Tell Me Something True (14 page)

“We’ll go to my house, okay?” said Juan Luis, and Angel nodded, but he could still see the glimmer of fear that had appeared
in Juan Luis’s eyes, and it wasn’t the same that day, and it was never the same again, not really.

That night, he ate dinner alone, as he usually did, and much later, in the early morning, he heard his father come home, with
a cavalcade of cars behind him.

He didn’t confront him; you didn’t do that with his dad. But by then, he didn’t need to. He knew. And save for the time he
got sent away to Switzerland to school, everybody in his lifetime has known.

The unspeakable topics, the knowing looks, the business deals that, no matter how legitimate, are always executed quietly.
In almost everyone he deals with, he sees an underlying layer of fear.

But in Gabriella, he sees curiosity. No, he corrects himself. He sees interest. She is interested. She truly wants to know.

“My father has a lot of enemies,” he says carefully, sitting up and looking closely at the face that doesn’t look at him.
“He’s in jail,” he continues. “And I’m his only son. I’m a very easy target. It could be that they’re not interested in me
at all. I’m not part of his business. But we can’t take that risk. So, until he gets out, until he does whatever it is he
needs to do to resolve things, I need an army.”

“But why don’t you go live somewhere else in the meantime,” she asks logically.

“I don’t want to,” he says flatly. “I don’t want to be anywhere else. I love it here. And I want to be close to my father.”

“But Angel,” she says, and finally looks at him directly, her eyes cloudy with concern but clear in their intent. “He…” Gabriella
stops herself short.

She wonders how involved he is, wonders how much he really does. She wills herself, for this moment at least, to believe that
he indeed stands alone, apart, like her mother stood alone and apart, close to her father but so completely separate he never
knew.

“Are you close to your father?” she finally questions, because this much she can handle, this much she could share with him.

Angel considers her. A nice girl. From a nice family. The last time he dated a girl like her, she went to bed with him, but
milked him in the process, made him buy her Prada bags and Jimmy Choo shoes. Then her parents sent her to study in Miami and
she never returned his calls again.

He knows better now.

He looks at this girl who he wants to make love to so very badly his stomach hurts. He could have simply insisted his father
is in the “import-export” business, the standard line for people like him. He could insist on the other standard line—he’s
been wrongly jailed.

But she’s not stupid, he knows. He does neither.

“Princesa,” he finally says, the term of endearment slipping from his lips so easily, so softly she feels she could reach
out and capture it in her hand. “My father isn’t perfect. He’s had to do what he’s had to do, and a lot of it hasn’t been
that pretty. But he had a horrible life. Everything he has, everything I have, he worked for. I don’t always agree with him,
and I definitely do things differently, but he’s my father. He’s the only father I have, and I love him, even when I know
he’s not right. And now, he wants me to do well.

“And I’ve done well. I have my own business; I make my money. And it’s legit. But he’s in jail, and I’ll support him as long
as I have to. And that’s the package, princesa,” he says, slightly defiant.

She is silent for a long time, looking at the sky, deliberately thinking of nothing again, because she can’t think of anything
today; the weight of it all would crush her.

“Okay,” she finally says. “Okay.”

He stubs out his cigarette, and when he leans over, she can smell tobacco on his breath, and for the second time in her strict,
antismoking life, she wants more of that smell, and when he leans down to kiss her, she reaches up and pulls him closer, to
taste the cigarette he’s been smoking.

She has no makeup on, and her skin is very white and tinted with a high, feverish blush, and her hair is very black underneath
the many streaks of color, and her eyes have the same hue as the rain-filled clouds that now sit on top of the mountain ridge
in front of them, and he thinks that she doesn’t look like anyone else he knows and that each of her contrasts fits into this
landscape and that every dip and curve and joint in her body fits underneath his hands.

I
told Marcus once that if he ever were unfaithful to me, I didn’t want to know.

“Don’t come to me with one of your American guilt trips, pouring your heart out over your infidelities to get it off your
chest,” I said. And I meant it, too.

Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente, they say. Out of sight, out of mind.

If I don’t know about it, it hasn’t happened. But if I did find out, well. Well, frankly, I didn’t know what I’d do.

I asked him what he’d do if he ever found out I was unfaithful.

“I would put your stuff out on the street and kick you out of the house,” he said calmly.

“You can’t do that!” I laughed. “This is the twentieth century! You don’t kick someone out of the house because they slept
with someone else. Anyway, it’s my house, too!”

“I don’t care,” said Marcus. “You’d be out. You broke the vows.”

I couldn’t believe this was my Marcus talking. The man who made love to me in the teacher’s lounge.

“Marcus, that’s unreasonable,” I said, and I was serious now, because I could see he wasn’t joking. “What if you’re the unfaithful
one?”

“I would never do that,” he said.

“How can you know that?” I countered.

“I wouldn’t,” he said again.

“But how can you know that?” I insisted.

“Because I made a decision,” he said and took my hand. “I married you. Forever. Because I love you. Because I don’t love anyone
else. Because I didn’t love anyone else. And I won’t break this marriage. And I won’t be unfaithful.”

With Marcus there are never ambiguities. He listens, he analyzes, he weighs. But in the end, things are black and white for
him; right or wrong.

