Tell Me Something True (24 page)

“Maybe she loved Angel,” Chelita adds, shaking her head sadly. “She just didn’t know how to take care of him. He was like
a little pet to her. She would show him off when he looked good, and then when he wasn’t there, or he had a problem, she would
simply forget about him. She couldn’t be bothered.”

Chelita abruptly changes the subject. “Anyway, the only time his father really seemed worried about Angelito was when he got
sent to jail,” she says. “He was so worried about his only son. Or at least, the only one he knows of.” She chuckles forgivingly.
“So he gave him Julio. It’s Julio’s job to make sure nothing happens to Angel. Nada, pero nada. That’s what Don Luis said.
That’s why Julio lives here in the building. Julio does it because it’s his duty,” she adds, looking directly at Gabriella.
“But I do it because I love him.” Chelita holds Gabriella’s eyes for a moment longer. “Do you know that Angelito never brought
a girl to sleep here before?”

Gabriella feels herself blushing as mortification sinks in. She hasn’t been herself, she knows, and she’s forgotten the rules
of the game. She’s not spending nights here, not yet, probably never. Here, that wouldn’t be an act of defiance but of spite,
and her simmering resentment with Nini can never become that. But she’s treading dangerously close to the rules of propriety.
No matter the time of day, you simply don’t screw in someone else’s house when there’s an adult inside, even a maid, because
maids talk. Now she learns that the maid is some kind of surrogate mother.

“I’m sorry,” she says finally. “I’m sorry if I’ve done anything to offend you. I didn’t mean to.”

Chelita looks at her blankly, then her expression changes to surprise as Gabriella’s words sink in.

“No, no, señorita,” she says, her eyes widening in alarm, and for the first time since she’s met her, Gabriella hears servitude
in her voice. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” she says, looking down at her hands. “It’s just that you’re the first he
brings. I just meant, you must be special to him.”

The nanny, Gabriella thinks to herself, getting a grip on who she is and who she should be apologizing to. She is speaking
with the nanny. The nanny who loves the man Gabriella loves as if he were her son, who did things for him with a mother’s
selflessness. But a nanny, an employee, just the same, who is now babbling apologies for overstepping her bounds.

He’s never allowed anyone to sleep here before. The thought, the specialness of it, makes her smile. But looking at Chelita,
she knows that the words weren’t about her. They were about him.

Julio’s job is to make sure nothing happens to Angel, but that, too, is Chelita’s calling. Her words are not a congratulations,
but a request.

“Tranquila, Chelita,” she says, gazing at the flat, black eyes steadily. “He’s special to me, too. Conmigo no le pasa nada.
Nada, pero nada.”

Chelita smiles her small, tight smile and she picks up the now-empty tray. “Ande pues, play me one more of those Arthur songs
I like, and I’ll let you work.”

*  *  *

She’s always watched the cabalgata. But she’s never ridden in it.

“Eight hours on a horse!” Nini reminded her tersely, when she announced her intentions of riding.

The cabalgata is the kickoff to Cali’s annual fair, seven days of drunken revelry, punctuated by daily bullfights and relentless
partying.

If you want to fully experience this fair, you buy season tickets to the bullfights, you dance to the beat of salsa orchestras
that play long after the sun is up, and you go to the cabalgata.

You are part of it—one of the nearly seven thousand riders who will trot down this city, from the northern tip to the bullring
in the south, the sun beating on your wide-brimmed hat for five hours—or you watch it: one of hundreds of thousands who line
the streets to see the horses, to see the riders, to drink, to let loose, because in this brief week, there are few rules
or scripts or parameters.

She’s always watched this ride from the sidelines, from the outside looking in. She had been part of Juan Carlos’s posse when
they were younger, and they would ride on a flatbed truck, stopping in strategic locations to cheer, chat, and drink with
their riding buddies, identifying every rider and every mount along the ten kilometers of this path that neatly crosses the
city.

But today, she’s sitting on a horse. Her name is Grace Kelly, but the trainers call her Greiskeli, all one word. She doubts
they know for whom she’s named. She is elegant, Gabriella will grant Greiskeli that, a gray Paso Fino horse with a haughty
head.

