There were very few who would dare to ask her how she got the scar on her cheek, because the stories of its origin that circulated had cemented the fear and respect Bella commanded in Poso Wells. Still, some truth could be sifted from the overlaps in the various versions one heard, which said that when Bella met Oswaldo Yerovi at the age of seventeen, she thought that life in this violent place was not only possible but maybe worth living. Then, after some years of peaceful cohabitation, not without joy and the birth of two children, her partner began to turn moody, to flare up without anything to justify his behavior. That was when Yerovi was said to have met Chicho Salém, who brought the young man to work with him at Bastión Popular, where Yerovi was also said to have a second family and home. Bella didn’t trust the rumor mill. For her, seeing was believing, so one day she left her children with a cousin and shadowed Yerovi for twenty-four hours. That was enough. First, in the morning, she followed him to a clearing where, hidden from view by the bodies of some stripped cars, she managed to get close to the group of men who greeted her mate and, confident they could not be overheard, discussed their plans for the coming night. On the ground, spread on a dirty red cloth, she could see wallets, credit cards, cellphones, watches, and jewelry. Since the men took no care to lower their voices, she could hear all they said while drinking from a bottle that went from hand to hand.
“When those sonsofbitches are hung over, it doesn’t even take any force,” one said.
“Like taking candy from a baby,” the one alongside him agreed.
“Old Salém opened the doors of paradise.”
“Home of the goose that lays the golden eggs.” Bella could see four gold teeth when this man smiled.
She went on listening behind the carcasses of stripped automobiles for a good while, but nothing got any more specific and her husband didn’t say anything, only drank one beer after another while sitting in a chair outside the main circle formed by the other men.
“So, everybody meet here at 11:30. Yerovi, don’t forget your piece, now that you’ve got enough to buy one. If you don’t bring it, don’t get on the truck, because where we found you, we can find a hundred more. And be ready for anything. This is for real men. Remember, once you show what you’re made of, Salém will start to think more of you.”
Yerovi nodded but still didn’t say anything. He emptied the bottle in his hand and then stood up and left. Bella didn’t want to follow him through an unknown neighborhood so she decided instead, knowing what she now knew, to take advantage of a relative who used his car as a taxi at night. They agreed to meet around eleven at an intersection not far from the lot where she’d overheard Yerovi and the others. What Bella saw that night shattered her life. She would never forget the snickers of her husband and the rest of them, could never wipe out the vision of the flock of vultures gliding over the city, widening their circle and then diving to grab their prey. At about five a.m., after she’d seen them carry out robberies in several parts of town, the pickup in which her husband was riding slowed and then came to a stop. Bella could see three bodies on the ground: two men and a woman, all without helmets, who’d been thrown from a motorcycle and landed some yards in the distance. They looked like marionettes tossed at random: legs and arms at strange angles, the girl’s hips out of line with her torso. All three were bleeding, their faces distorted with pain. The accident must have just happened, minutes before. When the seven men sprang from the bed of the truck, they took whatever they could find: phones, jackets, shoes, and watches. They didn’t hesitate to lift up the bodies in search of wallets, as if these were not people but sacks of potatoes. Bella was surprised not only by their voracity but by the methodical way they went about their search. Her man’s skill at this task made her nauseous, but she held on. The group abandoned the two men and concentrated their attention on the woman, beginning to strip her. They pulled at her pants, but her crumpled bones complicated the operation. Now they had ripped open her blouse, and her breasts, covered in blood and road grit, were exposed to the night, looking like freshly butchered meat. Bella began pounding desperately on the horn of the taxi, interrupting the group’s laughter, until the driver grabbed her by the shoulders and slapped her.
“Are you trying to get us killed? Cut it out! Are you crazy?”
He grabbed her hands next, trying to stop her, but Bella kept flailing and repeating her blasts on the horn. Lights began going on in houses up and down the street. Her cousin drove off and, in the rearview mirror, Bella could see that the pickup was following them.
