The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina

by Zoraida Cordova

  “She was so beautiful,” Tatinelly said, touching the likeness carefully, like she was afraid it would disappear when she did.

  An idea came to Marimar. “Is there a museum for things like this?”

  “A circus museum?” Rey asked skeptically.

  She touched the thorn at her throat. “There’s one in Coney Island. The whole place used to be a carnival.”

  “Let me ask one of my professor friends,” Ana Cruz said, tapping her chin. “He loves obscure history about Guayaquil. Don’t get your hopes up. These things used to pass through towns, but they wouldn’t stay long.”

  Rey wrapped an arm around Marimar. “It’s a good thing we have a cousin who is here to look for ghosts.”

  Marimar sighed, taking an orange wedge he offered. She bit down, sweet citrus juice running down her fingertips. “They’re your ghosts, too.”

  22

  LA SIRENA DEL ECUADOR

  The following day, one of Ana Cruz’s contacts called with good news about a hole in the wall “historical center” located in the back room of a comic book shop. When they were ready to go, Mike announced he’d stay back and sleep. Mike only seemed to be able to get up to use the bathroom, but insisted he was fine in bed, and Tatinelly had woken up with bruises under her eyes from lack of sleep. Jefita worried and tittered as she made tea and refused to leave the house until they all drank and ate. It felt right having someone care for them. Marimar had almost forgotten what that was like.

  She wasn’t doing better than her cousins. She’d tossed and turned all night listening to the sounds of the city. The noise of a television left on, cats fucking in some yard, the orchestra of insects. Her insomnia grew so bad she moved to the courtyard, and it wasn’t until she was gently swinging in the hammock that she finally fell asleep, the scattered images of half dreams.

  As they piled into the minivan, Rhiannon said, “I talked to the moon again last night.” She scratched her forehead. Her rose had turned violet overnight.

  Rey examined his rose. “How come I don’t get to be a human mood ring?”

  Marimar grinned and said, “Because your only mood is dramatic.”

  * * *

  El Museo del Circo was located in the middle of the cerro Santa Ana, the colorful hill full of clusters of houses and shops, bars, art galleries, and bookstores. It took 444 steps to get to the very top where there was a lighthouse painted in the city’s signature pale blue and white, as well as a small chapel and 360-degree views of Guayaquil. The Montoyas and their crew stopped at around step two hundred, winded and out of breath. The “museum” itself was located in the back room of a comic book store, and was approximately the size of a studio apartment, but it only cost fifty cents to enter and the proprietor and curator was eagerly awaiting their arrival.

  Ana Cruz knew Professor Kennedy Aguilar from when they studied at La Católica. Back then, they’d been young and fired up to change the world. Kennedy Aguilar, with his empowering speeches about social justice and civil rights; Ana Cruz, by changing the minds of students and fostering kindness from an early age. Of course, she’d done what she had wanted to do for a long time, before she had to dedicate the rest of her life to taking care of an ailing father who, on good days, remembered she wasn’t a servant, and a mother who had died with more regrets than aspirations. Kennedy had been off to a good start, publishing in semiradical papers. But after the murder of his best friend and journalist, Lisandro Vega, his spirit had diminished. His marriage had failed. He’d lost every strand of hair except his mustache. Instead, he dedicated his life to the research of forgotten things, particularly South American circuses. A passion he’d procured from his grandmother’s stories about her time with a spectacular to end all spectaculars.

  Rey and Rhiannon walked around the room, studying the items on display. There were costumes on mannequins. Posters that still wafted with the scent of kettle corn and the sulfur left behind by pyrotechnics. There was a giant hoop, presumably one an elephant would have jumped through. The very unfortunate taxidermized head of a lion, an iron sledgehammer still coated in rust, or blood. Several flyers that didn’t advertise anything extraordinary, just people of different races. The Incredible Indian! The Marvelous Mulatto! The Astonishing Aztec! And those were some of the less racist ones. It made the nostalgia of it all turn bitter.

