It seems that on the seventh day, Consuelo threatened to cut her hair fashionably short, as was the trend in the capital. Ismael told her he would never allow it, that he would keep watch over her night and day until she gave up such a silly notion.
“Well, if you’re going to guard my hair twenty-four hours a day,” said Consuelo, “I suppose you’ll have to marry me.”
And that is the reason Ismael gave up chasing skirts all over the country. It was to rescue Consuelo’s abundant hair.
What is this thing with men and hair?
Amparo and the other women laugh and ponder this question for several minutes, but no one has an explanation. They regard Carlos Alberto questioningly, but he only smiles and shrugs his shoulders. They turn to Ismael for the answer. But he is asleep, snoring softly, on the sofa across the room; he has decided to stay after all. Consuelo is pressed up next to him, one arm across his chest.
“Look at them,” says Luz, “they fell asleep during their own story!”
“That’s because they are still living the story,” says Amparo.
The corners of Lily’s mouth are curved slightly upward in the beginning of a smile.
“I never knew that my mother could be so determined,” she says, “I always assumed it was my father who called all the shots.”
“Your mother, cariño, is no one’s doormat,” says Amparo. “It takes some nerve to rebuke a director for staring at one’s breasts.”
“Yes, I suppose that is true,” says Lily. “I remember the time Señora Lupe asked why Papi was away all the time and Mami replied that it was because he was El Zorro, fighting against evil.” She laughs heartily and the other women join her. Even Luz, who is mostly sour. Remember this, remember that, they say, their voices rising, their laughter getting louder and more raucous.
From the corner of her eye, Amparo sees Carlos Alberto regard them apprehensively, like a park ranger spotting dangerous animals that have rampaged into his camp in the night. But Amparo and the other women pay no attention to him; they are caught up with hilarity, slapping the table, roaring with laughter, tears streaming down their faces; they are celebrating the moon-dance life of Consuelo Martinez Salvatierra. And, as far as Amparo is concerned, this is the way it should be.
The capacity of the passiflora edulis to endure conditions less than optimum is often quite extraordinary.
Carlos Alberto
Sometimes, when women get together, they can summon up a cornucopia of joy that makes men, by comparison, appear clinically depressed. They can do this even during times of great hardship and duress. Just last night, Carlos Alberto had watched Luz, Amparo, Marta, and the nurse all congregated in a huddle around Lily’s bed in the living room, laughing together with complete abandon, while Ismael and Consuelo slept on the sofa undisturbed. And, in that instant, he had been catapulted backward into his childhood, where he is a mere boy living among too many women and a man who doesn’t talk to him.
Carlos Alberto has always found the intimacy between women both fascinating and unsettling. It is as though he is looking through the window of a club where he can never be a member, because it involves a comfort level and kinship that does not exist among men, except infrequently, out of necessity, such as among soldados during times of war, or perhaps among convicts in a prison facility. And he is filled with a certain wistful longing, an ache that seems to emanate in waves from the solar plexus, for this part of Lily he cannot own.
He has attempted to capture Lily in words, on paper. Not only the way she looks, which always makes his heart skip a beat or two, or how she expresses herself to him. He has probed, with the tip of his pen, her fears, her thoughts, hopes and desires, her darkest secrets, just as he had done when writing the character of a woman possessed of the spirit of Maria Lionza, in his recently resurrected novel, based loosely on an old Cuban radio novela, La reencarnada. But Lily is nothing like the sinewy heroine of his imagination, with whom he has danced in his fantasies and whose fantastical character he has known intimately. The more he writes in his diary about Lily, the less he knows. Even now, after seven years of marriage. Perhaps it is as she accused him once (although she immediately apologized and retracted when shock froze his face): that it is more the idea of Lily than Lily that he loves.
To possess Lily entirely is a crazy, greedy, impossible desire; he realizes this. And how can he begrudge Lily her secrets when there are parts of himself that he has kept separate? He has, for example, never told Lily what happened with Miguel Rojas and how it changed him.
