Of Love and Shadows (31 page)

Sitting on a wicker stool, Evangelina told Irene their story. Her family had been punished more than others, because shortly after the first raid, the law had come back and descended on them again. In the years following, the surviving children had found out how useless it was to search for the ones who had been taken away, how dangerous it was even to talk about them. But the girl was indomitable. When she heard of the discovery of the bodies in Los Riscos mine, she had hoped to hear some news of her missing father and brothers; that is why she was willing to talk with a journalist who was a complete stranger to her. Her mother, in contrast, was withdrawn and silent, observing Irene with distrust.

“The Floreses aren't my own parents, but they brought me up. I love them as if they were my own,” the girl explained.

She could tell Irene the very day their misfortunes began. It was a day in October, five years ago, when a jeep from Headquarters drove down the road of the cooperative and stopped in front of their house. They had come to arrest Antonio Flores. Pradelio Ranquileo had been assigned to carry out the order. He beat on the door, flushing with shame because he was bound to that family by bonds of destiny that were as strong as blood ties. Respectfully, he explained that this was a routine questioning; he allowed the prisoner to put on a jacket and walk to the vehicle on his own.
Señora
Flores and her children could see the owner of Los Aromos Vineyard sitting beside the driver's seat, and were surprised; they had never had any problems with him, not even during the stormy days of the Agrarian Reform, and they could not imagine the reason for his denunciation. After Antonio Flores had been taken away, neighbors came to console the family, and the house swelled with people. There were plenty of witnesses, then, when a half hour later a truck filled with armed guardsmen braked to a halt. Men jumped out, yelling as if they were in combat, and arrested the four oldest brothers. Beaten, half-dazed, they were pushed and dragged to the vehicle, and the last the others saw of them was a cloud of dust disappearing down the road. Everyone who had watched what happened stood stunned by the show of brutality, because none of the brothers had ever been involved in politics and their only sin was to have joined the Farmers Union. One of them did not even live at home; he was a construction worker in the city, and happened to be visiting his parents that day. Their friends decided it was all a mistake and sat down to wait for the young men to be brought home. They could identify the guardsmen; they knew them by name, since they had been born in the region and all attended the same school. Pradelio Ranquileo was not part of the second group and they speculated that he had been left at Headquarters to guard Antonio Flores. They went to him later when he was off duty but found out nothing; they could not get a word out of the Ranquileos' oldest son.

“Our life had been peaceful up to then. We were hardworking people and had everything we needed. My father had a good horse, and was saving to buy a tractor. But then the law came down on us and everything changed,” said Evangelina Flores.

“Bad luck runs in the blood,” murmured
Señora
Flores, thinking of the accursed mine where maybe six of her family lay rotting.

They looked for them. For months they made the obligatory pilgrimage of anyone following the trail of
desaparecidos.
They went from place to place, asking futile questions, and received nothing but the advice to consider the men dead and sign the legal papers; that way they would be entitled to an orphan's and a widow's pension. You can find another husband,
señora
, you're still good-looking, they told her. The legal formalities were long and drawn out, vexing, and expensive. The process ate up all their savings and put them into debt. Papers were lost in offices in the capital, and with the passing of time they saw their hopes fading like the lines of an old drawing. The children who were still alive had to quit school and look for work on neighboring farms; they were not hired, though, because they were marked. Each of them had tied up his bundle of miserable belongings and set off looking for a place where no one knew his misfortune. The family was scattered to the winds, and as the years went by, only the switched daughter still lived with
Señora
Flores. Evangelina had been ten when her adoptive father and brothers were arrested. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw them being dragged away, bleeding. Her hair fell out, she grew thin, she walked in her sleep, and when she was awake she seemed to drift in an idiot haze that earned her the gibes of other schoolchildren. Thinking it would be best to get her away from that house of bad memories,
Señora
Flores had sent Evangelina to another town to live with an uncle, a prosperous dealer in firewood and charcoal, who could offer her a better life. The child, though, missed her mother's love, and only grew worse, so they brought her back home. For a long time nothing could console her, but when she had her first menstruation, at twelve, she suddenly threw off her melancholy and woke up one morning transformed into a woman. It had been her idea to sell the horse and put up a vegetable stall in the Los Riscos market; and hers, too, the decision not to go on sending food, clothing, and money through the military to their missing relatives, for in all those years there was not a single bit of evidence that they were still alive. The girl worked ten hours a day selling and transporting vegetables and fruit; in the remaining six, before falling into bed exhausted, she studied the notebooks her teacher had prepared as a special favor. She had not wept again, and she began to speak of her father and brothers in the past tense, to accustom her mother little by little to the idea of never seeing them again.

