Of Love and Shadows (19 page)

The Arab had been appointed by his government to buy sheep. He met Eusebio Beltrán at a reception in the Arabian Embassy, and because each was driven by the same unremitting obsession for beautiful women and lavish parties, they became friends on the spot. After the reception, Irene's father invited his new friend to prolong the festivities at the house of a certain well-known lady, where they continued to celebrate with champagne and beautiful mercenaries until the evening ended in a noisy bacchanal that would have dispatched other, less hardy souls straight to hell. The next morning, the two men awoke with queasy stomachs and blurred memories, but after a shower and a thick, spicy clam chowder, they began to revive. Abstemious, like any good Muslim, the Arab was suffering real torment from his hangover, and for hours Irene's father offered him companionship and consolation with natural remedies such as camphor rubdowns and cold cloths on the forehead. By dusk, they were brothers and had poured out their life secrets to each other. That was when the foreigner suggested to Eusebio that he take charge of the sheep operation, because there were tons of money in it for the man who knew how to take advantage of it.

“Well, I've never seen a ewe on the hoof, but if they're anything like heifers or hens, I shouldn't have any trouble,” said Beltrán, with a laugh.

So began the business arrangement that would lead to Beltrán's financial ruin, even to his oblivion, as his wife had prophesied long before she had evidence to support her convictions. Beltrán traveled to the extreme south of the continent where such animals proliferate, and set about constructing a slaughterhouse and refrigeration plant, investing a large portion of his own fortune in the project. When everything was ready, a holy man from the heart of Araby was sent to supervise the ritual killings and thereby insure that everything would be carried out according to the strict laws of the Koran. Kneeling toward Mecca, the holy man was to say a prayer for every slaughtered sheep; further, he was to confirm that the animal was beheaded by a single stroke of the blade and bled in the hygienic manner prescribed by Mohammed. Once they were sanctified, cleaned, and frozen, the carcasses were to be air-expressed to their ultimate destiny. In the first weeks, the proceedings were carried out with appropriate rigor, but the Imam soon lost his initial enthusiasm. He had no incentive. No one around him understood the importance of his duties; no one spoke his language; no one had read the Holy Book. To the contrary, he was surrounded by foreign ruffians who laughed in his face as he chanted his Arabic prayers and constantly taunted him with obscene gestures. Debilitated by the cold southern climate, by nostalgia and culture shock, his spirit was quickly broken. Eusebio Beltrán, always a practical man, suggested that to avoid interruption in the operation, the Imam should record his prayers on a tape recorder. After that, the Imam's decline was apparent to all. His malaise reached alarming proportions; he stopped coming to the slaughterhouse altogether; he capitulated to idleness, gambling, oversleeping, and the vice of liquor—everything his religion forbade—but no one is perfect, as Beltrán consoled him when he found the Arab lamenting his human frailty.

