The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (21 page)

The capacity of the passiflora edulis to endure conditions less than optimum is often quite extraordinary.

S
ometimes, when women get together, they can summon up a cornucopia of joy that makes men, by comparison, appear clinically
depressed. They can do this even during times of great hardship and duress. Just last night, Carlos Alberto had watched Luz,
Amparo, Marta, and the nurse all congregated in a huddle around Lily’s bed in the living room, laughing together with complete
abandon, while Ismael and Consuelo slept on the sofa undisturbed. And, in that instant, he had been catapulted backward into
his childhood, where he is a mere boy living among too many women and a man who doesn’t talk to him.

Carlos Alberto has always found the intimacy between women both fascinating and unsettling. It is as though he is looking
through the window of a club where he can never be a member, because it involves a comfort level and kinship that does not
exist among men, except infrequently, out of necessity, such as among soldados during times of war, or perhaps among convicts
in a prison facility. And he is filled with a certain wistful longing, an ache that seems to emanate in waves from the solar
plexus, for this part of Lily he cannot own.

He has attempted to capture Lily in words, on paper. Not only the way she looks, which always makes his heart skip a beat
or two, or how she expresses herself to him. He has probed, with the tip of his pen, her fears, her thoughts, hopes and desires,
her darkest secrets, just as he had done when writing the character of a woman possessed of the spirit of Maria Lionza, in
his recently resurrected novel, based loosely on an old Cuban radio novela,
La reencarnada.
But Lily is nothing like the sinewy heroine of his imagination, with whom he has danced in his fantasies and whose fantastical
character he has known intimately. The more he writes in his diary about Lily, the less he knows. Even now, after seven years
of marriage. Perhaps it is as she accused him once (although she immediately apologized and retracted when shock froze his
face): that it is more the idea of Lily than Lily that he loves.

To possess Lily entirely is a crazy, greedy, impossible desire; he realizes this. And how can he begrudge Lily her secrets
when there are parts of himself that he has kept separate? He has, for example, never told Lily what happened with Miguel
Rojas and how it changed him.

It was to the immense relief of Dr. Jorge Quintanilla when, after five daughters and a gap of four years, Carlos Alberto was
born. Finally, he thought, a candidate for medical school. But there were periods during which his pride at having finally
sired a boy was severely put to the test. For example: when Carlos Alberto was seven, he insisted on dressing like a girl.
His older sisters were always piling onto one of the beds, lying against one another and laughing together. He felt left out.
He thought that if he dressed like them, he would be like them. It wasn’t only because there were five of them and only one
of him. It just seemed to him that it was clearly more fun being a girl. And his sisters didn’t mind if he invaded their closets
and came down to dinner wearing a dress and a pair of high heels. They didn’t care if he painted his face with their cosmetics,
as long as he put the caps back on. When he asked them to help him stitch a bit of lace onto his handkerchief, they thought
it was great. “Ay, look at him, tan lindo,” they would say.

“Carlos Alberto,” said his mother, “please finish what is on your plate if you want to have quesillo for desert.”

“My name is Lupita; Lupita Ferrer,” Carlos Alberto announced in falsetto, daintily lifting a spoon of black beans and rice
toward a petulant mouth slathered with his sister Celia’s raspberry lipstick. “I am a movie star.”

Dr. Quintanilla turned toward his wife, eyes bulging. “But, Maria Teresa,” he exclaimed, “the boy is turning marico. He’s
a damn pansy.”

“He’ll grow out of it, Jorge,” said Maria Teresa Quintanilla. But her husband wasn’t convinced. Women surrounded the boy all
day; he lacked sufficient masculine influence, in Jorge Quintanilla’s opinion. And so, the day after he found Carlos Alberto
cuddled up with his sisters on the sofa in front of the television and sniveling over the thwarted love of the gypsy character
played by the sultry Rebeca Gonsales, he enrolled him in summer camp at the Club Carabobo, where many city boys from good
families went, including boys from the prestigious Academia Roosevelt. Dr. Quintanilla felt certain that at Club Carabobo
all detrimental feminine influences would be expunged from the boy’s psyche forthwith.

“Pero, Jorge,” said Maria Teresa, “he’s only eight.” She believed that Carlos Alberto was still too young to be sent away
from home for a whole summer.

“Eight is old enough to start learning to be a man,” countered Dr. Quintanilla. “With all of you on my back like this,” he
added, meaning his wife and daughters, “it’s a wonder I haven’t turned into a fag myself.”

Dr. Quintanilla’s idea of what made a man involved football and baseball, mountain treks in the Andes, relay swimming, and
defending oneself from bullies, the last of which Carlos Alberto would learn to fully appreciate after Miguel Rojas discovered
the lace handkerchief under his pillow. It belonged to Celia, his eldest sister, and had been liberally and clandestinely
doused with her perfume, to remind him of home. When Carlos Alberto had surreptitiously tucked it away between his shirts
in the suitcase, little did he know how much trouble it would bring him.

It was two weeks into the summer. Carlos Alberto had just been reprimanded by the swimming coach for lagging behind in the
relay race, and he was eager to regain the security of his room, which he shared with one of the older boys, Miguel Rojas,
who was fourteen.

