Before he met Consuelo, the only thing Ismael enjoyed as much as music was diversity in women. Every woman had something alluring and irresistible that caught at his belly like the claw of a jaguar. With this one, it was the sharp angles of her shoulder blades that moved him to tears. With that one, it was the curve of a calf descending into the fine art of an ankle that made him ache with yearning. With another one, it was the composition of the foot with delicate arches and toes like ten delicious little shrimp that took his breath away. The swells and curves that rose and fell along the terrain of a woman’s topography made him want to take up sculpting—in order to mold over and over again the balance and counterbalance of women’s bodies, to re-create the juxtaposition of breasts, the roll of derriere, the differential between waist and hip, the outline of thigh, the sharpness of hip bone, the soft swell of the pelvis, mysterious repository and origin of life. Unfortunately, sculpting was not among his many talents, and his creations were monstrous, the precise opposite of what he meant them to be.
Immune though he was to deep and binding attachments of the heart, there was nothing devious about his love affairs. He made it a practice to make love only with those women who made the first move, warning them in advance that the only promise he could make to them was that he would leave. The terms of the contract were always clear, and it never occurred to a single one of his lovers to stake her claim to him or keep him longer than he wanted to stay; it was his very wildness that made him so attractive to them, and they were happy merely to be among those with whom he had dallied for a time.
All that changed the moment he locked eyes with Consuelo the night of Alejandro and Amparo’s fifth wedding anniversary. All other women suddenly paled in comparison, and he could imagine himself with no one but her. It was as if he had been struck by a thunderbolt, every cell of his being electrified at the sight of her. He wanted to bury himself forever in her hair, which swirled, curled, cascaded from her delicate and perfectly formed skull, obscuring or framing the features of her face as she moved, playing hide and seek with the nape of her earlobes and neck....What wouldn’t he give to drink from the triangle at the base of such a neck, so perfectly cupped by bones of exquisite delicacy? Without waiting for permission, his heart pledged its allegiance to Consuelo, and he could hardly believe his good fortune when hers returned the favor.
When they were first married, Ismael, who had never before been responsible for the safety and security of anyone but himself, had at first yielded to the opinion of the majority that the jungle was no place for a woman. He began to search for a place to rent in Tamanaco so that Consuelo could be near Amparo and Alejandro, and have the pleasure of their company while he was away, for of course it did not occur to him to give up his nomadic ways, and neither did it occur to Consuelo to expect it. Though his heart was captive, his wandering soul was not. And though the length of his travels was greatly reduced, his life as a married man was not so different from his life as a bachelor. Instead of returning to many lovers, he now returned only to Consuelo. Similarly, in what Amparo said was the quintessence of hubris, the fact of his marriage failed to temper his bold politics of resistance to an all-powerful regime. Once a friend and an ally of the incumbent, he saw no danger to himself or his beloved; friends could disagree and still be friends, he argued with an idealistic innocence that confounded Amparo. Or at least that was the substance of his argument until some other “friends” began to disappear, but by then he would be in too deep and it would already be too late.
His income from public performances and sales of his handcrafted cuatros was irregular, but it was enough to afford a small rented apartment in the rough and tumble neighborhood of Carmelitas. At least this was its reputation, the newspapers said as much—nearly every day there were noticias about some robbery or stabbing or drug arrest, and editorials on the government’s “determination” to restore law and order. It was a determination that resulted in a type of reverse ghetto-izing of the cities and their environs, where the rich were permitted to create vast prime property enclosures for themselves, with high walls and gates and rigorously policed by contracted guards, while the poor were left to fend for themselves in the overcrowded neighborhoods of the inner cities.
