Tell Me Something True (22 page)

“No one is more respectable than a patron of the arts,” Angel had replied wryly, a comment that managed to coax a laugh out
of his father.

“A patron of the arts,” he said, shaking his head. “I must say, Angel, I didn’t know you had it in you. It’s a good line,”
he said with grudging admiration in his voice. “Although, I wouldn’t exactly call presenting salsa shows patronage of the
arts. You’re going to have to do a little better than that to be Mr. Respectable,” he added, laughing again, looking around
at the cadre of bribed prison guards and personal employees that hung out in his private jail wing.

“It’s just the beginning,” said Angel calmly. “I’ll pay your money back. I’ll give it back to you nice and clean, as a matter
of fact.”

“Nice and clean,” his father had repeated, nodding, serious now, leaning forward in his chair and placing his hand on his
son’s knee.

“You do that, m’ijo. Otherwise, I’m wasting my time here eating shit. You let Julito run my numbers. Never mind what I say,
never mind what I do. Whatever you do, keep it fucking clean. I’m going to be the last one in my family to sit in a shithole
like this one. Don’t forget that.”

The business was clean in a year. And it began to become profitable as he expanded his reach. Being his father’s son and having
an army of men at his disposal gave him an edge over the competition: he could always offer artists security as part of the
package. The first time government officials investigated his finances, they found nothing out of line in his books. The second
time, only six months later, they didn’t, either. Angel was by nature meticulous, but the years of business school in Switzerland
and France had made him more so.

Angel kept a low profile. His shows could be over the top, but he was never part of the press. The word out in the street
now was that if they were to nail Luis Silva’s son, they had to look at something other than the concert promotion business.

He also kept the piano. He found it gave him a certain cachet to invite the stars he booked for a drink at his apartment and
have a grand piano to show.

Impulsively, he hired a piano teacher, who for a while came to his home every single morning at seven. Angel paid well for
the service, but after a year, he had to recognize it was an exercise in futility. Much as he felt the music, his brain refused
to convey the message to his hands, which felt like lumps of coal on the keys. Worse still, he found practicing tedious and
meaningless. He fired the teacher, but as a consolation prize, he hired him regularly to play at his parties.

Now Gabriella runs her fingers over the keys of his piano. No woman had ever played—really played—his piano. How many planets
had to have aligned themselves to bring this particular girl to this particular house? he wondered. Angel didn’t believe in
coincidences. His life was too precarious for coincidences. He believed in plans. But he believed in fate.

A door had opened here, and doors only opened briefly, he knew. This one he had almost shut. And now, he was getting a second
chance.

“Will you play?”

Gabriella shakes her head, but smiles a little, her first smile in hours. She has an arsenal of melancholia at her fingertips,
but she never plays it in front of anyone, not unless it’s a performance.

Angel walks toward her slowly, and through the sunglasses she won’t take off, she again takes in how very beautiful he is,
how tall and lithe, how his smooth golden skin contrasts against those strange green eyes. How odd his circumstance, she thinks,
that such outward perfection could result from the chaos of a father who now sits in jail and a mother who abandoned him.

Gabriella lifts her hand to his cheek and leaves it there, feeling herself steadied by the warm, new planes of his face.

He lifts both hands and gently removes her sunglasses. The gray eyes that so beguile him are swollen almost beyond recognition,
and her pale skin is splotchy.

“Qué quieres?” he asks her. “What do you want?”

Gabriella shakes her head. “I want to be with you,” she says, her voice hoarse, speaking very slowly in the beginning, then
rushing the words. “I want to be with you, and stand next to you, and I don’t want to hide or lie or pretend you’re anyone
else…” Gabriella’s voice rises and breaks off.

“I just want to be with you,” she repeats, quietly now.