I’m a waffler. My decisions change with circumstances; plans with me—as my friends well know—are like air. That’s why I love
Marcus. My anchor.

My transparent Marcus.

Or maybe not so transparent. If you say something long enough, you come to believe it, even if it isn’t true. And if you believe
it, then I guess it becomes true. Maybe that’s all I need—to be a little more like him. I need to believe.

G
abriella’s room is a replica of her mother’s room. Gabriella’s bed is her mother’s bed.

The bookshelves are her mother’s, and so are many of the books, although Gabriella has added her own over the years.

Even the closet harks back to her mother. Gabriella’s clothes fill the hangers and the shelves, but way on top, Nini has stored
Helena’s stuff: dresses that stretch tightly across her back and T-shirts and scarves and old, tiny bikinis.

There is a picture of her mother on the nightstand. It was taken at her college graduation in Los Angeles. Her hair is very,
very short, and she looks like a little pixie with that ridiculous cap on. It occurs to Gabriella that it was taken when she
was her same age, twenty-one years old, all grown-up but still intrinsically linked to her parents.

Her father phoned today and yesterday and the day before, but she hasn’t had the energy to return his call and say… what?
I know you were made a fool of? I know we both were? She has never been unavailable to her father before. Never. But the mere
thought of speaking with him fills her with the most profound shame, for him, for herself.

Gabriella looks at Helena’s picture closely now, trying, as she often does, to see herself in her mother’s face.

But this time, she sees nothing. She sees nothing at all.

She picks up the picture and turns it over, facedown on the nightstand, and when her cell phone starts ringing, she answers
it automatically and braces herself to speak with Marcus.

But it’s Angel, and she feels a pang of guilt at her relief.

“I’m sending someone to pick you up in an hour,” he says shortly.

“To do what?” she asks, uncomfortable with simply taking orders from a person she’s just started to date.

“It’s a surprise,” he says, his voice softening. “It’ll be worth it.”

“But,” she protests, confused. “How long will it be? What should I wear?”

“Wear whatever, it’s not formal,” he says. “It won’t take long. I’ll see you,” he says and hangs up before she can argue further.

Gabriella looks at the phone, now silent in her hand, and considers. She’s just agreed to go somewhere, with someone, for
God knows how long. If Nini knew about this, she’d have a fit.

But Nini isn’t home.

Gabriella slowly picks up her mother’s picture again and stands in front of the mirror, holding the frame next to her own
face. She leans forward, until both their faces are almost touching the glass, trying to read her mother’s eyes next to hers.
Her mother, who always did what she pleased, and yet, those last years, was so sporadically happy.

Gabriella, instead, has been a good girl.

“And so, what?” she says out loud to her reflection. “What do you have to show for it?”

Gabriella sighs and tosses her mother’s picture on the bed, not looking at it this time. She runs her fingers through her
hair and looks at herself dispassionately in the mirror, at the features she knows are arresting, at the eyes everybody says
are her best trait, at the white skin that burns so easily, at her hands, her hands that she loves, which remind her of sculptures
by Rodin. She remembers her mother’s words. She won’t look like this forever.

She looks at herself and sprays perfume on the insides of her wrists, on the crooks of her arms, behind her cheeks, and on
her temples and grabs her bag and her cell phone and walks out of her room.

“Lucía, I’ll be back in a bit,” she calls from the front door, and before poor, anxious Lucía can ask, “But where will you
go, niña Gabriella? What will I tell your grandmother?” she is gone.

She waits outside, by the entrance of the building, so no one has to call her and no one has to see or wonder who she’s going
with when the black SUV slides to a stop beside her and the armed guard opens the door for her to get in. She sits alone in
the back, the driver and a bodyguard in front. No one speaks. Chitchat, Gabriella has quickly learned, is just not the thing
with Angel’s staff.

They drive north toward the opposite end of the city, where the structures begin to intersperse with empty lots, until they
reach a hangar surrounded by a makeshift metal fence that opens slowly to let them through.

As she gets out of the car, Gabriella hears the strains of the music, the thump of the bass making the floor vibrate, even
where she stands.

“Don Angel wants you to go inside,” says the bodyguard, motioning her toward a flimsy-looking side door that looks prefabricated,
like this entire structure, which she now recognizes as one of the ballrooms that is built only for the holiday season dances.
One of Angel’s shows, she suddenly realizes.

Gabriella pushes the door open and is greeted by a wall of sound and the ripples of accordions echoing throughout the vast
room, where the space seems even more immense, with the chairs and tables that will later accommodate six or seven thousand
people still stacked against the walls. There is no one here, except a handful of people milling at the front and the band
on the stage, Jorge Celedón and Jimmy Zambrano.

“Oh my,” says Gabriella, bringing both her hands up to her face, and laughs out loud in sheer pleasure, her first, genuine,
spontaneous peal of laughter in days.

She lets the music wash over her, such pretty, happy music, all for her. She’s so absorbed she doesn’t notice him until he’s
already standing beside her.

“Do you like it?” he shouts eagerly in her ear. “They’re playing tonight, but I thought you’d enjoy them better during the
sound check with no one around!”