The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (22 page)

“I remembered how you used to beg me to let you take pictures with my old Zeiss when you were younger. I was going to give
it to you on your eighteenth birthday, but I have decided you should have it now. You earned it tonight, muchacho.” In his
enthusiasm of the moment, he slapped Carlos Alberto roughly on the back, rattling his son’s ribs so much he thought he would
faint. Observing the wince, he ran elegant surgeon’s fingers down Carlos Alberto’s rib cage. Ruffling his son’s hair, he said,
“Looks like you might have broken one. But I’m sure your opponent is in far worse shape. Here, let me strap you up for the
ride home.”

While his father tied a bandage around his torso, they relived the match in detail up until the spectacular moment where Carlos
Alberto had knocked his opponent out cold with a left hook he had learned from his father’s golf buddy, Alejandro Aguilar,
in the third round.

It was the first and only intimate moment he and his father had ever shared, as far as he can recall. Subsequent wins never
brought on such a show of emotion and pride; they were expected. Dr. Quintanilla believed in physical excellence as much as
he believed in excellence of mind and spirit. For him, excellence was the norm.

Carlos Alberto inaugurated his camera with photographs of his family members, secretly reveling in the unguarded private moments
captured and suspended on celluloid. His sister Celia, combing her hair and dreamily staring out the window before her first
date. His mother, laughing with abandon at his graduation dinner. His father on Christmas Eve, pensive at his desk. It became
his primary hobby, at which he spent virtually all his free time. He numbered each photograph. In a notebook he wrote down
the numbers and kept meticulous notes—the name of the subject, the date, the time of day, the occasion.

After a while, he began taking photographs of complete strangers on the street. In his notebook, he gave them fictitious names
and began writing imaginary tales about them. And thus his love of stories was renewed from his soap opera days. Only now,
he
was the one telling the story. Despite his father’s derision, it turned out to be his most valuable survival skill. In these
days of economic hardship and incertitude, it is what keeps food on the table and turns the lightbulbs on.

A few days before he graduated from college with a degree in literature and a minor in film history, Carlos Alberto drove
into the parking lot of the Supermercado Costa and reached into the glove compartment for his mother’s grocery list. Just
as he was about to turn into a parking space, a man driving a Jeep aggressively zipped ahead of him and took the place. Carlos
Alberto lost his temper and leapt out of his car to confront the man. When he saw it was Miguel Rojas, a lethal icy calm descended
upon him.

“Hola,” Carlos Alberto said, “remember me?”

When Miguel Rojas simply stared at him with a benign bovine gaze that made him crazy with rage, he said, “I’m Celia, your
marico friend from summer camp at the Club Carabobo. And you just took my space.” Then Carlos Alberto beat the shit out of
Miguel Rojas right there in the parking lot. In his memory the fight is a blur of fists—his own, hitting a body,
thump, thump, thump
—then a body hitting the side of the car with a sickening thud and slumping to the ground. He recalls launching several well-aimed
kicks for good measure, before getting back in his car and driving away without the groceries.

To this day Carlos Alberto is not sure whether he has not told Lily this story because he is ashamed of what Miguel Rojas
did to him or of what he did to Miguel Rojas.

When Lily introduced Carlos Alberto to her family over the Christmas holidays, there had been a bizarre and awkward moment.
For, by a preposterous twist of fate of the kind that seems feasible only in soap operas, Miguel Rojas happened to be married
to Marta’s daughter, Luz. Carlos Alberto observed that marriage seemed to have made a better person out of Miguel Rojas, who
judiciously behaved as though he were meeting Carlos Alberto for the first time, slapping him genially on the back in greeting,
albeit a little too hard. Carlos Alberto forgave him upon observing the tenderness he exhibited toward Luz and the gallant,
if lumbering, way he helped clear the table on Christmas Eve. Who could have imagined that an ornery girl like Luz could work
such a miracle on his childhood nemesis. In spite of the radical change for the better in Miguel Rojas and his manifest adulation
of Luz, things hadn’t worked out between the two, and Luz was now living in a luxurious penthouse apartment in Santa Fé, mooning
about and feeling sorry for herself in the best telenovela tradition.

In direct contrast with the goings-on in his own family, where nothing truly extraordinary had ever transpired, there is always
an air of high drama and the supernatural around Lily’s people—especially, it would appear, during times of duress. One minute
they might be arguing over politics at the dining table with enough passion to give themselves indigestion, the next they
might be praying to a mythological fertility goddess and telling stories to an unborn baby! It is extraordinary.

