The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos

by Margaret Mascarenhas

  The next morning, when Zulema joined her at the restaurant at eight-forty, Irene thought her sister looked tired.

  “Didn’t you sleep?” she asked.

  “Sure. After I ate all the chocolate Easter eggs out of the guest basket,” Zulema smiled.

  “So, what’s the matter, then?”

  “Bueno. I’m pregnant. And I haven’t told Max yet because he doesn’t like children.” Zulema’s face began to crumple, but then she regained her poise and put on her happy voice. “It is nothing for you to worry about, mi amor. Everything will work out for the best.”

  They wandered through the cobblestone streets of the town and bought a handmade cuckoo clock and six jars of honey.

  When they returned to the Pequeño Alemán, Max had already paid the bill and was standing outside the lobby with their suitcases. He said his sister in Caracas had phoned to say his apartment had been burgled. They got into the Peugeot, which Max drove down the mountain like a stuntman, squealing around curves, honking and overtaking anything in his path, as though getting back to Caracas more quickly would counteract the fait accompli of the burglary. Irene had clenched her hands tightly in her lap the whole way down, while Zulema stared out the window, humming tensely and out of tune.

  When they arrived at Max’s residence in Cumbres de Curumo, the place was crawling with cops. Zulema announced immediately that she was going to lie down. Irene stood in the spacious living room, shamelessly making eyes at one of the youngest cops, while Max charged about, trying to assess his losses.

  It turned out that, besides the usual—TV, stereo, computer—most of the silver had been taken. Max paced up and down, ticking off items on a sheet of paper on a fancy clipboard and pursing his lips in a way that made Irene think his mouth resembled nothing so much as a dog’s asshole. How could Zulema bear to kiss that wrinkled asshole mouth, she wondered. The cops said they’d try their best, but in all likelihood the silver would have already been melted down by now. At which point Zulema emerged from Max’s bedroom to say that all her jewelry had been taken, and Max said, so what, since most of it was junk. “Who cares about those peroles?” he said.

  Strangely, the only item removed from the ultramodern, heavily mechanized kitchen was an antique earthenware pot, which Max had purchased for a bomb from an archaeologist’s assistant at Hato Viejo. Could the thief be an indio? Who else would attribute value to such an item? Irene mentioned the possibility to Max, who ignored her, because, after all, she was just a girl. She repeated her theory to one of the cops, who listened politely, looked at her intently, and said, “To me, it looks like a job by a Guajiro called El Malandro. He always takes the cars.”

  Max’s second car, a fully loaded, custom-accessorized Jeep with huge wheels, was gone. But, although the keys were still in the ignition, this Malandro character hadn’t wanted her sister’s beat-up, but beloved, Corvair. Too bad, she thought. If he had, it would have given Max an excuse to buy her sister a better car.

  In the middle of everything Zulema had blurted out right in front of the cops and neighbors that she was pregnant, then promptly burst into tears. And Max had told everyone except Irene to leave, had shut the door, had taken Zulema in his arms, and said, “Let’s get married.” For all his assholish ways, the fact was Max loved Zulema and would always take care of her. And Irene felt glad about that. But her gladness had been short-lived, because, as soon as they got home, Benigno threw Zulema out of the house for taking Irene to Colonia Tovar with Max. Irene was forbidden to see her sister.

  “Yes,” said Zulema, as she walked out the door with her last suitcase, “take it out on the minor child, the only person in this family you can forbid anything. But just remember, she is not your blood, she is ours, mine and Mami’s.”

  “That’s the pity,” Benigno shot back, “the poor thing is related to two of the biggest putas in all of Caracas.”

  Two months after her sister had been banished, Irene was admitted to a mental health facility for the first time (but not the last) with what they had said was a cocaine-induced “fugue.” She was subjected to a straitjacket, tranquilizers, and seemingly endless sessions of hide-and-seek with a ferret-faced psychiatrist known as Dr. Estrelina Uzoátegui. Terrified and terrorized by the paradigm shift—the sudden and never-before-experienced policing of her thoughts and restriction of her movements—she took some solace in making fun of her doctor’s faint but discernible mustache and hair set in wings that pointed upward. “Dr. Beethoven, I presume,” she would greet her, which did not win her any favors.