The sheep continued to leave the plant, stiff and cold as lunar rocks, without anyone's being the wiser; no one knew that their impurities had not been bled through the jugular, or that the tape recorder was reeling off
boleros
and
rancheras
instead of the obligatory Muslim prayers. All this would have been of little consequence had his Arab government not sent—without previous warning—a second Imam commissioned to monitor his South American associate. On the same day the new arrival visited the plant and saw how the precepts of the Koran were being subverted, the sheep business was shut down and Eusebio found himself saddled with both a vociferously repentant Muslim mystic, who was nonetheless reluctant to return home immediately, and a mountain of worthless frozen sheep, which Eusebio could not sell because their flesh was not appreciated in his country. Then it was that the magnanimous aspect of Eusebio's personality came into play. He betook himself and his merchandise to the capital, where he drove his truck through the neighborhoods of the poor, giving away meat to the most needy. He was sure that his initiative would be imitated by other wholesalers, whose generosity would be challenged and who would also give a portion of their products to the destitute. He dreamed of a fraternal chain formed by bakers, greengrocers, fishmongers, and storekeepers, by impresarios of pasta, rice, and caramels, by importers of tea, coffee, and chocolate, by processors of preserves, liquors, and cheeses; in a word, Beltrán dreamed that every industrialist and businessman in the land would contribute a part of his earnings to alleviate the evident hunger of the downtrodden, the widows, the orphans, the unemployed—all the afflicted. But none of this came to pass. The butchers termed his grand gesture the work of a clown, and everyone else simply ignored him. But because he enthusiastically continued his crusade in the face of all odds, he was threatened with death for trying to ruin the business and prestige of honorable merchants. When they called him a Communist, it was almost more than Beatriz Alcántara's nerves could stand. She had summoned up sufficient strength to tolerate her husband's extravagances, but she could not bear the brunt of that dangerous accusation. Eusebio Beltrán, personally, continued to hand out legs and shoulders of lamb from a truck plastered with huge posters and equipped with a loudspeaker announcing his program. Soon he was being watched by the police and stalked by hired killers; his competitors had decided to put an end to the whole business. He was harassed with jeers and death threats, and his wife received anonymous letters of unimaginable obscenity. When his truck with its
PHILANTHROPIC BUTCHER SHOP
sign appeared on television, and the lines of the poor swelled to a throng beyond the control of the guardians of law and order, Beatriz Alcántara lost her last shred of patience, and unleashed all the bile stored up in a lifetime of bitterness. That was when Eusebio had left, never to return.

“I've never worried about my father, Francisco. I was sure that he'd left to get away from Mother and from his creditors, from the damned sheep that had begun to rot when he couldn't get rid of them,” said Irene. “But now I'm not sure about anything.”

Her nights were filled with fear: in her dreams she saw the ashen bodies in the Morgue; Javier Leal dangling like some grotesque fruit from a tree in the children's park; the endless lines of women inquiring about their
desaparecidos
; Evangelina Ranquileo, barefoot and in her nightgown, calling from the shadows. Among so many alien ghosts she also saw her father, sinking into a quagmire of hatred.

“Maybe he didn't run away. Maybe they killed him. Maybe he's a prisoner—that's what my mother believes,” Irene sighed.

“There's no reason why a man of his position would have become a victim of the police.”

“Reason has nothing to do with my nightmares, or with the world we're living in.”

Just then Rosa entered, announcing that a woman was asking for Irene. Her name was Digna Ranquileo.

*  *  *

Digna carried the weight of the ages on her shoulders, and her eyes had grown pale from so much looking down the road, and waiting. She asked Francisco and Irene to forgive her for coming at such a late hour, and added that it was because she was desperate, she hadn't known whom to turn to. She couldn't leave her children by themselves, so it was impossible for her to travel during the day; but Mamita Encarnación had offered to stay with them tonight. Because of the midwife's kindness, Digna said, she'd been able to catch a bus to the capital. Irene told her she was glad she had come; she led her into the living room, and offered her something to eat, but Digna would accept only a cup of tea. She sat uneasily on the edge of her chair, eyes downcast, hugging her worn black pocketbook to her body. A shawl covered her shoulders and her hose were rolled to her knees, not quite meeting the hem of her narrow wool skirt. Her effort to conquer her shyness was painfully evident.

“Have you learned anything about Evangelina,
señora
?”

Digna shook her head and, after a long pause, she told them that she'd given up hope for Evangelina; everyone knew that searching for someone who'd disappeared was a task that had no end. She hadn't come about Evangelina, but about Pradelio, her oldest son. Her voice faded to an almost inaudible whisper.

“He's hiding,” she confessed.

Pradelio had fled from Headquarters. Because the country was in a state of war, he could pay with his life for this act. Once, all you had to do to resign from the police was to go through some red tape, but now they were part of the armed forces and had the same responsibilities as soldiers on the field of battle. Pradelio Ranquileo was in a dangerous position; if they caught up with him, he would be in bad trouble; his mother understood how bad after she'd seen him hunted like an animal. Hipólito, her husband, was the one who made the important decisions in the family, but he'd hooked up with the first circus that set up its tent nearby. All he had to do was hear the boom of the bass drum announcing the spectacle, and he would pull out the suitcase containing the trappings of his trade, join in the hullabaloo, and be off on circuits through villages and towns, and she could never catch up with him. And Digna had not dared tell her problem to anyone else. For several days, she mulled it over, not knowing what to do, until she remembered her conversation with Irene Beltrán and the journalist's interest in the misfortune that had befallen the Ranquileo home. She thought of Irene as the only person she could turn to.

