The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos

by Margaret Mascarenhas

  A week later, on New Year’s Day, thousands of people revolted against the dictatorship with the support of part of the Air Force, but the revolt was put down. A massive general strike followed within days. When the Navy joined the rebellion, El Colonel fled the country in a small plane in the early hours of the morning. All political prisoners were released. According to Consuelo, when she heard the news on the radio, she ran out of the safe house into the moonlight, laughing and dancing and crying all at the same time.

  Years later she would name her only child Lily, with the English spelling, in memory of the woman who died trying to help her get her husband back.

  Amparo is crazy about Lily, which is why she has moved, bag and baggage, along with her best nurse, the former radio and telenovela star Alegra Montemar, into the Quintanilla household. But also, it is because she wants to be a support to Consuelo, to make sure she is all right. It is always harder for a mother with an only child; there is nothing comparable to that depth of attachment. Lily is her world, and her anxiety about the delivery is palpable. Consuelo is depending on her, Amparo, who has never lost a baby or a mother. Her closest call, where she almost lost both, was eleven years earlier, when she had delivered the love child of a young mestiza woman called Coromoto. It was their friend Diego Garcia who had carried the woman in his arms, her body too thin for childbearing, her arms scarred with tracks, to Amparo at midnight.

  “It’s too risky, Diego,” said Amparo. “Take her to the hospital.”

  “Amparo, the girl is destitute. No hospital in the city will accept her.”

  “No, Diego.”

  “Amparo, what do you think Lucrecia would do in your shoes?”

  And still Amparo resisted, shaking her head.

  “Let me put it this way, what would you do if you knew the child this poor girl was carrying is Lucrecia’s grandchild? Lucrecia’s and mine?”

  So of course Amparo could not refuse.

  They had settled the young woman, delirious and burning with fever, in a back room of the clinic. Two weeks later, when labor began, Amparo had struggled for hours trying to turn the breach baby. Every time she tried to reach inside, the woman would arch her back and emit a spine-chilling scream, and Amparo would have to stop. It was the only time in all her years of practicing midwifery that she thought she might lose a mother in the birthing process.

  Amparo can still see the woman’s taut and exhausted face before her. “No hospitals,” she said through clenched teeth. “You do it.”

  It was too late to call an ambulance; it would be too dangerous to move the girl at that stage. For a moment, Amparo’s mind went blank. As she struggled against the wave of panic, the words of her teacher came to her rescue.

  “Indigenous people have been using coca leaf for centuries for medicinal purposes and in rituals. When a child is born, relatives celebrate by chewing coca leaf together. When a young man wants to marry a girl, he offers coca to her parents. Coca leaf is harmless when used in the traditional way. For the most part, it is used medicinally, mostly to dull hunger. But coca has another beneficiary use: it both hastens labor and eases pain.”

  Between contractions, she gave the girl an infusion of coca leaf. Then she handed her an entire bag of leaves to chew at will. During the next break between contractions, she smeared her hand and arm again with a mixture of aloe vera and olive oil. Closing her mind to the screams, she reached into the womb and finally coaxed the baby around. There had been a lot of blood—Amparo had never seen so much blood before or after this one delivery—and she had feared for the lives of both mother and child. The woman had a tear so long and so deep, it took Amparo half an hour to stitch it, and the baby was yellow with jaundice. The first twenty-four hours had been critical. But Amparo had used all her skill in treating them and they had survived. It was still ill-advised for them to be moved—and, in any case, where would they go? They made their recovery on a cot in the back room of the clinic. After eight days, a young Guajiro man with a perpetually running nose had come to take mother and child away. And Amparo had been relieved.

  A few days later, when she had checked her supplies, she saw that her entire stock of coca leaf was missing. God only knows what happened to the woman and her baby in the end. She sometimes wonders about them.

  Even though Amparo is a practical person, even after witnessing exactly one thousand six hundred and fifty-two deliveries, the marvel of birth has never failed to humble her. Three years earlier she had participated with reverence at the birth of her own granddaughter, and in a matter of days she will experience the joy of seeing Lily’s baby come into the light.