  Rey tried to picture Orquídea smiling with a spotlight on her face in the middle of a European city with people trying to decipher what she was, as if she had been made of something other than bone and sinew and blood. Then again, how much different would it have been than if she had walked through the main street of Four Rivers, also with people trying to decipher what she was, where she had come from? How much different was it from Rey, standing at his gallery shows with people trying to decipher what he was, where he had come from?

  “Mamá Orquídea talked to the moon, too,” Rhiannon said, and they assumed she was talking about the poster they’d spent most of the evening staring at.

  Rey found himself wondering about how Orquídea could have belonged in the circus? Was Seal Boy really from the sea or just a man born with a medical condition? Was Wolf Girl truly a wolf or an impish girl with thick sideburns? How could a star be alive instead of just some clever pyrotechnics?

  Rey felt a pang in his chest, and he felt a tug at the root of his rose. He glanced around the room, but they were the only ones around. He took a deep breath. It smelled like air conditioner, polished floors. He’d caught a whiff of cigarettes from one of the employees in the comic book shop’s main room, and only then realized he hadn’t had a smoke since they left Four Rivers. No wonder he’d wanted to puke his lungs out after ascending two hundred steps.

  Kennedy, whom Ana Cruz called “profe,” was in the middle of regaling her with the long story of how he wound up procuring the lion head from a Russian circus that had blown up in Buenos Aires.

  “Ana Cruz said you wanted to know about a particular circus,” Kennedy asked eagerly.

  “The Londoño Spectacular?” Marimar handed him the poster.

  “You mean Spectacular Spectacular! I haven’t heard of this one in years,” he said, holding the unfurled advertisement open so it wouldn’t curl. “Pity the South American run of 1960 was cut short by the fire. Terrible. Terrible day. My father told me about it, but from the footage I saw, it was a sight, a real tragedy.”

  “Footage?” Marimar asked, something like hope in the single word.

  “Give me just one moment!” He ran off into an adjoining room.

  “I haven’t seen him this happy in years,” Ana Cruz said.

  Rey pointed a finger at Ana Cruz. “He’s not happy about us being here. I mean, maybe. But he’s definitely happy to see you.”

  Rhiannon grinned from ear to ear. Her rose deepened into a mix of pinks and reds. “He definitely likes you.”

  Ana Cruz turned the same shade of red as Rey’s rose. “Ay, sinvergüenza.”

  “Shameless but honest,” Rey said.

  “We’re a little weird, too,” Marimar added, and further explored the exhibits. She leaned in to look into the eyes of a taxidermized mermaid that was surely the skeletal remains of a human and possibly a shark somehow Frankensteined together.

  Half an hour later, they’d bought several comic books for Rhiannon in the front room, and Professor Aguilar returned with an old-fashioned movie reel. He set it up on his projector, turned off the lights, and ran the footage.

  The scene had been pulled from local TV and had no audio. The news anchor had a serious pornstache and the same drab brown suit everyone seemed to wear in the fifties. Behind him was a black-and-white striped, two-pole circus tent. A mouth made of fire ate its way out. Performers and people ran while a sad-looking firetruck tried to douse the flames. Clowns and stable hands fruitlessly ran for buckets of water. Makeup melted down their faces into grotesque sadness and fear. People picked up children, others ran. Smoke billowed and took shape, like the fire was a living thing. Fury made r
eal. Right before the segment cut out, a woman ran across the camera. Everyone, except for Kennedy Aguilar, took a sharp breath.

  “That’s my mother. She never said that she was there that day,” Ana Cruz said. She brought her hands up to her face, one pressed against each cheek in shock. Rey had always wondered why people did that. As if holding one’s own face would make a shocking terrible thing not true. As if you were the only thing stopping yourself from breaking apart.

  Still, as he watched his great-grandmother shout, he knew what she was screaming—her daughter’s name.

  “Why was your mother there?” el profe asked Ana Cruz.

  He shook with giddy disbelief as he turned the light back on. Ana Cruz stared at the frozen scene with disbelief. The Montoyas knew that no one wanted to believe, even when they witnessed the truth.

  Marimar picked up the poster they’d brought with them, and pointed at the young woman riding a crescent moon. “She was there to see her daughter. Our grandmother. Orquídea Divina.”