On a busy street in Carmelitas he found an affordable one-bedroom apartment, where the mostly mestizo neighbors were friendly. The women brought the newlyweds baskets of fruit, steaming pots of food, small items of furniture they could barely spare. The men brought their tools and set about repairing the leaky kitchen sink, the broken window, and the busted light socket in the living room. Lacking cross-ventilation, the apartment was almost unbearably hot during the day, making the use of clothing an unthinkable torment, though it cooled to a tolerable temperature by late evening. The kindly neighbors from the other side of the street, who caught sight of the couple’s daily naked parade past the solitary window in the living room, kindly advised them to wet a bedsheet and place it over the window “so that they would not feel the heat so much.” And Ismael, assured that Consuelo would be safe amidst such generosity and solicitude, had continued to travel around the country, carrying his song of resistance to the inner recesses of the nation, returning to Tamanaco every few weeks with a renewed vigor and inspiration that manifested in the marital bed, a double feather mattress on the floor of their bedroom.
As soon as he walked in the door, he would pick up Consuelo and swing her in the air, bury his face in her bosom. Then, in a flurry of purpose, as though he might forget what he had seen, he would sit down at the all-purpose card table near the window where the light was good and begin to write, until Consuelo, impatient, would pull him away from the table and into the bedroom.
Already popular in the neighborhood, for anyone who can sing melodically while caressing the strings of the cuatro is always abundantly feted among the people, Ismael had rounded up his musician friends, organized a concert in the Plaza Bolívar, and donated the proceeds for a center in Carmelitas that rehabilitated local dropouts, a feat that elevated him to new heights in the eyes of the community. To show their appreciation, the men from the neighborhood kept an avuncular twenty-four-hour watch over Consuelo when he was away.
Consuelo declined Amparo’s invitation to stay with her when Ismael was gone. She, like Ismael, thought the newspapers exaggerated, or focused too much on poor neighborhoods like Carmelitas, or even made things up. She read aloud to him with surprise about the fulano who had been taken into custody for beating his wife, after the police had heroically entered the dangerous neighborhood of Carmelitas and subdued him. She was acquainted with the protagonists of the story, she said; she knew through her new friend Maria Pagán, who was a writer and ran the small secondhand bookstore down the street, that the police had been called but had arrived hours after the wife beater’s own neighbors took matters into their own hands, gave him a walloping he would never forget just to show him what a walloping felt like, and broke his right arm to make sure he would remember the lesson when he awoke sober.
“Why do the newspapers print such lies?” she asked.
Ismael replied that making an example of crime in Carmelitas was more publicly acceptable than investigating the exclusive residential communities where the powerful committed their own abominations from within their gilded ghettos.
They might have gone on living in Carmelitas forever, had Ismael not been home on the day a shot rang out, and the slender man in a suit who was walking toward Consuelo as she returned from the grocery store, fell to the ground, dead as wood, his eyes staring into the sky, blood pouring from his temple onto the sidewalk.
“He was only a few meters away from me,” Consuelo told him, when she reached the apartment, pale as a cloud. Her tone was calm but her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. She said the word on the street was that the dead man was a political dissident who printed pamphlets for the Communist party and had been taken out by the secret police. At that moment, Ismael changed his mind about living in Carmelitas f
or even one more minute, and they moved into Amparo’s house until they could make other arrangements.
After a few days, Consuelo said that what she wanted most in the world was to be always at his side, and if that meant following him into the jungle, well, she was ready. And Ismael had looked deep into the autumn-speckled eyes of this woman who communed so completely with him heart to heart, whose unwavering gaze spoke so eloquently her love and trust, and he thought, Why not?
Ismael was not so much defined by his early formative years as liberated from them when his father, Don Rafael Medina Martinez, began to speak in a tongue no one else could comprehend with a person, or persons, no one else could see. Don Rafael’s siblings had him committed to an asylum in the town of Las Tres Marías, where he would live out the rest of his days in the company of ghosts. His remaining days, as it turned out, were numbered to sixty-nine, the amount of time it took for a small bleed in one of the blood vessels in his left temple to become a torrent.