When they opened the mine, she was right behind the soldiers, lost in the crowd, wearing her black armband. From a distance she saw the large yellow bags, and squinted her eyes, hoping to see some clue. Someone told her it would be impossible to identify the remains without a study of dental records and every scrap of bone and clothing that had been found, but she was sure that if she could see them up close, her heart would tell her whether they were theirs.

“Can you take me where they have them now?” she asked Irene Beltrán.

“I'll do everything I can, but it won't be easy.”

“Why don't they give them to us? All we want is a grave where they can lie in peace, where we can bring them flowers and pray for them, and visit them on the day of the dead.”

“Do you know who arrested your father and brothers?” Irene asked.

“Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez and nine men from his command,” Evangelina Flores replied without hesitation.

*  *  *

Thirty hours after the death of Sergeant Faustino Rivera, Irene was shot down at the entrance to the publishing house. She was leaving work, rather late, when an automobile parked across the street started up, accelerated, and swept by her like an ominous wind, loosing a burst from an automatic weapon before disappearing into the traffic. Irene felt a powerful blow in the center of her being, but did not know what had happened. She fell to the sidewalk without a cry. All the breath rushed from her soul, and she was consumed with pain. She had an instant of lucidity in which she reached out to touch the blood forming around her in a spreading pool, then immediately sank into sleep.

The doorman and other witnesses were also unaware of what had happened. They heard the shots but did not identify them as such, thinking they came from a car backfiring or an airplane overhead, but when they saw Irene fall, they ran to her aid. Ten minutes later, she was in an ambulance with sirens screaming and lights whirling. Her life was spurting from countless bullet wounds in her abdomen.

Francisco Leal learned of the shooting by chance an hour or two later, when he called her house to ask her to dinner; it had been some days since he had seen her alone, and he was drowning with love. Weeping into the telephone, Rosa told him the bad news. That was the longest night of Francisco's life. He spent it sitting beside Beatriz in the hospital corridor on a bench opposite the intensive-care unit where his beloved was roaming aimlessly through the shadows of the valley of death. After several hours on the operating table, no one had any hope that she would live. Connected to a half-dozen tubes and cables, she lay awaiting her death.

The surgeons had opened her up and attempted to repair the damage, discovering for every stitch they took another opening to close. Quarts of blood and plasma were poured into her body, she was flooded with antibiotics, and, finally, crucified on a bed, suffering the enduring torture of catheters, she was sedated in a mist of unconsciousness to allow her to bear her martyrdom. With the complicity of the physician on call, who commiserated with such obvious grief, Francisco was permitted to see Irene for a few minutes. She was naked, transparent, afloat in the glaring white light of the operating room; a respirator was connected to a tube in her trachea, cables joined her to a cardiac monitor on which a scarcely perceptible signal kept hope alive, and her veins were pierced with numerous needles; she was as pale as the sheet, dark shadows purpled her eyes, and a compact mass of bandages covered her stomach, from which erupted the tentacles of rubber drains. A mute sob gripped Francisco's chest, and lingered there for an interminable time.

Beatriz assaulted him the minute she saw him: “It's your fault! From the instant you came into my daughter's life, we have had nothing but trouble!”

