The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (14 page)

With the exception of a brief stint in the rough and tumble neighborhood of Carmelitas, and in the absence of responsibility
for anyone but themselves, Consuelo and Ismael had spent the first nine years of their marriage like gypsies, carrying little
more than the clothes on their backs, relying on the kindness of those who harbored them in the course of their travels. Whenever
they visited Tamanaco, they resided with Amparo and Alejandro, who would go out of their way to give them every comfort and
luxury.

The village of the Que, located in the vast region of Maquiritare, was so small that it had never been placed on a map, and
to get there they had to travel by water taxi canoe down a swift river the color of tea that emptied into a smallish lake
in the middle of the forest. The lake was called Encanto, and it was filled with pink dolphins and sideneck turtles. It was
here, in the forest by the lake, among the jaguar and puma, the blue and yellow macaws, the scarlet ibis, the purple orchids,
that the couple spent most of their early married life, for it was here that the Que had built their huts and it was to the
Que tribe that Ismael belonged.

While her husband went to the river to carve canoes or rode out on a hunt with his uncles and cousins, Consuelo spent her
days with the women, hollowing calabash gourds, weaving geometric shapes into baskets, making handmade paper and natural dyes,
items the Que bartered for cloth in the town of Santa Elena. It was here, in this remote part of the Gran Sabana, where she
began to experiment, hesitantly, with the dyes she made with the other women, and to use them to record her experience. Her
first subject was the fire goddess, Kawa.

According to the tribeswomen, the goddess Kawa had owned fire from the beginning of time. She hid it in her stomach and would
not show it to anyone, not even her husband. When her husband went out to hunt and she was alone, she would turn into a frog,
open her mouth, and spit out the fire to heat her cooking pots. When her husband returned, hot food would be ready for him
to eat. What Kawa did not know was that when her husband left the house, he turned into a jaguar, for he was the god of the
hunt.

Initially, Consuelo painted on the inside of bark, or lengths of wood, or even on flattish stones collected from the lake
bed, and only much later, when she had developed more confidence in her abilities, did she begin to draw and paint on handmade
paper. At first her painting and drawing tools were feathers and sticks, but the Que applied their ingenuity to create for
her special brushes made of horsehair and driftwood sculpted by the river. In the evenings she would join Ismael and their
hosts for an exchange of stories and songs. She had never been so happy.

During that time, she and Ismael slept together outdoors in a single hammock strung between two trees with nothing more than
the moon and the stars above their heads. Well, perhaps
slept
is a euphemism, Consuelo says, since they rarely slept at all in those days, whether they were in a bed or a hammock.

The only thing Consuelo missed in her life was a child of her own. After her first miscarriage, Ismael had rocked her in his
arms and told her not to worry, that conception and birth were miracles that had their own time. And he had taken her to visit
Amparo, who could always find a way to distract her. And because he filled her world with wonder and love, she did not dwell
excessively on the absence; she rebounded quickly from the five miscarriages that followed, and the pangs of longing and loss
she felt whenever she watched a mother with her child were brief.

Consuelo is positive that it was on one particular starlit night, in their ninth year of marriage, that Lily was conceived.

(How do you know for certain? We had so many such nights, says Ismael, smiling.)

(Tell my husband that it is because just as he was finishing off his business, and growling like a wild animal, I saw a starburst
in the sky, and felt another burst inside me, says Consuelo.)

(Ay, Mami, not in front of the baby! I can’t even cover her ears, says Lily.)

By the time she discovered she was pregnant for the seventh time, she had learned to keep in abeyance that bubbling stream
of joy. But when she successfully entered her fourth month, her euphoria could not be contained.

Ismael went to Santa Elena and cabled Alejandro. Within days he had found a suitable duplex in the residential district of
Altamira, since being pregnant had changed Consuelo’s perspective on gypsy living, if only because she now hankered for a
proper bathroom.

“It’s a distress sale,” Alejandro said excitedly, “it’s going cheap for that locality.”

