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Authors: Margaret Mascarenhas

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“Epa,” yells the bus driver, “why are you discussing as though you poor pendejos know what the gods are thinking and that
you can influence the outcome?”

Efraín and La Vieja Juanita board another bus in Chivacoa. The bus is much fuller than usual at this hour of the morning—indeed,
it is packed almost beyond capacity and they have to stand, pressed against others, in the aisle. When they arrive in Sorte,
crowds of people are already thronging the shops and stalls and pouring across the bridge to the mountain. Efraín hastens
to Fernando’s shop to retrieve the pieces of cardboard and makeshift table that make up their own stall, while La Vieja Juanita
waits with their bags, guarding their place from potential interlopers. When he finishes setting up the stall, Felipe Gonsales,
a neighboring vendor who sells Maria Lionza rosaries and scapulars, walks over.

“Oye, Vieja, have you heard the latest?” he says.

“You mean about the statue? Who hasn’t heard?” says La Vieja Juanita, pointing with her chin toward the crowds.

“No,” says Felipe, “I mean about the boy.”

“What boy?”

“Early this morning a boy is supposed to have emerged from the Lady’s shrine right into the sacred circle of a ceremony dedicated
to her. Quite a few people saw him. At first they thought he was just some brat fooling around, and they were angry that he
had disrupted the ceremony. Some people are claiming that when they tried to grab him, their arms went right through him.
Then the boy vanished into thin air. Now they are saying it is the boy in the legend, El Niño, the messenger of Maria Lionza.
Hundreds are already on their way to Sorte to post a vigil in the hope that he will appear again. But the Bancos are saying
that the next time he appears, it will be to El Presidente himself.”

Efraín stares at Felipe as though he has seen a spirit while La Vieja Juanita snorts. “Those fakers and their followers must
have consumed too much rum.”

Felipe shrugs. Like La Vieja Juanita, he is there to make money off the tourists. And anything that brings them to Sorte in
droves is good for business.

This is certainly true for Efraín and La Vieja Juanita. The excitement about the statue is so great that within seconds of
setting up their stall, they are mobbed. Less than forty-five minutes go by before their mobiles are completely sold out,
and they are able to leave much earlier than expected.

In the evening Efraín decides to tell La Vieja Juanita about his vision but disguises it as a dream. When he finishes, she
is staring at him as if she is experiencing a revelation. He has seen such a look on the faces of some of the Marialionceros
just before they go into a trance, just before their eyes roll back into their heads and froth starts coming out of their
mouths. He fears she might be on the verge of such a fit. Instead, she slams the table with her fist so hard it cracks the
wooden plank lengthwise down the middle and makes Efraín jump. She laughs uproariously. When she laughs, the years fall away
from her face. Efraín has never seen her laugh like that. He is both relieved and bewildered by her reaction. It is as though
she has hit the jackpot.

That night Efraín dreams he is standing at the door of a room with people he does not know. Two men, one younger and one older,
and four women of different ages. One of the women is lying on a bed. She is pretty, but her stomach is very fat. Another
woman is sitting on the bed of the pretty fat one. The rest of the people are on chairs around the bed. The woman sitting
on the bed, who is older than the woman lying down, but not as old as La Vieja Juanita, fingers some beads and begins to chant
in a language Efraín recognizes as Carib.

Mábuiga Maria Lionza,

Buíntibu Labu gracia,

Búmañei abúreme binuatibu,

Jeda su uriña,

Biníua tiguiyé tin bágai.

Sándu Maria Lionza,

Lúguchu búnguiu,

Ayumuraguaba uao gafigontíua urguñetó,

Lídan ora úouve.

Itara la.

When the old woman completes the incantation, the pretty, fat woman says, “Who is that?” and points toward the door. Efraín
moves into the shadows.

“Where?” say the others.

“Oh, I thought I saw someone.”

The younger man goes to investigate. “It’s nothing, mi amor, you are just tired.”

“It must have been a shadow,” says the pretty, fat woman, “Never mind, Marta, please go ahead.” Then the woman sitting on
the bed begins to tell a story. It is a story Efraín has heard before. It is the story of Maria Lionza.