When Carlos Alberto had started supplying stories to the television producers of soap operas for extra cash, he never imagined
he might wind up living in one.

It is the fifth day since the statue of Maria Lionza broke in two, and everything related to the goddess has become a national
obsession, fueled by an unremitting media frenzy. There are constant flash bulletins and updates, opinions are polled and
dissected. Is the broken statue a metaphor for the political and economic divide in the country? Is it an omen, and if so,
what does it portend? Should the statue be moved to a new location for repairs or should it be repaired on site? Who actually
has jurisdiction over the statue—the Ministry of Art and Culture or the Municipality? Is the worship of Maria Lionza a religion
or a cult? Clashes between factions with opposing views on these questions have broken out all over the country.

In a related story, the media is excitedly reporting that an apparition called El Niño is supposed to have materialized out
of thin air before a group of Marialionceros in Sorte. Cut to a clip of the president, announcing the launch of a new educational
reform campaign. The details of its aims are vague, but its slogan is : “¡El Niño, el Futuro!”

While Carlos Alberto is watching, the phone rings. It is a producer at TVista requesting permission to use segments from his
documentary interviews with various Marialionceros as background on the evening news. Carlos Alberto is rendered almost speechless
by the amount they are willing to pay for it: one million Bolívares. Seeing a chance to resolve all his financial problems
in one fell swoop, he accepts their proposal on one condition: that they also give him a contract to conduct interviews with
those claiming to have seen El Niño for a total of three million.

“And the copyright is mine,” he says, nearly bowled over by his own audaciousness. Yes, fine, great, brilliant, says the British
producer, we’ll send the contract papers across by this afternoon. If Carlos Alberto believed in prayer, this would be its
answer. And yet, what if something were to happen to Lily while he is away? Are three million bolos worth that risk? He is
conflicted, thrown against the ropes of his own inner boxing match.

“Of course you must not miss this opportunity, mi amor,” says Lily. “And take my father with you; he knows people everywhere.”

“But what about you and the baby?

“Don’t worry, it’s only for a few days. I’ll be fine here with all these babysitters.” But Carlos Alberto thinks it is possible
she is just being brave.

“You should tell a story to your baby before you go,” says Marta, while Luz cackles wickedly.

“Why not?” says Carlos Alberto, glaring at Luz. “After all, storytelling is my métier.”

So, on the fifth day of the Novena to Maria Lionza, Carlos Alberto tells of how much of an ass he was willing to make of himself
in order to get Lily to notice him.

The first time Carlos Alberto saw Lily, she was standing at a honey stand on a cobblestone street in the German settlement
of Colonia Tovar, which lies hidden in the mountains some 60 kilometers west of the capital.

Lily, whose name he did not know, of course, at the time wore a white sleeveless summer dress of fine muslin that fell beguilingly,
ending in a flutter around her narrow ankles. Her small feet were delicately bound in flat bronze sandals with spidery straps.
Her tiny round toes, with nails varnished in clear polish, were so alluring that he felt a desperate and urgent desire to
place them, one by one, in his mouth. A slight chill pierced the air as afternoon moved into evening, and, tearing his gaze
away from those succulent buds, he noticed little goose bumps standing out on her thin forearms. The sunset shone through
her dress, outlining her slender thighs, the gentle curve of her calves. It caught wisps of her shoulder-length brown-black
hair, spinning them into shimmering threads that swirled distractedly in the summer breeze. She was looking down, rummaging
in her white crochet handbag, her lashes making dark quarter moons against the vanilla of her skin. Then, as she bent lower,
digging deeper in her handbag, her hair fell across her face and it was all he could do not to reach out and brush it back.
Finding enough change for the honey vendor in the bowels of her bag, Lily straightened before he could act on his insane impulse,
tossing back her hair and revealing a few stray freckles on her nose.

(Not freckles, birthmarks, says Lily.)

Carlos Alberto followed Lily like a detective as she walked along the lanes of the village, hiding behind his newspaper when
she stopped to window-shop. She made her way to the beveled lawns of the Fritz, a middle-range inn, but more expensive than
his own, and sat down on a chaise lounge in the shade of a tree, next to a couple who looked to be around sixty-five years
of age. The older woman was painting a watercolor with a child’s paint set. The older man was strumming a cuatro and serenading
her. Carlos Alberto decided these were the girl’s grandparents. He was already making up stories about her by then, and he
continued to do so throughout the afternoon from his perch on a stone wall in the sun.