Chasing the Sun: A Novel

by Natalia Sylvester

  It’s as busy a day as any, but Andres feels as if he’s watching his employees shuffle papers around and make phone calls through a one-way mirror. Occasionally, they look up as he walks by, and a few nod or say hello, but it doesn’t feel like anyone can really see him. They’re all worried about work and he’s trying to find a way to save his wife, their jobs, and their families. No matter how hard he tries, Andres has never been able to look at his employees without seeing their families. It is a burden and a responsibility that he can’t—and won’t—take lightly.

  He walks along the outside of the domino desks instead of cutting through the middle like he usually does. He passes fewer people this way.

  There’s Jacqui Saez by the fax machine, who recently took two days off because she had family in town for her daughter’s christening. Rodrigo Marquez is typing at his computer and talking on the phone at the same time. Andres knows he has five sisters. He passes Donna, Rebecca, and Ada, all secretaries who bond over their jobs and have children who go to the same school as Cynthia. It’s not unheard of for them to take turns carpooling, and they’ve asked Andres several times to let them know if he ever needs a ride for Cynthia. He tilts his head and smiles at each of them as he nears his office, afraid that if he says hello, his voice might crack and give him away.

  “Good morning,” Edith says, carrying a mug of coffee in one hand and a manila file in the other. “Before I forget, these are the papers your wife meant to pick up the other day. You said they were urgent so I wanted to bring them to you first thing.”

  “Of course. Thank you,” Andres says, placing the file in his suitcase before he forgets. His mother and Graves will be expecting to see the reports the next time they meet, but for now he can’t stand to look at them. These papers were meant to be a lesson in enterprise for his son; now they’ll be just scrutinized so a stranger can name his price.

  He closes the door, takes off his shoes, and sits with his legs crossed and with his back against the couch across from his desk. The everyday sounds of his busy office are dampened, and he’s left to his own helplessness, unsure what to do next. Edith always places the day’s paper and his coffee on the table next to the couch, and Andres rarely takes the time to ingest either. But ever since Marabela was taken, he can’t help but look through newspapers for information on kidnappings.

  With his back curled like a faucet over today’s El Tribunal, Andres scans the stories. The letters blur together as he runs over the lines with a covered pen, a habit he picked up from reading contracts quickly but carefully, ready to make changes at any moment. Today’s news is not some document that can be edited, but still Andres clings to his small rituals.

  When he recognizes a name on page five, he’s almost afraid to keep reading. The thirteen-year-old son of Edgar Villanueva was stolen from his own home two nights ago. He had been sleeping in his bedroom while his parents were still at work. Police think the kidnappers watched the house for weeks, learning the patterns of their life, the times that people came and left, the times that the maids opened the gates to check the mail and take out the trash. In the perfect moment, one man gagged the maid and took her back into the house. Three others went into the bedroom, covered the boy’s head and tied his hands. They pushed him into the back of their truck and drove off, so fast that they left the smell of burned rubber in the air.

  Andres imagines it was similar for Marabela. They were quick. They covered her face and tossed her against the hard metal bars of a truck. They cared if she was alive, but barely.

  Andres imagines the agony is similar for Villanueva. Instantly, he feels a kinship with Edgar, one he never could have imagined feeling when Andres met Villanueva and his wife six months ago at a mutual friend’s wedding. They’d all sat at the same table and Andres had made sure to be polite and approachable but otherwise assumed that would be the extent of their acquaintance. His wife was a petite woman with blond hair and freckles, who spoke with a Spanish lisp and a hint of suspense in her voice, as if she were always on the verge of telling a joke. She’d kept her arm wrapped around Edgar the entire time, gently scratching the back of his hand with her fingernails. Andres found he didn’t like looking at them for too long. They were a mirror image of the couple he and Marabela used to be.

  “They were nice,” Marabela said afterward, as they walked to their car. “I invited them over for dinner next week.”

  “Why?”

  “You didn’t like them?”

  He just shrugged his shoulders. “They seemed a bit fake.”

  “They seemed happy.”

  “Too happy.”

  “Only you could turn that into a bad thing,” she said. She began searching through her purse for something he knew she wouldn’t find; it was her way of avoiding eye contact when she was annoyed.

  “It just didn’t seem real,” Andres said.

  “And what? Is it hard for you to believe a married couple could be happy?”

  “You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I don’t know what you meant,” she said as she climbed into their car. “Look on the bright side; it’ll be good for you to get to know each other. For business.” But she was bitter when she said it, and they didn’t speak the rest of the ride home.

  The article has a picture of the boy in his school uniform, and a picture of his politician father sitting in what Andres assumes is their home, with his face buried in his hands. He pleads for no one to hurt his son in the pages of the very newspaper Andres’s father used to own. Edgar doesn’t bother threatening anyone. He just talks about how money isn’t an issue, and that the captors will get whatever they want as long as they get his boy home safely.

