The Heiress of Water: A Novel

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  “You can’t breathe a word of this to Will,” Sylvia said, pointing one finger up to the ceiling. “I won’t tell you a thing unless you promise to keep this conversation a secret.”

  Monica drew an imaginary line across her lips. “But why are we keeping it from Will, Sylvia?”

  Sylvia’s sparkling eyes darkened and she balled her small hands into a fist. “Because he isn’t a mother, that’s why. He has no instincts, no intuition, and he won’t get out of the way and let me help my child.” She cupped her abdomen with both hands. She glanced back at the bed behind them. “She’s my baby, dammit. She’s a part of me.”

  Monica let out a breath, slowly. She stared at the floor in silence, deeply moved by the fiercely protective maternal presence. There ought to be more of that in the world, she thought. The world would be a better place if every mother felt like that. She held her right hand up. “Okay. I promise not to tell anyone. You have my word.”

  When she was satisfied, Sylvia put her hand on Monica’s knee again and looked deeply into her eyes. “Out of twelve cases similar to Yvette’s they have succeeded in facilitating an ‘assisted recovery,’ as they call it, in six cases. That’s a phenomenal track record. Phenomenal. Anyway, the tough part is the cost: special air transportation is about ten thousand dollars.

  Plus the five thousand to the clinic.”

  Monica whistled.

  “I have the money,” Sylvia said softly.

  “I thought it was a trial—a study. How can they charge five thousand dollars for a trial?”

  “The fee is for room and board, ongoing daily care for twelve weeks, pharmaceuticals, physical therapy, on-site family accommodations, and unlimited local transportation. When you add it all up, you’ll find it’s actually dirt cheap compared to what all that would cost here in the States. The venom treatment itself is free of charge.”

  “Did they send you literature? A map or an address?”

  “No, they just pick you up at the airport. I don’t really know which end of the coast it’s on. I just know it’s on the beach.”

  “… Did they mention a contract, an application, anything?”

  “It’s not a Club Med, Monica. It’s top secret.”

  Monica made the most horrified expression she could come up with. “Sylvia, I wouldn’t even talk to them unless they can produce some literature that spells out details.”

  “I’m not stupid.” Then, in a softer voice, almost a whisper: “I was thinking of maybe going along with your dad.”

  “Now that’s a great idea.”

  Monica took Sylvia’s hands and leaned so close that she could see the pinhead-sized dots on the cushions of Sylvia’s earlobes where earring holes had apparently closed up. Monica looked past her, at the toes of Yvette’s pale yellow socks pointing inward on the bed and whispered, “Someone built that clinic and the treatment around my mom’s work. I know it.”

  “Let’s go then,” Sylvia said, opening her eyes wide. “It’s your duty to make sure your mother gets credit. Let them know you’re aware of what they’re doing. Who knows, they may want to ask you things about your mother and her work that weren’t documented. You can stay at a nearby guesthouse for a few dollars a night.”

  Monica felt a current of excitement rush through her. Still, she refused to get completely swept up just yet. “What does Yvettte’s doctor say? Did you show him the article?”

  Sylvia laughed bitterly and spoke in a deep voice, imitating Dr. Forest Bauer. “‘It’s something to watch,’ he says to me. What the hell does he think I’ve been doing for two years? Watching. Every little movement, every breath she takes.” Sylvia shook her head and pointed at the door. Her face was contorted with inner conflict. “The FDA will approve importation of foreign pharmaceuticals if there is no other available treatment here in the U.S. … as long as you can get a U.S. doctor to oversee the treatment.” She kept pointing at the door, shaking her head.

  “But no one will,” Monica said.

  Sylvia hung her head. “No one will.”

  “Well, that’s not a good sign. We have some of the best neurologists in the world here at Yale, Sylvia. If they don’t think it’s a good idea …” Monica began to feel the weight of responsibility for commenting on the cones in the first place.