  But for Lily, for Lily alone, for even the thought of Lily, Irene had cloaked her fears in high-spirited abandon and mirth. Lily’s name did not feature on Benigno’s list of “real people” in her life, which was required by the hospital as part of the data on patients suspected of suffering from too much imagination. Which was why her handlers had tried their best to convince her that Lily was only a figment of her imagination. She wrote many drafts of many letters to Lily, which she asked her jailors to post. Whether or not they posted the final editions to the address she gave them, she has no idea. The point is, at fifteen, she was already an adept storyteller long before she ever considered taking it on as a métier. She kept the drafts but only two remain.

  A few months after she was released from the hospital, she accompanied her mother to Puerto. Tiring of the responsibility after two days, her mother went off to have a Brazilian bikini wax, granting temporary custody to her hombre of the moment, a hard-boiled Guajiro drug and gun runner in his twenties called Moriche. Since there was nothing to do in Puerto besides go to the beach, that was what they did, scanning the sand for a clear space, running hand in hand to claim it when they spotted it, spreading their outsize beach towels on their small half moon of powdery sand, rubbing Johnson’s Baby Oil mixed with iodine on each other, leaping over dead jellyfish as they ran to the sea, hugging and laughing while the big waves crashed over them in an explosion of foam. Afterward, her mother’s lover ordered dozens of fresh raw oysters with lemon juice from the roving beach vendors, which he fed to his young charge, while she braced herself on her elbows and slurped greedily from the shell. Some of the juice dripped onto her bare stomach, collecting in the concave of her belly. Laughing, Moriche dipped his finger into the little puddle and tasted it. When she giggled, he bent his head and licked her belly button.

  He was very interested in her family and most particularly in her father, Benigno. What he did for a living, where he worked, what kind of car he drove, that sort of thing. Irene was fed up. “You seem more interested in my father than in me,” she said.

  “Only because he’s your father,” he demurred.

  The next day, Mercedes took one look at her daughter, who was looking at Moriche, and said they were leaving.

  When she returned with her mother to the capital, it was nearly Semana Santa. Lily contacted her on a pay phone from the panadería near her house every day, and they had clandestinely arranged to meet several times, always successfully. They had even spent a whole day together at the Hotel Macuto, and she had been in a state of elation all week. But when Lily returned to convent school in Valencia, Irene’s euphoria evaporated as suddenly as it had appeared. Besides, her mother had found out that Moriche had followed them to Caracas from Puerto. She knew all about the Macuto rendezvous and threatened him with the direst of consequences. With both Lily and Moriche gone, she felt dead.

  “Buenas tardes, Señora Crespo, may I speak with Elvis?” The receiver was hot in her hand and her heart began to beat more rapidly as the viper rose in her throat. It had been three days since Moriche had been banished.

  “Hola, Elvis, it’s Irene. Listen, I have to talk to you about something as a friend. It’s about Lily. The day we all met at the Macuto, after you guys left, she made fun of you behind your back, saying things like, ‘He kisses like a fish,’ and ‘He walks like a faggot.’ I really felt bad for you.”

  She held her breath and pinched her thigh until he r
esponded the way she knew he would....

  Yeah, for sure, she can be a real frigid bitch. I just thought you should know...So, you want to come over and hang out? I’m here all alone, even the maid has gone out....Don’t worry, you can confide in me, I’m like a tomb, pana...You’re coming? Okay, see you later. Ciao....

  An hour later she clasped her legs around her best friend’s novio, and while he strained against her, she stared over his shoulder and tried to remember the precise number of oysters Moriche had fed her in Puerto.

  Often she cries in her sleep. And sometimes her dreams tell her it is the salt of the sea she tastes on her lips. That it is the sea breeze that ruffles her hair. That it is the sand that causes her toes to curl. That it is her Guajiro lover who leaps out from behind a coconut tree, grabs her by the waist before she can run, drags her into the water, deeper and deeper. She struggles pretend-angrily, banging her fists on his chest.