She was grief-stricken, beside herself. Francisco actually felt sorry for her; for the first time, he saw her free of artifice: nerves rubbed raw, human, suffering, approachable. She collapsed onto the bench and wept until she had no tears to shed. She could not understand what had happened. She wanted to believe that this was the work of an ordinary felon, as the police had assured her it was; she could not bear the idea that her daughter had been pursued for political reasons. She had not a hint of Irene's role in discovering the bodies in the mine, and could not imagine her involved in murky activities directed against the government. Francisco went to buy a cup of tea for each of them, and they sat side by side drinking it in silence, united by an identical feeling of catastrophe.

Like so many others during the previous administration, Beatriz Alcántara had gone into the streets banging pots and pans to protest the food shortages. She had backed the military coup because it seemed infinitely more desirable than a Socialist regime, and when the time-honored Presidential Palace had been bombed from the air, she uncorked a bottle of champagne in celebration. She burned with patriotic fervor, although her enthusiasm had not been so great as to cause her to donate her jewels to the fund for rebuilding the nation; she feared she would see her jewels adorning some colonel's wife, as wagging tongues had rumored. She adjusted to the new system as if she had been born to it, and learned never to speak of what it was best not to know. Ignorance was indispensable to peace of mind. That horrible night in the hospital, Francisco was at the point of telling her about Evangelina Ranquileo, about the dead of Los Riscos, about the thousands of victims—about her own daughter—but he took pity on her. He did not want to use this moment when she was convulsed with grief to destroy the illusions that had until that moment sustained her. So he confined himself to asking questions about Irene, about the years of her childhood and adolescence, taking pleasure from each anecdote, begging for the tiniest detail, with the curiosity every lover has for everything connected with his beloved. They talked about the past and, between confidences and tears, the hours went by.

Twice during that night of torment, Irene was near death, so near that returning her to the world of the living was a phenomenal feat. While the doctors clustered around her, battling to revive her with electric shocks, Francisco Leal felt he was losing his grip on reason, regressing to the days of prehistory—to the cave, to darkness, to ignorance, to terror. Despairing, he sat and waited as evil forces dragged Irene toward the shadows, believing that only magic, chance, or divine intervention could save her from dying. He wanted to pray, but could not utter the words that as a child he had learned from his mother's lips. Distraught, through the strength of his passion he tried to bring Irene back. He exorcised the darkness with the memory of their pleasure, setting against the shadows of hovering death the light of their coming together. He longed for a miracle, for his own health, his blood, his soul to pass to her and give her life. He repeated her name a thousand times, beseeching her not to give up, to go on fighting; from the bench in the corridor he called to her in secret; he wept openly, felt crushed beneath the weight of centuries, waiting for her, seeking her, desiring her, loving her. He remembered her freckles, her innocent feet, her smoky pupils, the aroma of her clothing, the silk of her skin, the line of her waist, the crystal of her laughter, the peaceful abandon with which she lay in his arms after making love. He sat there, muttering to himself like a madman and suffering insufferably, until the new day dawned and the hospital awakened; he heard doors opening and closing, elevators, footsteps, instruments clanking on metal trays, and the sound of his own racing heart. Then he felt Beatriz Alcántara's hand in his, and remembered her presence. Drained, they looked at each other. They had lived through those hours in similar pain. Bare of makeup, Beatriz's face was ravaged, the fine scars of her plastic surgery revealed; her eyes were puffy, her hair limp with sweat, her blouse wrinkled.

“Do you love her?” she asked.

“Very much,” replied Francisco Leal.

Then they embraced. At last they had discovered a common language.

*  *  *

For three days Irene Beltrán wandered along the frontiers of death, at the end of which she drifted into consciousness, pleading with her eyes to be allowed to fight using her own resources, or to die with dignity. They took the respirator away, and little by little her breathing stabilized, as did the rhythm of the blood in her veins. Then they transferred her to a room where Francisco Leal could stay by her side. She was submerged in the stupor of drugs, lost in the fog of nightmare, but she felt Francisco's presence, and when he left she called for him in a voice as weak and helpless as a baby's.