The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos Read online

  Mercedes Dos Santos, a devotee of the goddess Maria Lionza, believed in commemorating a girl’s passage into womanhood with the onset of menses using rituals entirely of her own invention.

  “Okay, muchachas,” said Mercedes on the day Irene got her period (Lily was ahead of her friend by a month), “today, we are celebrating your womanhood. Ya son todas unas mujercitas. I’m going to teach you how to walk.”

  “Ay, don’t be ridiculous, Mami,” said Irene. “We know how to walk.”

  “You walk like boys,” said Mercedes. “That is not the way for a woman to walk. A woman must walk like this.” She strolled across the terrace, moving her hips in an exaggerated figure eight. “Vamos, muchachas, now you try it. Muevan las caderas.”

  They spent the afternoon swinging their hips around on the terrace until Irene said she felt like throwing up. Then Mercedes, in a rare display of maternity, put her to bed with a hot water bottle.

  In the evening, Lily wandered into her mother’s kitchen, swaying her hips in a figure eight and feeling very grown up—toda una mujer.

  “What is wrong with you?” asked Consuelo, raising her eyebrows, and exchanging an amused glance with Marta.

  “Nothing,” said Lily, and went back to her room to practice the woman-walk.

  When they were thirteen, Lily and Irene auditioned for the Roosevelt school play, since Irene thought she might want to be an actress when she grew up. That year it was The Wizard of Oz. They appeared together for two auditions—one to assess their spoken English-language skills, the other to determine their musical talent. Both girls were selected: Irene as Dorothy, and Lily as the Good Witch. Exuberantly, they embarked on a shopping expedition for red shoes in Irene’s size, but they were unsuccessful in their quest.

  “Let’s look in my mother’s closet,” Lily suggested. Together, they foraged in Consuelo’s closet until they found what they were looking for: a pair of old-fashioned but well-preserved red satin pumps lying inside a box that also contained some letters tied with blue ribbon. Irene wanted to read the letters, but Lily said her mother wouldn’t like it. “Try the shoes on.” They were a tight fit, but Irene managed to squeeze into them. Consuelo had gone to the grocery store, and they had to get back to the theatre for the dress rehearsal, so Lily said, “Just take them. She won’t mind if we just borrow them; she never wears them. I’ll tell her about it later.”

  The rehearsal went well, though Lily forgot one of her lines, and the director commented favorably on the red shoes. “Perfect,” she said. “When the light shines on them, they look like rubies.” Afterward, the girls took a taxi to Irene’s, where they sat on the floor in the bathroom smoking stolen Astors from the silver cigarette case in Benigno’s study.

  “I’m bored,” said Irene, after they had finished their cigarettes.

  “Me too,” said Lily, mirroring, as always, Irene’s mood. “What shall we do?”

  “Have you ever studied yourself aquí?” asked Irene, pointing to her vagina.

  “Asco. Don’t be disgusting,” Lily said.

  “No, I mean it,” said Irene. “I do it all the time. You should try it. We can do it together, right now.” Nothing embarrassed Irene.

  “Forget it,” said Lily.

  Though Irene could usually persuade Lily to follow her lead, Lily had more conventional ideas of what was acceptable and what was not, and sometimes Irene went too far. Like the time they both had their periods during the same week. Irene had tried to convince her that if they mixed their menstrual blood together and buried it in the garden, they would be bound as sisters and their children would be hermanos.

  Lily can’t pinpoint when it all turned around—when they had exchanged roles and she, Lily, mutated fully from leader into disciple. Perhaps this gradual, imperceptible shift in the balance of power originated with Irene’s discovery that she could fit perfectly into her sister Zulema’s designer jeans, which were much more expensive and cooler than theirs. Irene wasn’t selfish about her discovery, though, and readily lent Lily anything she coveted from Zulema’s brimming walk-in closet. And Zulema didn’t seem to mind, as long as they didn’t choose anything she wanted to use on one of her dates the same night. Irene and Lily were the same size. Except for their feet. Only Lily could fit into Zulema’s tiny shoes. Still, that didn’t give her any advantage in the power equation. Irene had clearly become the controller in their society of two.