The property had a large garden with fruit trees at the back of the duplex and a small rose garden in front. Consuelo was
jubilant. Alejandro offered to advance the down payment. When Ismael declined, saying it was too much, Alejandro said, “Don’t
be a fool, hombre, it’s not a gift. You’ll be able to rent out the top half and pay me back in no time, with interest, if
you insist.”

The women in her new neighborhood came to welcome her with a Torta de almendras the day after she moved in. Consuelo served
it immediately, accompanied by coffee, and the women stayed long into the evening, admiring her paintings, sharing recipes,
gardening tips, and affectionate jokes about their husbands. The bond was sealed by six p.m., when the other women returned
to their own kitchens.

Consuelo and Ismael now had, for the first time since their marriage, not only a home but a financial cushion, since within
three days of their advertisement in the newspaper, an East Indian family of five fell in love with the first-floor rental
portion of the duplex, and offered three months’ rent in advance. Thus, the couple had officially joined the bourgeoisie,
a social condition Consuelo enjoyed and Ismael good-naturedly endured, securing his first job as an inspector of national
parks and forests so as to ensure a steady income. The ordinary trappings of middle-class living—refrigerator, stove, telephone,
hot water in the shower, and a flushing toilet—which Consuelo had not missed during her nine-year honeymoon with Ismael, now
seemed indispensable, and within days that other slapdash life in the wild seemed like a distant memory as she set about building
her modern-day nest.

For the most part, with the exception of a need to constantly visit the bathroom, Consuelo enjoyed being pregnant, watching
her body with awe as her stomach swelled, as her breasts grew to double their original size, as the skin of her face took
on the luminescent sheen associated with pregnancy. She documented her bodily changes, week by week, standing before the mirror
and drawing freehand on a notepad. From month four to month seven, she was ravenous for anything sweet and spent most of her
time picking fruits from her garden and in the kitchen, where she would spend hours preparing exquisite delights for herself.
Flan de auyama, Dulce de lechosa, Merenguitos con limón, Jalea de mango. She must have perfected hundreds of sweet dishes
during that period. But, she had to admit, the last two months of pregnancy seemed like an eternity. No longer able to muster
the energy or the enthusiasm to cook, or paint, or tend her beloved garden, she spent hours lying on the sofa, a resplendent
beached whale, talking to Amparo on the phone, joyfully expectant and nervous at the same time.

“How is it possible,” she asked Amparo, “for this body of flesh and bone to stretch so much and crack open so wide as to accommodate
the carrying and birth of a child?”

“It isn’t pleasant toward the end,” said Amparo cautiously, “but don’t worry, we women are stronger than we think.”

“I read in a magazine article that you forget the pain once it is over,” said Consuelo.

Amparo snorted. “I suppose it was written by a man. No. What happens is this: you remember the pain, but your
forgive
it every time you look into your child’s eyes.”

“Amparo, what is an episiotomy?”

“Ay, no, por favor. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about names. I like Azucena for a girl, and it’s probably
a girl judging by the way she hangs so low in your belly,” said Amparo, who claimed she had learned this fail-safe method
of discernment from her grandmother.

“Por Dios, Amparo! Azucena is a terrible name, it is a name for an old maid. Other children will laugh at a name like that,”
said Consuelo. Then, “Can you really tell whether it is a boy or a girl just by looking at my stomach?”

“Of course,” said Amparo, whose grandmother had accurately predicted the sex of her own two children, Alex and Isabel. “Girls
hang low, boys stay high. Promise me that I can be there when she is born.”

“Promise? I insist!”

Ismael returned late at night from a three-day expedition to the Delta on the last day of October, one day before Consuelo’s
fortieth birthday. He curled himself around her on the bed, but not too tightly, since she had already told him that any sustained
physical contact at this stage in her pregnancy made her feel unbearably hot and oppressed. In actuality, it would hardly
have made a difference on that particular night, since Consuelo, who had taken a strong infusion of Manzanilla before bed,
slept like a stone and was not even aware of her husband’s presence.