  Whatever eccentricities Marta might exhibit, she is certainly right about one thing; too much anxiety at Lily’s bedside is not good for Lily or the baby so precariously lodged in her womb after so many years of trying. Even unborn babies need to be surrounded by joy and good cheer, much more so when their mothers are frightened of losing them. That is why she thinks Marta’s Novena is a good idea. What harm could there be to mumble a few incantations and tell stories at Lily’s bedside?

  No harm at all.

  Amparo is sitting in the study with her back to the door. She glances nervously over her shoulder to see if anyone is there, but they are all in the kitchen, listening avidly to a football game on the transistor radio. During commercials, they break into a heated discussion about football and why Venezuela has never made it to the World Cup.

  “Who said that?” whispers Amparo to the air. The voice is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. “Look at me, por Dios, talking to an imaginary voice! It must be senility coming on. May the Virgin protect me.”

  Your pale and tedious Virgin has lost her ability to imagine. She could never envisage such an extraordinary development. Now, pay attention, por favor, because there is something I need you to do. Go to the Quinta Consuelo. In the lower right-hand drawer of the dressing table in the master bedroom you will find a photograph. Bring it here.

  “But what for?”

  For remembering.

  Amparo thinks her mind is playing tricks on her, tired out as it is from so much emoción, so much effort to create just the right atmosphere for bringing this special baby into the world. Of course it is just her apprehension about Lily, about the awesome responsibility of bringing Consuelo’s grandchild into the world alive and well.

  The evening before, after Ismael had taken off for his own house in his decrepit Lancer to get a change of clothes, Consuelo had suddenly sent Amparo after him.

  “Amparo, please follow him home and bring him back in time for dinner,” she said, “I don’t think he’s eaten all day.”

  “Of course, querida,” says Amparo, although she does not understand why Consuelo does not go herself, take the opportunity to spend some time alone with her husband after being separated for the past six months. Now that they are together in their daughter’s house, Consuelo’s continued use of intermediaries between herself and Ismael seems crazy.

  Crazy or not, it is the reason Amparo finds herself half an hour later ringing the doorbell of Quinta Consuelo, where Ismael and his wife had spent thirty-five years of their lives together.

  Ismael opens the door with what Amparo has come to refer as his hard-boiled look. “I don’t need any meddling mother hens around here,” he says. But then his features soften, and she knows he is joking.

  “Ismael, kindly address your complaints to your esposa. She sent me to make sure you are back for dinner,” she says.

  “Está bien, mujer,” said Ismael. “But don’t try to keep me there. My daughter’s house is overflowing, and her sofa is not very comfortable for sleeping. I have been on the road for most of these past six months, sleeping on the ground in the open air. I am due a few nights of comfort in my own bed.”

  Amparo laughs, for Ismael is a man who is perfectly comfortable sleeping on the ground in the open air, and possibly even prefers it.

  “Would you mind if I use your bathroom?” she asks. Isma
el gestures politely toward the master bedroom.

  In the bedroom, which is preserved in a state of disarray, Amparo notices that the side of the bed where Consuelo used to sleep is the only side that is rumpled. And her heart aches for Ismael. With all their bravado, men are lost without their women in the end. She is glad Alejandro went before her, even though she misses that old malandro so much it makes her teeth hurt.

  At first she is unable to find the evidence that would vindicate the voice in her head. She is relieved and disappointed at the same time. But then her hand sweeps the back of the drawer, touches the pointy corners of a small box wrapped in paper. She pulls it out, takes it to the bathroom, and shuts the door behind her. In the cardboard box is a framed black-and-white photograph of the four of them—Amparo, Alejandro, Consuelo, and Ismael. It had been taken the night of their fifth wedding anniversary, Alejandro and Amparo’s, the night Consuelo and Ismael first met. They were holding up champagne glasses and smiling. So young, so full of joy, of promise, with their lives ahead of them.