  Suddenly, Sylvia brightened and pulled a gold chain out from under the neck of her blouse. Attached to the chain was an antique locket, but bigger, like a small pillbox. “Look. I just got this from Rome. A real strand of Saint Anthony’s hair. Four hundred dollars. A bargain if you think about what a relic it is. It’s supposed to return lost things, people included.”

  Monica eyed the object with scrutiny. “Saint Anthony was completely bald from adolescence. Besides, it’s Saint Joseph who’s the patron of lost things.”

  Sylvia gasped and looked down at the locket. She turned it over slowly. Monica heard her whisper a word that sounded like “Cheat.” She looked up at Monica, then back at the locket, shattered.

  Monica tugged her arm and smiled. “Sylvia, I’m teasing. I don’t know anything about saints.”

  Sylvia’s shoulders slumped in mock relief and she held up the pendant. “Good, because I’m really counting on this to work.”

  When Monica left, an hour later, she had the direct phone number of the mysterious Leticia Ramos. Sylvia suggested that Monica stick around and say hello to Will, who was on his way, but Monica rushed off, saying she had a massage appointment. It was a lie, of course, and she blushed violently as she recalled the pleasure with which she had purged the anxiety from his spine, spooling the invisible threads of tension that had woven themselves around his bones. When he left, she had mentally unwound and examined them in secret. He was searching for something, it told her. Just like everyone else, he was searching for something he’d either lost or never had.

  chapter 7 A MAYAN CURSE

  Bruce found what he was looking for in a box in the attic labeled ESCRITORIO—SALV. The labels on the boxes were in Spanish, which was only remarkable in that they were scribbled in his own handwriting. Years later, it tickled him there had been a time when a foreign language could wrestle down the English of his internal dialogue and become dominant enough for him to use it in household notations to himself. He remembered feeling proud the morning after his first dream in full Spanish sound track, a major milestone of life as an expatriate.

  Bruce figured that most of the phone numbers and addresses in his dusty spiral-bound notepad, circa 1972, would still be good. Salvadorans seemed to maintain loose relations with past dwellings; there was always an elderly aunt or a nephew hanging around years later who could tell you where to find the owner.

  The names written in faded ink were the dusty bones of a life and a time that had passed. For Bruce, it was as if time itself had been trapped between these pages, its vibrant wings pressed into limp, transparent sheets that crumbled the moment he exposed them to the pale sunlight of the attic. He wondered what would happen if he marched downstairs, picked up the telephone, and punched in one of those odd number sequences. He might dial into a twilight zone where kids born in the seventies were still toddlers, where his old pals were slim and had heads full of thick, black hair. He and Alma would be invited over for gallo en chicha, a native feast of rooster meat cooked to shreds in a delicious sweet, dark sauce that looked like oxidized blood.

  His thumbnail split a section that was stuck together, and the pages parted to reveal the name Renato Reyes Fuentes. Bruce gasped a little, his hand unwittingly resting on his heart, an old sadness spilling out on the page like an overturned ink bottle. Twenty-two-year-old Renato, who had been born with a clubfoot, had been doing odd jobs for the Borreros since he was fifteen. What Bruce remembered so vividly about Renato was that he possessed an amazing optimism despite his crippling deformity. He lived his life among the hungry, the angry, the hopeless, and the dead, and the brightness of his spirit was as astonishing as a red poppy blooming in a field of snow. He maintained an almost naive
sense of trust in the spirit of his countrymen to be reasonable, to see the path to peace through empathy and respect. His mother had once been on the domestic staff at the Borrero house, and she was a favorite of Alma’s. When Renato visited his mother every Sunday in their hometown, Gotera, Alma always sent her cash and free-of-charge meds, courtesy of Dr. Max Campos. Gotera at that time was the hotbed of guerrilla-military confrontations. On one of those visits, Renato stepped out of his mother’s humble, one-room house to visit a friend who lived a few blocks away. He was never heard from again. A month later, Bruce saw his photo on the corkboard at the Mothers of the Disappeared headquarters.