  He says, “You are like a sparrow, so tiny and soft and fluttering.” He smiles. Then he scowls. “Look at this crap all over the beach. It’s getting so you can’t even find a decent place to sit in the sun.” She looks around and notices for the first time that the beach is heavily littered. Plastic bottles, cigarette butts, condoms. Three stray dogs snarl over someone’s leftovers, a half-eaten sandwich and an apple. The owner of a nearby restaurant shack runs out and whacks at them with a stick, shouting, “Fuera, fuera, animales de mierda.”

  “He should be hitting the humans who left the garbage, not the dogs,” says Moriche. The dogs are spoiling her moment.

  “Don’t look at them, look at me,” she says, cupping his chin in the palm of her hand, gently turning his face toward hers. He smiles. When he smiles, the suntanned skin around his eyes crinkles. His smile is a lighthouse and, basking in its beam, she thinks she is in safe harbor.

  Caracas, May 1978

  Dear Lily.

  I’m writing to tell you that Elvis has turned out to be just like every other asshole guy. He actually tried to do it with me the other day, making cutie eyes and saying he was so lonely. Anyway, I thought you should know that he obviously isn’t faithful to you. It’s not really my business, but you know how much I care about you and I don’t want you to get hurt. You should definitely dump him.

  Now, I have a lot of other things to tell you. Remember the Guajiro guy I introduced to you at the Macuto when you came down for Semana Santa? The one who was my mother’s lover. Anyway, one day when my mother wasn’t there, he surprised me in the kitchen alone and told me he loved me. And I told him I loved him too. I mean, I suddenly realized that I loved him right then while we were standing in the kitchen together. All of a sudden, he grabbed my you-know-what, and then pulled me to him by the hips and French kissed me. WOW. We went into my mother’s room next to the kitchen (she still uses the cachifa one) and we did it like three times. I love him! I love his brown hair, his brown eyes, and his incredibly bueno body. He picks me up from school every day on his motorcycle and you should see the looks on the faces of all those Roosevelt bitches. Women just love him and he makes eyes at practically every female that passes in front of him, and of course I die of jealousy, but he tells me that I’m the only one he really wants. The big problem is: he hasn’t offi-cially broken up with my mother yet, and even if he does, can you imagine the peo if she finds out about him and me? But maybe she’ll be the one to break it off because my dad has threatened a divorce if she doesn’t give up her place in Puerto and come live in the city permanently. And you know what else I found out? Please don’t tell ANYBODY, only between you and me. Besides the gun business, she’s started dealing coca. Moriche told me and he knows it for a fact because he supplies her. The last time I was in Puerto there were some really scary characters hanging around her cottage, and one of them, this guy in a military uniform, practically tried to rape me. But Moriche gave him a huge coñazo on his jaw and my mother started screaming in his face and so he left. I don’t know what to think about it all. What do you think? Please write back soon. A really big letter. Are you coming back to the city in November for your 16th birthday? I hope so.

  I love you. Your friend always,

  Irene.

  She had never been a good judge of character. And most of the characters in her life weren’t exactly pillar-of-society material. So though it pains her, it does not really surprise her to think that it was Moriche who tipped the insurgents off that she would be in Maquiritare that Semana Santa, that it was Moriche who orchestrated the kidnapping in the forest.

  When she left Lily on the veranda of the cabaña, her heart was pounding with the excitement of seeing him again. But instead of Moriche there had been four guerilleros dressed in military fatigues who grabbed her roughly by the arms and covered her head in a black cloth so dense she thought she would suffocate, or that she and her abductors would live like fugitives in the jungle for what seemed like an eternity with only cocaine to pass the time and stanch their hunger when they couldn’t find food, or that they would force her to swear her loyalty to the revolution one hundred times a day, or that one of them would prick her finger with the coke-cutting blade and press it to a sheet of paper, leaving an ugly stain over a strange insignia that looked like a passion flower. She hadn’t expected there would be a ransom note.

