The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (31 page)

The only daughter, among many sons, of a farm laborer, Marta’s mother had fled Spain at the age of sixteen, just two years
before the military coup that would spark off a social revolution. A cousin who planned to get out on the next boat claimed
that it was easy for young women to find positions as housemaids in the New World, a better prospect than waiting to be raped
by insane revolutionaries.

“That damned Basque woman will be the death of us all,” she said in reference to the Marxist revolutionary Dolores Ibarruri.

With tears in her eyes, Maria Inocenta accepted the small money pouch that contained the sweat of her father, her mother,
and her brother and crossed the Atlantic Ocean, as thousands of poverty-stricken Spaniards were doing, their hearts nearly
bursting with hope of a better life and the means to send money to their families in the old country.

Maria Inocenta’s arrival in the port city of Havana was dramatic: the flimsy craft that was carrying her from the ship to
the shore capsized, sinking all her belongings in the bay, including a few ropes of smuggled Andalusian chorizos.

She was illiterate, but whatever she lacked in education she compensated with fearlessness and spunk. What she did not know
when she left Andalusia was that Cuba was suffering an economic recession almost as severe as the one in Spain. Like so many
other European refugees whose hopes were soon dashed on the shores of the New World, Maria Inocenta did whatever had to be
done to survive, including, it turned out, trabajo de jintera. After striking out at all the fancy restaurants where she had
begged, once even on her knees, to be given work as a waitress or cook, she finally knocked, her stomach rumbling stridently
with hunger, at the door of Las Quince Letras in the San Isidro district of Havana.

“Do you know how to please a man?” asked her prospective employer, Señora Conchita Ramos, one eyebrow elevated. She was wearing
a Chinese silk kimono, open almost to her navel, and held a slim cigar in her hand, which she brandished with a certain flair
that to Maria Inocenta, dazed by hunger and exhaustion, appeared impossibly exciting and attractive. She had never seen a
woman with so much confidence. But what appealed to her most was the fact that Señora Conchita appeared extremely well fed.

“Back in the old country I was the favorite girl in the most famous and busy brothel in the city of Granada,” said Maria Inocenta,
even though she was a virgin and had never even lain eyes on a city before arriving in Havana. She could not be sure at the
time whether Señora Ramos hired her because she believed her story, or because she liked her, or because she simply wanted
a fresh face. And what did the reason matter? She had a roof over her head and food in her belly. She would not die like a
dog on the streets.

Devoutly Catholic and hence resistant to the loss of her precious virginity, she insisted that her specialty was hand work.
And, upon hearing this, a sensation both sharp and sweet struck a chord in the breast of the jaded Señora Ramos. This dark
Andalusian beauty, with her quick wit and defiant youth, reminded her of herself in years gone by. And so she told Maria Inocenta
that she could stick to hand work but would have to undergo training in mouth work as well. She could keep her virginity until
she turned eighteen, and then they would see.

Las Quince Letras was a high-class establishment. The wealthy and exclusive clientele of Señora Ramos followed her rules,
paid her extravagantly, and behaved like gentlemen. In turn, Señora Ramos could afford to take excellent care of her girls,
and it made business sense to protect her investment. Maria Inocenta was given free room and board, lovely nightclothes made
of lace and silk, and an evening gown for each day of the week. Plus, she was allowed to keep forty percent of her earnings,
better terms than any other whorehouse in the city, half of which she dutifully sent back to her family in Spain. In her spare
time she helped out in the kitchen, and it was there in the brothel kitchen that she learned how to cook and discovered she
had a knack for it.

Life was almost too good to be true, until the night one of the clients broke the rules and impregnated her. It wasn’t all
his fault; Maria Inocenta admitted later that she was as much to blame as he, having somehow lost herself in a world of the
senses while entertaining the young man in a game of strip poker, where the rule was that the winner not only got to choose
the clothing item to be removed but to remove it. When his hand gently slipped into the waistband of her silk underwear and
then slid slowly down into
that place,
she swooned, and before she knew it he was inside the forbidden gate.

Señora Ramos, who had grown maternally fond of Maria Inocenta, said she could continue working as a hand-and-mouth girl because,
believe it or not, there were some men who would pay a great deal to be so serviced by a beautiful pregnant woman. She said
Maria Inocenta could keep the baby, that a baby would bring joy to all the members of the household. She would treat it as
her own grandchild, she vowed. But Maria Inocenta thanked her benefactress for her kindness and said she would leave the brothel
and take her chances, because what kind of life would a baby have in a brothel? Conchita Ramos was disappointed but not in
the least bitter, and she did what she could to help.

Only barely beginning to show, and on the recommendation of a friend of Señora Ramos, a rum baron who frequented Las Quince
Letras, she applied for a job as an assistant cook in the household of the rum baron’s niece, a villa in Calzada del Cerro.

“I write down the menus in the morning. Can you read?” the woman asked.

“But of course! I have a high school diploma from the old country,” Maria Inocenta replied with confianza, though she had
never been to school and could barely scratch out her own name with a stick in the dirt. In reality, she had simply memorized
some important phrases found on the menus of the most popular restaurants and made them into pictures of lines and curves
and dots in her mind. Sofrito. Rabo encendido. Picadillo. Lechón asado. Dulce de leche. But take the letters apart and she
would have no idea what they represented. However, so convincing was her pronunciation that it never occurred to la Dueña
that she was faking it. She got the job and moved into a small but well-ventilated room at the back of the house.

