The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (37 page)

“Why do the newspapers print such lies?” she asked.

Ismael replied that making an example of crime in Carmelitas was more publicly acceptable than investigating the exclusive
residential communities where the powerful committed their own abominations from within their gilded ghettos.

They might have gone on living in Carmelitas forever, had Ismael not been home on the day a shot rang out, and the slender
man in a suit who was walking toward Consuelo as she returned from the grocery store, fell to the ground, dead as wood, his
eyes staring into the sky, blood pouring from his temple onto the sidewalk.

“He was only a few meters away from me,” Consuelo told him, when she reached the apartment, pale as a cloud. Her tone was
calm but her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. She said the word on the street was that the dead man was a political dissident
who printed pamphlets for the Communist party and had been taken out by the secret police. At that moment, Ismael changed
his mind about living in Carmelitas for even one more minute, and they moved into Amparo’s house until they could make other
arrangements.

After a few days, Consuelo said that what she wanted most in the world was to be always at his side, and if that meant following
him into the jungle, well, she was ready. And Ismael had looked deep into the autumn-speckled eyes of this woman who communed
so completely with him heart to heart, whose unwavering gaze spoke so eloquently her love and trust, and he thought, Why not?

Ismael was not so much defined by his early formative years as liberated from them when his father, Don Rafael Medina Martinez,
began to speak in a tongue no one else could comprehend with a person, or persons, no one else could see. Don Rafael’s siblings
had him committed to an asylum in the town of Las Tres Marías, where he would live out the rest of his days in the company
of ghosts. His remaining days, as it turned out, were numbered to sixty-nine, the amount of time it took for a small bleed
in one of the blood vessels in his left temple to become a torrent.

Since Don Rafael had not had the foresight to make a will, assorted family members, which included not only his three brothers
and two sisters but also aunts, uncles, and second cousins once removed, upon receiving word of the demented patrician’s demise,
took it upon themselves to carve up the assets expeditiously on a first-come, first-served basis. The division was an acrimonious
one, with accusations and litigations that would span several generations, but at the time in question they all agreed on
one thing: the inheritance rights of Don Rafael’s five-year-old son Ismael, born of an embarrassing (to them) union with a
woman of impure blood, must be neutralized by the immediate burning of his Catholic baptismal certificate, to be followed
by an expunging of the Church records in the parish of Las Tres Marías. So anxious were the relatives to eclipse the evidence
of his paternity that the child might have been out on the street were it not for Don Rafael’s sister Estrelina Aguamar, an
aged widow and devout Catholic, with skin the color of grapefruit. She insisted that the boy must complete his Catholic education
and took it upon herself to pay for his schooling and boarding in the Don Bosco lyceum of Las Tres Marías until he turned
sixteen.

“It is not the child’s fault that his blood is tainted, and it is our duty to ensure that he does not grow up like an animal,”
she decreed.

The others concurred piously with the noble thought, especially since Estrelina had been the one to take charge and have Ismael’s
baptismal records erased with the compliance and complicity of the parish priest of Las Tres Marías. They were lavish with
praise when Estrelina, who had invested her sizable widow’s wealth judiciously, announced she would be footing the poor little
bastard’s bills.

The truth of his birthright and dispossession would become known to Ismael many years later, piecemeal, from his Que family
and through accounts told in the village closest to the Medina Martinez estate known as Santa Elena. But whether his course
had been altered by design or by destiny mattered little, for he felt no connection with that former life or with those who
had played a role in it. He could remember only vaguely the man and woman whose genes he bore, dim figures made out of smoke
that hovered benignly in the loft of his memory. The only characteristic Ismael believes he inherited from his father is the
ability to fall instantly and irretrievably in love.

Don Rafael Medina Martinez was a distinguished gentleman, of medium build and an enviable head of wavy, jet-black hair, who
had inherited his wealth and property from his father, who had inherited it from his father, a former colonel who had won
it from another colonel in a card game. He had completed a degree in medicine, as was the practice for a proper Señor, though
it was not the practice for landed gentry to vulgarly put their degrees to any use. With the exception of the years spent
obtaining his degree, he had lived in the estate mansion known as Cabeza de Carnero all his life. Solitary and ascetic in
character from a young age, by the time he was forty-five he remained unmarried, a condition that had pleased his relatives
enormously. When by the age of fifty he remained a bachelor, it seemed certain that the status quo would be preserved and
the only question was to whom the estate would devolve. Since his intentions had not been made known to them, his siblings
and their spouses jockeyed for position, visiting him dutifully on the holidays with gifts of potted meats, cheeses, and sweetbreads,
and fussing over him in an apprehensive manner that more often than not drove him to the sanctuary of his stables. This gave
his siblings the opportunity to rummage about in the study in search of a will, but they never found evidence of one. In the
frenzied competition for his affections, they would redouble their efforts, arguing over who would sit at his right hand at
the dining table, who would pour his sherry or coffee, who would accompany him for his nocturnal walk in the garden, until
it was, to Don Rafael’s relief, time for them to return to their own homes. Every year they played this game, bowing and scraping
in his presence, but, in his absence, as his eccentric habits augmented, they could not resist mimicking his peculiar and
fastidious mannerisms. As soon as he left the room, their very faces would change, slyly spewing defamations and untruths
about him with each other. It was understood that he was to be tolerated because of the
money.
And so it went year after year, until the day Don Rafael fell madly in love.