Angel has been giving her instructions on what to do with Greiskeli since the moment she said yes, she would go to the cabalgata
with him, and now he reiterates all of the horse’s fine points.

Gabriella shouldn’t, can’t make Greiskeli canter because that will ruin her step, he cautions, for the hundredth time. Greiskeli
is a Paso Fino horse; her small, even, quick steps can’t be broken. She can’t try and ride her like a normal horse; she’ll
look ridiculous. She must be absolutely relaxed, or the step will kill her back. Gabriella can’t use her crop. She can’t pull
on the bit too hard; Greiskeli is very, very sensitive to the bit.

“Angel, why are you letting me ride her if you’re so afraid I’ll damage her, for Christ’s sakes?” she finally asks, exasperated.

“Because she’s my best and most beautiful horse, and I want everyone to look at you on her,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Ah, you want to show me off,” she says smugly, smiling.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” he answers, bringing his horse close enough to touch hers, taking one of her hands away from
the reins, bringing it up to his mouth and kissing it, palm up, before returning it to her again.

Gabriella smiles, but almost automatically looks around for her cousin. Juan Carlos can’t be bothered to go anywhere this
year; he watches from a single vantage point—either the club downtown or some friend’s house.

She hasn’t seen him today, but then again, from the inside looking out, she feels like she’s part of a massive blob, and in
the sidelines she sees a blur that has only twice been interrupted by calls of “Gabriella!”

When she hears the shouts, she looks inquisitively from under her broad-brimmed black hat, trying to discern the faces of
her friends, until finally she locates them on balconies or on the ground.

But calls to her are far more sporadic than calls to Angel, and it takes her by surprise, his undeniable popularity.

During their time together, they have rarely left his apartment, save for occasional trips to the farm, which he knows she
loves. But mostly he works nights and sleeps days, and his few undisturbed hours are for her and her alone. Sharing has never
been part of the equation, and for the first time, she sullenly begins to resent all this implies.

She wonders if this will be the pattern for the remainder of the feria, for the nightly parties, the bullfights where he holds
prime seats. She, it sinks in, is his girl; his girl to show off to the world, but on his terms.

He’s been showing her off already.

“This is Gabriella,” he says simply, never adding “mi novia,” my girlfriend, and she’s not sure yet if she would have liked
the label or not. In the end, it’s understood, and she takes in the appraising, frank stares, from the guys and the girls,
who look her over carefully, who take in her not-yet-siliconed boobs and her curly hair, which she has tied loosely with a
red ribbon that matches the red bandanna around her neck.

She isn’t his type at all, they seem to be thinking. A part of her worries that they’re right, that if she didn’t have the
appeal of her piano playing to offer him, he might have cut things off already.

But here she is, in the most public of public displays, and she feels gladly defiant when, in a brief stop, he leans over
and, with an air of proprietorship, kisses her long and hard, letting the strong anise taste of the aguardiente he’s been
drinking trickle down into her mouth.

The crowd is cheering by the time he lets her go, and all of a sudden, she sees everything around her more clearly: the polished
black riding boots, the blinding white of the crisp shirts accented by bright red bandannas, the black hats with orange trim,
the leather drinking canteens with their red caps, the blue and pink and green polo shirts and tight jeans and cans of beer
tossed over beautiful heads of beautiful people while streamers rise into the incandescent blue sky.

That newfound clarity, she would later tell him, might have saved her from falling, because she saw the man—a teenager, really—step
from the crowd into the path of the horses, and she took up the reins left slack during her kiss to turn Greiskeli away from
him, when he threw the firecrackers at her feet.

The mare reared high on her hind legs, and with the sun shining directly into her upraised face, Gabriella felt as if she
were being dropped, weightless, from an infinite height. She clung to the reins even as she felt her feet slipping from her
stirrups, her hips sliding from the saddle.

Angel’s hands came down hard on the reins, snatching them from her hands with such force, she had to wear bandages for two
days to cover the welts. But his voice, when he spoke to the horse, was gentle, an incantation that calmed her down as quickly
as Gabriella had lost control.

She was too stunned to be angry, it had all happened so fast.