Early in the morning on the first day of November, Consuelo awoke to a wet bed and contractions that were already seven minutes
apart. She punched the slumbering Ismael in the small of the back with her fist, and he awoke with a start. “It’s time,” she
said through clenched teeth. “We have to go to the hospital. Call a taxi and call Amparo.”

“There is no time to go to the hospital,” said Ismael, lifting her nightgown and peering between her legs. He ran up the stairs
to the door that separated their own living area from that of their tenants from India, a Hindu man and his Muslim wife, both
civil engineers working for an oil company. He pounded forcefully on the door calling out, “Nati! Nati!” The woman of the
house, Nathifa Kalidasa, opened the door in her bathrobe and slippers and allowed herself to be firmly commandeered by the
elbow, down the stairs to the apartment below. She followed Ismael into the bedroom, took one look at Consuelo writhing and
moaning on the bed, and, without a word, ran to the kitchen to put on a pot of water to boil. She returned with an armful
of towels, and a porcelain basin from the bathroom, which she set down on a chair. She approached Consuelo, took hold of her
hand, wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her bathrobe, and began to sing alien words of comfort in a high sweet
voice.

Ismael rolled up the sleeves of his pajama shirt and ran to the kitchen, returning with a clean, sharp knife and a bucket
full of ice cubes, which he set down on the night table, before returning to the kitchen for the boiling water. He had forgotten
to call Amparo.

“Let me help you up,” he said to Consuelo. “You’ll do better in a squatting position. Gravity will help you with your work.”

“Don’t TOUCH me, coñomadre,” shouted Consuelo at her husband. “What do you know about delivering babies, eh?”

Ismael did not reply. He lifted his clawing, biting, howling wife, set her down on her feet, and pushed her into a crouching
position at the foot of the bed. He placed her hands on the bedpost for support, put an ice cube in her mouth, and instructed
her to clench it with her back teeth and breathe in short, quick gasps through her mouth. He wrapped some ice cubes in a washcloth,
smashed it against the nightstand to crush the ice, and gave it to Nathifa, who held the washcloth to the back of Consuelo’s
neck.

An hour later, Consuelo was hurling abuses Ismael hadn’t known were in her vocabulary. “Hang on, mi amor,” he said, wiping
his brow, “almost there.”

Ismael crouched down. He slipped between his wife’s straining arms, facing her. She spat in his face. He slid his hands under
her, and she could feel a wriggling bundle, like a giant misguided mojón, moving wetly through her. Her stomach rippled, sending
a searing jagged knife of white heat to her brain.

“Get it out of me,” Consuelo yelled, falling back, and supporting herself with her elbows on the floor.

“Empuja,” he whispered, leaning forward, his hands ready. Consuelo pushed so hard she thought her head would explode. She
felt her bones unlock, separate in a massive rush of indescribable pain and pleasure. Then she was free.

“It’s a girl!” yelled Ismael exultantly a moment later.

Ismael expertly severed and tied the umbilical cord, blew into the baby’s mouth, and swabbed her with a damp towel. He swaddled
her in a clean one and handed her to Nathifa, who had tears in her eyes. Kneeling in front of Consuelo, whose legs were still
splayed open, Ismael waited for the afterbirth, which he placed in a bucket for disposal, then he gently removed his wife’s
blood-soaked nightgown. He washed her with another wet towel, helped her back into bed, covered her with a fresh sheet. Nathifa
placed the baby against Consuelo’s breast, and stood by, smiling. And when Consuelo looked into her child’s eyes, her heart
began to dance.

“Happy birthday, mi amor,” said Ismael.

“I want to call her Lily,” said Consuelo. “Lily Nathifa Martinez.”

“Amparo is going to be furious that she missed the birth,” said Ismael. “Are you sure you want to deprive her of being present
for the naming as well?”

“We’ll make her the godmother, as consolation. And Alejandro can be the godfather,” said Consuelo with finality.

“Lily Nathifa Amparo Martinez? Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And what consolation does your husband receive for all the curses he had to endure?” asked Ismael, smiling.

At that moment Consuelo couldn’t remember cursing her husband. She couldn’t remember the pain. In fact, she couldn’t remember
a time before the moment she held her baby in her arms.