The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (6 page)

“How do you get away with it?” they asked, eyes large with admiration and envy. Lily did not think of herself as “getting
away” with anything. And although she did not reflect on it at the time, she now supposes there must have been a number of
boys taking a lot of cold showers.

In any event, it went on like that until her senior year in college. And then, one dazzlingly bright and crisp spring day,
at a street café in the sleepy mountain village of Colonia Tovar, a beautiful stranger sat awkwardly across a table from her.
He leaned in, elbows bent, his hands folded on the red-checkered tablecloth with the diamond-shaped mustard stain. And, as
Lily observed him staring morosely into his coffee cup, a lock of tousled dark hair hanging beguilingly across one eye, the
seagull took flight.

Everyone except Luz agrees that the baby is lucky to have such a poetic storyteller for a mother.

“You are most definitely your father’s daughter,” says Consuelo.

“Hah. There is no meat to that story, only bones,” says Luz, taking a long drag off a cigarette.

“Ay, Luz,” says Marta, “why do you always have to criticize?”

Luz shrugs her shoulders, ignores both her mother and the ashtray Marta has placed beside her, stands and flicks her ash out
the window. At which point Dr. Ricardo Uzoátegui, who had examined Lily at the hospital, arrives, examines her again, and
pronounces her better, but advises continued bed rest.

After dinner, Carlos Alberto takes up position at Lily’s bedside, stroking her forehead until she dozes off. While she sleeps,
a young mestizo boy with blindfolded eyes, and a smoldering fat cigar in his left hand appears to her in a dream.

“Have you seen my mother?” he asks.

He moves closer, until he is standing only a foot away. He holds the cigar to his mouth, inhales deeply, and blows out an
enormous cloud of smoke into her face. He vanishes in the smoke cloud, which swirls, condenses, solidifies, and takes the
form of her childhood friend, Irene. She is wearing the red shoes.

We had fun, didn’t we, Lily? Gozamos una bola.

We did, whispers Lily.

We were fresh and fearless.

We were.

What happened?

I don’t know.

Lily begins to cry. She cries silently and continuously, with her eyes squeezed shut, a steady stream of saltwater running
down the sides of her face and dampening the pillow. Stricken, Carlos Alberto asks, “Where does it hurt?” But Lily cannot
pinpoint the precise location of the wound, which is not so much a wound as a hole through which the remembered enchantment
of her childhood slowly seeps. Right now, Lily misses Irene more than anybody in the world.

She can hear Carlos Alberto telling her mother that they should have stayed at the hospital. She can hear him slapping his
hand against his head, as though her tears are somehow his fault and the fault of everyone on the planet. When Carlos Alberto
has finally gone, cursing, from the room, and her mother after him, her father brings in some juice and spoons it into her
mouth.

After a few sips, Lily finally speaks. “Papi,” she says, “I have a wish.”

“And what is your wish, my darling?” says Ismael.

“I wish to find out what happened to Irene. Will you help me?”

Before her father can answer, there is a shriek from the study, where Marta is listening to the radio. Luz, Consuelo, and
Carlos Alberto come running from different parts of the house, thinking something has happened to Lily. But Lily points to
Marta who now emerges from the study pale as chalk, wringing her hands.

“You’ll never imagine what has happened!” Marta pauses dramatically while all regard her expectantly.

“What in God’s name is the matter, Mamá?” says Luz.

“The statue of Maria Lionza in the capital—this morning it cracked in two! All the radio channels are carrying the story.”

Like all plants, passiflora grown in a pot is likely to have the nutrients washed out of its soil during watering. If these
nutrients are not replaced, the plant will die.

O
n Monday morning, more than two hundred kilometers from the city of Tamanaco, Efraín rubs the sleep from his eyes as a beam
of light from a hole in the palm-leaf roof of the hut falls upon his face. He tries to remember what he has been dreaming,
but his awakening is too abrupt; a fragment, the image of a vast expanse of blue-green ocean, is all he can retrieve. He is
disappointed, for he is fond of recounting his dreams in their entirety to his grandmother, La Vieja Juanita.

Sitting up, he swings his legs down from his hammock, his toes barely touching the dirt floor. He looks across the cylindrical
one-room thatch hut and he is greeted by the familiar sight of his grandmother preparing breakfast on the wood-burning stove.
Though there is no one in the doorway, he imagines he sees his mother in the open frame, brushing her long hair. Efraín forgives
the sun for stealing his dream, as it is replaced by the vision of his mother’s long mane spilling into the sunshine.

“Buenos días, mi cielo,” says his mother-memory, turning at that moment, “and what did you dream last night?”