  Andres is afraid for him, and then jealous, and then disgusted that this kind of jealousy can even exist. The fact that Edgar has gone public tells him that these kidnappers are nothing like Marabela’s; Edgar can go to the police, can go to the press, because his son’s captors are part of a revolution they want to publicize. Their crime is all politics, not business. Targeting a politician’s son is a way for the terrorist organizations to reassert their power, in case anyone’s forgotten. In some twisted way, Edgar has a freedom Andres can only hope for; he has no secrets and therefore everyone’s support.

  There is even a radio station for families like Edgar’s to send messages to their loved ones. Sometimes Andres imagines himself waiting in line for five, six hours, as some of the families do, all for the chance to broadcast a few words and hope that they find their way to Marabela. But he can’t bring himself to defy Hades’s demands for secrecy and silence.

  Instead, he’s been listening to the radio late at night before bed, with the volume turned so low that if he breathes too hard he can’t hear it.

  We love you. We are always thinking of you. We will never give up until you’re back with your family, where you belong.

  Their grief has a voice, when all Andres can cling to is quiet desperation.

  He decides he needs to leave the office and gives Edith an excuse about being needed at home, but as he makes his way back to the car he realizes it’s the last place he wants to go. It’s still early, and he could use some time to clear his head.

  He stops at the bronze statue of the city’s founder in the center of the plaza while passersby swirl around. Nobody seems to notice him, though he must look out of place: a lost man in a three-piece suit, clutching his briefcase like a child with a plastic lunch box, wandering around with no real place to go. He turns toward the breeze so he can feel the wind in his hair. The flower beds surrounding the statue give it an artificial touch, their brightness too intense to be real. He’s always walked by them in a hurry, and he regrets that only now, when his mind is incapable of appreciating their beauty, does he have time to stand and look at them.

  On every street corner, men in bright vests make a business out of exchanging tourists’ foreign money for their own. They’ve stuffed their pockets so full of cash and coins it looks like they’re car
rying rocks. Andres wonders how they keep from being robbed; it’s no secret that cash is their trade. Since the exchange rate changes constantly, no one ever knows what they’ll get. Tourists approach the men, ask, “How much for fifty?” and the men type numbers into their handheld calculators, holding the screens up to their customers’ faces. The tourists always look so impressed. So much for so little? they seem to say. It is the greatest illusion of all.

  The locals know better, though. Their currency is ever changing. First there was the inti, named after the ancient Incan sun god, then the sol, Spanish for “sun.” Now the nuevo sol promises something new. The government says it is stronger, but still no one trusts it will be worth tomorrow what it’s worth today. The people can’t easily forget their shock when their money plummeted not even two years ago, and they realized that even a million amounted to very little. How was it possible to have a million of anything and nearly nothing all at once?

  The truth is, Andres stopped counting his wealth in soles long ago. With inflation the way it’s been, counting cash is like counting grains of sand as the tide comes in.

  “Señor, cuatro soles,” a little boy says to him. “I’ll polish your shoes. Sit down right here, señor. Cuatro soles.” The boy pulls a brush and black shoe polish from a wooden box, then places it on the floor and sits on it. He taps the side of it three times, signaling for Andres to sit.

  Andres knows he could get his shoes polished for less about a block away, but he sits down on the green bench because he has nothing better to do, or nothing better that he’d like to do, or simply because he’s tired and he hasn’t the energy to argue.

  The boy can’t be older than four, but he rubs the brown leather shoes with a strength that makes Andres rock back and forth. The sensation is not unlike the feeling of hurtling down an unpaved highway. Every five strokes or so, the boy tosses the brush so it spins and circles in the air, then taps his box twice before catching it. It’s a little show that might help him get a few cents of extra change, but Andres is too busy staring at a crack in the sidewalk to notice.

  A flash of yellow cloth catches Andres’s eye across the street, a woman with a pale dress caught in the wind, walking at a slow pace, as if admiring the grimy buildings along the plaza. He realizes with a start that it’s Marabela—unmistakably—the wavy dark brown hair that bounces as she walks, the way she swings her arms side to side, nonchalantly. Andres jumps up and begins running toward her, brushing the little boy off his wooden box. In the distance, he hears the boy shouting after him, demanding payment, but the voice fades as Andres picks up speed. Marabela turns at the corner of the street, still about a block ahead of Andres. Even though he runs faster, he can’t catch up to her in time. It’s like a strange scene out of a horror film, where the villain advances at a steady pace while his victim dashes through the woods. Andres pushes people out of his way, bumps their shoulders, and almost trips over a woman’s basket of fruit on the edge of the sidewalk, but none of it matters, just that he reaches Marabela before she disappears from his life for a third time.

  Finally she stops at a phone booth about forty feet ahead of him. In an instant Andres jumps to several different conclusions, from the best (she’s escaped and she’s trying to call home) to the worst (she set this whole thing up and now she’s walking around in a brand-new dress). He knew she was capable of leaving him, but putting the family through so much pain just for money and the satisfaction of destroying his company is a new low. He supposes she always had it in her—the seeds were there, in the form of jokes and sarcasm.

  Andres swings open the door of the phone booth, out of breath. She just stands there, her eyes wide open and afraid of the stranger in front of her. The woman in the phone booth cannot possibly be the same one he followed. She has a sharper nose than Marabela’s and tired wrinkles around her eyes.