  It was Irene who taught Lily how to French-kiss. They practiced on each other for three weeks before they were ready to try it with boys. And Irene tried it first. It was also from Irene that Lily inherited Elvis Crespo, a thirteen--year-old boy from the Prados neighborhood with jet-black hair and roguish grey eyes, who loved girls at an age when most boys still hated them.

  “He’s too young,” said Irene. “I like them to be older than me. But he’s a fantastic kisser.”

  Though the general consensus would be otherwise, it wasn’t really Irene’s fault that their Spanish teacher from the Academia Roosevelt caught Elvis and Lily with their tongues swirling around each other’s mouths.

  Meeting at the elevator in the lobby of Irene’s apartment building one day after school, Elvis and Lily had pressed the penthouse button and agreed to kiss all the way up to the fifteenth floor. They were therefore unprepared when the elevator stopped, impromptu, on the fifth floor and the door slid open to reveal Señora Ramirez, who had been visiting her married daughter in the same building. Out of the corner of her eye, her mouth still locked on Elvis’s, Lily saw Señora Ramirez raise her manicured hand to her own mouth, her eyes bulging behind tortoise-shell spectacles. “Ay, Dios mío,” she exclaimed, just as Elvis, without taking his lips from Lily’s, or removing his left hand from her bottom, reached to the side with his right hand and slammed the Close Door button with the heel of his hand.

  “Mierda. That was my Spanish literature teacher,” Lily said, laughing into his mouth. “Coño, Elvis, did you see her face? What if she’s having a heart attack at this very moment!”

  “Shut up,” said Elvis, grabbing her hips with both hands. “We still have eleven floors to kiss.”

  Bursting with righteous indignation and concern for Lily’s welfare, Señora Ramirez called the house the very same afternoon. It was Luz, Marta’s daughter of the same age as Lily, who took the call. Luz had always been a tattletale.

  When Lily got home and saw her mother’s face, she knew she was grounded before she even crossed the threshold.

  Irene emotionally rushed to Lily’s defense when Lily phoned to whisper the news while Consuelo was in the shower.

  “That bitch!” Irene yelled. “She’s nothing but an old BOLSA FRUSTRADA. She probably hasn’t done it in FIFTY YEARS. Listen, Lily, do you want me to come over and tell your mother it’s a lie? I’ll do it, if you want me to. I’ll say I was in the elevator with you and Elvis, and that Ramirez is just one BIG FAT LIAR.”

  There were times when even Lily winced at the ferocity of Irene’s language, when she was shocked by Irene’s capacity for deception. But she knew the point was that Irene wanted to save her if Lily would let her.

  “No,” said Lily, “thanks, but I never lie to my mother.”

  “It won’t be your lie,” said Irene, who, Lily had observed, lied to Mercedes almost every time they had a conversation, “it’ll be mine.” And, for a moment, Lily was tempted, knowing that when her father learned of her French-kissing adventure—as he was bound to, since her mother told her father everything—she’d be grounded until she was an old maid. But Lily also knew that if she let Irene do this for her, she would never feel right again with her mother, and her mother would know. Consuelo always knew what Lily was feeling, sometimes even before Lily did herself.

  “No,” she said. “I’d rather get it over with.”

  “Okay,” said Irene, “but call me back first thing in the morning and let me know what happened.”

  One thing about Irene, she always had to know everything. And Lily always had to te
ll her.

  “Okay,” she agreed. But over the weekend her mother and Marta watched her as if they had eyes at the back of their heads, and Lily couldn’t elude their scrutiny long enough to make the call.

  By Monday morning, Lily was enrolled in the school attended by Marta’s daughter, Luz. It was a convent boarding school in Valencia, two hours’ drive from Tamanaco. Lily could still be in the Roosevelt school play, since it was only one night, and her parents didn’t want to ruin it for the Academia Roosevelt, but that was it. She was no longer allowed to visit Irene, or to invite Irene over.

  The next time Lily had the opportunity to speak with Irene was in the dressing room of the Carreño Theatre on the night of their first performance of The Wizard of Oz.

  “They’re sending me to a convent boarding school in Valencia where Luz goes,” said Lily morosely, slipping into her white-witch dress.