  You remember?

  “Yes, I remember.”

  You must tell the story to Lily.

  Of course, Amparo knows this conversation exists only in her imagination. She must have seen Consuelo put the photograph in the dresser drawer at some point. But storytelling was as good an occupation as any other while waiting for the baby to come. Perhaps being compelled by a militant Maria-lioncera to dig for joy in their memories would be good for everybody. Luz, for example.

  Life had given Luz some pretty tough knocks—the loss of her father before she was born, a difficult relationship with her mother, not being able to have children, her divorce. For a while, after she married Miguel Rojas, it had seemed as though Luz was finally going to be happy. But something had gone wrong; Miguel had left her. And although when he left her, he left her enormously wealthy, he also left her bitter. All Luz’s toughness was just the veneer over her unhappiness, la pobre. Luz might be rich enough to buy diamonds at a time when most people could barely afford Harina P.A.N. But all the buying in the world could not cure loneliness.

  The best cure for a bitter heart is to feed it with hope and possibility. And with that thought in mind, on the fourth day of the Novena to Maria Lionza, Amparo tells the story of how Consuelo Salvatierra fell in love with Ismael Martinez.

  “Amparo and Alejandro Aguilar cordially request your company to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary,” said the embossed invitation. So, when she was twenty-nine, Amparo’s best friend, Consuelo, attended a large dinner party at her home in the prestigious residential area known as Lagunita on a clear, star-filled night in June. And that is where she first saw Ismael Martínez—poet, composer, and revolutionary—just back from the Gran Sabana, where it was rumored he had been rabble-rousing with the Pemon tribes to block the construction of an oil field.

  That Ismael, he was always up to something, raising hell of one kind or the other. There had been rumors of his involvement in working-class riots and plots to overthrow the dictatorship. And in those days individuals suspected of sedition usually disappeared or else were the victims of bizarre accidents, or inexplicable suicides.

  But there was Ismael, acting as though he hadn’t a care in the world. That night he was casually debonair in black trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled twice at the cuff. He stood with his back against the terrace railing, his dark brown, wavy hair catching the silver light of the moon. He was facing Consuelo and Amparo, who stood just inside the French doors, surrounded by his usual group of revelers whenever he came to the city, which is to say, mostly women. He was playing the cuatro and singing. The song was “Flor de mayo,” and the way he sang it could set a fire ablaze in any woman’s belly. It is not an exaggeration to say that all the women were in love with Ismael Martinez that night, jostling one another in an effort to be closest to him, or in his line of vision, using every feminine trick in the book to capture his attention.

  Consuelo and Amparo stayed where they were, observing the women surrounding the man. Like Amparo, like all the well-to-do, oil-rich wives in Tamanaco at that time, they were confidently slender and elegant, with perfectly coiffed heads. They wore imported lipstick and sported the latest fashions from Europe, all purchased with oil money. Amparo could tell that Consuelo, who was a big-boned woman with unruly black hair that fell to her generously rounded hips, felt immediately out of place, even though she looked spectacular in a low cut black dress and red satin pumps.

  The song came to its wistful conclusion, evoking sighs of pleasure from the audience. Amparo thought: Ismael can make even these city slickers long for the Gran Sabana, even if they’ve never been there.

  “Be careful with that one,” she whispered in Consuelo’s ear. “He has the soul of a llanero—a real heartbreaker. No woman can tame him. He belongs to every woman and no woman.”

  And just then, by some strange twist of fate, Ismael stopped singing and looked directly at Consuelo, who immediately became pale as a ghost and looked as though she might faint.

  “I tell you, Amparo,” she would say later, “it was as if he had grabbed my womb with his eyes and squeezed it.”

  But, to go back to the story, just as Alejandro instructed the band to play a bossa nova, a man called Pedro Lanz, who held an important government post and was visiting from the capital, approached Consuelo and asked Amparo for an introduction. Now, Amparo didn’t like Lanz, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, for he was by no means an unattractive man and had impeccable manners. But, according to Alejandro, being nice to Lanz was good for business, and Amparo was nothing if not her husband’s most effective public relations manager.