It was to the immense relief of Dr. Jorge Quintanilla when, after five daughters and a gap of four years, Carlos Alberto was born. Finally, he thought, a candidate for medical school. But there were periods during which his pride at having finally sired a boy was severely put to the test. For example: when Carlos Alberto was seven, he insisted on dressing like a girl. His older sisters were always piling onto one of the beds, lying against one another and laughing together. He felt left out. He thought that if he dressed like them, he would be like them. It wasn’t only because there were five of them and only one of him. It just seemed to him that it was clearly more fun being a girl. And his sisters didn’t mind if he invaded their closets and came down to dinner wearing a dress and a pair of high heels. They didn’t care if he painted his face with their cosmetics, as long as he put the caps back on. When he asked them to help him stitch a bit of lace onto his handkerchief, they thought it was great. “Ay, look at him, tan lindo,” they would say.
“Carlos Alberto,” said his mother, “please finish what is on your plate if you want to have quesillo for desert.”
“My name is Lupita; Lupita Ferrer,” Carlos Alberto announced in falsetto, daintily lifting a spoon of black beans and rice toward a petulant mouth slathered with his sister Celia’s raspberry lipstick. “I am a movie star.”
Dr. Quintanilla turned toward his wife, eyes bulging. “But, Maria Teresa,” he exclaimed, “the boy is turning marico. He’s a damn pansy.”
“He’ll grow out of it, Jorge,” said Maria Teresa Quintanilla. But her husband wasn’t convinced. Women surrounded the boy all day; he lacked sufficient masculine influence, in Jorge Quintanilla’s opinion. And so, the day after he found Carlos Alberto cuddled up with his sisters on the sofa in front of the television and sniveling over the thwarted love of the gypsy character played by the sultry Rebeca Gonsales, he enrolled him in summer camp at the Club Carabobo, where many city boys from good families went, including boys from the prestigious Academia Roosevelt. Dr. Quintanilla felt certain that at Club Carabobo all detrimental feminine influences would be expunged from the boy’s psyche forthwith.
“Pero, Jorge,” said Maria Teresa, “he’s only eight.” She believed that Carlos Alberto was still too young to be sent away from home for a whole summer.
“Eight is old enough to start learning to be a man,” countered Dr. Quintanilla. “With all of you on my back like this,” he added, meaning his wife and daughters, “it’s a wonder I haven’t turned into a fag myself.”
Dr. Quintanilla’s idea of what made a man involved football and baseball, mountain treks in the Andes, relay swimming, and defending oneself from bullies, the last of which Carlos Alberto would learn to fully appreciate after Miguel Rojas discovered the lace handkerchief under his pillow. It belonged to Celia, his eldest sister, and had been liberally and clandestinely doused with her perfume, to remind him of home. When Carlos Alberto had surreptitiously tucked it away between his shirts in the suitcase, little did he know how much trouble it would bring him.
It was two weeks into the summer. Carlos Alberto had just been reprimanded by the swimming coach for lagging behind in the relay race, and he was eager to regain the security of his room, which he shared with one of the older boys, Miguel Rojas, who was fourteen.
All the younger boys had to share a room with an older boy. To keep them in line, said the coach. Miguel Rojas was the only son of Jaime Rojas, who ran a chain of supermarkets he’d acqu
ired by a providential marriage to a Portuguese heiress, Lidia Costa. Miguel Rojas was an Academia Roosevelt alumnus and one of the richest boys in Tamanaco, if not the country. But being rich didn’t seem to have enhanced his disposition, and Carlos Alberto took precautions to avoid drawing attention to himself and to stay out of the older boy’s way as much as was possible in such close quarters.
“What have we here?” said Miguel Rojas, as Carlos Alberto entered the room, eyes already stinging with the tears he had not cried in front of the coach. Miguel was standing on his bed. Celia’s handkerchief dangled from his hand. “Don’t tell me I’ve been sharing my room with a mariquita.”
“Give it to me,” Carlos Alberto whined, making a desperate lunge for the handkerchief.
“-No-no-no,” said Miguel Rojas, whipping it out of the boy’s grasp. “I think Coach would like to see this—this marvelous result of his training.”