  Finally Moriche returned, but not as her knight in shining armor; instead of rescuing her, he said, “You have to go back. Otherwise they won’t give us the money.”

  “No,” she said.

  “You have to do it for us, for me.” Wheedling.

  “No,” she said.

  He had raised his hand and she had run into the night.

  When she ran away, she stayed on the run. She was nearly three months pregnant by the man she was running from. She ran and ran until she reached a road, and there she hitched a ride on a pickup truck in the caravan of a traveling circus. She climbed onto the back and sat down next to a man with wild hair and green eyes, who, she learned, was a member of a flying trapeze troop.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, and she felt it was more out of politeness rather than inquisitiveness.

  “Coromoto,” she lied. She had always wished her name to be different, and now there was nothing to stop her from assuming the name of her choice.

  “Like the Indian chief!”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The circus people were kind. They gave her some cash and a list of people to contact in Barquisimeto if she needed a job. The first name on her list was a man called Catire who had a car-repair shop. She couldn’t imagine what kind of job would be available in a car-repair shop for a girl like her, a broke and pregnant runaway, but the circus people swore by the proprietor, saying he had connections everywhere.

  When she arrived at the shop, which was located in the seedier section of the city, she asked one of the mechanics for Catire. He pointed her gruffly toward the back of the shop, which was much larger than it seemed from the road, and she made her way through a maze of vehicles in various stages of repair, stepping around oilcans and toolkits and over the legs of men whose upper torsos were hidden under cars, until she reached a room of glass in which she saw a middle-aged mestizo man talking on the telephone. He seemed deeply involved in conversation. As she stood, hesitantly, near the glass door to the glass room, he looked up, saw her, and beckoned with his hand for her to come in. He hung up the phone.

  “Bienvenida,” he said, smiling.

  Since her circus friends had told her that there was nothing that could shock Catire, and no problem he couldn’t solve, she told him everything. “I won’t go back.”

  “Your arrival is timely,” he said, when she had finished. “I have business to attend to on the border, and I have been looking for someone to attend to the office while I am gone.”

  She worked for several months in the glass office taking phone calls and writing down messages, suspecting that her “job” had been invented on the spur of the moment and grateful for it. Catire would disappear for
long stretches of time, and when he returned the furrows in his brow would be deeper. Every evening she returned to a convent, to the nuns who had taken her in on Catire’s recommendation. She was polite and respectful and said the rosary with her benefactrices daily, but they watched her with concern, for it seemed to them that that she was restless and merely biding her time until her baby was born. She had agreed that the baby would be put up for adoption; she had met the prospective parents, a simple, working-class Catholic couple. Unfortunately the baby did not survive more than a few days.

  The day after the burial, she sat on a bench waiting for the bus to take her to the convent after work, as she had done every day except Sunday since her arrival in Barquisimeto. The bus came and went, and then another and another, and still she sat on the bench. And when a middle-aged man in a car slowed down and offered her a ride, she said yes. He was on his way to Sorte, a kind of pilgrimage, he said, for favors rendered by the Lady. When they stopped for gas a few hours later, he offered her some cocaine. “To keep us awake for the drive,” he said. She took it. And that was the beginning of an endless spiral of drug consumption, withdrawals, and more drug consumption.

  Eight years later, she was picked up outside a restaurant in Chivacoa for offering oral sex in exchange for money, disturbing the peace, and being under the influence of illegal drugs. As she was disoriented, the police handed her over to the poorly equipped and understaffed psychiatric ward of a government hospital, where she was admitted. She was seven months pregnant, and even if she had been coherent she would not have been able to say by whom. The effort of her resistence to the hospital staff induced a premature labor, and a baby was delivered and put up for adoption the very next day. Her agitated and disoriented condition was diagnosed as schizophrenia. She was wrongly administered a drug that put her into a catatonic state. Fearful, the hospital transferred her to a mental health facility, where she remained in a catatonic state for eleven years.