  “But of course, Señor Lanz,” said Amparo. “May I present Señorita Salvatierra.”

  “Un placer,” said Lanz, politely offering his hand. But it remained hovering in midair, and Consuelo did not accept it. Amparo nudged her, thinking her distracted, but Consuelo, said, “Oh, was he talking to me? I thought he was introducing himself to my breasts.”

  Lanz’s swarthy complexion went pink as if he had just been boiled, and, for the first time Amparo’s social skills failed her entirely. In any case, there wasn’t a thing she could have done, since Consuelo was behaving as though both she and Lanz were invisible to her, and perhaps they were, because at that moment Ismael started walking toward them and Consuelo was watching him with her lips slightly parted, as if he were the only other human being on the planet.

  “Buenas, Amparo; good evening, Pedro,” said Ismael.

  “Good evening, Ismael,” said Pedro Lanz.

  “Pedro and I fought in the last revolution together, did you know that, Amparita?” said Ismael. “But now he is a director and has become antirevolutionary.”

  “Ismael, you know I know nothing of politics,” Amparo replied, while Consuelo began studying the area near their feet. Pedro Lanz must have realized he didn’t have a hope in hell of redeeming himself with Consuelo. He politely extracted himself, saying he thought he would get something from the bar.

  “Good riddance,” Ismael said, eyeing Consuelo appreciatively. “Now this, Amparo, is a woman. Where have you been hiding her? I demand an introduction.”

  Amparo, like all the other women, was a little bit in love with Ismael, who, she was convinced, could charm a snake if he set his mind to it. Relieved by the precipitous departure of Lanz and happy for the opportunity to please Ismael, she said, “Ismael Martínez, this is my best friend Consuelo Salvatierra, from Valencia. We were in school together.”

  “In that case, I will have to visit Valencia more often,” he replied, while Consuelo blushed all the way down to her knees.

  Now, Amparo may have been fond of Ismael, but she was protective about Consuelo, and she didn’t want him messing about and trampling the flowers in the garden of her best friend’s heart. Besides, though Ismael could be considered among the best of the country’s most important poets and musicians, he rarely had a céntimo to his name. On the
other hand, one dance could hardly matter, and the two were unlikely to meet again. Still, she thought it best to caution him. “Cuidado, Ismael. Don’t try to play the fool with her—she’s not like the others. If you were to break her heart, Alejandro would kill you and I would let him.” Alejandro had a reputation for a lethal left hook.

  “I only wanted to ask her to dance,” said Ismael, smiling disarmingly. “Do I have your permission, Amparita?”

  Amparo looked at Consuelo, who continued to look at the floor. “Well, Consuelo?” said Amparo. “Would you like to dance with this good-for-nothing lout?”

  “Yes,” said Consuelo, without raising her eyes.

  (And then what? says Lily.)

  And then Ismael reached out, placed his fingers under Consuelo’s chin, and lifted it until her eyes were level with his. Then he took her gently by the elbow and led her to the dance floor, where they began to dance. They danced so beautifully together, and all eyes were upon them. They continued to dance during the buffet, and during the serving of coffee and brandy. Finally, when all the other guests had left, Alejandro and Amparo went to put out the lights on the terrace, and through the French doors they saw a solitary couple, still swaying softly to the music of the moon. After that night, Consuelo and Ismael danced all night every night for a week. And on the eighth day of their acquaintance, they were married at a small chapel in Valencia, with only Consuelo’s aged parents, Amparo, and Alejandro in attendance.

  Amparo held a reception for them on the terrace where they had first met and invited all of Tamanaco society. All the women in attendance were dressed to kill in all the colors of the rainbow, as though, even after the fact, they might be capable of seducing Ismael back to his earlier ways. But Ismael didn’t even look at them and in their hearts those women wore black.

  “How did you achieve the impossible?” Amparo asked Consuelo later.