  He apologizes but slams the phone booth shut. The woman jumps, and he tries not to look back at her so he won’t have to see her judging him, losing his grip on what he wants so badly to be real.

  When Andres wanders back to the plaza, he finds the shoe polish boy rooting through his briefcase.

  “Here,” he says, taking eight soles out of his pocket, doubling the amount he owes. Andres knows he shouldn’t be tossing extra money around, even if it’s just a few bucks, but it’s what Marabela would have done. She always used to say, “What’s a little change for us? Nothing. For them, it’s everything.” The boy’s smile tells Andres she was right, and soon he runs off with his box and brushes in tow, leaving the briefcase open and ransacked on the sidewalk.

  It’s an exhausting effort for Andres to pick up the papers and pens. Each time he bends over, his pant legs lift over his ankles, revealing the beige socks he put on this morning without bothering to check whether they matched. He can feel his slacks slipping past his waist. In just a few days, he’s lost not only his sanity but also quite a bit of weight.

  His thoughts turn to his dry throat and a sudden urge for a drink, something strong that would sting on the way down. About a block away, there’s a bar he frequents after work, and now his body wanders over without him giving it much thought. Instead of walls, the bar has a large mirror that extends from one corner of the room to the other, and Andres can see his addled reflection as he places an order. The bartender quickly fills up a glass and Andres slouches over it, a warm fire that he wants to keep to himself.

  But his quiet moment is quickly interrupted by a familiar voice: “Andres!” He turns to find Nico Valdez, the head of a company Andres works with frequently, holding a drink as he walks through the dense crowd.

  A smile spreads across Andres’s face. He’s always liked Nico. In the fourteen years they’ve worked together, their companies have grown at similar rates. They’ve talked at this bar many times before, venting about lazy employees and difficult business partners, sharing tricks for how to beat traffic in the mornings. They’ve been to each other’s house for dinner, though less in recent months, when his and Marabela’s problems became nearly impossible to conceal. They shake hands and pat each other’s back.

  “Hola, hermano,” Andres says, relieved to see a familiar face but nervous that this is as far as his lies about Marabela will go. Surely Nico’s heard from his wife that Marabela’s disappeared from her social circles. Surely someone has already talked.

  “How are you? How are the wife and kids?” Nico asks.

  “They’re great. Just fine, thanks.” The lie is instinctual; he can’t remember the last time he didn’t feel the need to put his guard up.

  Nico doesn’t seem to be paying attention. He’s got his eyes on the bar, contemplating his order. “A certain kind of day requires a certain kind of drink,” he says, slapping his palm against the bar. “What are you having?”

  Andres tilts his glass at him. Whisky. Straight.

  “Oof! That bad, huh?” Nico laughs, not realizing the truth in his joke, or perhaps not caring to uncover it. “Two glasses of that, a nice nap in the backseat while Jorge drives you home . . . tell him to take the long way and go around the block a couple of times, and you’ll be set.”

  Andres takes another sip and waits for the next question to come, tries to think of how he’ll answer it. The captors said no cops, utter secrecy, but how would they know if Andres told one trusted friend? He can’t be expected to carry the burden of this secret on his own. It’d be so nice to finally unload, to have someone listen to his side of the story.

  “So tell me, how long do you think before El Chino starts showing up to everything in a tank?” Nico says.

  Andres takes a sip of his drink, already tired of hearing and reading about the Fujigolpe. He knows there’s little he can say to keep Nico from declaring his opinions in dramatic fashion as usual, so he decides to fuel the flames. “Personally, I think it’s about time. At least someone’s doing something.”

  “Hermano, really? He suspended the goddamned constitution! This is going to change everything. Watch, years from
now when these terroristas de mierda have been locked up for decades and no one remembers their names or what they did, then the people will start complaining about democracy and everything they willingly gave up when they were too afraid to stand up for it. Remember, I said it first. Anyone who gets rid of freedom in the name of freedom is no better than the terrorists.”

  “But they’ll be locked up. Isn’t that the point?” Andres takes a couple more sips of his drink and gets up. This casual encounter isn’t providing the relief he hoped it would. He can tell Nico is disappointed in him but doesn’t want to end the conversation on a sour note.

  “Don’t forget—tell Jorge, twice around the block and you’ll be rested like a baby.”

  “Right. Nice to catch up, Nico.”

  “You didn’t finish your drink,” he says.

  Andres shakes his head and waves. On his way back to the car, he passes the phone booth where he encountered Marabela’s look-alike. It’s empty now, and the receiver dangles from its metal rope. He contemplates picking it up, wonders whom he could possibly call. His childhood friends haven’t been in touch in years, having distanced themselves after he and Marabela married. He tried to convince himself that it was because these friends were jealous of his happiness, but now he can admit that Marabela might have made them uncomfortable with her habit of turning even the most casual conversations into an opportunity to lecture about racial divides between the classes or the short-term collective memory of citizens who continue to support militarization. He would do anything to hear one of her impassioned diatribes right now.