The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (43 page)

The day after the burial, she sat on a bench waiting for the bus to take her to the convent after work, as she had done every
day except Sunday since her arrival in Barquisimeto. The bus came and went, and then another and another, and still she sat
on the bench. And when a middle-aged man in a car slowed down and offered her a ride, she said yes. He was on his way to Sorte,
a kind of pilgrimage, he said, for favors rendered by the Lady. When they stopped for gas a few hours later, he offered her
some cocaine. “To keep us awake for the drive,” he said. She took it. And that was the beginning of an endless spiral of drug
consumption, withdrawals, and more drug consumption.

Eight years later, she was picked up outside a restaurant in Chivacoa for offering oral sex in exchange for money, disturbing
the peace, and being under the influence of illegal drugs. As she was disoriented, the police handed her over to the poorly
equipped and understaffed psychiatric ward of a government hospital, where she was admitted. She was seven months pregnant,
and even if she had been coherent she would not have been able to say by whom. The effort of her resistence to the hospital
staff induced a premature labor, and a baby was delivered and put up for adoption the very next day. Her agitated and disoriented
condition was diagnosed as schizophrenia. She was wrongly administered a drug that put her into a catatonic state. Fearful,
the hospital transferred her to a mental health facility, where she remained in a catatonic state for eleven years.

When she became catatonic, she entered a state of profound indifference along with a slowing down to the point of immobility.
Although seemingly unresponsive and soporific to those trying to elicit a reaction, in fact she can recall her experience
as one of reacting normally and appropriately but in glacial time, where others appeared to be moving too fast. At the same
time that her physical life came almost to a standstill, her interior life accelerated to the speed of light; she began to
live entire lifetimes in the span of a single day, most of the details of which she can remember even now. She tried on the
skins and breathed through the lungs of men, women, children, young people, old people, middle-aged people, married people,
single people, widows, heterosexuals, homosexuals, prostitutes, priests, athletes, poets, painters, musicians, revolutionaries;
people who were beautiful, ugly, brave, timid, sad, joyful...Lovers who tasted like oysters and seaweed and salt.

Like a latter-day Maria Lionza, she lived a thousand lives, with all their attendant joys and sorrows, ups and downs, successes
and failures. And she died a thousand deaths. All in a period of one year.

Toward the end of her first year as a catatonic, she dis-covered that a part of her always remained separate and independent
from the life she was leading in her imagination, a part that behaved like an omniscient scriptwriter, and that by rescripting
her choices, she could alter the course of her destiny. In other words, she could be both the scriptwriter and the scripted;
she could be in two places at once. She became enamored of a particular incarnation, that of a mother and wife whose name
was Coromoto. She took refuge in that role and decided she would stay in it until she ran out of ideas, or until Coromoto
died of old age, whichever came first.

No physician could explain it when, after eleven years, she was abruptly catapulted into the world of the asylum. Physically
she emerged hardly the worse for wear, the passage of years imperceptible in her countenance. Incredibly, she had the muscle
tone of a professional swimmer and hardly required any physiotherapy at all. But she was not happy to be back; she missed
her other life so terribly and desperately that she begged her doctors to administer to her the drug that had induced her
catatonic state. And when they refused, she had tried to bribe one of the physiotherapists with sex. Though sorely tempted,
for he found her heartbreakingly beautiful, he was an upstanding fellow and told her that even if he wanted to help her, it
was impossible, for the drug had been taken off the market.

For nine days, she refused to leave her bed, shutting her eyes tightly, willing herself to sleep, hoping to find her lost
life in her dreams. Sometimes this was possible, if only fleetingly. But her body put up a resistence; cramps from being too
long in the same position, and the relentless pressure of the mattress, neither of which had affected her while catatonic,
conquered her in the end. She sat up, swung her legs gingerly over the side of the bed, stood, and took her first hesitant
steps in eleven years.

It took several months, but eventually she began to accept and participate of her own accord in the routines and activities
her doctors prescribed. But she was often disoriented and vacillated between social and antisocial.

