Tell Me Something True (9 page)

“Things don’t just happen, Helena,” she told me later, after she filed for the divorce. “You allow them to happen. That’s
the difference between your brother and me. He thinks events are out of your control. But you always have a choice. And with
affairs, it’s about saying no at the beginning, by refusing to even let it be an option.”

I wasn’t like Julián. I wasn’t like Mercedes.

There wouldn’t be an end to say no to. There wouldn’t even be a beginning to say no to.

Just a day that will come and will go.

My book. It would help my book.

Our family had never been into farms. They were doctors and architects and attorneys. I was photographing this book from an
aesthetic, architectural point of view, but having the inside history would give it added perspective, no?

Why was I trying to justify my actions?

At my age, I didn’t need to justify anything to anyone.

“Yes, I can make it,” I said as I sat up in bed and looked around, wondering what to wear.

A
fter three days, Gabriella no longer wakes up with a stab of apprehension in the pit of her stomach. After three days, she
can forget the call and the what-if. There is neither to be had. The weight of the decision has been lifted off her shoulders,
and she feels immensely happy and relieved.

In the evenings, she calls her father and talks about other things. Trivial chitchat. The kind that simply provides more comfort
than silence. It soothes her to speak with him; it always has. They can spend hours digressing over a book, discussing a shoot.
But now, for the first time, she’s careful about what she mentions: her workout schedule, outings with Juan Carlos that are
controlled and predictable—dinner, drinks, dancing one night—with people she’s known for years and years. People who are safe,
whom any father would approve of unless the surface was scratched too deep.

“Are you thinking about your future?” he invariably asks, because he just can’t help himself.

“I’m thinking!” she says, trying not to snap at him.

She’s thinking that what she’s been doing all these years maybe isn’t what she wants to do anymore. Sometimes music flows
to her and from her, but sometimes it doesn’t. Lately, that happens more and more, and she can’t seem to find what she had
and what made her special, and she wonders if one can simply grow out of talent. But she can’t tell her father that because
he’d be so disappointed in her, so disappointed to find out she’s not extraordinary after all.

Lying on her bed, her feet propped up against the headboard, Gabriella gnaws at her thumb.

“What’s eating
you
up to make you do that?” she hears Angel ask in her mind.

She tells herself she’s already forgotten her one-night stand. But could you even call it that? A one-night dance, maybe.
One night. Period.

In the beginning, the thought crossed her mind that Juan Carlos would bring it up in front of their friends.

“Guess who Gabriella’s new boyfriend is,” he’d say, laughing over drinks.

It is, she’d admit, perfect fodder for teasing.

Gabriella and the Thug.

But Juan Carlos doesn’t do things like that. She constantly underestimates this man, because he
is
a man at twenty-four, with a grown-up’s sensibility to social norms that paralyzes her and fills her with self-doubt.

It’s always been that way, ever since they were children.

“Gabriella, you can’t wear that!”

“Gabriella, I know in the States no one cares what you do or how you act, but here, we do.”

She has always kowtowed to him. As a child she was painfully shy and awkward with people her age. Half of her schooling had
taken place with tutors on movie sets, where her friends were child actors with overbearing moms—moms that she sometimes wished
she had. In the evenings, she would put on headphones and practice on the Clavinova her father let her bring with her since
she turned ten and it became apparent that piano lessons weren’t just another distraction.

She doesn’t kowtow to Juan Carlos anymore, though. She’s beautiful now. But inexplicably, she still wants to please him.

“Well, he hasn’t called me, just thought I’d let you know,” she countered that morning at the club, while running around the
golf course.

“Who?” he asked nonchalantly.

“Angel Silva, of course,” she replies, laughing.

“Don’t know him,” Juan Carlos answers shortly, picking up his pace as he climbs the hill that leads to the ninth hole.

The view is breathtaking from there, sweeping down the fairway dotted with mango trees, along the river that borders the course,
and down below to the stables.

But he doesn’t stop or even break his stride, merely looking back at her and shouting, “You’re falling behind, prima!” and
just like that drops the subject and the name from his existence.

And she did, too. Well, at least she’s trying, and by force of will, even the remarkable color of Angel’s eyes starts to slip
into oblivion.

Querida Gabriella:

Las Ceibas is a three-hundred-year-old home named after the ceibas—the weeping willows—that are planted by the river that
crosses the garden in front of the house.

According to the legend, the trees were planted in honor of an Indian princess, Atuni, who lived in the area. The entire valley
is peppered with Indian burial sites, and they say Las Ceibas was built near or on top of one. That’s where the story comes
from. The land was granted to the Montoya family by the Spanish crown. That’s where the word hacienda comes from, you see?
From the hacendado period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The Montoyas claimed the land and built it up, even though the Indians fought them on it. It was sacred Indian land and shouldn’t
be touched.