All the younger boys had to share a room with an older boy. To keep them in line, said the coach. Miguel Rojas was the only
son of Jaime Rojas, who ran a chain of supermarkets he’d acquired by a providential marriage to a Portuguese heiress, Lidia
Costa. Miguel Rojas was an Academia Roosevelt alumnus and one of the richest boys in Tamanaco, if not the country. But being
rich didn’t seem to have enhanced his disposition, and Carlos Alberto took precautions to avoid drawing attention to himself
and to stay out of the older boy’s way as much as was possible in such close quarters.

“What have we here?” said Miguel Rojas, as Carlos Alberto entered the room, eyes already stinging with the tears he had not
cried in front of the coach. Miguel was standing on his bed. Celia’s handkerchief dangled from his hand. “Don’t tell me I’ve
been sharing my room with a mariquita.”

“Give it to me,” Carlos Alberto whined, making a desperate lunge for the handkerchief.

“-No-no-no,” said Miguel Rojas, whipping it out of the boy’s grasp. “I think Coach would like to see this—this marvelous result
of his training.”

Carlos Alberto envisioned himself spinning wildly across the full topography of his utter humiliation. Coach’s sardonic face,
huge, looming above his own. The vicious taunts of all the boys in camp. His father’s disgust when he learned of his son’s
disgrace. It was too hideous to contemplate. He couldn’t allow it to happen.

“Please,” Carlos Alberto whispered, “please don’t tell anyone.”

“And what,” said Miguel Rojas, “will you do for me in return?”

“Anything,” he promised, “anything you want.”

Miguel Rojas sat down on the bed and indicated that Carlos Alberto was to stand in front of him. He obeyed, his heart pounding
through his temples. Whatever happened, he told himself, he must not cry like a damn mariquita.

“Kneel down,” said Miguel Rojas, as Carlos Alberto stood trembling but dry-eyed in front of him. When the younger boy was
kneeling penitently as if before a priest, Miguel Rojas said, “Where did you get this handkerchief? And make sure you confess
the truth, or you will be punished.”

“It belongs to my sister,” Carlos Alberto said.

“What is her name?”

“Celia.”

“How old is she?”

“Sixteen.”

“Is she beautiful?”

“Very beautiful.”

“What color are her lips?”

“Pink.”

“Eyes?”

“Brown.”

“Does she have tits?” Miguel Rojas had his eyes closed during this part of the interrogation, as though trying to conjure
a picture of Celia in his mind.

“Yes,” said Carlos Alberto.

“Are they big?” Miguel Rojas asked, opening his eyes.

“I guess so.”

“What do you mean, you guess so? Either they are big or not.”

“They are big.”

“How big?”

Carlos Alberto made a circle with his hands of about twenty centimeters in diameter. He was so busy trying to get the size
right that he failed to immediately notice that Miguel Rojas had undone his fly. Carlos Alberto was afraid.

“Kiss it,” said Miguel Rojas, his voice thick and strange. “This is what girls like.”

Carlos Alberto did as Miguel Rojas said. Then Miguel Rojas stepped back and began to rub himself. His face got redder and
redder. “Celia, Celia, oh, Celia,” he moaned, while Carlos Alberto stared in horrified fascination.

Afterward Miguel Rojas wiped himself with the handkerchief. “Here,” he said, pressing the soppy piece of cloth into Carlos
Alberto’s hand, “give this back to your sister with the big tits.”

In retrospect, Carlos Alberto thinks that perhaps Miguel Rojas did him a favor, for he never again wished to be like a girl.
That part of him was gone forever, or else buried so deep he could no longer recognize it. After a week, he took up boxing,
a sport he perfected year in and year out at summer camp, much to his father’s delight.

“You see, Marité?” said Dr. Quintanilla, “All he needed was to be around boys.”

Maria Teresa Quintanilla nodded and smiled at her husband, but sometimes he would catch her watching Carlos Alberto covertly
with a worried frown creasing her forehead. Carlos Alberto’s sisters were hurt when he shrank away from their caresses and
refused to watch telenovelas with them. “Don’t you like Lupita Ferrer anymore?” asked Celia, tousling his hair.

“Girls are disgusting,” he said, violently pushing her hand away. “They are pigs.” After that, his sisters left him to his
own devices.

Miguel Rojas never bothered him again after he joined the boxing team. He had graduated from an all-boy high school and gone
off to the Universidad Simón Bolívar by the time Carlos Alberto won his first state boxing medal at the age of sixteen. Dr.
Quintanilla, glowing with pride (and possibly relief) presented his son with an expensively wrapped gift box in the locker
room.

“Open it, mijo,” he said.

Carlos Alberto, his face still throbbing from an uppercut to the left cheekbone and dressed only in the towel wrapped around
his waist, tore off the paper and opened the box. He drew in a breath of surprise, wincing at the fresh pain in his side.
But his pleasure at the contents of the box far outstripped his pain. Inside was a Rolleiflex 3.5F and a meter.

“¡Estupendo, Papá!” he exclaimed.