On sociable days, to distract herself
from
herself, she often felt inclined to elicit personal information from her fellow inmates. These she would document in the
notebook with the leather binding her sister had sent her for Christmas, then rewrite them as her own. She even documented
the utterings of the one they called El Cantante, who went about wearing operatic makeup and belting out songs in the style
of Carlos Gardel, a tango singer of the thirties. Sometimes El Cantante would stab himself in the chest with a pencil for
effect and then he would be carried away, waving his fist emotionally in the air and bellowing to the tune of “Cielito lindo,”
“Ay, ay, ay, ay, I’m dying, I’m dying!” Around him, she composed a tale that had to do with transvestite bar dancers.

On antisocial days, she read everything she could get her hands on—novels, history books, magazines, newspapers, even gardening
tips. She was particularly taken with a children’s book containing legends and descriptions of foods and customs attributed
to the different tribes of Venezuela. Of the legends, her favorite was the legend of Coromoto, namesake of that other Coromoto,
the one of her dreams.

One day, while the Cacique Coromoto was crossing a stream, he had a vision of a woman of astonishing beauty who beckoned to
him. At that moment a mestizo called Juan Sanchez, who was a friend of the blancos but also of the indios, passed that way
and the lady disappeared. The Cacique Coromoto recounted his vision to Juan Sanchez, who told the Cacique to gather his tribe
at the end of eight days near the stream, which is when he would pass that way again. At that time, he said, he would teach
them how to become purified for the lady. Coromoto consulted his medicine man, who thought it was a trap. That night the beautiful
lady appeared to Coromoto in his dream. Coromoto drew his spear and raised it up against her, but the lady approached him
without fear. With his hand he tried to push her away, but she walked into his hand and disappeared, and in the palm of his
hand her image remained. When he awoke, there was no image on his hand, but he discovered that everyone in the tribe had had
the same dream. The next night the lady appeared again in his dream. Coromoto told her that if she was a friend of the white
man, she should not visit him again. The next day he gathered his people and told them they must move deeper into the jungle.
But Juan Sanchez, who was listening from behind the trees, alerted the blancos, who surrounded Coromoto’s camp before dawn.
The people were all captured except for Coromoto, who escaped into the forest. The blancos pursued him, but just before they
could capture him, he was bitten by a snake and died within minutes. On the palm of his hand, there appeared an image of the
lady.

How she wishes she could be the Coromoto of her dreams again. To retrieve the life she lost. To love and be loved by a strong
and good man. To hold her son against her breast and feel the beating of his heart. To recapture, even for a day, those carefree
times under the palms in Santa Marta.

With the years that passed came more enlightened methods of therapy. The last psychiatrist in residence had been a Jungian,
a mestizo import from Cuba who saw no conflict between the world of dreams and reality, as long as, he said, one maintained
an awareness of one’s own level of consciousness.

“Think of dreams as just another kind of reality,” he said. “It is not so much what you believe but whether your beliefs are
a help or a hindrance to you.”

Under his tutelage, she progressed incrementally toward the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel (which meant, as her
doctor repeatedly reminded her, toward a functional reality of her own that she could tolerate). Unlike his predecessors,
Dr. Martinez saw role-playing of the kind she had engaged in all her life as having a useful function in maintaining mental
equilibrium.

Sometimes he would play Benigno. Sometimes she would sit on his lap.

“So, having parents like Benigno and Mercedes, do you think that’s what made me loca?” she had asked the Jungian, still relishing
the power of secrets.

“Nice try, but too easy,” he had replied.

At the interview to evaluate her petition for release, the Jungian doctor said, “You are still sometimes a niñita in your
woman’s body. Have you decided what you would like to be when you grow up?”

She thought it over. She would like to be a daughter who can manage to make it to her own father’s funeral, instead of sitting
around drunk on agua ardiente and high on cocaine in a dirty bar downtown. She would like to be a mother not compelled by
circumstances of insanity to give up her child for adoption, too stoned to notice he is gone, never to see him again or know
his destino. Possibly, she said, she would like to be older, with all her trials behind her, sitting in her garden on Año
Nuevo, a good man by her side. Definitely, she can see herself as a doting grandmother, with laughing, equally doting grandchildren
at her knee, drinking fresh passion fruit juice, her favorite as well as theirs. But since it is not possible to will into
this
existence
that
son,
that
mother,
that
wife,
that
grandmother, requiring as it does a rewrite of the past or a fast-forward to the future, not to mention an unavoidable dependency
on the collaboration of others, she will settle for being a grown woman who can wear red shoes and get away with it. In short,
she will settle for being herself: Irene.