Chasing the Sun: A Novel

by Natalia Sylvester

  “You can come up with it. We can still make this work,” Guillermo says reassuringly. “I know it’s difficult, but I’ve seen clients come up with more in worse situations.” He indicates their surroundings with one hand. The office, though simply decorated, hints at prestige and elegance. It is a room that hardly anyone but Andres enters, not even Marabela, who ordered the furniture according to his tastes but didn’t go so far as to arrange it once it arrived. Andres’s framed business diplomas hang on the walls along with pictures of his first printing machines. In a well-lit corner of the room, a roll of colorful canned food labels—the first major order his company ever received—sits in a glass display case alongside copies of a medical brochure, a bulky store catalog, a stack of a popular women’s magazine, and strips of an elegant wine label, replicated over and over. On its own, each printed item is unimpressive, but in bulk and in perfect duplication, the colors are stunning, the crisp lines showing off the attention to detail he has become known for.

  When his company was still in its infancy, Andres took enormous pride in the glossy finish of each roll of paper, how the ink never left a dry, chalky residue on his fingertips, unlike the black ink of the dailies. Understandably, at first his father wasn’t happy with his decision; he hated the thought of Andres working with sensationalist tabloids, even if he was only printing them. Andres had thought Marabela of all people—with her photographer’s eye and appreciation for quality images—would understand his enthusiasm, but she found the printing process rather impersonal. She’d tease him when he bragged about the latest new and improved machine.

  “It’s great for what it is,” she’d say. “It’s massive and commercial. But art is printed one image at a time, slowly and patiently. Not rushed out of a line at thirty feet per second.”

  “Forty-five,” he’d correct her, and keep flipping through lists of prices and specs into the early morning while Marabela fell asleep on the couch, her feet pushing against his thighs. This was when they lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and the living area doubled as Andres’s home office. Marabela hated going to bed without him; she’d try to stay up while he worked but usually fell asleep at his side. Foolishly, Andres looked forward to the days when they could buy a house and a bigger office closer to downtown for company headquarters. Now, with so much space for spreading out and being so far apart, he misses the cramped closeness of their youth.

  Andres started out with only one press and a four-person crew; in eighteen years, he’s expanded the company and created hundreds of jobs for honest, hardworking people. He houses his twelve printing machines in a factory three times the size of his original operation. He employs press operators in teams of six or seven to prepare and stock the paper feeds. There are another sixty-eight employees in the administrative office downtown, where Andres oversees accounts and holds meetings with potential clients. It’s been six months since he turned down the last offer to buy out the company, his third such offer in the past five years from larger, international companies hoping to expand to Peru. He’s always thought of the investors as crazy, describing the transaction like it’s nothing more than a math problem. To Andres, the company is more like a child who needs guidance and nurturing, one who always needs its father no matter how old it gets. He knows he could never let it go.

  “I’ll figure something out,” he says, excusing himself to make a quick phone call. He tries to collect whatever strength is left in him to dial his mother’s number and ask for the money again. She doesn’t refuse him, but she does negotiate. She’ll pay only Guillermo’s fee, and it’ll be a loan, she adds. “Take your time paying it back. We’ll have many years ahead of us, I hope.”

  Hope is useless, he thinks as he hangs up.

  With the matter of his fee taken care of, Guillermo agrees to start working so long as he receives payment the next day. He doesn’t waste time with paperwork or formalities.

  “Did they say when they’d call back?”

  “No. Just that they would,” Andres says.

  “We’ll have to get them to give us windows for when they’ll call next time. In the meantime, we’ll be using every minute between now and then to prepare,” Guillermo says.

  “Of course. You’re right.” Andres remembers he had one more question. “My mother mentioned that you helped the Duarez family when Elena was kidnapped. Have you kept in touch with her since she came home?”

  Guillermo stops his note-taking and looks confused for a moment. He gathers his papers and straightens them out with a loud tap against the desk. “It’s probably best that you ask the family. I’m not at liberty to discuss my clients’ personal matters. You understand.”

