The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (40 page)

“I can make it,” Lily shouts back.

“No you can’t.”

And suddenly, for no good reason at all, midway between the shore they had left and the shore to which they were heading,
hundreds of meters away from either, they get into a fight about it. Liar, liar, they are both yelling, a short burst of adrenaline
rage propelling them toward each other. Then they are hitting and pulling each other’s hair, scratching and screaming out
every remembered hurt, every offense—you did this, you did that. Take it back, take back what you said, she says, climbing
onto the other girl’s back. And Lily, spluttering, still screaming, goes under. Moments later she receives a kick or punch
to the chin, she too goes under. She is swallowing a lot of water. She can’t see Lily. The water has closed over her head.
Time grinds to a standstill. She knows she is drowning but is strangely detached from it. Suddenly someone is grabbing her
by the hair, an arm goes under her chin, someone is pulling her in to shore, then pounding on her chest.

No, she wants to say. I am
not
dead. I am alive. The moment the water gushes from her mouth, she opens her eyes. An older man, older than her father is
staring at her, relieved.

Where is Lily?
he asks.

Lily?
she says. She can feel the fear clutch at her throat.
The other girl,
he says,
the other girl in the water.

There is no other girl,
she lies.

She remembers Lily’s face floating above hers, eyes wide open, hair spread out like a fan of snakes. There had been something
piercingly beautiful about watching Lily breathe water.

She awakens to the morningsong of the golden-winged Maizcuba with Manuel snoring lightly next to her, his hand heavy on her
hip. Gently, she removes the hand. Raising herself to a sitting position, she studies the photograph on her bedside table,
which her lover has mounted expertly, presenting it to her last night, on the eve of their first anniversary together. It
was taken in the magnificent Tepuys, where they had vacationed last month.

In the photograph, she is standing on an enormous boulder that is suspended in the crevice between two mountains cut of Precambrian
rock. Five hundred meters below runs a stream that flows into a lake. Her feet appear much smaller in proportion to her body,
much daintier than they actually are. Her face has been darkened with a fake shadow because her frozen smile in the original
photograph had reflected her unmitigated terror. Tricks of the trade, said Manuel.

A photographer by profession, he had insisted that she stand with both feet on the boulder because that would make a more
dramatic picture. It is important to him that his pictures have drama. Though she is no stranger to drama herself, these days
her role of choice is that of spectator. When she had hesitated, he had been exasperated.

“It’s been there for thousands of years, and hundreds of people have stood on it before; why would you imagine it might fall
now?”

Perhaps because deep down she still believes that everything she imagines can become a reality?

When she reaches into herself to find that quintessential core, she pulls out a fistful of sights, sounds, smells, tastes,
emotions, that shift like tiny pebbles in the palm of her hand.

The only bedtime stories she ever heard had been those her father—her real father, not the reticent cuckold, Benigno—would
tell her about a magical place near Soledad in the state of Anzoátegui, where he had grown and lived in a big extended family
on a hacienda called La Mariposa that hugged the border of the River Orinoco. A place where everyone was as easy on a horse
as in a bed; where work, food, and play were shared; where every evening, after dinner, his uncle Rainaldo would bring out
his cuatro and all the family would gather in the courtyard to sit on the wooden stools and wicker chairs. And Rainaldo would
begin to sing, and all would join, their voices carrying high into the clear llanero sky. And his grandmother’s eyes would
fill with tears each time Rainaldo sang his signature ballad, “Maria Luna,” about a campesina who fell hopelessly and forever
in love with a fidalgo, for it reminded her of her own story. And every summer the women and children would travel to the
north of the state to the beach town of Conoma, where they would remain for three weeks, to fortify themselves with the medicinal
salt of the sea. And one evening his mother lost a diamond earring in the sugary sand at Isla de Plata, and his aunt threatened
San Antonio before digging her hand into the sand and pulling out the solitaire, which shone in the moonlight like a star
in the palm of her hand.

She doubts that her father had any preconceived notions about acquainting his daughters with their llanero heritage; more
likely he was homesick.

She was three when the family made their one and only trip to Soledad from Caracas. The airport was a makeshift shack, and
their suitcases were unloaded onto the tarmac. It was hot and sticky, and the air smelled like slightly wilted flowers. Her
father’s brother Rainaldo was there to pick them up in his faded blue truck. Just beyond the airstrip, they had stopped at
a local bar. She and her sister were given a limonada, the adults drank beer. What she remembers most about the drive to the
hacienda was the incredible expanse of green for as far as she could see. Even at that age, it had made her heart beat faster.

