The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (3 page)

“Mierda. That was my Spanish literature teacher,” Lily said, laughing into his mouth. “Coño, Elvis, did you see her face?
What if she’s having a heart attack at this very moment!”

“Shut up,” said Elvis, grabbing her hips with both hands. “We still have eleven floors to kiss.”

Bursting with righteous indignation and concern for Lily’s welfare, Señora Ramirez called the house the very same afternoon.
It was Luz, Marta’s daughter of the same age as Lily, who took the call. Luz had always been a tattletale.

When Lily got home and saw her mother’s face, she knew she was grounded before she even crossed the threshold.

Irene emotionally rushed to Lily’s defense when Lily phoned to whisper the news while Consuelo was in the shower.

“That bitch!” Irene yelled. “She’s nothing but an old BOLSA FRUSTRADA. She probably hasn’t done it in FIFTY YEARS. Listen,
Lily, do you want me to come over and tell your mother it’s a lie? I’ll do it, if you want me to. I’ll say I was in the elevator
with you and Elvis, and that Ramirez is just one BIG FAT LIAR.”

There were times when even Lily winced at the ferocity of Irene’s language, when she was shocked by Irene’s capacity for deception.
But she knew the point was that Irene wanted to save her if Lily would let her.

“No,” said Lily, “thanks, but I never lie to my mother.”

“It won’t be your lie,” said Irene, who, Lily had observed, lied to Mercedes almost every time they had a conversation, “it’ll
be mine.” And, for a moment, Lily was tempted, knowing that when her father learned of her French-kissing adventure—as he
was bound to, since her mother told her father everything—she’d be grounded until she was an old maid. But Lily also knew
that if she let Irene do this for her, she would never feel right again with her mother, and her mother would know. Consuelo
always knew what Lily was feeling, sometimes even before Lily did herself.

“No,” she said. “I’d rather get it over with.”

“Okay,” said Irene, “but call me back first thing in the morning and let me know what happened.”

One thing about Irene, she always had to know everything. And Lily always had to tell her.

“Okay,” she agreed. But over the weekend her mother and Marta watched her as if they had eyes at the back of their heads,
and Lily couldn’t elude their scrutiny long enough to make the call.

By Monday morning, Lily was enrolled in the school attended by Marta’s daughter, Luz. It was a convent boarding school in
Valencia, two hours’ drive from Tamanaco. Lily could still be in the Roosevelt school play, since it was only one night, and
her parents didn’t want to ruin it for the Academia Roosevelt, but that was it. She was no longer allowed to visit Irene,
or to invite Irene over.

The next time Lily had the opportunity to speak with Irene was in the dressing room of the Carreño Theatre on the night of
their first performance of
The Wizard of Oz.

“They’re sending me to a convent boarding school in Valencia where Luz goes,” said Lily morosely, slipping into her white-witch
dress.

“¡No puede ser!” Irene exclaimed.

“I’m not allowed to talk to you after the play is over.”

“Ay, you poor thing. But don’t worry, we can find a way, we can write letters.”

At that Lily brightened slightly. “Don’t forget to return my mother’s shoes, or I’ll be in even worse trouble.”

Though not ordinarily one to place much stock in possessions, when Lily confessed that she’d lent the shoes to Irene for the
play, Consuelo had been upset.

“I met your father in those shoes,” she sighed.

The play received a standing ovation from an audience comprised predominantly of parents, teachers, and American consulate
or oil company personnel. After the performance, as they were leaving the dressing room, Lily recalled her promise to her
mother. But Irene said the red shoes must have accidentally gone back to the school with the costumes and that she would retrieve
them the next day. Several days passed and, in Lily’s presence, Consuelo phoned to congratulate Irene on her performance as
Dorothy and to ask when she could retrieve her shoes, which, she explained, were of great sentimental value to her.

“I’m so sorry, Señora Consuelo,” Irene said, “but they are missing. I’ve looked everywhere. My parents would be happy to pay
for a new pair.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Consuelo.

It was Consuelo’s idea to send Lily to the same school as Luz. Lily was certain this was because Luz was an incurable tattletale
who could be counted on to report everything. She thought it hypocritical of her father, who didn’t believe in a Christian
God and had never stepped into a church after the day he married her mother, to endorse such a plan. And she said as much
to Ismael, who conveyed her message to her mother, with whom Lily refused to speak. But Consuelo replied loudly enough for
her daughter to hear, that between teenage boys with an itch in their pantalones and Catholic school, Catholic school was
definitely the lesser evil.

From the age of ten until the last time Lily saw her at the age of fifteen, Irene thought nothing of walking around her family’s
penthouse dressed in bikini panties and a short, tight T-shirt that ended just above her belly button and said,
Mefiez-vous des enfants sages
. Dressed in this manner, Irene would sometimes wander into the study where her father sat drinking martinis and listening
to opera at what Mercedes claimed was a thousand decibels above the human safety level. Climbing into his lap, she would wrap
her arms around his neck and lay her head upon his shoulder. Benigno, clutching a vodka martini in one hand, would place his
free arm around his daughter and bellow out the words to the music. This is how Lily found them when, after a gap of two years
at convent school, she was finally allowed to visit Irene and invite her on a family trip to Maquiritare.