  “¡No puede ser!” Irene exclaimed.

  “I’m not allowed to talk to you after the play is over.”

  “Ay, you poor thing. But don’t worry, we can find a way, we can write letters.”

  At that Lily brightened slightly. “Don’t forget to return my mother’s shoes, or I’ll be in even worse trouble.”

  Though not ordinarily one to place much stock in possessions, when Lily confessed that she’d lent the shoes to Irene for the play, Consuelo had been upset.

  “I met your father in those shoes,” she sighed.

  The play received a standing ovation from an audience comprised predominantly of parents, teachers, and American consulate or oil company personnel. After the performance, as they were leaving the dressing room, Lily recalled her promise to her mother. But Irene said the red shoes must have accidentally gone back to the school with the costumes and that she would retrieve them the next day. Several days passed and, in Lily’s presence, Consuelo phoned to congratulate Irene on her performance as Dorothy and to ask when she could retrieve her shoes, which, she explained, were of great sentimental value to her.

  “I’m so sorry, Señora Consuelo,” Irene said, “but they are missing. I’ve looked everywhere. My parents would be happy to pay for a new pair.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Consuelo.

  It was Consuelo’s idea to send Lily to the same school as Luz. Lily was certain this was because Luz was an incurable tattletale who could be counted on to report everything. She thought it hypocritical of her father, who didn’t believe in a Christian God and had never stepped into a church after the day he married her mother, to endorse such a plan. And she said as much to Ismael, who conveyed her message to her mother, with whom Lily refused to speak. But Consuelo replied loudly enough for her daughter to hear, that between teenage boys with an itch in their pantalones and Catholic school, Catholic school was definitely the lesser evil.

  From the age of ten until the last time Lily saw her at the age of fifteen, Irene thought nothing of walking around her family’s penthouse dressed in bikini panties and a short, tight T-shirt that ended just above her belly button and said, Mefiez-vous des enfants sages. Dressed in this manner, Irene would sometimes wander into the study where her father sat drinking martinis and listening to opera at what Mercedes claimed was a thousand decibels above the human safety level. Climbing into his lap, she would wrap her arms around his neck and lay her head upon his shoulder. Benigno, clutching a vodka martini in one hand, would place his free arm around his daughter and bellow out the words to the music. This is how Lily found them when, after a gap of two years at convent school, she was finally allowed to visit Irene and invite her on a family trip to Maquiritare.

  “She is with her father,” said the maid. “Wait here.”

  Lily stood in the hallway while the maid knocked on the door of Benigno’s study and called out, “La Señorita Lily, para la Señorita Irene.” The door was ajar and from where Lily stood, she could see Irene with her father. She watched, mesmerized. Irene’s profusion of hair swirled, obscuring the faces of both father and daughter from Lily’s view. Long legs, his encased in brown silk pajamas, hers bare, ending in old-fashioned red satin pumps, creating a tableau of some mythical and wonderful four-legged life form.

  Many years later, on a rainy Saturday in the month of August, Lily sought to re-create this image with Carlos Alberto. She made him pose in his pajamas on a leather lounge chair with a martini glass in one hand. She arranged his legs out in front of him.

  “The things you come up with!” he exclaimed. But he played along anyway.

  She positioned her husband’s tripod and set his camera on automatic, before leaping into his lap wearing a T-shirt, bikini panties, and red heels. She flung her long brown hair about them. As soon as the flash went off, Carlos Alberto ran his tongue lightly along the nape of her neck and they made love right there in the leather chair. Afterward, Lily rushed the film to the photo shop downtown, which promised delivery of prints in two hours. She could barely contain her excitement while she waited for the chemicals to perform their magic. But her compositional masterpiece emerged from the dark room as a double exposure, with a close-up of her parents on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, their faces smiling radiantly, the figures of Carlos Alberto and Lily herself vaguely outlined, ghostlike, in the background.

  The obstetrician confirmed Lily’s pregnancy on the last day of October, one day before their birthday. They were born on the same day, Lily and Consuelo. And Lily could hardly wait to give her mother the birthday present.

  “Mami!” she yelled, bursting through the front door, with Carlos Alberto close on her heels. “Guess what, Mami, buenas noticias, I’m going to have a baby!”