Later, when Juan Carlos pressed her for details, she told him honestly that she didn’t know what finally happened. But she
couldn’t bring herself to tell him what she did see. That, before giving her back the horse, before even asking how she was,
Angel was calling Julio on the walkie-talkie, speaking in that low, measured tone he used to give orders. “Enséñenle a ese
hijueputa que no se mete ni con mis caballos ni con mi hembra.”

Tell that son of a bitch he’s not to mess with my horses or my woman, she heard him say tersely, and to her surprise, she
felt a small rush of adrenaline. He could indeed teach a lesson, and the notion thrilled her and soothed her sense of impotence.

“Come on,” Angel says now, pressing her to keep moving away from this spot. He doesn’t turn back, but she does, in time to
see two of Angel’s bodyguards elbow their way to where her prankster is now obliviously talking with his friends.

“But I didn’t do anything,” she hears him protest in a loud drunken voice.

“Come
on
, Gabriella!” says Angel, harshly now, when he sees her strain to get a better look, and this time, Gabriella urges Greiskeli
on. When she turns back again to look, just a few moments later, the man and Angel’s bodyguards have been swallowed by the
crowd. For a second, her eyes lock with those of someone else standing at the edge of the street, a young man who looks confusedly
after her, then frantically calls out to someone inside the crowd, pointing at her, at Angel, before someone else pulls him
also out of sight.

In the early evening, Angel hosts a party at his father’s house, the house where she first met him. If anything, the terrace
upstairs is even more crowded than that first day, as stragglers from the cabalgata arrive in a steady stream throughout the
late afternoon and into the night. She knows the faces, but she doesn’t really know the people. In this city that she’s so
familiar with, she’s never been deeply involved beyond the close-knit group commandeered by her cousin, and for the first
time ever, she feels like a foreigner.

Instead of wandering through the house, this time she finds a corner on the rooftop from where she can watch, undisturbed,
the lawn below. The grooms are removing the saddles and stirrups from the arriving horses and loading the animals into boarded-up
trucks, which will take them back to the stables tonight. Along the side street, a line of Humvees and SUVs, flanked by bodyguards
and drivers, stretches all the way out into the main drag, forcing incoming traffic to slow down and ogle this towering house,
lit with tiki torches and strobe lights. Behind her, the valley is dark, save for a smattering of far-flung homes, sprinkled
aimlessly into the countryside, because this side of the city is yet to be fully developed. There’s little to see here at
night, except the darkness that gradually lightens up until it meets the boundaries of the main highway, almost a mile out
in the distance.

She sees again, like a flicker in her mind, the face of the boy who spooked Greiskeli, his friend’s look of confused bewilderment
as he was pulled away. If anything were to happen to her, who could Nini turn to? She could lose herself in the darkness tonight,
and no one would even blink.

She remembers her first night here, how she danced with Angel.

But no one’s dancing tonight, and she tries to act nonchalant when she finally leaves her spot and wanders aimlessly through
the crowd, looking for his company.

“Hey, Gabriella!” a voice calls to her, and Gabriella feels a wave of gratitude sweep over her as one of Angel’s friends—Antonio,
or is it Daniel—motions her to join a group sitting around a low table.

“Belleza!” he says good-naturedly, slurring the words, putting his arm around her. “Come, let’s have a toast!”

She sits on the floor beside him, and gamely takes the shot of aguardiente he offers her, downing it in one gulp.

“Bravo!” he cheers loudly. “Bravo!” “Salud!” the others echo, tiny glasses clinking all around.

“One more,” says Daniel/Antonio, serving another round of shots.

“No, no,” says Gabriella, who’s beginning to feel woozy, and worried that she can’t find Angel. “I’ll wait for the next one,”
she says placatingly, but really there’s nothing to placate.

Around her, the conversation is meaningless: the horses, the drinks, who wore what, who passed out. She isn’t a part of this
group and has nothing to contribute.

When Antonio/Daniel takes out the packet of white powder, pours it directly on the table, and begins to break it down in thin
little lines with his American Express Platinum Card, she’s almost relieved at the change of pace, the shift in attention.