  “Of course,” Andres says.

  “Good.”

  Guillermo explains that the best way to ensure a loved one’s safe return is to expect that everything will go wrong. He repeats this again and again during his thirty-minute briefing. He explains that they’ll need a room to use as their base of operations and a dedicated phone line to record all calls. Andres assumes they’ll take care of everything from his office, but Guillermo points to the large window behind Andres’s desk and dismisses the suggestion. “This won’t do,” he says.

  In spite of himself, even in these extreme circumstances, Andres is offended. He still clings to the illusion of being in charge, even though whatever power he’s fooled himself into thinking he has vanished the second he heard the kidnapper’s voice on the phone.

  “What’s in here?” Guillermo asks from a few steps down the hall. He places his hand on the thin white door to Marabela’s darkroom that practically blends into the walls. Normally, people walk by it and assume it’s a closet. Even Andres, who knows it’s much more than that, has gotten used to pretending there’s nothing on the other side. For a moment he’s impressed by Guillermo’s intuition, but this is quickly replaced by a childlike panic, as if he’s trespassing into a forbidden space.

  “We can’t go in there. It’s off-limits,” he says.

  Guillermo gives him a dubious look. “Andres. We need a space that won’t be compromised. It doesn’t need to be big, just enough for a small desk and a couple of chairs. Windowless and guarded would be best, for obvious reasons.” He repeats his question. “What’s in here?”

  “It’s Marabela’s darkroom. I’ll have to get a key for it,” he says, and calls down to Consuelo.

  When she brings the key upstairs, he can see the hesitation in her eyes as she hands it to him. As he opens the door and lets the light in, Andres feels like he’s stepping into a place that was never meant for him.

  After Marabela gave birth to Ignacio, everyone expected she’d stop taking photographs for Rolando’s newspaper, but it was only a matter of months before she was back at the office, camera in hand, looking over her editor’s shoulder in hopes that he’d assign her a good story. Her job got more dangerous with each passing year. When the military government began converting private farms into agricultural cooperatives, Marabela was there to photograph the protests. She ventured onto the streets even as they were seething with tear gas meant to dissuade thousands of striking workers. It was as if she was incapable of feeling fear as long as she saw it through the lens of a camera. Andres tried hinting that she should stay home, but Marabela refused to quit, arguing that their country needed brave journalists who wouldn’t run from the truth or cower to a corrupt press now more than ever.

  Everything had been so uncertain back then. In the papers, he’d read about the guerrilla insurgent groups festering in the southern Andes—how they were gathering support and arming peasants in the most impoverished regions of Ayacucho—and he’d become terrified of Marabela ending up behind the camera, on the other side of those images. There were men whose faces had been bludgeoned with machetes, their wounds half covered by handkerchiefs, and women who knelt next to corpses of loved ones, weeping. Sometimes Marabela would hold up the paper, read the image credit, and shake her head as she tossed it away in disgust. “I should’ve
been there,” she’d say.

  He couldn’t understand it at the time, but he also couldn’t bear the thought of her wandering through the pueblos jóvenes growing along the edges of the city. As the Shining Path began to establish its presence in the shantytowns, she’d photograph evidence of its influence graffitied on the walls of shacks, messages of uprisings by the people and boycotts of elections. Over the years the group started targeting its acts closer to the city. By the time Cynthia was born, Andres feared Marabela would venture out farther as soon as she could leave Consuelo with the baby, chasing the kind of stories that never ended well. Every day there was another bomb, another fire, first in the electrical transmission towers that left the entire city in the dark, then near the government palace and shopping malls.

  “This was my gift to her for our tenth anniversary,” Andres says, volunteering the information to fill the uncomfortable silence.

  Guillermo takes a look around, turning his entire body as if the room were much bigger than it is. “It’s a tremendous gift for a photographer. She must have loved it,” he says.