Gabriella lifts her other hand to his face and brings it close to hers, so close she can smell the sweat of his skin and the
clean smell of shampoo that clings to his hair. When he kisses her, she tastes beer and cigarettes and an almost unbearable
sweetness that she doesn’t want to let go of. He’s the one who pulls away, who leads her to the bedroom, who undresses himself
first, then slowly takes all her clothes off and covers her with his body so he touches every inch of her, his legs against
her legs, his thighs against her thighs, his stomach against her stomach, so he obliterates everything else but his skin on
her skin, his mouth on her mouth.

“I remember very few things about my mother,” she tells him later. “Very few
real
things, I mean. You know how, when you look at a picture so many times, you come to believe you’ve actually seen what’s in
the picture? I think that’s what happened to me. I remember a birthday party where my parents got me a pony and a petting
zoo, and I remember my mother kneeling beside me, taking my hand, and helping me pet the baby sheep. But that’s also in my
photo album, you know what I mean? I don’t know if I remember her, or just the picture.”

She’s lying with her head on his chest, not looking at him as she speaks. Overhead, the fan whirls, and the long white gauzy
curtains billow gently as the Cali afternoon breeze pushes through the open balcony doors. In the stillness of the room, she
can hear the rhythmic in and out of the curtains sweeping up and down, accompanying the kitchen clock, which ticks loudly
and steadily a room away.

“I went through a phase where I wanted to find out the”—she lowers her voice to a dramatic level—“the long-term effects of
growing up without a mother. I even joined a support group. We’d sit around and talk about the emotional void and how it’s
so important to have a substitute mother figure to provide the tenderness and comfort that a woman gives. Blah, blah, blah.

“But you see, the thing is, I never really felt a void. I mean, yes, I missed having a mother. Terribly. But my dad was so,
so extraordinary. He would even go to the Mother’s Day breakfasts. He would take me with him when he went away for a long
time. He would go shopping with me. When I got my period, he sat me down and gave me this long talk about the meaning of being
a woman.

“So it’s not that I was unloved. I was so loved. By everyone. But by him especially. And he would always tell me how very
much my mother had loved me, too. How I was the light of her life. Have you heard that song by La Oreja de Van Gogh? It’s
a waltz, a kind of children’s waltz, very whimsical. It sounds like a windup toy. And the mother—I always think it’s the mother
anyway—sings about how she has to visit her child when she’s asleep, in the world of dreams. And when her daughter wakes up,
she’ll think she dreamt of her, but really, it was a visit. That’s what I held on to for all these years. That my dreams were
visits. And in my dreams, she was always the way I remembered her. The way she looked in the pictures. So beautiful. And so
happy. It kills me to think that she was unhappy with me. That in the last days of her life, I was a burden to her, an obligation
that kept her from her happiness.”

Angel doesn’t say anything for a few moments, then offers simply, “She would have come back, you know.”

“I don’t know that.”

“Maybe she didn’t say it. But she would have. That guy Juan José is right. People do fall in and out of love. They have affairs.
They think they’re in love with someone else, and then they realize they’re not, and sometimes it’s too late.”

Angel looks at the fan. It’s hypnotic.

“It had nothing to do with you,” he says matter-of-factly.

Gabriella is quiet now. The fact that she lost her mother tragically, that her father never remarried, and she was raised
only by a man has been a defining ingredient of who she is.

It’s been fodder for pity and attention and curiosity, a void she can’t truly fill, but a crutch she’s used, sometimes shamelessly,
to get her way. She doesn’t remember the Mother’s Day celebration of her kindergarten year, but she vividly recalls the first-grade
breakfast, where each child in the class had to write a note to their mom and read it aloud.

She had mulled over the note for hours in her seven-year-old head. She prayed to her mother every night, like Nini had taught
her to do. But no one had ever told her she could actually write to her, mail her a letter, a letter that could be opened
and read. It was even better than writing to Santa Claus, she decided.