“Duck down. I’m going to try to get away from those bastards. If they catch us, we’re dead.”
This time Bella did as her cousin said, while he made sudden turns for what seemed like hours. Finally, on a busy street, she got out and took a bus. When she reached Wells, Yerovi still hadn’t arrived. Midway through the morning, he showed up drunk. The children were already at school, and Bella had all his things packed in a box that she’d tied with a rope. When he tripped on his way to the bed, he kicked at it.
“Bella, preciosa, take these off for me,” he said, pointing to his shoes.
His words were slurred, but his tone was friendly. Bella was surprised by the tenderness in his request. That friendliness had disappeared from the house months ago.
“Oswaldo, there are two ways to do this.” She took a breath and held her voice steady. “You can go peacefully, or things can get violent, but one way or the other you’re leaving.”
“What?” Yerovi said, while trying to get comfortable on the bed and looking at her through unfocused eyes.
“You’re going, I said.”
“Where? What are you talking about? I’m tired, let me sleep.”
“A lot of work?”
“Yeah, a lot. But—” he reached out his arm. “We haven’t been together for a long time, have we? C’mere.” His hand fell. “Bella, come on, take off your clothes.”
The woman did not manage to get to the outhouse. Her body bent in two in the yard, vomiting up everything in her stomach. She splashed water on her face from a basin and went back in the house. Yerovi was snoring on the bed. A ray of sunshine fell like a whip across his face. Bella went to the kitchen and found a long carving knife that she stuck in her waistband. The bedroom reeked of aguardiente. She came to the bed and felt in the man’s pockets and the folds of his clothes. No pistol. She got a glass of water and threw it on his face.
He sat up, shocked and angry.
“Are you nuts? What the fuck are you doing?”
His eyes were red. He kept on shouting, rubbing his eyes, and shaking his head from side to side.
“I told you, you’re leaving.” Bella pointed at the box on the floor. “There’s your stuff.”
Yerovi stood up and walked toward Bella. Passing the window, he saw a group of women outside, looking his way.
“Fucking vultures! Get out of here. You want something to gossip about? Is that what you want?” He stuck half his body out the window while screaming like he’d gone crazy himself. Then he turned around and headed back toward Bella, who hadn’t moved or said another word.
“That’s what it’s about? Those busybodies came flocking around with the story that I’ve got another woman? Who are you going to believe, them or me?”
Bella still kept quiet. Yerovi sat down and put his head between his hands, elbows resting on the table they used for meals. He seemed to have forgotten about her. When he looked up, his voice had changed.
“Bella, we’re getting out of here. I can’t stand this place.” He looked at her with tears in his eyes. “We can’t go on this way. We can’t do anything, we can’t even screw without everybody knowing, it’s like living with our insides hanging out. I’m not an animal.”
“Really?” Bella felt she was collapsing, she wanted to hug her husband, to tell him it had all been a bad dream, but then she remembered the girl. “How long did you think it would take me to find out?”
“It’s nothing, Bella. You’re
my wife. I’ll get rid of her tomorrow morning, first thing, but listen to me, let’s get out of here.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
Yerovi looked at her differently. He stood up, came over to her, took her by the shoulders.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m not talking about any woman, Oswaldo. Last night I followed you—” she looked him in the eyes. “I followed you all night long, and I want you to leave this house and never come back.”
This is the point where things get confused. Some people say that Bella, before he could react, pulled the knife from her waistband and, closing her eyes to find the courage to use it, cut off one of his ears and blinded him in the left eye.
Others say that Yerovi grabbed a bottle from the table where he’d been resting his elbows minutes before. He smashed it to so as to have a weapon to kill his wife to keep her from going to the police about what she had seen, and it was then, before Bella could get the knife out in front of her, that he sank the sharp edge of the broken bottle in her cheek and left her branded with the mark.
Facts. The truth is always somewhere above, below, or next to the facts. The truth is that only when the light was dim, or in the shadows of a darkened room, or just at dawn when everything still appeared in silhouette, did Bella continue to be beautiful in fact as well as in name. That was the only truth.