  “Yes,” Andres says, but he is not so proud of it now. He’d thought he could meet her halfway with the gift of the darkroom, but Marabela had recognized it for what it was: a compromise. So he rarely asked to enter, rarely even bothered knocking on the door.

  “I’ll arrange it so that no one would even know I was here,” Guillermo says. Andres closes the door behind them and the two men are enveloped in darkness. Andres hears a switch and a deep red light fills the room, startling him.

  “This kind of light is safe,” Guillermo says.

  “Are you sure?”

  “My father was a photographer. You didn’t think she fumbled around in here in the dark, do you?”

  “I hadn’t really thought of it. It’s private. I haven’t set foot in here in years.”

  Even so, he recognizes the room’s scent. The chemicals smell like Marabela’s fingertips, harsh and piercing; all that’s missing is the added essence of her skin, the subtle mixture of her lilac-infused soaps and lotions. He’s never felt so uneasy yet so comforted by a place, even one where he’s not welcome. Marabela is everywhere here, in the still-hanging images of Cynthia playing with a street vendor’s hat, in the test strips of gray and black that litter the garbage, each meticulously cut to the same exact size. She’s even left a pair of slippers he’s never seen her wear. The darkroom reveals pieces of her he recognizes and pieces of her he didn’t know were there.

  Guillermo clears his throat and scratches his neck, looking away from him. Andres feels his pulse pound at the thought of rearranging the room for their efforts. What would Marabela do if she knew her safest space was being exposed to such horrors? After all they went through to put the darkroom together, it pains him to see it dismantled.

  “Keeping a private darkroom is no easy feat,” he says. “The chemicals are expensive and hard to come by, and that contraption”—he points at what looks like a giant magnifying glass, vaguely remembering how Marabela explained that it shoots light through the negatives, burning an image onto the resin-coated paper—“I had to have it imported from the US because Marabela insisted it was the best.”

  “Very impressive,” Guillermo says.

  “Everything in here is fragile. We shouldn’t even be in here, let alone touch anything,” Andres says.

  “I understand. I’ll be careful setting up. Don’t forget, this isn’t permanent. We’re doing this for Marabela’s own good, so she’ll be back here as soon as possible. I’m sure she’d appreciate that.”

  Andres shakes his head. “You don’t know my wife. She sometimes has difficulties seeing the bigger picture.”

  “And she’s a photographer?” Guillermo says. Andres catches his smile, a gentle jab. He should be offended but his first instinct is to laugh, and it feels good, this tiny allowance.

  “So, where do we start?” he says.

  “First, all this equipment needs to be put away. I’ll need your help,” Guillermo says.

  They take trays of liquids and pour them down the drain of the small sink. Pictures get tucked away into a drawer, and Guillermo checks the area to make sure there are no unexposed films or papers that need to be shielded from the light. In the eerie glow of the red light, they work in silence, and when they’re done the room is just another poorly lit windowless office with a view to nowhere.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Guillermo makes a list of items he’ll need: a cordless telephone, a duplication device to make copies of every recording, and headphones with a ten-foot wire, so he can listen in on conversations but stay out of sight if necessary. He adds notepads, extra pens, and a map, and suggests Andres send for one of the copy machines from his office. When they’re done assembling this unlikely shopping list—a task not unlike Marabela’s handling of the kids’ school supplies, Andres realizes now—they send Consuelo to pick up the electronics and Carla to the office supply store. While they’re gone, Guillermo asks how long the maids have been working with the family.

  “Consuelo’s been with us more than seventeen years, and Carla just a year, but she’s Consuelo’s niece. They can be trusted,” Andres says, surprised that he’s suddenly feeling defensive of the women.