  They had waited and wanted for so long and nothing had seemed to work. Not the beach weekends and sexy fantasies they devised to arouse themselves into a frenzy of passion. Not the fertility drugs. Not the humiliation of holding her legs suspended in midair for half an hour directly following intercourse. Finally, and in spite of Carlos Alberto’s objections, she had gone to her godmother, Amparo.

  “Don’t worry, mija,” Amparo had said when Lily told her she felt helpless. “These things have their own time. But there is no law that says we can’t help speed them along.” And she had handed Lily a bag of herbs. “This is Amantilla. Chew a leaf before you sleep with your husband. This one,” she said, handing Lily another bag, “is Maca. It is for Carlos Alberto; he must take it as an infusion once a day. And this may sound crazy, mi vida, and I don’t know why it is so, but making love on rainy days will improve your chances of conception.”

  “¡Feliz cumpleaños, Mami!” Lily shouted, racing toward the kitchen. “You’re going to be an abuela!”

  But her mother had not replied. How could she when she was lying unconscious in the garden?

  “What is wrong with my mother?” Lily whispered when the elderly family doctor had finished his examination and given Carlos Alberto a list for the pharmacy.

  “It is her heart,” he replied with what seemed to Lily a preposterous calm. “Fortunately not a major attack, and she is stable now, but she’ll need complete bed rest for a while.”

  Lily had the sensation of being swept away by a strong current. She could taste her mother’s heart in her mouth: metallic, pulsating, blood red.

  “You should notify your father,” the doctor said.

  “I would if I could, Doctor,” said Lily, suddenly angry, “but he is somewhere in the Delta, and there is no way to contact him by phone.”

  “Your mother is lucky that you happened to arrive in time. Otherwise...well, she really shouldn’t be left on her own in her condition.”

  When Consuelo was well enough to leave the hospital, Lily said, “You can’t stay alone, Mami, while Papi roams the country looking for inspiration. You will have to stay with Carlos Alberto and me....Coño su madre, why can’t he stay in Tamanaco?”

  “Don’t judge your father so harshly, Lily,” Consuelo said. “Can he help it if his work takes him away from us?”

  “Mami, por fa
vor, stop making excuses for him. Can’t a poet work from imagination and memory? Why can’t he work from his studio at home like you do? He is seventy-five years old, and still he runs wild in the llanos and who knows where.”

  Consuelo turned her face to her daughter, but looked beyond her.

  “It is who he is. And who he is, is the man I love. Do you know that every year since we met, he has written me a love song? Ay.” Consuelo sighed, her tongue loosened by medication. “Cuanto lo amo. Even now, at this age, I long to wrap my arms and legs around that man and draw him into myself.”

  Lily had been shocked by the raw desire in her mother’s eyes. The eyes of a woman still deeply in love with her husband of forty-one years.

  Until that moment, Lily had never really thought of Ismael in any terms other than as her father. A father who shared himself with todo el mundo, a father more absent than present. On the other hand, when he was present, he had never failed to fill her days with wonder and adventure.

  One day, he had brought her the moon.

  It was a Sunday morning, the morning of her sixth birthday and her mother’s forty-seventh. Lily heard a loud honking in the driveway and peered over the balcony to see her father smiling up at her from the window of a silver car with fins gleaming in the sunlight.

  “Mami, guess what—Papi has brought home a car like a big fish!” Lily shouted.

  A few minutes later, the three of them stood out in the driveway surveying the Lancer station wagon. Ismael said he had purchased it secondhand on the meager salary doled out by the government Department for the Preservation of National Parks, Forests and Protected Areas where he worked to supplement the intermittent sales of his wife’s paintings, infinite interpretations and permutations of the flowering passion fruit vine. Every available space in the house was crammed with her work, completed or in progress—a wild, violent collage of color and form that leapt out at the eye from every wall in every room. Not even the bathrooms were spared, which prompted Lily’s godfather, Alejandro, to wonder how anyone could be expected to have a decent bowel movement while under such an assault. “Do you close your eyes when you sit on the toilet?” he asked, playfully poking Lily in the ribs.