In spite of her disreputable beginnings in the new world, and the illicit seed in her womb, Maria Inocenta had remained throughout
a staunch Catholic. She wanted to baptize her child and so, before the Mass one Sunday, confided this desire to the elderly
parish priest, Padre Delgado. He listened quietly while she told him that her husband, a fisherman, had drowned off the coast,
victim of a terrible storm. Afterward, he advised her to come regularly for instruction and promised to help her. But to her
mala suerte, a gentleman frequenter of Las Quince Letras had recognized her at Mass and, indignant at watching her receive
the Host with the same mouth and sip the Blood of Christ with the same lips that, only a few days before, had caressed his
manhood, had waited until she left and done his sacred duty by informing the priest. When she returned the following day,
Padre Delgado scolded her for telling such monstrous lies. He said she had severely jeopardized the safety of her soul. He
said that under the circumstances, and until she had confessed and been purified of her sins, he would not be able to baptize
her child.

Maria Inocenta was a girl who had never learned to hold her tongue. She tried to explain that if she had always remained virtuous,
she would be dead. No one, she said, could fill their belly with chastity and honesty. For her, living on the streets was
the reality she faced and against which she fought so that she could meet her basic needs, and now the needs of her child.

“Which is better for the soul,” she asked the priest, “giving a man five minutes of pleasure and telling a small mentira here
and there that hurts no one, or living on the streets and starving like an animal?”

The aging priest, who was essentially a kindly soul, though somewhat restricted in his ability to express it by his doctrine,
had felt pity for her plight but insisted that she renounce both men and lies. He said it was most definitely better to starve
and die than to lose one’s soul to the devil. Then he prescribed a penance of three rosaries per day along with her promise
to visit each person to whom she had told a lie, confess to them, and apologize. He said that given her unmarried and sullied
state, she would not make an appropriate mother and that when the child was born, she should give it up for adoption. He said
that although her own soul had a stain on it, there was still a chance for the newborn.

As though, Maria Inocenta said later to Marta, this old childless padre with his poor, shriveled private parts could know
anything about the soul of a mother, whoever she may be and however she may have come to be with child. For that matter, what
could any man know about it? Only a woman could understand what it means to carry new life in her body for nine months. She
decided that to bring her child safely into the world, she would tell any lie that would keep her alive. From then on, she
gave up the idea of baptism, and directed her prayers exclusively to la Virgen de la Caridad, patroness of Cuba. La Virgen,
blessed be her name, was a woman who would understand, and it was La Virgen alone in whom she would confide and from whom
she would seek solace.

Meanwhile, she continued to work in the home of the wealthy Trujillo family, where she met the man who would become her husband,
Ernesto Torre.

Ernesto Torre was the gardener for the Familia Trujillo. He nurtured and talked to his thriving plants, flowers, and bushes
as though they were his babies, and this is what Maria Inocenta first loved about him. When she offered to take his lemonade
to him in the garden one midmorning, the elderly head cook had smiled perceptively and handed her the tray. And that is how
their courtship began.

Ernesto was the first to notice when Maria Inocenta began to show and immediately asked her to marry him. He claimed he did
not object to raising another man’s child as long as he could have Maria Inocenta by his side. He would raise this child as
one of his own, and he expressed the hope of having many. Together they saved their money, until, in Maria Inocenta’s sixth
month, they calculated they had enough to purchase a small plot of land. They found one near Matanzas, where they grew black
beans and yuca, and where Marta was born—kicking and screaming, according to her mother—on an Easter Sunday.

Marta remembers the details of her mother’s stories better than the details of her own childhood. Of her childhood, she mostly
remembers sensations. The succulent taste of black beans and yuca. The wind on her skin when she climbed the mango trees with
her sister, Yolanda, and their two younger brothers, Angel and Lucio. The rich smell of her father’s tobacco pipe.

She knows, looking back, that her family was poor, barely eking out a living on their crops, but poverty is not what she remembers.
Since she had never lived any other life, never had any source of comparison, how could she have known the difference between
poor and rich? Love and warmth is what she remembers, with one hot day blurring into another, and another.

The only sequence of events in her childhood that stands out with clarity in her mind is the time she traveled to Havana with
her mother and they visited the big fancy whorehouse, Las Quince Letras, though of course she hadn’t known it was a whorehouse
at the time. She must have been around nine years old, the eldest of four children. She remembers all the women in the big
house, beautiful women wearing beautiful clothes, fussing over her, taking turns holding her on their laps, and calling her
“little pecado de juventud,” with tears in their eyes. She remembers the soft rustle of silk and the heady smell of perfume.
She remembers Señora Ramos feeding her delicious chocolates, the first she had ever tasted, and handing her mother a packet
with money in it. She remembers her mother’s desperate gratitude, and that her father had been angry when they returned and
had thrown the money on the floor.

Maria Inocenta’s ability to inspire confidence in her eldest child about her origins must have been extraordinary, for Marta
feels no shame about her mother’s story or her own illicit conception, and tells of it often. Carlos Alberto had been so taken
with the story that he asked and received her permission to turn it into a telenovela. It was called
Soledad,
and Marta had watched the dramatization of her mother’s early life with pride and fascination. That the names were changed
mattered nothing; on the contrary, being privy to the secret of the story’s origins was a titillating enhancement to her viewing
experience.

Marta likes to say that just as Abraham and Sarah exploited and abused the slave girl Hagar, so too her mother had been exploited
and abused by Churchgoing people who took advantage of her. Her mother was like Hagar. The spring she found in the desert,
where none existed before, is what enabled Hagar to survive. This is how Marta sees her mother: as a woman who miraculously
found a spring in the desert.