The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (2 page)

Carlos Alberto opens the door. It is Marta’s daughter, Luz. Returning her quick embrace, Carlos Alberto says, “You’re just
in time for our special Sunday breakfast.” He ushers Luz toward the kitchen, where Lily and Consuelo are seated at the table.

“¡Ay, qué bueno, Luz!” says Lily, pulling herself to a standing position, opening her arms in welcome. “What a lovely surprise!”

“So, what are you cooking?” asks Luz, smiling, as she walks toward her embrace.

“We are cooking up life!” Lily says, patting her belly, just before she slips on a patch of spilled milk and crashes to the
floor.

The new girl stood out like a neon sign in her white frilly dress with pink ribbons on the first day of school. Cinnamon skin,
and green eyes far older than her ten years. Her long dark brown hair was primly pinned back from her face on both sides of
her middle parting with delicate gold-plated barrettes, making her look quaint and old-fashioned, a girl from another era.
But what struck Lily was the contrast between the daintiness of the girl’s attire and the tremendous size of her feet, which
were encased in lacy ankle-socks and white patent leather shoes. A size thirty-seven, por lo menos, Lily thought.

“This is Irene Dos Santos,” said Señora Gutierrez, the principal of Academia Roosevelt, the bilingual American school built
with American oil money, which shone like a sparkling jewel in the sun above the filthy, poverty-stricken barrio of Las Ruinas.

Only the medium to very rich could afford to send their children to the prestigious Academia Roosevelt, and even then there
was a long waiting list. To Lily’s good fortune, her godfather was Alejandro Aguilar, media magnate and jefe of the regional
television station TVista. Alejandro Aguilar was also on the board of directors at Academia Roosevelt, and so Lily’s enrollment
had been a foregone conclusion.

Señora Gutierrez was holding the new girl’s hand. “I want you to take Irene to the fifth-grade homeroom and help her get oriented,”
she said to Lily, and to the new girl, “Irene, this is Lily Martinez.”

Irene cast her eyes to the ground, where one self-conscious foot tried to hide the other one.

“Come on,” Lily said, taking her hand and feeling superior in her skintight jeans and platform shoes, “let’s go.”

That was the first and last day Lily saw Irene in a dress.

“You looked so saintly,” Lily said to her later, when they’d become best friends and told each other everything.

“Coño, its true,” she said, “Mercedes made me wear that dress. You must have thought I was an imbecile.” Irene always referred
to her mother by her name, with an intrepid modernity that took Lily’s breath away. Since no one, apart from the maid, was
ever at the Dos Santos residence between three p.m. and eight p.m. or even later, Irene usually came back with Lily, and Lily’s
father would drop her home after dinner.

On most weekdays after school, Consuelo would make the girls sandwiches stuffed with the previous night’s milanesas, before
they rushed off to roller-skate at the Plaza Altamira.

“Cuídense bien, muchachas,” Consuelo would say, kissing them both before they left, “and be back by seven.”

“Your mother is such a great cook, and really sweet, tan linda,” said Irene.

“I know,” said Lily, “I don’t know what I would do without my mother. Probably starve.” And then they giggled in that hormone-induced
borderline psychotic schoolgirl way.

Life at the Dos Santos residence and that at the Martinez residence was as different as night and day. At Lily’s house people
sat round the table together and talked about food, art, and politics, whereas at Irene’s nobody sat at the table and the
focus was on diets, fashion, cute boys, and the right combination of Johnson’s Baby Oil and iodine to make the most effective
suntan lotion.

Irene lived in a luxurious penthouse apartment with expansive terraces in the upmarket Urbanización of Prados, along with
her older sister, Zulema, who was studying interior design, and her parents, Mercedes and Benigno.

In a large enclosure in the midst of the terrace garden, Irene kept a baby water boa as a pet. Sometimes, while she did her
homework, she liked to hang it around her neck. Lily thought this wildly and wonderfully adventurous, though she herself was
never brave enough to try it. The Dos Santos family had moved to Tamanaco from the capital when Irene’s father, an engineering
expert on earthquakes and landslides, was transferred by the Ministerio de Obras Públicas.

Mercedes and Benigno. A couple of such extraordinary incongruity that Lily was taken by surprise each time she saw them together,
which was rarely. Benigno Dos Santos was a large man, bearded to disguise a weak chin, a polished passive-aggressive personality
of few words who spent his time after office hours in his study with a view of the mountains, sipping vodka martinis and listening
to Italian opera on the stereo. Which always seemed strange and disappointing to Lily, given that he was half Brazilian; Lily
had expected Carnival in Rio. The voluptuous Mercedes, a mestiza of Chilean, African, and Guajiro descent, spent five days
a week in the coastal town of Puerto, where she had a successful gunrunning business, a beach house, and a string of young,
adoring lovers. Mercedes Dos Santos hated Pavarotti. Billy Ocean was more her speed.

“Pero, Benigno, why does your music have to be at TODO VOLUMEN?” she would yell when she came home on the weekend.

“Perdón, mi amor,” he would say, cranking up the volume even louder.

Mercedes slept separately from her husband, in a room off the kitchen that was technically the servant’s quarters but was
actually the brightest and best-ventilated room in the apartment. No one was allowed to use the kitchen when Mercedes was
home. The noise and smells bothered her, she said. This was probably why the Dos Santos family never sat down to dinner together.
In fact, there was rarely any normal food in the house. At the Dos Santos residence everyone drank strong black coffee and
dined at odd hours on expensive snacks—anchovies on toast, caviar on cream crackers, grapes and cheese, and their all-time
favorite, sandwiches stuffed with Diablitos. That is, whenever Mercedes had remembered to stock the kitchen at all, which
was about fifty percent of the time. The other fifty percent of the time, the refrigerator contained only beer.

In all likelihood, it was pure hunger that prompted Irene and Lily to fry bacon and eggs, purchased with their pocket money
from the kiosk down the road, on the flat of an electric clothing iron in the bathroom. Somehow, these messy concoctions always
ended up tasting more delicious to Lily than even her mother’s cooking. Stomachs appeased, they would invade Zulema’s closet
and try on all her clothes, taking whatever they wanted for school the following day.

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.