“I have to get Pradelio out of the country,” she whispered.

“Why did he desert?”

Digna didn't know. One night he had come to the house, pale and drawn; his uniform was hanging in shreds, and he had the look of a crazy man. He would not tell her anything. He said he was starving, and he wolfed down anything he could find in the kitchen: raw onions, huge chunks of bread, dried meat, fruit, tea. Once he had had his fill, he folded his arms on the table, rested his head on his arms, and slept like a baby. Digna watched him while he slept. For more than an hour she sat by his side, trying to imagine the long journey that had brought him to this point of exhaustion and fear. When he woke up, he said he didn't want to see his brothers and sisters, because they might forget and tell someone he'd been there. It was his plan to flee into the mountains where not even the buzzards could find him. The only purpose for his visit was to say goodbye to his mother, and to tell her they would never see him again, because he had a mission and he intended to carry it out, even if it cost him his life. Later, during the summer, he would cross the border through a pass. Digna Ranquileo asked no questions. She knew her son: he would not share his secret—not with her, not with anyone. She limited herself to reminding him that to cross those endless peaks without a map, even in good weather, was madness; many men had wandered through these mountains until they were overtaken by death. Then the snow fell and covered them, and they disappeared until the next summer when some traveler came across their remains. Digna suggested that he hide until they got tired of looking for him, or head south where the cordillera was not so high and it would be easier to cross.

“Let me be, Mother,” Pradelio interrupted. “First I must do what I have to do, and then I'll get away the best I can.”

He had gone up into the mountains, led by his younger brother Jacinto, who knew the hills like no one else. High at the summit he had found a hiding place; for food, he ate lizards, rodents, roots, and what little his brother could bring him from time to time. Digna resigned herself to seeing him fulfill his destiny, but when Lieutenant Ramírez had come and searched the area house by house looking for him, threatening anyone who might be concealing him, and offering a reward for his capture, and when Sergeant Faustino Rivera, dressed in civilian clothes, silently turned up one night at her house to warn her in whispers that if she knew where the fugitive was hiding, to tell him that they were going to comb the hills until they found his hideout, his mother had decided not to wait any longer.

“Sergeant Rivera is like one of the family, that's why he felt obliged to warn me,” Digna clarified.

For a countrywoman who had lived her entire life in the place where she was born, and who knew only the nearest towns, the idea that a son of hers would end up in another country was as inconceivable as his hiding at the bottom of the sea. She could not imagine the size of the world beyond the peaks outlined against the horizon, but she suspected that the world stretched to regions where they spoke in other tongues and where people of different races lived in unimaginable climes. In those regions it was easy to stray from the straight and narrow and be swallowed up by bad luck, but to go was better than dying. She had heard talk of people going into exile, a frequent topic of conversation in recent years, and she hoped that Irene could help Pradelio escape the same way. Irene tried to explain the insurmountable difficulties of the plan. Anything as audacious as trying to outwit armed police, leaping over an iron fence and safely seeking asylum in an embassy, was out of the question—and no diplomat would give protection to a deserter from the armed forces, particularly one fleeing for reasons unknown. The only solution was to try to find someone connected with the Cardinal.

“I can go to my brother José,” Francisco offered finally, very reluctant to jeopardize his organization by letting a military man in on the secret, even if he was a poor guardsman running from his own companions. “The Church has mysterious paths to safe havens, but they will insist on knowing the truth,
señora.
I will have to talk with your son.”

Digna explained that he was dug into a hole in the cordillera at a height where it was hard to breathe, and that to get there you had to climb a goat trail, picking your way through rocks and brush. It was not an easy climb; the road would be long and hard for someone not accustomed to mountain trails.