by Jay Begler
When they returned to the stable, the young boy asked, “How was your ride?”
Rebecca answered smiling, “It had its ups and downs,” and winked at Morales. “Tell me, what are those two houses down the road? Does anyone live there?”
“They are special guest houses for people that want privacy. Sometimes Mr. Chula comes up here to relax and be alone.”
“I’d love to see the inside of one of them, wouldn’t you Hector?
“Yes.”
The young boy made a call on his cell phone, waited and said, “Its fine. Go to the first house. They are identical on the inside, and Maria the housekeeper is in the first house. She can fix you some coffee or hot chocolate or whatever you like.”
They sipped hot chocolate on a large porch in front of one of the houses. Each wanted to hold the other’s hand, but resisted because they wished to keep their relationship a secret. Rebecca said, “That was pretty wonderful.”
“It was just us acting as lovers.”
“It felt so spontaneous and romantic. Is that what we are now, Hector, lovers?”
“I’d like to think that’s we are, though, in reality, we are more like fireflies.”
“We’re what?”
“Fireflies. We’ll be intense for a short period, and then our love lights, so to speak, will go out.”
“It’s a sad but perfect concept.”
“I’m not as brilliant as you think. The idea is from a book called The Fireflies, by a Mexican writer named Hector, like me, Suarez.”
Rebecca took his hand and kissed it, forgetting for the moment her potential public exposure. “What do you think it feels like to be truly in love, Hector?”
“It’s how I feel about you now.” He thought for certain that there might be a slight rebuke for this admission, but Rebecca replied. “It’s about how I feel about you Hector, but still Hector as hard as it will be to break away from you when I leave, I will. And if you truly love me, you will keep your word.”
“I promised and I promise.” Then, looking around and seeing no one, he leaned over and kissed her.
“Do you want me to still come to your room tonight?” She laughed slightly, “or are you all tuckered out?”
“Not to worry, I’ll be up for the occasion.”
That night, and virtually every night thereafter, Rebecca came to his room. Their passion for each other and for the sex was unrelenting. She wanted to experience virtually all forms of lovemaking, and Morales was happy to accommodate.
The days at the hacienda fell into a routine: physical training in the morning, laboratory work side by side till noon, late swims in the enormous pool after work, and lovely long walks. It surprised him that during these walks, they never seemed to run out of things to talk about, some frivolous and some serious. Occasionally, on mostly nasty days, they would practice on their instruments and play duets together; other days they’d be content reading in the hacienda’s well stocked reading room. Their love making, like their relationship evolved. Once competent enough in the mechanics of making love, they developed a rhythm with each other. They lusted for each other, and made love in every nook and cranny of the hacienda.
Towards the end of the summer, Morales’ fully realized that for the first time in his life he was truly happy, a feeling tempered by the knowledge that Rebecca would soon be leaving. As the end of her stay approached, that knowledge morphed into apprehension and deep regret. Each night, he would wake well before dawn, tense and worried, and wonder, “What am I going to do without her?”
The night that Morales had dreaded had arrived. Rebecca would leave in the morning. They began to make love, but Rebecca pulled away and sobbed. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”
“Like what?”
“So painful not seeing you anymore.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Amidst tears she said, “Yes, it does!”
As if he truly understood, Morales held her and gently kissed her head. “I know. I know. It’s equally hard for me. But I’ll always be there for you, if you change your mind or simply want to see me.” And then he laughed slightly and said, “Or you want the best sex you’ve ever had.”
She laughed, “It’s too early to make that judgment, but I suspect you’ve spoiled me.” They didn’t speak after that, but held each other until sleep overtook them.
It was the noise of the helicopter engine that woke him. He said, “Rebecca?” There was silence. Morales ran to the window. A sliver of morning light was pushing back the night sky. As he looked out, he saw Rebecca and her father enter the helicopter. The pilot was loading up the last of their luggage.
The helicopter lifted slowly from the ground and flew west to Mexico City. He thought, “No. It can’t end this way.” He needed to say something; to hold her, to kiss her one last time.
He returned to his bed and saw a note,
“Dearest Hector,
I didn’t want to wake you. You’ll always have a special place in my heart, and I hope that you feel that way about me as well. Perhaps someday when we are older, we’ll run into each other. But for now, I ask that you honor my wish that we have no further contact with each other. I know it’s hard, but that’s the way it has to be. I’ll always love you. R.”
Not knowing quite what to do, Morales found himself in Rebecca’s room and saw an orange scarf she tied a chair. He wondered if she had left it for him on purpose. He put it up to his nose and drank in the remnants of her perfume, which she once told him was called “My Sin.” They both laughed when she said that her parents cautioned that anything connected with a sin was inappropriate. Morales kept the scarf well after he became head of the Aztec Cartel. By that time, however, its fragrance evaporated. Still, whenever he went with some of his men to hunt down and kill someone, he wore the scarf thinking it would protect him. No one dared to laugh at him.