Since Don Rafael had not had the foresight to make a will, assorted family members, which included not only his three brothers and two sisters but also aunts, uncles, and second cousins once removed, upon receiving word of the demented patrician’s demise, took it upon themselves to carve up the assets expeditiously on a first-come, first-served basis. The division was an acrimonious one, with accusations and litigations that would span several generations, but at the time in question they all agreed on one thing: the inheritance rights of Don Rafael’s five-year-old son Ismael, born of an embarrassing (to them) union with a woman of impure blood, must be neutralized by the immediate burning of his Catholic baptismal certificate, to be followed by an expunging of the Church records in the parish of Las Tres Marías. So anxious were the relatives to eclipse the evidence of his paternity that the child might have been out on the street were it not for Don Rafael’s sister Estrelina Aguamar, an aged widow and devout Catholic, with skin the color of grapefruit. She insisted that the boy must complete his Catholic education and took it upon herself to pay for his schooling and boarding in the Don Bosco lyceum of Las Tres Marías until he turned sixteen.
“It is not the child’s fault that his blood is tainted, and it is our duty to ensure that he does not grow up like an animal,” she decreed.
The others concurred piously with the noble thought, especially since Estrelina had been the one to take charge and have Ismael’s baptismal records erased with the compliance and complicity of the parish priest of Las Tres Marías. They were lavish with praise when Estrelina, who had invested her sizable widow’s wealth judiciously, announced she would be footing the poor little bastard’s bills.
The truth of his birthright and dispossession would become known to Ismael many years later, piecemeal, from his Que family and through accounts told in the village closest to the Medina Martinez estate known as Santa Elena. But whether his course had been altered by design or by destiny mattered little, for he felt no connection with that former life or with those who had played a role in it. He could remember only vaguely the man and woman whose genes he bore, dim figures made out of smoke that hovered benignly in the loft of his memory. The only characteristic Ismael believes he inherited from his father is the ability to fall instantly and irretrievably in love.
Don Rafael Medina Martinez was a distinguished gentleman, of medium build and an enviable head of wavy, jet-black hair, who had inherited his wealth and property from his father, who had inherited it from his father, a former colonel who had won it from another colonel in a card game. He had completed a degree in medicine, as was the practice for a proper Señor, though it was not the practice for landed gentry to vulgarly put their degrees to any use. With the exception of the years spent obtaining his degree, he had lived in the estate mansion known as Cabeza de Carnero all his life. Solitary and ascetic in character from a young age, by the time he was forty-five he remained unmarried, a condition that had pleased his relatives enormously. When by the age of fifty he remained a bachelor, it seemed certain that the status quo would be preserved and the only question was to whom the estate would devolve. Since his intentions had not been made known to them, his siblings and their spouses jockeyed for position, visiting him dutifully on the holidays with gifts of potted meats, cheeses, and sweetbreads, and fussing over him in an apprehensive manner that more often than not drove him to the sanctuary of his stables. This gave his siblings the opportunity to rummage about in the study in search of a will, but they never found evidence of one. In the frenzied competition for his affections, they would redouble their efforts, arguing over who would sit at his right hand at the dining table, who would pour his sherry or coffee, who would accompany him for his nocturnal walk in the garden, until it was, to Don Rafael’s relief, time for them to return to their own homes. Every year they played this game, bowing and scraping in his presence, but, in his absence, as his eccentric habits augmented, they could not resist mimicking his peculiar and fastidious mannerisms. As soon as he left the room, their very faces would change, slyly spewing defamations and untruths about him with each other. It was understood that he was to be tolerated because of the money. And so it went year after year, until the day Don Rafael fell madly in love.