  Eighteen years later, the irony still made Bruce’s arms prickle. The idea that thousands of people could fall into a black hole, their end a mystery for all eternity, was haunting. Renato’s family—which included a wife and a child—could only surmise what had happened. He had probably been shot by the National Guard, which targeted the “red” towns. The pea-brained military thugs, predatory and reasonable as a stampede of raptors, suspected all citizens, especially young men, of being guerrilleros, or at the very least sympathetic to the communist cause.

  But it was just as possible that the rebel side had swallowed poor Renato. They might have killed him for refusing to join. His mother told Bruce that the guerrillas were charging monthly fees for their promise to protect local families from the military raids. Renato’s mother had fallen behind on her premiums, the equivalent of twenty dollars a month. She confessed that for a time she had kept up her payments by selling the medications that Alma sent, despite needing them to treat her high blood pressure. The word on the street was that Renato’s disappearance was a lesson to anyone who refused to pay.

  Two months later, Alma had found a bed for the old lady at the main Borrero house in San Salvador, and even old Magnolia did her part by putting the other maids in charge of her care. But the old lady only outlived her son by a year. She died of a broken heart, which took the form of a deadly stroke.

  Bruce flipped the page and scanned the rest of the list. Even though there were ten or so people Bruce would enjoy seeing again, only five remained actual friends after the erosion and corrosion of fifteen years. Out of those five, one had fallen victim to cancer, another was living in Spain, and two were journalists living somewhere in California. The only person he considered a true friend who was still living in El Salvador was Claudia Credo. He flipped through the book, looked under C, and found her name. The pages made crackling noises as he turned them. The dust of the attic was making him sneeze, so he decided to go downstairs, clutching the wire-bound notebook to his chest. He laid the relic on the coffee table and sat back, trying to remember the country code to dial.

  Claudia Credo’s loyalty was earnest and undeniable. She consistently went out of her way to include Bruce in her social circles even during periods when he himself wasn’t investing much in their friendship. If he was cranky and unsociable, she said, “Oh, you’ve been working too hard, Bruce. You should get some rest.” If he went months without returning her phone calls, she never mentioned it when they finally talked. It had crossed his mind that perhaps the source of her loyalty and patience was something other than pure friendship. After all, it had been Claudia who had targeted Bruce at that fateful embassy dance. She had used Alma as a decoy, never imagining the destiny she would unleash.

  But time had shown Claudia to be the kind of person who spontaneously gave of herself to everyone around her. Over the years Bruce hadn’t attributed her devotion to anything else but the easy familiarity that can spring up—often inexplicably—between two completely different people. Theirs was a friendship that could be unfrozen at the last sentence, like releasing the pause button on a home movie. He tracked her down at her parents’ house.

  “Gato, I can’t believe it!” she cried, after the maid, who answered with a polite ”Buenas tardes,” handed her the telephone. Bruce chuckled at recalling that Salvadorans assigned nicknames with the spontaneity and tenacity of fourth graders. He had often been struck by the insensitivity of these little handles. Take Claudia Credo, for example. Even her parents called her Santa Clau, a reference to her corpulence. Poor Renato was dubbed Llanta Pacha, “flat tire,” for his limp. A guy who hid the stump of a missing hand by tucking it in his trouser pockets was called Yo Pago, meaning “I’ll pay,” since he appeared to be eternally digging for his wallet. Bruce always considered himself lucky that he got his benevolent nickname early (Gato because of his catlike green eyes). A British journalist had once pointed out that in El Salvador early nickname assignment protected you from a far more creative, accurate, and less flattering version later on.

  The two friends settled into an easy chat. Claudia Credo told Bruce that she was still living with her parents, still not married, but had moved up professionally from working in the press office for the National Guard to working directly for the Office of the President. After they had filled each other in on the big stuff, Bruce asked her if she knew anything about the mysterious clinic. She did not. He told her what he had discovered the previous day: that venom trials were being held at Negrarena, at the Caracol villa. She was silent for a moment. “You know that property was abandoned for a long time after Magnolia died.”