Rebecca’s reaction to the end of her relationship to was different. By the time the helicopter reached a cruising altitude, she had already placed Morales in one of her compartments and sealed it tight.
Morales spent the next two weeks in a grief-stricken zombie like state. At his lowest moments, he wished he never met Rebecca because his pain caused by her exit was so intense. At the end of each day, however, he would return to the pool, to the spot where he first fell in love with her. He was re-reading Rebecca’s note when he heard a girl’s voice from behind.
“Hector?”
He knew it wasn’t Rebecca’s voice. He turned and stared at a teenage girl and drew back slightly in shock. She was rail thin, and wore a baseball cap which topped a very thick veil and ultra-large dark sunglasses. It was Isabella.
Six
•
Our Lady of the Veils
When Chula first saw his daughter behind the glass window fronting the hospital’s nursery, he thought the hospital must have made a mistake. This couldn’t be his daughter; their offspring. He was handsome, Adriana beautiful. The meshing of their genes couldn’t produce this thing (he later regretted that word but it came to mind at the time) a grotesque-looking infant, a child with elongated and skeletal features and eyes that bulged in a way that they looked artificial. In the shock of the moment, he perceived her more as an alien than a human being. For the first time, the tough, macho, Marlboro Man, stepped out of his persona and cried uncontrollably.
Doctors at the hospital had several theories for her condition, but could not say with confidence that their varying diagnoses were correct. Ultimately, their consensus was that she had a form of Marfan syndrome, because her physical appearance seemed consistent with symptoms of the disease. The Marfan Foundation estimates the disease afflicts one in five thousand. There is a spectrum, however, as to the severity of the symptoms, ranging from mild (often not detected) to severe. As an infant, Isabella’s symptoms were at the far end of the severe range. Her parents sought the best medical treatment in the world, but conventional medicine did not help. It was only aft
er they went to a clinic on the outskirts of Geneva and doctors put her on a regimen of injections, reputedly consisting of reformulated lamb placentas that she showed some slight improvement. Her looks moved from grotesque to head-turning ugly.
As a teenager, Isabella’s weight reached 100 pounds and her skeletal features were not as pronounced. Still, she had the kind of looks that caused people to stare and comment in whispers. As she became older, Isabella had to endure the cruel taunts of her classmates. A nasty girl in her class would say behind her back that she looked like a skeleton in a dress. The mean-spirited observation was accurate. The shocked reaction of Morales, his recoiling in surprise, was something that Isabella had experienced before.
Life, however, had dealt Isabella a mixed hand. She was more than intelligent. With an IQ of close to ١٩٥, those administering her test rated Isabella as a “high genius.” The Chulas didn’t realize quite how smart Isabella was until, at the age of 2, she asked for her favorite book, Goodnight Moon. To their amazement, she read it aloud to them cover to cover. She taught herself to read, and the Chulas did not understand how she accomplished this amazing feat.
When the Chulas bought her jigsaw puzzles, she would place all the pieces on the floor in front of her, stare at them for a minute or two and then in less than five minutes put the puzzle together. The puzzles for her age were soon too simple for Isabella and she would grow bored doing them. To increase the challenge, she turned the puzzles over so no pictures were visible and rapidly put them together. By the time she was five, she had memorized hundreds of songs, and would entertain Chula and his wife and amaze their friends by singing songs they suggested perfectly. By her tenth birthday, all who experienced her singing realized that as she matured, she would have a beautiful singing voice, though they confided in each other that she could never entertain professionally given her looks.
As a way of coping with her appearance, she exhibited a quick wit and a self-effacing charm that made her popular with adults and most of her classmates. Just before entering high school, she decided to wear thick veils and large sunglasses as a way of deflecting shock. Her classmates were initially surprised at this, but later paid no mind to it, naming her “our lady of the veils,” a name which she liked and which stuck to her.
While some at school still made fun of her, Isabella was disarming enough to deflect the teasing and smart enough to tease back to the effect that by the time she was fourteen, the teasing had stopped and she had many friends. The problem was that as she moved through her teens, her friends were becoming interested in boys. While she never became an outcast, Isabella felt like an outsider. When not asked to a school dance, she would cry to her mother, “What boy would take out someone like me?” Her mother comforted her, but did not have a response. It wasn’t that Isabella wanted a relationship with a boy, she just wanted acceptance by her peers.
She had no interest in boys, or girls, or sex. She determined that she was asexual, which she thought might have been a blessing. As her peers’ interest in boys intensified, Isabella sensed a growing feeling of isolation and loneliness. A voracious and extremely fast reader, Isabella retreated to the world of books and particularly books about art. If she could not be beautiful, she could appreciate and enjoy things of beauty, and found that art provided an abundance of the beauty that eluded her.
By the time she was fifteen, Isabella knew far more about art than most adults. She visited every art museum in Mexico City many times and cajoled her parents into taking her to great museum cities like New York, London and Paris where she would spend hours on docent tours. She was the youngest person to subscribe to Artforum and Art In America magazines, and one of a handful of people who read each cover to cover. She began painting and took art lessons, becoming a competent, but not exceptional artist. Painting, however, was a vocation that she followed into adulthood. Creating art, though not worthy of critical acclaim, gave her great joy.