“I can’t remember,” says Efraín mournfully to his mother in his head.

“Don’t worry, perhaps it will come back to you later. And, if not, there will always be other sueños.” Her eyes are filled
with love and tenderness, no longer the deep tristeza that had consumed her after they had fled Santa Marta.

It is almost two years to the day that, in the dead of night and with soldiers hot on their trail, they had made their way
from the coast to Castilletes. In the terrifying pandemonium of flight, Efraín and his mother had been separated from Manolo
at a river crossing on the border. They had traveled to a Guajiro refugee settlement near Escondido, where they had rested,
but only for a few hours. The next day they left for San Felipe, where La Vieja Juanita waited to accompany them to their
final destination—an illegal Quechuan hut in the Yurubí forest. But Manolo had never rejoined them, and after a year and a
half of waiting, his mother, Coromoto, had gone to look for him. At least that is what Efraín believes. One day she was there,
brushing her hair in the doorway, the next day she was not.

Neither Efraín nor La Vieja Juanita speak of those who are missing, for fear of jinxing their destinies. Yet, nameless, they
are always present.

Efraín checks the position of the sun in the sky and concludes that he has overslept by more than an hour. On most days La
Vieja Juanita wakes up first, Efraín last. Earlier, it had been his mother who woke up last because she worked nights as a
bartender at a truck stop thirty-five kilometers away. Since there were no longer any buses plying her route by the time she
got off work, a waiter called Gustavo would give her a lift on his motorcycle to the hole in the fence on the road past San
Felipe that borders the Yurubí. Then, exchanging her sandals for the sneakers she carried in a fraying tote, she would walk
for half an hour. By the time she got back to the hut, it would be nearly two in the morning. Even in his sleep, Efraín could
feel her lips on his when she kissed him on her return. He misses her kisses.

“Levántate, muchacho,” says La Vieja Juanita.

He climbs out of his hammock, goes outside. He pisses against the guava tree and walks back into the hut, where he sits on
a stool next to the slightly lopsided wooden door held up on two sides by wooden fruit crates. It serves variously as a dining
table, a cutting board, and the work space where his grandmother makes her delicate mobiles of papier-mâché. Suspended by
nylon thread from pieces of natural wood that Efraín gathers from the surrounding forest, they are delicately crafted human
forms with wings of exotic bird feathers, arms exuberantly outstretched, giving the impression that they are flying. No two
mobiles are the same.

“Anyone would think this was a five-star hotel, the way you lounge about,” says La Vieja Juanita. “I’ve been slaving at this
maldito stove for over an hour.” Efraín smiles at the daily refrain, inhales deeply the aroma of fresh ground coffee beans,
shuts his eyes. A few minutes later, she places two fragrant cups of black coffee and two steaming bowls of Pizca Andina on
the table. This is their usual breakfast before heading to Sorte, a favored tourist destination believed to be the home of
the Indian goddess Maria Lionza. During the tourist season, which is most of the year, Efraín and La Vieja Juanita pack up
the vibrant mobile representations of the goddess and her court and walk through the forest to the main road, where they catch
a bus to the town of Chivacoa. There, they take another bus to the flea market at the foothills of Sorte Mountain, where they
set up their stall made of cardboard. When they leave, Efraín folds the cardboard carefully and leaves it in the care of Fernando,
the owner of the only place of business on this stretch with actual walls.

Though it is their only livelihood, Efraín is always sorry when La Vieja Juanita’s works of art are sold at the flea market
near Sorte, for they are far too beautiful to be given away for only three hundred bolívares. He thinks that most of the purchasers,
with their absurdly festive tourist hats and fat wallets, don’t appreciate the time, love, and skill that go into each piece,
and he is sometimes rude to them. Then La Vieja Juanita makes him apologize. When he is silent and gloomy afterward, she ruffles
his hair and changes the subject. She asks him to tell her his dreams.

Efraín can remember his dreams as long as they are not interrupted. Once in a while his dreams have a component of presentiment.
According to La Vieja Juanita, this is a marvelous thing; it means he is in touch with the spirit world. La Vieja Juanita
places great store in the spirit world. She says all Indian boys listen to the messages from the ancestors in their dreams
and that is why they know who they are. “It is the mestizos who try to live in two worlds, white and Indian, who are in danger
of losing themselves in the commotion of life.”

“And what about your son, Moriche?” Efraín’s mother had asked with a drop of acid in her voice. And La Vieja Juanita hadn’t
replied to that because the last they heard of Moriche, he was running guns and drugs for whichever side of the cross-border
conflict—rebel or military—paid him the most, and even La Vieja Juanita had called him a malandro sin vergüenza.