The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos

by Margaret Mascarenhas

  When she became catatonic, she entered a state of profound indifference along with a slowing down to the point of immobility. Although seemingly unresponsive and soporific to those trying to elicit a reaction, in fact she can recall her experience as one of reacting normally and appropriately but in glacial time, where others appeared to be moving too fast. At the same time that her physical life came almost to a standstill, her interior life accelerated to the speed of light; she began to live entire lifetimes in the span of a single day, most of the details of which she can remember even now. She tried on the skins and breathed through the lungs of men, women, children, young people, old people, middle-aged people, married people, single people, widows, heterosexuals, homosexuals, prostitutes, priests, athletes, poets, painters, musicians, revolutionaries; people who were beautiful, ugly, brave, timid, sad, joyful...Lovers who tasted like oysters and seaweed and salt.

  Like a latter-day Maria Lionza, she lived a thousand lives, with all their attendant joys and sorrows, ups and downs, successes and failures. And she died a thousand deaths. All in a period of one year.

  Toward the end of her first year as a catatonic, she dis-covered that a part of her always remained separate and independent from the life she was leading in her imagination, a part that behaved like an omniscient scriptwriter, and that by rescripting her choices, she could alter the course of her destiny. In other words, she could be both the scriptwriter and the scripted; she could be in two places at once. She became enamored of a particular incarnation, that of a mother and wife whose name was Coromoto. She took refuge in that role and decided she would stay in it until she ran out of ideas, or until Coromoto died of old age, whichever came first.

  No physician could explain it when, after eleven years, she was abruptly catapulted into the world of the asylum. Physically she emerged hardly the worse for wear, the passage of years imperceptible in her countenance. Incredibly, she had the muscle tone of a professional swimmer and hardly required any physiotherapy at all. But she was not happy to be back; she missed her other life so terribly and desperately that she begged her doctors to administer to her the drug that had induced her catatonic state. And when they refused, she had tried to bribe one of the physiotherapists with sex. Though sorely tempted, for he found her heartbreakingly beautiful, he was an upstanding fellow and told her that even if he wanted to help her, it was impossible, for the drug had been taken off the market.

  For nine days, she refused to leave her bed, shutting her eyes tightly, willing herself to sleep, hoping to find her lost life in her dreams. Sometimes this was possible, if only fleetingly. But her body put up a resistence; cramps from being too long in the same position, and the relentless pressure of the mattress, neither of which had affected her while catatonic, conquered her in the end. She sat up, swung her legs gingerly over the side of the bed, stood, and took her first hesitant steps in eleven years.

  It took several months, but eventually she began to accept and participate of her own accord in the routines and activities her doctors prescribed. But she was often disoriented and vacillated between social and antisocial.

  On sociable days, to distract herself from herself, she often felt inclined to elicit personal information from her fellow inmates. These she would document in the notebook with the leather binding her sister had sent her for Christmas, then rewrite them as her own. She even documented the utterings of the one they called El Cantante, who went about wearing operatic makeup and belting out songs in the style of Carlos Gardel, a tango singer of the thirties. Sometimes El Cantante would stab himself in the chest with a pencil for effect and then he would be carried away, waving his fist emotionally in the air and bellowing to the tune of “Cielito lindo,” “Ay, ay, ay, ay, I’m dying, I’m dying!” Around him, she composed a tale that had to do with transvestite bar dancers.

  On antisocial days, she read everything she could get her hands on—novels, history books, magazines, newspapers, even gardening tips. She was particularly taken with a children’s book containing legends and descriptions of foods and customs attributed to the different tribes of Venezuela. Of the legends, her favorite was the legend of Coromoto, namesake of that other Coromoto, the one of her dreams.

  One day, while the Cacique Coromoto was crossing a stream, he had a vision of a woman of astonishing beauty who beckoned to him. At that moment a mestizo called Juan Sanchez, who was a friend of the blancos but also of the indios, passed that way and the lady disappeared. The Cacique Coromoto recounted his vision to Juan Sanchez, who told the Cacique to gather his tribe at the end of eight days near the stream, which is when he would pass that way again. At that time, he said, he would teach them how to become purified for the lady. Coromoto consulted his medicine man, who thought it was a trap. That night the beautiful lady appeared to Coromoto in his dream. Coromoto drew his spear and raised it up against her, but the lady approached him without fear. With his hand he tried to push her away, but she walked into his hand and disappeared, and in the palm of his hand her image remained. When he awoke, there was no image on his hand, but he discovered that everyone in the tribe had had the same dream. The next night the lady appeared again in his dream. Coromoto told her that if she was a friend of the white man, she should not visit him again. The next day he gathered his people and told them they must move deeper into the jungle. But Juan Sanchez, who was listening from behind the trees, alerted the blancos, who surrounded Coromoto’s camp before dawn. The people were all captured except for Coromoto, who escaped into the forest. The blancos pursued him, but just before they could capture him, he was bitten by a snake and died within minutes. On the palm of his hand, there appeared an image of the lady.