Carlos Alberto envisioned himself spinning wildly across the full topography of his utter humiliation. Coach’s sardonic face, huge, looming above his own. The vicious taunts of all the boys in camp. His father’s disgust when he learned of his son’s disgrace. It was too hideous to contemplate. He couldn’t allow it to happen.
“Please,” Carlos Alberto whispered, “please don’t tell anyone.”
“And what,” said Miguel Rojas, “will you do for me in return?”
“Anything,” he promised, “anything you want.”
Miguel Rojas sat down on the bed and indicated that Carlos Alberto was to stand in front of him. He obeyed, his heart pounding through his temples. Whatever happened, he told himself, he must not cry like a damn mariquita.
“Kneel down,” said Miguel Rojas, as Carlos Alberto stood trembling but dry-eyed in front of him. When the younger boy was kneeling penitently as if before a priest, Miguel Rojas said, “Where did you get this handkerchief? And make sure you confess the truth, or you will be punished.”
“It belongs to my sister,” Carlos Alberto said.
“What is her name?”
“Celia.”
“How old is she?”
“Sixteen.”
“Is she beautiful?”
“Very beautiful.”
“What color are her lips?”
“Pink.”
“Eyes?”
“Brown.”
“Does she have tits?” Miguel Rojas had his eyes closed during this part of the interrogation, as though trying to conjure a picture of Celia in his mind.
“Yes,” said Carlos Alberto.
“Are they big?” Miguel Rojas asked, opening his eyes.
“I guess so.”
“What do you mean, you guess so? Either they are big or not.”
“They are big.”
“How big?”
Carlos Alberto made a circle with his hands of about twenty centimeters in diameter. He was so busy trying to get the size right that he failed to immediately notice that Miguel Rojas had undone his fly. Carlos Alberto was afraid.
“Kiss it,” said Miguel Rojas, his voice thick and strange. “This is what girls like.”
Carlos Alberto did as Miguel Rojas said. Then Miguel Rojas stepped back and began to rub himself. His face got redder and redder. “Celia, Celia, oh, Celia,” he moaned, while Carlos Alberto stared in horrified fascination.
Afterward Miguel Rojas wiped himself with the handkerchief. “Here,” he said, pressing the soppy piece of cloth into Carlos Alberto’s hand, “give this back to your sister with the big tits.”
In retrospect, Carlos Alberto thinks that perhaps Miguel Rojas did him a favor, for he never again wished to be like a girl. That part of him was gone forever, or else buried so deep he could no longer recognize it. After a week, he took up boxing, a sport he perfected year in and year out at summer camp, much to his father’s delight.
“You see, Marité?” said Dr. Quintanilla, “All he needed was to be around boys.”
Maria Teresa Quintanilla nodded and smiled at her husband, but sometimes he would catch her watching Carlos Alberto covertly with a worried frown creasing her forehead. Carlos Alberto’s sisters were hurt when he shrank away from their caresses and refused to watch telenovelas with them. “Don’t you like Lupita Ferrer anymore?” asked Celia, tousling his hair.
“Girls are disgusting,” he said, violently pushing her hand away. “They are pigs.” After that, his sisters left him to his own devices.
Miguel Rojas never bothered him again after he joined the boxing team. He had graduated from an all-boy high school and gone off to the Universidad Simón Bolívar by the time Carlos Alberto won his first state boxing medal at the age of sixteen. Dr. Quintanilla, glowing with pride (and possibly relief) presented his son with an expensively wrapped gift box in the locker room.
“Open it, mijo,” he said.
Carlos Alberto, his face still throbbing from an uppercut to the left cheekbone and dressed only in the towel wrapped around his waist, tore off the paper and opened the box. He drew in a breath of surprise, wincing at the fresh pain in his side. But his pleasure at the contents of the box far outstripped his pain. Inside was a Rolleiflex 3.5F and a meter.
“¡Estupendo, Papá!” he exclaimed.
“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 cr
azy 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.
The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos Page 14