Bored by her life at the hacienda and the small town of Ojinaga, where she attended a solid private school established by the Cartel and catering only to the children of Cartel members, she enrolled in The American School in London. Not only was it one of the best schools in London, it was within walking distance of the Tate and the British Museum. She spent many weekends traveling to art-centric cities like Florence and Paris. Once, on a school break, she traveled to Saint Petersburg on her own to visit the Hermitage. Isabella was so excited about the Hermitage that she took a crash course in Russian. When it was time for her museum tour, she took it with a Russian-speaking docent.
Knowing that she would someday inherit the hacienda and cattle business, Isabella learned virtually everything she could about cattle ranching. Within a year she knew as much about cattle as the foreman of the ranch and almost more than her father about the business, except for the part the cattle played in transporting drugs. When she returned to the hacienda on breaks or holidays, her friends were the ranch hands, employees of Chula who not only were genuinely fond of her but, like everyone else who came in contact with her, in awe of her intelligence. They also respected that she did not shy away from getting her hands dirty when she worked alongside them.
After she turned twenty-one, Chula asked her to go horseback riding with him. It was something they both loved to do together. During these rides they would have conversations about many things; some deeply personal. They stopped on top of a high bluff overlooking a dark lake below. It was one of Chula’s favorite places. With great trepidation, Chula said to Isabella, “I have something to tell you, Isabella, and you may find it awful and unbelievable. I pray that you’ll still love and respect me and your mother once I make my confession.”
She laughed slightly and replied, “That you are El Fantasma?”
He was shocked and alarmed. “You know? Who told you?”
“No one. But you wanted me to learn everything about your business, and part of that was going through all of your financials. Remember, last Christmas, I spent a week looking at your books and computer records. They seemed incongruous in ways, and the more I researched, the more I thought the only way the ranch all made sense financially was that it played a role in illegal drugs and that most likely you were El Fantasma. Also, you may remember when I was sixteen, and you started teaching me to fly a helicopter.”
“Yes, and two years later you were a certified pilot and began flying people to the local airport.”
“Well, in January of this year, I did a solo over the entire ranch, and took photographs of all of your buildings with a telephoto lens and then studied them.” Before he could protest, she said, “Don’t worry, I deleted the photos. I could tell from the configuration of a few of the buildings that they were producing drugs. And I’m guessing that you are using your steers to transport drugs.”
Astonished, he said, “You really are a genius. But I’m concerned about what you may think of me and your mother.”
“You are still my parents and I love you, though it’s hard for me to accept who you are and what you do. But let’s face it. I’ll never marry or have children.” She held up her hand to block his denial of what she just said. “My life is here on the ranch with you, mother and those who work on the ranch. I want to be part of it, just the business side and would like to help you, starting with the suggestion that you camouflage some of your buildings better to avoid detection from the air.”
The only time Chula ever cried was when he first saw his daughter at the hospital. And now, with his daughter at his side and overlooking the lake below, there were tears in his eyes. This time, however, they were tears of joy. Within a decade, Isabella was functioning as the COO of the Aztec Cartel.
Before Isabella announced her presence, she appraised him from a distance. He was, she thought, so sad. His initial involuntary reaction to her appearance was a startled moving back of his head. Isabella was used to this reaction from people who saw her for the first time. She laughed and said, “What’s the matter Hector, you never saw a ske
leton in a dress before?”
Embarrassed by his action, Morales responded, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t…”
She cut him off. “Not to worry. I’m really used to it. It doesn’t bother me at all, so it shouldn’t bother you. It’s amazing that we haven’t met before. The closest we came was when we were born and in the same nursery. I’m glad I came back early from Europe so we could finally meet.” She slipped off the robe she was wearing to reveal a one-piece black bathing suit. Her figure was unusual. Unlike the curved and soft body of Rebecca, her body was slender and sinewy and above all ultra-thin. Seeing Morales looking at her figure, she laughed and said, “At ski school at Courchevel, they call me the “ski pole.” Morales wanted to reply but didn’t know quite what to say.
“Hector, may I ask you something?”
“Sure”
“You look so sad, like someone who has lost the love of his life and my guess is that it’s the beautiful Rebecca.”
He protested slightly, “No no.”
“It’s ok, Hector. I never met her, but have seen photos of her. She’s lovely, and from what I understand quite enchanting.”
Morales needed a friendly ear to vent his frustration and sadness and, like a spigot suddenly opened, he described how they met, found romance, and fell in love with one another. “I think we both loved each other, but she insisted that when she left, our romance was over. I thought I could make her fall in love with me and maybe I succeeded, but her mind was made up.” And then he admitted something about himself he never revealed before. “You know Isabella, what’s interesting is that I never really loved anyone. I always thought I was incapable of feeling love. Rebecca changed all that.”