  How she wishes she could be the Coromoto of her dreams again. To retrieve the life she lost. To love and be loved by a strong and good man. To hold her son against her breast and feel the beating of his heart. To recapture, even for a day, those carefree times under the palms in Santa Marta.

  With the years that passed came more enlightened methods of therapy. The last psychiatrist in residence had been a Jungian, a mestizo import from Cuba who saw no conflict between the world of dreams and reality, as long as, he said, one maintained an awareness of one’s own level of consciousness.

  “Think of dreams as just another kind of reality,” he said. “It is not so much what you believe but whether your beliefs are a help or a hindrance to you.”

  Under his tutelage, she progressed incrementally toward the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel (which meant, as her doctor repeatedly reminded her, toward a functional reality of her own that she could tolerate). Unlike his predecessors, Dr. Martinez saw role-playing of the kind she had engaged in all her life as having a useful function in maintaining mental equilibrium.

  Sometimes he would play Benigno. Sometimes she would sit on his lap.

  “So, having parents like Benigno and Mercedes, do you think that’s what made me loca?” she had asked the Jungian, still relishing the power of secrets.

  “Nice try, but too easy,” he had replied.

  At the interview to evaluate her petition for release, the Jungian doctor said, “You are still sometimes a niñita in your woman’s body. Have you decided what you would like to be when you grow up?”

  She thought it over. She would like to be a daughter who can manage to make it to her own father’s funeral, instead of sitting around drunk on agua ardiente and high on cocaine in a dirty bar downtown. She would like to be a mother not compelled by circumstances of insanity to give up her child for adoption, too stoned to notice he is gone, never to see him again or know his destino. Possibly, she said, she would like to be older, with all her trials behind her, sitting in her garden on Año Nuevo, a good man by her side. Definitely, she can see herself as a doting grandmother, with laughing, equally doting grandchildren at her knee, drinking fresh passion fruit juice, her favorite as well as theirs. But since it is not possible to will into this existence that son, that mother, that wife, that grandmother
, requiring as it does a rewrite of the past or a fast-forward to the future, not to mention an unavoidable dependency on the collaboration of others, she will settle for being a grown woman who can wear red shoes and get away with it. In short, she will settle for being herself: Irene.

  Her words and good humor had seemed to satisfy the release board, and they let her out to try her way in the world. By this time, she was already thirty-five.

  Her first impulse as she embarked on this new chapter was to find Lily. But though she scoured the city white pages of the moth-eaten directory at the halfway house where Dr. Martinez had secured her a room, she could find no trace of her former friend, nor even of anyone who had known her. Disheartened, she sat at the card table that served as both dining table and writing desk, tapping her foot to a jazz rendition on the radio of the song made famous by Judy Garland—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—the song she had sung to a crowded theatre hall as a schoolgirl, a song she had practiced with Lily.

  Or had she?

  Could it be that, as with so many other characters that have populated her thoughts and dreams, she has simply invented Lily Nathifa Amparo, whose name means “Pure Pure Sanctuary”? All the evidence—or lack thereof, actually—might seem to point in that direction. Yet, her memories of Lily are the most vivid, standing out from most of her recollections of life before the asylum.

  It is, of course, entirely possible that Lily and her family, like so many others, weary of an unforgiving political and economic climate that ground their dreams to dust, had migrated to some small town in North America or Europe, or anywhere they could maintain the fiction in their minds that to exchange their homes and traditions for security is a fair trade.

  Or could it be she, Irene, who is imaginary? Perhaps we are all God; perhaps no one would exist if someone else did not dream them into existence.

  Now there is a thought the Jungian would appreciate.

  It was her outpatient therapist, Lucrecia Usoa, who, quite accidentally, while substituting for a colleague on holiday, discovered that Irene’s mother, Mercedes, had admitted herself to the Serenidad Old Age Home in the hills of El Hatillo several years earlier. She suffered from Parkinson’s.

  “They say she doesn’t recognize anyone now. I can go with you, si quieres,” said Lucrecia Usoa. Irene was certain that not even Lucrecia’s reassuring presence would be able to shield her from the unquenchable nature of her mother. She was wrong. When she arrived, her mother, a shell of her former self, looked right through her as though she weren’t there at all. Irene sat in front of her, held tight her trembling hands in an attempt to still them, and blurted out the heartbreak of all she had lost—her lost years, lost time, lost loves. She apologized for running, for her own lunacy. But Mercedes only stared at a place somewhere over her head, her lips moving soundlessly, as if in silent prayer. Then, loosening her hands from Irene’s grip, she stood and tottered over to her dressing table, where she began to fastidiously rearrange and meddle with the items on its surface. Folding and unfolding a washcloth, mixing her tooth powder with water from a jug, dabbing rose water behind her ears. There was a statue of the Virgin Maria on the dressing table. No Maria Lionza nonsense here; the place was run by nuns. She stood up to leave. Mercedes took no notice. Irene did not return, for there was nothing to return to but ashes.

  It was also Lucrecia, after reading some of her stories, who said she had a good ear for the cadence and mannerisms of speech and suggested that she try her hand at scriptwriting. So she gave it a shot, completed a script about a family like the one she would have liked to have had, sent it off to the biggest telenovela-producing station. And then she waited for three months.