A long time ago, to the Cacique Yare was born a beautiful daughter with green eyes like a cat. She was called Yara. On the
night Yara was born, her father had a vision. In the vision, a monstrous snake consumed an entire village. The next day Cacique
Yare summoned the tribal priest. The smoke-blowing priest told him that the color of his daughter’s eyes was a signal of bad
times to come. Furthermore, the priest said, sending a cloud of smoke into the chief’s face and obscuring his view, if the
green-eyed girl ever saw her reflection in the nearby lake, a giant anaconda would emerge from her mouth and bring death and
destruction to the Caquetio tribes. Because of this, said the priest, the girl must be sacrificed to the Great Anaconda. But
the Cacique Yare refused to kill his child. Instead he sent her to a secret place in the forest. For seventeen years, as Yara
grew into a young woman, twenty-two guardians—eleven men and eleven women—watched over her. The guardians’ most important
job was to prevent the girl from ever reaching the water of the lake, where she might see her own reflection. But one day,
after a heavy and gratifying meal, they fell asleep in the sweltering noonday sun, and Yara wandered away from them. She strayed
into the valley and to the shores of a splendid lake with water like glass. With fascination, she observed her reflection
in the water. As she watched herself in the water, her appearance began to change. She grew longer and longer and longer,
until she had taken the shape of a giant anaconda. The snake kept on growing. It grew so much that it filled the lake, which
itself overflowed and brought floods to the surrounding villages. Yara kept on growing. Her head remained in Acarigua, but
her tail extended past Valencia and all the way to Tamanaco.

It is said that many years later, no one really knows how many, Yara shed her snakeskin and emerged once again as a beautiful
young woman with emerald eyes. In her hair she wore a passion flower, a sign of her divinity.

(I thought it was an orchid, says the pretty, fat woman.)

(No, it is the passiflora edulis, which is sometimes confused with an orchid, says the woman telling the story.)

Anyway, while Yara gathered herbs and berries in the forest, she was discovered by a search party of Spanish soldiers who
mistook her for Doña Maria Lionza, a Spanish lady presumed shipwrecked off the coast and rescued by local tribes. The soldiers
attempted to detain her, shouting, “Maria Lionza, Maria Lionza,” but she did not answer them. Instead, she called in a high
singsong voice to a giant tapir that grazed nearby. When the tapir came to her side, she leapt astride it and disappeared
into the thick of the forest. She rode into the Sorte Mountain, where she made her home, leaving the mountain only once after
that, to meet with the conquistador Ponce de Leon, as an advocate for her people. Ponce de Leon fell in love with her and
she with him, but it was an impossible love because of their opposing worlds. And so she returned to her world, leaving a
piece of her heart with him and carrying a piece of him in her belly. It is said that she is immortal, that she lives in Sorte
until this day, that she is known today as Maria Lionza, venerated by hundreds of thousands who call themselves Marialionceros.
It is said that she visits the world by possessing a chosen woman with her spirit. It is said that one day she will send her
son, El Niño, to deliver a secret message, and he will whisper it into El Presidente’s ear.

The fruit of the passiflora edulis is sweetest when the skin is slightly shriveled.

Consuelo

W
hatever challenges life has thrown at her, and no one familiar with the details will dispute that she has passed through some
extraordinary ordeals, Consuelo has always landed squarely on her feet. According to Marta, it is because artists are especially
beloved by the goddess Maria Lionza. Consuelo herself is wary of too much happiness, a tenacious seed sown in her in childhood
by a cynical mother who had herself been abandoned at birth and who whenever anyone asked how her day was going, would invariably
reply, “Pésimo.” She had counseled Consuelo repeatedly that to expect the worst was to be well prepared for life. And so,
the moment Lily slipped and fell on the kitchen floor, her thoughts were already anticipating the future, arriving at the
culmination of a fast-moving event, an event in which her worst fears could be realized.

It was as though her mind had suddenly separated from her body. Even as she grabbed the keys to the young couple’s Range Rover
while Luz hurried to open the door for Carlos Alberto, whose arms were full of Lily, even as she helped him settle Lily with
her head in his lap in the backseat, she was making a mental inventory of all the things that could go wrong. With her heart
squeezing and her mind howling in alarm, it should not have been possible for her body to make itself climb into the driver’s
seat, for her fingers to turn the key in the ignition, for her foot to gun the engine in reverse, almost before Luz could
pull in her foot and slam the door on the passenger side. They screeched out of the driveway at a speed that kept pace with
her racing thoughts and made Carlos Alberto shout in protest, “Try not to kill us all before we get to the hospital.” In response,
her foot only pressed down harder on the accelerator, a robot foot powered by fear and the determination to overtake the future.

They sped past the Plaza and onto the Avenida Franco, where a terrific traffic jam forced the car to an abrupt crawl. Her
eyes scanned for an opening in the left lane, and in the absence of one, she cut sharply in front of another car and sped
onward to Los Aves Hospital. She parked haphazardly in the place for ambulances and ran behind Carlos Alberto, who was carrying
Lily, through large and bloodied glass doors that Luz held open. In the emergency room, she stood like a startled deer, blood
pounding against her temples, her breath coming in quick, jagged rasps.

BOOK: The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos
3.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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