But the Montoyas wanted the home along the river. They compromised. The house is built apart from the burial ground, although
it’s hard to say what is what any longer. The grounds have shifted during the centuries.

What everyone swears is true is that Gerardo Montoya fell in love with an Indian girl—Araceli—the daughter of one of the caciques
of the region.

She was baptized with a Spanish name, which means “altar from the sky.”

Of course, it was doomed. They were split by religion—the baptism was really a front—language and ethnicity. He had stolen
her people’s land. But she. She loved him.

You can imagine. She’d never seen anyone like him. Tall—because even though the Spaniards of the day were tiny, they were
still taller than the Indians—and bearded and what was most remarkable of all, he had green eyes.

And she was supposed to be sublime and graceful and, on top of that, a healer, widely respected even by the other tribes.

It is said that both went against their parents’ wishes, meeting clandestinely at the waterfall that still lies within the
hacienda’s boundaries. She even cast a spell upon her father, so he wouldn’t realize she went missing for hours on end.

But, of course, he found out, because people are envious of others’ happiness, and they made sure he knew.

One evening, as Araceli went to meet her lover, she was intercepted by her father and his men. Would they have killed her
because of her dishonor?

It’s hard to say. But Araceli panicked. She ran along the river’s edge, and in looking back, tripped on a rock perched high
on a cliff and fell to the water and to her death.

Gerardo planted the willows in her honor, and now, the trees weep for Araceli every time her spirit passes from the waterfall
down to the river that runs in front of the house.

They say Gerardo never married, and the Montoya name died with him. The hacienda was transferred to another Spanish noble,
and through the years its lineage was lost.

But the story of Araceli and Gerardo has remained in local lore.

Those who stay overnight at the house swear that some evenings, you can truly hear the willows weep.

The house is now owned by a friend of mine. A friend from long, long ago, Juan José Solano. His family bought the hacienda
a century ago.

They call him Jota Jota, which is JJ in Spanish. Isn’t that funny?

Actually, it isn’t. People are their names. If they’re not, they become them. Like Araceli.

Frivolous people invariably have frivolous names.

But only a few, a very brave few, Gabriella, ever change their names.

I told you what your name meant, didn’t I? A strong woman, close to God.

I hope, Gabriella, that you never change your name.

I hope, Gabriella, that you grow up to become your name.

I, on the other hand, am an Helena, named after my grandmother and totally unfit for my name. Helenas are gorgeous creatures;
impassive, elegant, proper, in command.

I am none of those things. I’m askew, the antithesis of Helena. Surely someone must have seen that from the moment I was born
with this Medusa hair.

But Juan José must have been born a Juan José. Dignified, aristocratic, traditional. Chivalrous, even.

How could they have reduced him to a banal JJ?

Maybe a real Helena would have looked for a JJ. A yin to her yang.

But because I wasn’t a real Helena, I always looked for a Juan José. But I never knew he was there, until now.

S
he had rehearsed the meeting that would never take place a million times in her mind. In all the scenarios, she is right and
he is wrong. In all the scenarios, she is impeccable, she looks like old money, and she has a guy by her side. In all the
scenarios, he has a girl by his side, too. A girl like him. The kind that wears very tight white jeans, heavy makeup, and
a Louis Vuitton bag that could be real or could be fake. In all the scenarios, she acknowledges him slightly, like one would
a servant. She goes on her way, and he looks at her longingly, knowing she was right and he is hopelessly wrong.

She expected the meeting would never take place, but of course, it does. And in it, she’s wrong and he’s right.

She’s sweaty and flushed and unappealing, straight out of a five-mile run, in for a quick stop at the supermarket, wearing
over her spandex shorts loose sweatpants that make her butt look droopy. She sees him enter her aisle at the precise moment
she’s plucking a box of tampons from the shelf. Their eyes meet briefly, his move on, and it occurs to her, for the first
time, that he might not even remember her.

But as quickly as his eyes move on, they move back, and his mouth slowly, knowingly, curves into that sideways smile that
reached her three nights ago.

“Gabriella,” he says simply. It’s not a greeting or a question, but a statement, and she knows, unequivocally, that she, too,
has been a part of his waking days.

“Angel? Angel!” The voice interrupts the answer she’s unable to give, and the girl that steps onto the aisle with his name
on her lips is beautiful in the way well-kept girls with straight blonde hair and fake breasts can be.

With her box of tampons and her ugly sweats Gabriella is utterly at a loss.