The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (42 page)

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 responded 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.