  “Even so, it’s best that only you have a key to the darkroom. No one should enter but you and I.” Guillermo continues giving Andres basic instructions as they work. He feels like he’s back in school, taking an introductory course where the teacher goes over the syllabus first. “They’ll make you wait,” Guillermo says. “Fear and anticipation are their most powerful weapons. Remember that each time you speak. The most important thing is consistency. Each time they call, they should talk only to you. They should call only your second business line, not the home one—”

  “It’s not suspicious if I ask them to call a different number?”

  “It’s common practice by now. They shouldn’t be surprised unless they’re amateurs. Just tell them you can’t risk missing their call if other people are calling the main line during the day.”

  “Of course,” Andres says.

  “We have to be able to notice when they do something out of the norm. We can’t do that until we’ve established what the norm is. So we’ll be monitoring everything—every call, every sound in the background, even expressions that they’re fond of using, and the times of day they call. I need you to be alert.” At this, Guillermo snaps his fingers. “You need to establish a rapport with these men. They can’t just see you as a source of income and an enemy.”

  “I’m supposed to befriend them?”

  “You’re supposed to convince them not to do anything drastic. And the only way to do that is to let them think they’re better off getting what they can and moving on.”

  “To someone else?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that you’ll have to negotiate—”

  “Without letting them realize I’m negotiating?”

  “Something like that.”

  By now Guillermo looks annoyed by Andres’s constant interruptions. He’s a man of few words and he seems to have exhausted his quota, so they work in silence for the next half hour. Consuelo returns from shopping, having gone to three different stores. She offers to help but Guillermo thanks her and guides her gently away from the door, explaining that the best thing she can do is help maintain as much normalcy in the house as possible.

  “The kids will be home from school soon,” Andres adds. “They’ll want a snack.” This is something he’s learned in just the few days he’s been staying home. “Maybe prepare some fresh chicha.” They usually buy the purple corn drink bottled from the store, but made fresh it fills the house with the sweet aroma of cloves and the boiled pineapple rinds mixed in.

  “I wouldn’t mind a glass, either,” Guillermo says, smiling at Consuelo as she leaves.

  They’re in the midst of connecting the wire to the telephone, stretching it across the hallway between Ignacio’s room and t
he bathroom, when the kids come home. Andres can hear Cynthia talking to Carla in the kitchen, but Ignacio’s steps are fast approaching up the stairs, as if he’s in a hurry to lock himself in his room. Guillermo stands in the middle of the hall with the wire in his hand while Andres tries to roll up the cord as fast as he can, inching toward him, the wire limp as a jump rope between the two of them.

  “What’s going on?” Ignacio says. Andres follows his son’s eyes as they travel from him, to the wire, to Guillermo. He can tell he’s trying to connect the pieces himself but he’s missing a key element. Andres hands his end of the wire to Guillermo, who gives him a nod, just small enough so that Ignacio doesn’t catch it.

  “Let’s go to your room.”

  Ignacio clutches the straps of his backpack, tightening and loosening them so the bag bounces up and down against his body. He tosses it onto his bed as soon as they walk in, and Andres moves it to the edge of the bed as he takes a seat.

  “Do you want to sit down?” he asks.

  “Do I need to?”

  Andres leans over, rests his elbows against his knees, and locks his fingers together. He could almost be praying, except he’s looking right at his son, trying to think of the words that will make this information bearable. The air in the room is stagnant and warm. Ignacio flips on the fan and pulls out a rolling chair from under his desk. He takes a seat and pushes himself against the wall, away from his father.

  The fan spins overhead, picking up speed slowly. A glimmer of light catches Andres’s eye by the nightstand. Hanging from Ignacio’s lamp and swaying side to side is a silver pendant on a fine, short chain. He’s not close enough to see the engraved figure, but Andres recognizes the small oval shape: Saint Anthony, patron of lost articles. A gift Marabela gave their son when he was four and had left his favorite toy truck at the beach. She and Ignacio went back five days in a row to search for it in the sand. Even weeks later, Andres would catch Ignacio looking for the truck, digging holes and abandoning them for a new spot to unearth.