The trip from the airport had taken over two hours. When they finally arrived, her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins
had covered her in kisses and all the aunts and uncles had taken turns holding her on their laps.

So, her best and truest memories are of La Mariposa, of the heat, the smell of beer and fresh air, the laughter and the excited
chatter of her father’s enormous family, and the sense of being enveloped in a big love blanket, of the hot summer breeze,
and her grandmother’s chickens, of the enormous dining room where twenty-eight people—aunts, uncles, cousins, and farmhands—congregated.
And of Señor Camacho, her grandfather’s foreman in his pristine white shirts with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, who taught
her how to swim in the river. And of her grandmother’s maid, Maria Pagan, who would take out the evil eye whenever she got
too cranky.

Her biological father’s name was Pedro Lorenzo, and he had been her mother’s first love. But she never mentioned this to her
Jungian therapist. Even with him, whom she later trusted the most, there were still a few details she held to her chest, a
few truths she wasn’t giving up, a few secrets she would keep.

Her earliest recollection of Pedro Lorenzo is of his breath, pungent with tobacco and coffee, as he kissed her good-night,
and the roughness of his unshaven cheek before he left for work at dawn.

“Good morning, Princesa,” he would say.

Except for the Mariposa stories, the rest of her memories are not as vivid; they are a blur of loud voices, anguish, angry
silences, a rare and curious laugh like the bark of a small dog. Besides this, she remembers only one other thing about Pedro
Lorenzo: he had liked to tease. Usually, he overdid it.

After that first and last magical trip to La Mariposa, Pedro Lorenzo gave her a glossy picture book with many animals in it.
Every evening, when he came home from work, he would sit with her on the living room sofa, the book spread open on his lap
and he would teach her the names of all the animals. He also taught her the sounds the animals were supposed to make, except
he mixed them all up so that she thought the zebra said “meow,” the lion, “moo,” and so forth.

Mercedes said it was cruel and told him to stop. But Pedro Lorenzo thought it was hilarious. He’d trot out his toddler animal
expert whenever he had his business friends over for dinner and make her stand in the middle of the living-room floor with
everybody watching. Then he’d ask her to recite the names of the animals and their corresponding noises, the way he taught
them to her.

“And what does the (rooster/dog/pig) do, mi amor?” he’d prompt.

When she obliged, proud of herself, Pedro Lorenzo would bark-laugh and his guests would join him in hilarity, while his child
stood, bewildered, a questioning half smile on her face.

When she was five, just before he disappeared forever, he came home in the evening with his face bloodied.

“See what Mamá did to me?” he asked, a strange, brooding humor in his eyes. “This is what happens to you when you argue with
Mamá.”

When, at the age of ten, she blamed her mother for bashing up her father and driving him away, Mercedes told her not to be
ridiculous. “Your father had too much to drink and slipped on the gravel in the driveway, the pendejo. Good riddance to that
asshole.”

The night before he left forever, he said to Irene, “Try not to be your mother when you grow up, Princesa. Be my princess
forever.”

A tall order, considering she never saw him again.

A year later, her mother met Benigno at a bar in the Hotel Macuto, who, she said assuredly, if slightly drunkenly, was a real
man, with a real job, who could take care of a real family. Unlike Pedro Lorenzo, she meant. The loser, she called him. The
girls were forbidden to speak of him, much less refer to him as their father. That Benigno Dos Santos was incompatible in
every conceivable way with her mother, and for that matter with herself and her sister, did not seem to factor into Mercedes’s
thinking. Nor the fact that at the age of forty-five he had never been married. Nor the fact that he loved his adopted daughters
more than he should have.

When Irene turned fifteen, Mercedes had thrown a party at the penthouse she shared with Benigno.

“Fifteen is an important benchmark in the life of every young Latina girl,” she said, though she was unable to explain precisely
why fifteen was the magic number. Her mother invited only adults, her own friends, to the party, including someone called
Lourdes, a lesbian sporting a crop of bleached blond hair who looked much younger than her thirty-five years. Lourdes brought
her own bottle of Cuban rum, which she shared clandestinely with the quinceañera, pouring it into her Coke bottle under the
table while stroking the girl on the thigh. When the birthday girl threw up all over the ceremonial cake trimmed with cherry-red
hearts, her mother sent her to bed and carried on partying with her friends.