  “Abandoned?” Bruce said, sitting back in his recliner. “After her nephews screwed Monica out of inheriting it?”

  “They couldn’t agree on what to do with it. While the family was busy squabbling—and this went on for years—the place filled up with squatters. The owners showed up one day and the Moroccan swimming pool had been drained and was full of fighting cocks and goats.”

  An image of the crystalline swimming pool with its hand-painted imported tiles flashed in his mind. “Wow.” He drew in a great breath as he shifted in his chair. Just approaching the subject of his battles with the Borreros required taking his weight off his knees.

  “So then someone must have bought it and cleaned it up.”

  “You know there’s nothing I can’t find out, Gato.”

  “I know that very well, my dear. That’s one of the reasons I called.”

  He could actually hear the smile on her lips as she said, “I’ve decided I’m going to start exacting a price for my friendship, Gatito. I’ll find out what you want—for a price.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “That you come to see us,” she said, her voice switching to a child’s pleading cadence. “Everyone asks about you, everybody.” She began to name their mutual friends by their nicknames: “Loco, La Seca, Feo, Dormilón, Cuto, Chele, El Fantasma, Pánico Británico, everybody.”

  “Really?”

  “Just because you don’t think about us doesn’t mean we don’t think about you. We wonder what’s going on in your life. Like maybe El Gato finally gave up drinking crappy beer and switched to Scotch.”

  Bruce laughed, then heard someone speak in the background, and Claudia’s voice seemed to turn away from the phone to respond.

  “That’s right, Mamá. The gringo who loved your sugar tamales.”

  Bruce smiled. “Tell your mom I said hello. … Anyway, Claudia, you don’t have to try to convince me to go to El Salvador, I’m already planning a trip. I’m researching a magazine article. I’m interested in what’s going on at Clinica Caracol.”

  “Bravo. I’ll pick you up at the airport and you can stay with us. In the meantime, I’ll get started on the nosing around.” There was a pause, and she seemed to search for the right words before she spoke. “You know, Bruce, the spirit of your wife has replaced La Siguanaba as our most popular folkloric tale. I believe that’s one of the reasons Caracol was empty for so long. One of the Borrero cousins got it in his mind that her spirit was haunting the place.”

  Bruce laughed bitterly. “For God’s sake. I knew they were a pack of wolves, but I didn’t think they were superstitious.”

  “Guilt manifests itself in funny ways,” Claudia said. “The Borrero cousins knew that getting Magnolia to
sign everything over to them wasn’t what she would have wanted had she been of sound mind. By all rights, your daughter should be a very rich young woman.”

  Bruce crossed his arms, nudged the receiver into the crook of his neck. He looked out to the public golf course that stretched out from under his house like a lush green carpet. “Monica doesn’t know the whole story about the family wars. I didn’t want to contaminate her with my anger.” He took a deep breath. “She’s been saying she’d like to go with me to El Salvador, but I’m extremely uncomfortable with the idea.”

  “Monica is how old?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “How time passes.” Claudia whistled. “Wow. Twenty-seven.”

  “I don’t want to alter anything in her peaceful life by unearthing the rotting past.”

  “Are you afraid she might blame you for what happened?”

  “I wish I could be sure she would blame me. I’m far more worried that she might blame herself if she knew. She set the events into motion that ended in her mother’s death. I think it would be tough to live with that.”

  He heard Claudia exhale, and for a moment there was only the eerie scratch of the long-distance line, hissing between them. “Then discourage her from coming. The subject of the Borreros is a gossip magnet down here. Everyone will be curious about her. She’ll be like some long-lost princess.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about.”

  “Well, whatever you decide, I have plenty of room for both of you. When are you arriving?”

  “I’m waiting for the green light from my editor, is all. I’ll know within the week.”

  “I’ll start rounding up the old gang. I’m sure they’ll want to see you.”

  “How about if you keep this to yourself for now? I don’t want the Borreros to get word that I’m around, especially if they have anything to do with this clinic. Besides, my editor could change his mind. If I go, I’ll probably stay a week. Is that all right?”