  When a letter from the station arrived, she tore it open with clumsy, trembling fingers.

  Your script has been rejected. Too raw, too weird, with too many old people. Too much narration in the background. We make telenovelas, not art films. We’re in the business of happily ever after. We fabricate dreams.

  The rejection continued:

  For future reference, there should be only two central characters destined to fall in love, and everything in the story should revolve around that. Make them young, more contemporary, give them sexier names...Consuelo and Ismael are too antiquated; our viewers don’t want to see old people in love. It’s a turnoff.

  That’s how they talk over at the big, corporate TV stations. Though apolitical as a rule, she thinks it will serve the bastards right if the government shuts them all down.

  She is neither able nor willing to comply with the terms of the TV producers, to rewrite the beings culled from the imperfect, twisted, but nevertheless beloved, fragments of her own psyche and experience. While she has no issue with fantasy per se, she cannot write lies or characters who have no souls. In her present life she can no longer pretend that everything crazy is exotic, she cannot ignore the elephant in the room, and when confronted with ugliness or pain or misery, she does not turn away. Her tenacity over the matter of editorial control has paid off and she has successfully sold for radio eight starter scripts, known as enredaderas because of the vinelike nature of their narratives, which can be continued by other writers into infinity, or as long as the audience’s love and attention holds.

  The first, The Fall of Maria Lionza, she dedicated to Lily after seeing her in a dream. It received widespread acclaim in a public survey among novela aficionados and ran for six months. The next was called The Boy Who Thought He Could Fly, followed by The Dancing Heart, then Opening the Door of Miracles—A Midwife’s Story, Diary of a Writer in Love, Daughter of the Revolution. The latest, Dreamwalkers, whose protagonist is gifted with the ability to enter the dreams of others and change their destiny, has been on the air since last September. And she is already midway through another, Incarnation of a Princess.

  No matter how many times she hears it, she is always thrilled when a new novela is announced with a dramatic flourish: “This is Passion Radio with another hot-blooded tale from the pen of Coromoto Santos.” Coromoto Santos is her nom de plume.

  It is public radio, not television, and it pays far less, but the fruits of her labor are read to the audience precisely the way they are written. And once her starter script has been enacted on the radio, she is happy, and perfectly in harmony with the idea that someone else will carry on what she has begun. Every now and then she tunes in to see what has happened to this character or that, and, more often than not, she is delighted. She loves writing for radio. Radio scripts are far more equitably balanced in terms of narrative and dialogue, inviting the audience to participate in their own unique visualization process. There is no question that radio allows for a much more intimate storytelling experience than television. She has voyeuristically watched people in cafés, or through the windows of their parked cars and living rooms, turn on the radio, close their eyes, and be transported to another place, another time. Public radio is far less glamorous than television, but the scripts are unadulterated, allowing for a more equitable balance between dialogue and narrative. It is literature. She likes that.

  Long live public radio.

  The Jungian had warned her against indulging her inclination toward magical thinking. But as for the fate of the corporate TV stations, it amuses her to flirt with the idea that her wish is being granted. One by one, they are having their leases revoked by the government. Students take to the streets, protesting in the name of freedom of speech. She believes in freedom of speech, of course. But she will not be joining the protests in the streets. In her catatonic period, she had lived the life of a revolutionary and died for it. She remembers the experience quite vividly, and as far as she is concerned she has already paid her karmic dues toward society in this regard. In this, her current and chosen life, she is responsible only for herself, and that responsibility is great enough, sometimes almost too great.

  These days, says Lucrecia, you have to take care to differentiate between dreams born of your own subconscious that lead to awareness, and fantas
ies handed to you on a platter that lull you into a stupor. You have to be on your toes when it comes to discerning what is real.

  For Irene this sometimes seems an exhausting and overwhelming task, mitigated only by her love for Manuel and his for her. How fortunate she is to have seen him sitting moodily in a café on the corner of Benadiba and Cinco and caught his eye, how fortunate that he took out his camera and asked her if she would mind if he took her picture, how fortunate that she, normally so reticent with strangers, had agreed to accompany him to his studio.

  When she thinks about it, it is a miracle that more people aren’t flocking in droves to the nuthouse. She supposes they go to Sorte instead. Or, for those who can afford it, to the banks of the River Ganga in India, whose muddy waters, it is said, can wash away even the most tenacious of ills.

  Lucrecia says there are those in the mental health business (for in this crazy world, craziness has become a business) who believe that blurring the line between what is real and what is imaginary is perfectly legitimate, even outside the realm of fiction. One of Lucrecia’s collegues at the halfway house where Irene used to live teaches a self-brainwashing technique to his patients, a complicated business involving the monitoring and conscious adjustment of one’s eye movements, which can be used to convert unacceptable memories into acceptable ones. In other words, they alter the facts. Of course, writers of novelas can do this automatically, without coaching. They write the world the way they want it to be at that moment. It is a heady thing, dreaming up worlds, kneading them like pastry dough, folding them over on themselves.