  Now it was el profe’s turn to look shocked. “I need to sit down. This is fascinating. Truly my rarest discovery yet. Other descendants of the Spectacular! Of course, all of this information has taken me years to collect. It’s a passion of mine, you see.”

  “Why are you so surprised?” Marimar asked.

  “Because so many lives were lost that day. Orquídea was listed as deceased, even though her body was never recovered. Along with her husband, of course.”

  “Of course,” Rey repeated.

  “Did her husband work in the circus?” Tatinelly asked.

  “Work in the circus? You really don’t know…” el profe took off his glasses and cleaned them with a pocket square. He smiled so hard, the vein on his forehead sprouted. He walked twenty paces to the other side of the room where he quickly flipped through a black album on a display stand. “Here we are. Bolívar Londoño III and Orquídea Divina Londoño.”

  He stepped aside to let the small family gather around. It was like looking into the past. Orquídea had her hair pinned in a stylish, elegant chignon with a brooch on the side. The wedding dress was simple, with lace sleeves, a tapered waist, and a floor-length skirt. Even in the old photograph, the beads and pearls on the material looked beautifully done. She held a bouquet of roses and flashed the same smile that contained a hundred secrets.

  “Damn,” Rey said. “Her first husband was sexy.”

  Marimar reached out and flicked his ear. “That is so inappropriate!”

  “I’m a married woman,” Tatinelly said, “But he is foxy.”

  Ana Cruz shrugged at Marimar, but they couldn’t deny it. Bolívar and Orquídea were a stunning couple. From the shine of the fabric, she could tell his suit was velvet, cut and tailored to his Roman sculpture figure. He wore his hair, too long for the age, curled like wisps under his top hat. He was smiling, too. The smile reserved for someone who knew that they’d just been given the world. He gripped the iron lion’s head cane with one hand, and Orquídea’s waist with the other. A ring on his finger caught the light.

  “Where—how did you find this?” Marimar asked, her voice trembling.

  Rey looked up to ask what was wrong, but her brow was furrowed with confusion, her eyes glossy with unshed tears.

  “My grandmother made the wedding dress. Her name was Mirabella Galante. A seamstress who’d come to Ecuador from Catania, Sicily, and found work at the Spectacular.”

  Ana Cruz snapped open a lace fan and tried to cool the air around her sweaty face. El profe had to run and get her a chair. They marveled at how intertwined a part of their past had been and they had never truly known.

  “What does this mean?” Tatinelly asked. She touched the back of her hand to her damp forehead. Rhiannon, whose flower had returned to the blue of a bruise, offered her water bottle to her mother.

  Only Rey seemed to notice Marimar hurry out the door. He followed after her. She took the stairs to the top of the cerro Santa Ana, climbing the remaining 265 steps. By the time they reached the summit, he found her gripping the railing. The humid river air wrapped around them, made the flags wave straight and true.

  “What is it?” he asked. “And don’t say nothing because you look like you’ve seen a ghost and we have seen too many fucking ghosts to be scared of them.”

  She walked to the ledge where the city spread out beneath them. Millions of houses and people and cars ignorant of their revelations. Marimar turned her face to the clouds, but she knew better than to pray.

  “Londoño,” she said tapping the skin beneath her flower bud. “He was wearing it.”

  “Wearing what? Marimar, I don’t understand.”

  Marimar opened the purse at her hip. In a hidden zipper pocket was a photo, this one he’d seen once before, seven years prior. It had been folded and unfolded several times since then. He wondered how often Marimar had looked at it and wondered at the identity of the man hidden by a flash of light. The man she believed to be her father. Who’d had a hand in her mother’s death. It was the single subject he knew not to broach with her, but here she was, carrying it with her thousands of miles away.

  Then he saw it. The thing that had scared her. The hand over Pena Montoya’s shoulder. It wore a signet ring with the same eight-pointed star as the ring worn by Orquídea’s first husband.

  “A coincidence,” Rey said, but he didn’t manage to sound wholly convinced. “Lots of people have the same jewelry.”

  She laughed, catching the attention of too many tourists. “Orquídea said the man in this photo was my father. Why do he and Londoño have the same ring?”