V
Waiting Forever for You
That was certainly not what he’d been expecting to find when he went down the hole in search of the dog. Now what kind of mess have I gotten myself into?, Varas asked while he carried the woman through the gloomy tunnel in search of the way out. He knew he had followed a straight line, with no forks that he could remember, never choosing between one branch or another as best he could recall. But now he couldn’t find the shaft of light that ought to pierce the ceiling somewhere, nor the rope that should be hanging from the world outside. Either he’d lost all sense of time or he’d been here many more hours than he thought, or else reality, down in this place, stretched itself out into something very different. He stopped and lowered the woman to the ground, then leaned against the wall and let himself slide down too. He had forgotten the slimy texture, in no way reassuring, but at this point what did he care? What he needed to do was think. The dog, which had been following him, covering his rearguard, came up to him and resumed its licking. The animal’s warm breath in the stifling atmosphere of the tunnel didn’t bother Varas. In fact, it comforted him.
“Cuauhtémoc,” he said, scratching the dog’s head. “That’s your name, after the eleventh Aztec emperor. That guy had balls. There was Cortés torturing him to get him to reveal where the gold was hidden, and there was Cuauhtémoc, my buddy Témoc, calmly keeping it together while they burned the soles of his feet.” Varas stopped talking, but kept stroking the animal’s back, and after a moment he laughed. “He must have felt like a fallen eagle, and here we are, you and me, as fallen as can be.” When he said that, some mechanism clicked back into action. He stood up and, without any transition, went on, “But not totally lost, are we, Temocsito? Look, you go in front this time and I’ll follow you, because that’s what friends are for. You game?”
With the animal as his guide, Varas concentrated on following, which allowed him to discard all the ideas that had accompanied him since he found the naked, mud-caked woman in the tunnel: that he’d fallen through a wrinkle in time, that on dropping into the hole his reality had lost its footing and logic had lost its hold. Because, after all, why would a woman be crawling and grunting, unable to speak, in a tunnel closed in by scum-covered walls? Better not think about it. If he could get out, then there’d be time to find some kind of answer. Témoc started barking, the sound bouncing down the tunnel, echoes of echoes until the echoes revealed the rope, still in place. When Varas managed to see it, in the faint light from the fading flashlight, his face lit up. At last they had a way out, but how? The woman could not climb by herself, and he didn’t know how he could scale the gummy wall that would swallow his foot if he tried to put any weight on it. And Témoc?
“These papers need to be signed,” said the sickly-looking man wearing a sea-blue suit and sky-blue silk shirt, maintaining his posture by the window.
The two men were in the huge conference room of the Vinueza Consortium, located on the fourteenth floor of the only building in Ecuador with artificial intelligence, near the Colón Hilton in Guayaquil. Once an entrant presented badges and magnetic cards to clear security, the building—one more employee of the company—took charge of offering services. There were no buttons in the elevators, because the building recognized the voices of those who entered and deposited them at their desired floors. It maintained an ideal temperature, purified the air with constant shots of ozone into the ventilation system, opened doors, and projected statistics and sales charts in the air thanks to a sophisticated program that gave such abstractions three-dimensional form. Cutting-edge technology, available only on the top three floors occupied by the officers of the firm, allowed holograms to display the human body, specifically that of the female, in the most varied positions. The two men were conferring at an oak table, several yards long and oval in shape, in the center of the room. Fourteen red leather armchairs lent the space an austere grandeur.
“José María, signed by whom?” replied the other, a graying man of more than sixty-five, his blurry right eye blinking constantly. Close up, the thick cataract was quite visible.
“What do you suggest, Pablo? That we stand here with our arms folded while one of the Corporation’s most lucrative deals slips away?” responded José María, a short man whose sickly appearance was complemented by a prominent belly that suggested he hadn’t offered his soft body even a single day of exercise in all his forty-five years. He was pale, and his skin was covered with a fine layer of cold sweat that made him look like a fish. “We can change the date and forge his signature,” he concluded.