A man of discipline and scrupulous habit but not of imagination, every morning Don Rafael would perform his ablutions and
emerge from his room at precisely eight a.m. impeccably dressed in his riding attire, punctuated by his signature cravat the
color of wine. He would breakfast frugally on fruits and nuts before riding out to inspect his properties, which consisted
of two hundred acres of timber forest and another two hundred of rubber plantation, returning by one p.m. to lunch on a single
filet of fish, half a tomato, and a light chicken broth, then retiring for a siesta till four. From four to six p.m. he would
attend to his property accounts. Promptly at six, he would pour himself a glass of sherry from the decanter in the library,
select a book he had read before and would read from it again until eight, at which time the standard dinner of finely chopped
boiled vegetables and beef roast cut as thin as cloth would be served and polished off with a small bowl of quesillo, accompanied
by a demitasse of strong dark coffee. His day ended with a brief walk in the garden to hasten digestion, followed by bed.
And so it went, with one day melting into another, for weeks, months, years, until the morning he rode out with his trusted
foreman, Anastacio, to inspect the eastern side of the timber forest, which bordered a stream that separated his property
from the small settlement on the other side. The settlement was inhabited by a branch of the Quechuan tribe, who were known
as Que. For generations there had been an unspoken understanding that neither the white man nor the Que would cross into the
other’s territory, and the stream marked the boundary of their agreement.

That day on the opposite side knelt an Indian girl of no more than fourteen years of age. She was collecting large smooth
stones from the stream’s bed, which Don Rafael knew would be heated on a fire and used to assuage the pain of muscle fatigue,
having observed this practice among some of his workers. Her head bent, focused on her task, the girl did not notice Don Rafael’s
approach. Stricken by an inexplicable and gripping urge to see her face, he dismounted, signaling to Anastacio to remain where
he was. As he stepped into the mild current of the stream, the girl started, then leapt to her feet, covering her face with
one arm as if to avert a blow, as the stones scattered to the ground from her lap.

“Iman sutiki?”
He asked her name gently. Slowly the girl dropped her arm to her side and looked at him with a face so fresh and vibrant
with youth that a covetous spear of desire pierced his breast. He reached out his hand, which she took, tentatively, in hers.
He smiled, she smiled back. Hand in hand, they approached the girl’s father who was also the tribal leader.

“Munaycha ususiyki,”
he said, which meant “Your daughter is pretty,” and was the traditional way of asking a father for his daughter’s hand in
marriage. The girl’s father, impressed with the whiteskin’s facility with the language, smiled and nodded. And when Don Rafael
led his child bride back to his horse and lifted her up, she went with him willingly.

This is the story as told in the town of Santa Elena. In the Que version, the girl was captured, bound, and trussed like a
wild boar, clawing and biting, and taken to Cabeza de Carnero, and she never smiled again. But the stories again converge
on the following points:

Don Rafael had loved the girl, whose name was Luna, with passion but without understanding, as if she were a beautiful but
mysterious figure in a painting to which he was drawn inexplicably, an object with which he could not bear to part. It was
this lack of understanding that led him to re-create her in the mold of his fine lady ancestors whose majestic portraits hung
on the walls of the Cabeza de Carnero mansion in gilded frames. He called for a tailor from Las Tres Marías to make petticoats
and corsets and dresses. He gave instructions to the servants that her abundant hair be pulled tight and away from her face,
tamed into an enormous bun that made her head appear too big for her body. She was bedecked with family jewels that had been
taken out of their boxes after many years, and her feet were bound in elegant slippers. Within a year she bore him a son,
who was christened Ismael in the church of Las Tres Marías, but who she called by a secret Que name that meant “moonlight,”
and with whom she played as if with a delightful toy, being only a child herself.

One evening when Ismael was four, Luna bent to kiss him and went for a stroll as usual. She was never seen again. Don Rafael
found her dress and petticoats lying in a heap on the edge of the forest, then farther down the path her corset and hair clips.
Finally, her satin slippers were discovered on the bank of the stream where he had first seen her. With seven of his men,
armed with rifles, he crossed for the second time the unspoken boundary into the Que settlement in the desperate hope that
he would find her among her people and take her back. But the elder of the community, held up his hand and said with a sadness
that left no doubt, “She is as lost to us as she is to you.”

Her disappearance marked the beginning of Don Rafael’s end, for it was then that he began to consort with ghosts.

Here, the Que version has something to add. On the day Luna vanished, children playing near the stream on the Que side claimed
to have seen, only for a moment amidst the trees, a creature with the head and torso of a woman and the body of a tapir.