  Rey shook his head. “Maybe their families knew each other. Like Professor Aguilar’s seamstress grandmother who made our grandmother’s wedding dress. Maybe something went wrong and that’s why Orquídea ran, and somehow his kid met your mom. Even as I say it, it sounds fucked.”

  “It’s not enough.” Marimar turned, as if someone had called her name. But she didn’t see any familiar faces among the tourists at the top of the hill.

  When he closed his eyes and took deep breaths, Rey thought he heard someone shout his grandmother’s name. Orquídea! Perhaps the same way Isabela Buenasuerte had done on that terrible night when the Londoño Spectacular Spectacular had gone up in flames. A woman searching for her daughter. A woman searching for forgiveness.

  He wanted to comfort Marimar and tell her that they’d unravel the real truth. But he knew, as the skin around his rose tightened with a sharp pain, as if there was a thorn beneath his tender flesh, he knew something was wrong.

  Rey whirled around to find Ana Cruz running to them. “Come quickly! It’s Tatinelly.”

  23

  ORQUÍDEA DIVINA’S SECOND HEARTBREAK

  “What do you think about when you stand out here on your own?” Bolívar asked her one night, coming up behind her. They were headed toward Dublin for their final European show before returning home. Sometimes it was strange to Orquídea to still call Ecuador her home. The Londoño Spectacular Spectacular had been her home. Bolívar was her home now. Even the sea, cold and tempestuous as it was, was her home.

  Bastard Daughter of the Waves, the river monster had called her.

  In his fox furs, Bolívar was absolutely breathtaking. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed the sides of her neck. He opened her own mink fur, a wedding gift, and slid his arms across her breasts, down her stomach, reaching between her legs to where she hissed in surprise.

  “Your hands are cold.”

  She turned around on the quarter deck and leaned back against the rail. The salty Irish Sea breeze beat his cheeks pink. She rested a hand over one.

  “This trip makes me think of my father. I met him once. He was a seaman. Sailed in and out of my life. I just haven’t had a reason to think about him so much before.”

  Bolívar bit his lip and gazed at her in that way of his. Like she was the only person on this ship. It was just Orquídea, the moon above, and the sea surrounding them.

 
; “You said yourself you grew up on a river. That wasn’t enough to think about him?”

  “The Guayas River doesn’t empty out into the ocean,” she said. When she rested her hands on his solid chest, her sapphire ring winked like one of the infinite stars above. Had he wished for it, like he’d wished for so many things? “And here there is so much of it.”

  “You know I cannot stand it. How can I take away your sadness, mi divina?”

  She didn’t know if he could, but she tilted her chin up to accept the kiss he was promising. His mouth tasted like wine, sweet like the dark cherry jam he liked to spread on cake after dinner. Orquídea had tried to be so careful with her heart. It had already been broken once, the day her father shoved a purse full of coins in her hands and told her not to look for him. How could she not look for him when every time she saw her own reflection, fractures of him stared back at her? The parts desperate to be loved but never feeling quite whole enough to be loved.

  But Bolívar had whisked her away across the world. He’d chosen her. Yes, he’d had indiscretions, but that was life on the road, on the seas. He’d shown her she was the only one for him when he married her. Now their life would change. Why was she so afraid of telling him?

  She deepened their kiss, running her hands along the waistband of his trousers. He pressed his erection against her, and when he lifted her up, she yelped.

  “Are you afraid I’ll let you fall?” he whispered in her ear.

  “I’m afraid of a lot of things. But not of you.”

  Their corner of the deck was dark. Even the late-dinner passengers would be asleep. He looked around to make sure they were truly alone, then returned to her. His mouth on her throat, he hiked her dress up and over her hips. He pushed her lace underthings aside and eased his erection into her. He gripped the back of her knee and raised it to his hip. The pressure of him swelled and he thought he’d break apart in a single heartbeat, so he slowed. She felt her own pulse drumming in her ears, the hollow between her clavicles. He knew just where to touch her, just where to make her breathless and tight. She shut her eyes and felt the ocean mist around them. Licked the salt from his lips as he told her he loved her, needed her, and shuddered. He rested his face in her cleavage. Then he pulled out and she yanked her dress back down.