“I didn’t hear that.” The older man stood and walked over to the window. Then, more quietly, he modified his statement. “You didn’t say that.”
He went on looking out the window and then turned around to face José María. “I don’t need to remind you that you have no say over what happens in the Corporation. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re the administrative director of the Vinueza Enterprise Group. It’s Andrés’s brother who’s in charge of the Corporation.”
“If it makes you more comfortable, fine, I didn’t say it,” José María answered. After another pause, he continued. “Tell me, since when has Andrés’s brother taken charge of anything? And where do I find him so he can sign the documents? Who do you think you’re talking to, Pablo? Andrés has—or I should say ‘had’—power of attorney to handle everything.” Closing his eyes till they seemed two horizontal lines, he looked less like a slippery fish, and more like an eel with an upset stomach.
“No notary will certify that document. Everybody’s talking about his disappearance,” Pablo continued.
José María smiled. Pablo, the most senior partner, the only one remaining from the era in which Vinueza Jr.’s father had personally seen to all the business of all ninety companies, had already implicitly given him carte blanche. As long as Pablo didn’t have to know about it, José María could do whatever he thought necessary. That role didn’t bother him. With the results quantified in millions, his scruples could stay packed away forever in a box. But his smile also reflected Pablo’s failure to object to his use of the past tense. If all else failed, that was the next step, Plan B: get a judge to declare Andrés Vinueza legally dead. But as of yet, there was no need for things to go that far. Not with the photos José María had in his possession.
Varas had always defended his comic books against his mother’s ill-intentioned attacks. To his mother, reading comics meant, automatically, being lazy and good for nothing. He’d managed to make a deal with her, that if his grades stayed high, there was no god who could take his comi
cs away. Also, once he was old enough to have a job, he earned his own money to buy them. His tastes inclined toward anything created by Stan Lee, the sage of Marvel Comics. But not even when he was reading them so avidly in his adolescence could he have imagined how useful the comics would turn out to be. Thinking about how to get out of the tunnel with the woman and the dog, he pressed his hands against the wall and, in the darkness, what came to him was the first issue of Spiderman, the one where Peter Parker discovers that his wrists emit a thick, sticky substance that must have been much like what Varas was touching now. Thanks to the substance, Spiderman could climb walls. Varas gave it a try. His stretched out his arms and pushed first his right foot and then his left against the tunnel wall. He began climbing slowly. When he found that this really did work, he climbed back down. Once on the ground he considered how to carry the woman, because that was what he had to do. She had neither the will power nor the strength to hang from his neck. The only option that occurred to him was to place her in front of him and tie her to his body with the rope, making her into an extension of himself while he climbed toward the world outside. The tension that had focused all his attention on getting out of there had obscured the fact she was naked, which now made him most uncomfortable. This was neither the time nor the place to feel what he was feeling, but there it was, out of his control. He took off his shirt and covered her with it. Temóc rubbed against his leg and Varas pushed him away, now in a bad mood. A question began to flutter in his brain: What lie am I telling myself? He decided to leave that unanswered. He wrapped the shirt around the woman, pressed her against his body, and tied the rope. He performed his Spiderman feat and reached the surface sooner than he expected. There was no one around. Judging by the position of the sun, it was about noon. He leaned the woman against one of the mounds of dirt and told her he’d be right back. Then, before descending, he adjusted some long locks of her mud-caked hair to cover her face. If the intensity of light beaming down from the sky was making his eyes burn, he could only imagine what it was doing to hers. While he looked at her he wondered again what she could have been doing in the tunnel, but none of the answers that shuffled through his brain made sense. Some hidden truth was eluding him. By the time he had lowered himself halfway back into the hole, he was feeling trapped between two worlds: the world of light and that of shadows. He decided that no truth he was going to find would be sufficient to explain her. Or anything else.
Poso Wells Page 4