A man of discipline and scrupulous habit but not of imagination, every morning Don Rafael would perform his ablutions and emerge from his room at precisely eight a.m. impeccably dressed in his riding attire, punctuated by his signature cravat the color of wine. He would breakfast frugally on fruits and nuts before riding out to inspect his properties, which consisted of two hundred acres of timber forest and another two hundred of rubber plantation, returning by one p.m. to lunch on a single filet of fish, half a tomato, and a light chicken broth, then retiring for a siesta till four. From four to six p.m. he would attend to his property accounts. Promptly at six, he would pour himself a glass of sherry from the decanter in the library, select a book he had read before and would read from it again until eight, at which time the standard dinner of finely chopped boiled vegetables and beef roast cut as thin as cloth would be served and polished off with a small bowl of quesillo, accompanied by a demitasse of strong dark coffee. His day ended with a brief walk in the garden to hasten digestion, followed by bed. And so it went, with one day melting into another, for weeks, months, years, until the morning he rode out with his trusted foreman, Anastacio, to inspect the eastern side of the timber forest, which bordered a stream that separated his property from the small settlement on the other side. The settlement was inhabited by a branch of the Quechuan tribe, who were known as Que. For generations there had been an unspoken understanding that neither the white man nor the Que would cross into the other’s territory, and the stream marked the boundary of their agreement.
That day on the opposite side knelt an Indian girl of no more than fourteen years of age. She was collecting large smooth stones from the stream’s bed, which Don Rafael knew would be heated on a fire and used to assuage the pain of muscle fatigue, having observed this practice among some of his workers. Her head bent, focused on her task, the girl did not notice Don Rafael’s approach. Stricken by an inexplicable and gripping urge to see her face, he dismounted, signaling to Anastacio to remain where he was. As he stepped into the mild current of the stream, the girl started, then leapt to her feet, covering her face with one arm as if to avert a blow, as the stones scattered to the ground from her lap.
“Iman sutiki?” He asked her name gently. Slowly the girl dropped her arm to her side and looked at him with a face so fresh and vibrant with youth that a covetous spear of desire pierced his breast. He reached out his hand, which she took, tentatively, in hers. He smiled, she smiled back. Hand in hand, they approached the girl’s father who was also the tribal leader.
“Munaycha ususiyki,” he said, which meant “Your daughter is pretty,” and was the traditional way of asking a father for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The girl’s father, impressed with the whiteskin’s facility with the language, smiled and nodded. And when Don Rafae
l led his child bride back to his horse and lifted her up, she went with him willingly.
This is the story as told in the town of Santa Elena. In the Que version, the girl was captured, bound, and trussed like a wild boar, clawing and biting, and taken to Cabeza de Carnero, and she never smiled again. But the stories again converge on the following points:
Don Rafael had loved the girl, whose name was Luna, with passion but without understanding, as if she were a beautiful but mysterious figure in a painting to which he was drawn inexplicably, an object with which he could not bear to part. It was this lack of understanding that led him to re-create her in the mold of his fine lady ancestors whose majestic portraits hung on the walls of the Cabeza de Carnero mansion in gilded frames. He called for a tailor from Las Tres Marías to make petticoats and corsets and dresses. He gave instructions to the servants that her abundant hair be pulled tight and away from her face, tamed into an enormous bun that made her head appear too big for her body. She was bedecked with family jewels that had been taken out of their boxes after many years, and her feet were bound in elegant slippers. Within a year she bore him a son, who was christened Ismael in the church of Las Tres Marías, but who she called by a secret Que name that meant “moonlight,” and with whom she played as if with a delightful toy, being only a child herself.
One evening when Ismael was four, Luna bent to kiss him and went for a stroll as usual. She was never seen again. Don Rafael found her dress and petticoats lying in a heap on the edge of the forest, then farther down the path her corset and hair clips. Finally, her satin slippers were discovered on the bank of the stream where he had first seen her. With seven of his men, armed with rifles, he crossed for the second time the unspoken boundary into the Que settlement in the desperate hope that he would find her among her people and take her back. But the elder of the community, held up his hand and said with a sadness that left no doubt, “She is as lost to us as she is to you.”
The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos Page 24