“She is with her father,” said the maid. “Wait here.”

Lily stood in the hallway while the maid knocked on the door of Benigno’s study and called out, “La Señorita Lily, para la
Señorita Irene.” The door was ajar and from where Lily stood, she could see Irene with her father. She watched, mesmerized.
Irene’s profusion of hair swirled, obscuring the faces of both father and daughter from Lily’s view. Long legs, his encased
in brown silk pajamas, hers bare, ending in old-fashioned red satin pumps, creating a tableau of some mythical and wonderful
four-legged life form.

Many years later, on a rainy Saturday in the month of August, Lily sought to re-create this image with Carlos Alberto. She
made him pose in his pajamas on a leather lounge chair with a martini glass in one hand. She arranged his legs out in front
of him.

“The things you come up with!” he exclaimed. But he played along anyway.

She positioned her husband’s tripod and set his camera on automatic, before leaping into his lap wearing a T-shirt, bikini
panties, and red heels. She flung her long brown hair about them. As soon as the flash went off, Carlos Alberto ran his tongue
lightly along the nape of her neck and they made love right there in the leather chair. Afterward, Lily rushed the film to
the photo shop downtown, which promised delivery of prints in two hours. She could barely contain her excitement while she
waited for the chemicals to perform their magic. But her compositional masterpiece emerged from the dark room as a double
exposure, with a close-up of her parents on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, their faces smiling radiantly, the figures
of Carlos Alberto and Lily herself vaguely outlined, ghostlike, in the background.

The obstetrician confirmed Lily’s pregnancy on the last day of October, one day before their birthday. They were born on the
same day, Lily and Consuelo. And Lily could hardly wait to give her mother the birthday present.

“Mami!” she yelled, bursting through the front door, with Carlos Alberto close on her heels. “Guess what, Mami, buenas noticias,
I’m going to have a baby!”

They had waited and wanted for so long and nothing had seemed to work. Not the beach weekends and sexy fantasies they devised
to arouse themselves into a frenzy of passion. Not the fertility drugs. Not the humiliation of holding her legs suspended
in midair for half an hour directly following intercourse. Finally, and in spite of Carlos Alberto’s objections, she had gone
to her godmother, Amparo.

“Don’t worry, mija,” Amparo had said when Lily told her she felt helpless. “These things have their own time. But there is
no law that says we can’t help speed them along.” And she had handed Lily a bag of herbs. “This is Amantilla. Chew a leaf
before you sleep with your husband. This one,” she said, handing Lily another bag, “is Maca. It is for Carlos Alberto; he
must take it as an infusion once a day. And this may sound crazy, mi vida, and I don’t know why it is so, but making love
on rainy days will improve your chances of conception.”

“¡Feliz cumpleaños, Mami!” Lily shouted, racing toward the kitchen. “You’re going to be an abuela!”

But her mother had not replied. How could she when she was lying unconscious in the garden?

“What is wrong with my mother?” Lily whispered when the elderly family doctor had finished his examination and given Carlos
Alberto a list for the pharmacy.

“It is her heart,” he replied with what seemed to Lily a preposterous calm. “Fortunately not a major attack, and she is stable
now, but she’ll need complete bed rest for a while.”

Lily had the sensation of being swept away by a strong current. She could taste her mother’s heart in her mouth: metallic,
pulsating, blood red.

“You should notify your father,” the doctor said.

“I would if I could, Doctor,” said Lily, suddenly angry, “but he is somewhere in the Delta, and there is no way to contact
him by phone.”

“Your mother is lucky that you happened to arrive in time. Otherwise...well, she really shouldn’t be left on her own in her
condition.”

When Consuelo was well enough to leave the hospital, Lily said, “You can’t stay alone, Mami, while Papi roams the country
looking for inspiration. You will have to stay with Carlos Alberto and me....Coño su madre, why can’t he stay in Tamanaco?”

“Don’t judge your father so harshly, Lily,” Consuelo said. “Can he help it if his work takes him away from us?”

“Mami, por favor, stop making excuses for him. Can’t a poet work from imagination and memory? Why can’t he work from his studio
at home like you do? He is seventy-five years old, and still he runs wild in the llanos and who knows where.”

Consuelo turned her face to her daughter, but looked beyond her.

“It is who he is. And who he is, is the man I love. Do you know that every year since we met, he has written me a love song?
Ay.” Consuelo sighed, her tongue loosened by medication. “Cuanto lo amo. Even now, at this age, I long to wrap my arms and
legs around that man and draw him into myself.”

Lily had been shocked by the raw desire in her mother’s eyes. The eyes of a woman still deeply in love with her husband of
forty-one years.

Until that moment, Lily had never really thought of Ismael in any terms other than as her father. A father who shared himself
with todo el mundo, a father more absent than present. On the other hand, when he was present, he had never failed to fill
her days with wonder and adventure.

One day, he had brought her the moon.