She finally wrote:

Dear Mommy,

Happy Mother’s Day! I didn’t know you celebrated it in heaven, too. Does it ever get lonely up there? I don’t get lonely too
much, but sometimes I wish you could take me shopping and that you could wear the gifts I make you for Mother’s Day. This
year I made you a pin. It’s made out of newspaper, but we call it papier-mâché. It’s red because Daddy says it’s your favorite
color.

I’m sending it to heaven with this letter. If you can, let me know if you like it. Maybe you can visit me in a dream, like
an angel. I know you’re probably angry because I got a C in math. But I’ve been practicing a lot, and now I’m getting A’s.
Daddy says everyone in heaven gets A’s or B’s. So, can I get a puppy now?

Happy Mother’s Day. I hope you like your pin. Don’t lose it!

I love you very much, Mommy.

Love, Gabriella

Her father was in the classroom, as he always was for these events, and he’d listened attentively, ignoring the hush in the
room, the mothers discreetly dabbing at the tears in their eyes, the other kids staring at Gabriella in awe. She had a mother
in heaven. How cool was that?

A week later, she got her puppy. But Marcus, who definitely didn’t want to foster some notion about wish-granting ghosts,
went through a lengthy explanation of how the puppy was a gift for her good grades.

Gabriella didn’t believe him.

She continued to write her mother. Past the age when she knew there was no Santa Claus, and past the age when she knew, in
her heart of hearts, that there was no possible way to send a letter to heaven. One Sunday, when she was ten years old and
Marcus was out jogging, she rummaged through his desk drawers looking for a stapler for her school project. Inside a brown
envelope box, at the very bottom, she found her letters, neatly tied up, the stamps—the dozens of stamps needed to send something
to heaven—still pasted on each envelope. They were still sealed, intact. Never sent, never opened. Her father hadn’t had the
stomach to read her letters to her mother.

Only then did it sink in that her mother was someone that could only be seen in her dreams. She never wrote her again, and
Marcus never questioned the abrupt halt in the correspondence. For him, imagination was the product of having your feet planted
firmly in the ground. While he was all for preserving Helena’s memory, the letters to the dead made him decidedly uneasy.

Gabriella continued to talk to her mother at night, every night before she went to bed. She continued to invoke her name when
she really wanted something; the words “my mother would have…” were an effective button pusher. She continued to think of
her mother as an ethereal guiding light, not manifest, invisible, but somehow there.

“A mother,” Angel now says, and his voice is convinced. “She’s important, but she’s not indispensable, Gabriella, remember
that.

“All the memories I have of my mom when I was a child are beautiful,” he adds, slowly stroking her head again, looking up
at nothing. “Like little postcards. She was gorgeous, she always smelled so good—she used something called Diorissimo. It
smelled like jasmine.”

His hand pauses, and she can sense, not see, that his mind is somewhere else, that his fingers are touching someone else’s
skin.

“She always looked like she was going to go to a party or something like that. Her hair would always be perfect, her hands
were manicured, she wore these gold bracelets that tinkled when she walked. But she didn’t really take care of me. She didn’t
see that as her role. She was more concerned with looking good for my father, being a beautiful wife to him. So I learned
how to do things on my own. You don’t know what kind of mother yours would have been, either.

“Look at all you’ve done without her,” he continues, reaching down and lifting her face to his.

“You did it without her. You’re a wonderful pianist,” he says. “A composer of beautiful music. And you’re not a fucked-up
mess of a person. Whatever she did had nothing to do with you. It still doesn’t. Okay?”

He kisses her carefully on her upturned face.

“And what happened between you and me the other day, it had nothing to do with you, either,” he adds very carefully, in what
she recognizes is the closest Angel Silva can come to proffering an apology. “Sometimes,” he continues, uncertain at first,
then slowly emboldened, “people need to take a step back, they need to reassess, and it can happen over the smallest of things.
What’s important is being able to regroup and return. And sometimes, it’s not possible. But many times, it is.

“Okay?” he asks again, and for the first time that day, she nods.