest any one of them be the ones accidentally responsible for his death. And now, whenever they took him to the bloodwashed interrogation room, they locked the door and let him sit quietly in his chair, while each of them took turns screaming, making it into a contest about who could make the most spine-chilling sounds.

  As for Pedro Lanz, even were he to defy pure common sense, his own self-preservation instincts, his feelings of loyalty to his former school friend who had begun to visit him in his dreams—even were he to disregard all that and give the order of execution, it was by no means a certainty that the guards would carry it out. He could not be sure who among them had not been contaminated by the resistance, which had spread like a bushfire, raging from city to city, town to town, village to village, and even through the forests, consuming everything in its wake. Pedro Lanz was a man whose decisions and orders were designed to achieve a particular result, a man who did not like waste, particularly the waste of a good man, a man whose composing ability and lyricism, though clearly subversive, was nothing short of a maravilla. What a great advantage it would have been to have such a man on the side of the regime. Pedro Lanz could discern that the writing on the wall of time was not in the government’s favor, that its days were numbered. Besides, he had given his word to Consuelo that he would do “everything in his power” to secure the safe return of her husband, and he was nothing if not a man of his word, though when he gave it, it never crossed his mind that Ismael would resist every conceivable method of persuasion. Well, not every method; Pedro Lanz had never used the one method that would have broken Ismael in seconds: He had never arrested or threatened to arrest Consuelo. On the contrary, he had relaxed the surveillance on her the day before she disappeared from Tamanaco. He had done this because he too had the ability to fall in love at first sight, as he had on the night of the fifth anniversary of Amparo and Alejandro Aguilar, the moment he saw Consuelo.

  On the morning of the most violent and well-orchestrated popular uprising in the history of the nation, before leaving for the plane that would carry him into exile, the last order Pedro Lanz would give as director of Security and Classified Information would be to free Ismael Martinez.

  Ismael was alone in the cell, his cellmate having been executed three days earlier, when the only guard who had not yet deserted his post opened the cell door. “Hurry up, get going, and buena suerte,” he said, before racing down the steel grey corridor, ripping the regime’s insignia from his uniform and flinging away his cap as he ran, with Ismael close on his heels.

  Once there was a norteamericano, a black man, who said he had a dream. But it was not a dream. It was only a fleeting vision; a vision that dims and brightens in the never-ending battle between the few who have everything and the many who are tired of being left behind to suck the bones at the empty banquet table.

  Following a spate of random school kidnappings in Tamanaco, Ismael had taught Lily certain maneuvers that would enhance her chances of escaping the grasp of a predator. Once she had succeeded in loosening the grip of an attacker, her father said, she should run like hell, shrieking like a siren, to attract as much attention as possible. Lily was best at slipping out of a neck lock, but that was on dry land, with her feet on the ground. From his dreams he could see his daughter struggling in the water with Irene and called out to her. With seconds to spare, Lily followed her father’s instructions, coiling first and then jackknifing out of Irene’s grasp. Irene lunged toward her again as if in slow motion. “Hit her,” said Ismael.

  He had been warned by his Que grandfather of the dangers of intervention from the dream world in the course of real-life events. “There is always a price to pay in such an exchange,” his grandfather had warned. Ismael knows that Lily has already paid with a part of her soul, that he and Consuelo have paid with the pain of their own separation and the anguish of watching their child battle the unnamed fears that have prevented her from embracing life to its fullest. And Irene had surely paid. And now Efraín; he too is paying with the loss of his entire family. Perhaps finally Imawari would be sated.

  “Dios, mío,” Lily exclaims, “I just realized...the boy Efraín, he has Irene’s eyes!”

  “Stop talking and push,” says Amparo. And a few seconds later the first granddaughter of Ismael Martinez bellows her way into the world.

  For the first time in months Ismael and Consuelo fall into each other’s arms and into the same bed, too exhausted even for speech. But even in their sleep, their bodies call out to each other, and they awaken in the early hours of the morning to the relentless, involuntary movements of their hips. Laughing, they succumb to that primordial command. The silk of Consuelo’s nightgown slides from her body like a sigh. He kisses her; her legs lock around his back. Their lovemaking is long, luxurious, and wanton. And, at dawn, when there is a light knock at the door, they hold their hands to their mouths like randy teenagers who have made too much noise.

  “Come in,” says Ismael, covering their nakedness with the sheet.

  It is Luz. “I’m so sorry to disturb you,” she says, “but we cannot find Efraín.”

  Instantly, Ismael is on his feet, pulling on his trousers, running out the door, with Consuelo close behind him. Marta and Amparo are searching the house while Lily anxiously clutches her baby in the living room, Alegra at her side. Carlos Alberto is scouring the garden compound. “He couldn’t have gotten over the wall or out the gate,” says Carlos Alberto when Ismael joins him.

  Having run out of places to look in the house, all, including Lily with her infant, come out into the garden. They are all talking at once—who was the last person to see Efraín, what time, how could this happen, and so forth.

  Then Ismael observes the ladder against the back wall of the house and looks up. Efraín is standing at the highest point of the roof, right at the edge, his arms outstretched like a bird, his eyes wide and glazed as though sleepwalking.

  “He is on the roof,” says Ismael. Immediately Carlos Alberto and the others follow the direction of his gaze and there is a collective gasp.

  “Poor child,” says Carlos Alberto, “it is too much for him; he has lost his mind.”

  Luz begins to wail.

  “Quiet, Luz,” says Ismael. “He is dream-walking; we mustn’t do an
ything to startle him. Someone please get me my pipe and pouch of tobacco.”

  Standing in the garden below, Ismael lights his pipe, inhales deeply, closes his eyes. As he enters into a trance the sounds of the world fall away and there is only the smell of rich, full-bodied tobacco. In his mind’s eye the edges of the world soften, a resonance fills the sky, there is a hovering wind, the air assumes a ponderous density, and in his mouth he can taste metal. He is on the edge of the world of dreams. Through the dim gray light that filters through the membrane between the real world and the dream world, he can see Efraín outlined some distance before him instead of above him. Pushing away the membrane like cobwebs, he sees that the boy is standing on a cliff at the edge of the abyss. Across the gaping hole, and through a blue diaphanous mist, he can distinguish a female form. At first it seems as though she is beckoning to the boy, but then he realizes she is waving him back from the edge of the abyss. Efraín stands with his legs apart, his face upturned, and his arms outspread as he sings, “I can fly.” In each hand he holds a small feather. As Efraín tilts precariously forward, the woman’s gestures become more frantic. Ismael sucks deeply from his pipe and begins to blow a smoke bridge but he is too far away. He runs forward, blowing as he goes, but even as he gathers speed, he knows he cannot save the boy from tumbling into the abyss nor even keep himself from falling, for he has not asked Imawari for permission. And yet he leaps into the air, stretching and reaching to grab at Efraín’s shirt collar. It is a leap of faith. The sky opens in a livid sear, and a tremendous wind begins to blow, scattering debris in his face. Then, he and the boy are free-falling, hurtling toward the jaws of the great caiman. All at once, a great vine made of smoke unfurls beneath him and wraps itself around his waist, hoisting him, along with the boy, to safety. A gourd adorned with Maizcuba feathers drops at his feet. It is his grandfather’s rattle. Efraín crumples to the ground and Ismael lifts him into his arms. As if from a great distance Ismael hears his grandfather’s voice: “Who knows the line between vision and madness, between dreaming and waking, or whether there is a line at all?”