The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (7 page)

Efraín’s mother, who could never remember her own dreams, had said La Vieja Juanita’s ideas were made of straw, that she should
stop filling Efraín’s head with fairy tales.

“Fairy tales?” the old woman had snorted. “And what about that time when he was three and refused to get into the bus because
of his dream? Didn’t that bus drive right off the road and into a ravine a few hours later? And wasn’t everyone on the bus
killed? Is that a fairy tale?”

“He was having a tantrum. He has never liked buses. It was just coincidence,” his mother said.

“There are no coincidences,” said La Vieja Juanita.

But Efraín’s mother had not believed in the power of dreams any more than La Vieja Juanita believed in Maria Lionza. She had
worried that her son’s dreaminess would make him vulnerable and weird, and said she wanted his feet planted firmly in the
world.

La Vieja Juanita had scoffed, “People live in the world they choose.”

Efraín is not sure which world his mother had chosen.

One day La Vieja Juanita said her legs hurt and could Coromoto go to Sorte instead. And so Efraín accompanied his mother,
which was completely different from accompanying La Vieja Juanita, who was a mostly silent traveling companion. His mother,
on the other hand, liked to talk to him.

“When Manolo returns we will move to a city and I will go to the university. I think I would like to be a historian.”

Sorte was congested because it was one of the feast days of Maria Lionza. A well-dressed woman tourist with European features
approached their stall almost as soon as they had set it up. She couldn’t make up her mind about which mobile she wanted.

“My daughter will kill me if I don’t bring her the correct one to hang in the children’s room. Why are they all so different?”
she asked, and Coromoto explained.

“First of all,” she said, holding up the mobile of a blond goddess, “Maria Lionza has more than one form. In this one, she
is Maria, accompanied by two members of her court—El Negro Felipe, and El Indio Guaicaipuro. Together, they are called Las
Tres Potencias, and they represent the nation and the three races that make it up—white, black, and indio.”

“But I thought Maria Lionza was mestiza,” said the woman, confused.

“She can be white
and
she can be mestiza. And she also can be india, or negra. More than one form, remember? When Maria Lionza is in her white
form, she is depicted as a blond bombshell. When Maria Lionza appears in her mestiza form, she is equally voluptuous, of darker
skin, but she is called Yara. Often she is depicted as an inversion of the best-known image of El Libertador, the one which
is found in the middle of every Plaza Bolivar in the center of every village, town, and city. For example, Yara rides a tapir,
El Libertador rides a horse; Yara is naked, Simón Bolívar wears an army uniform; she holds a human pelvis, he holds a sword.
It’s two sides of a coin—female, male; nature, civilization; birth, death...You see?”

“Dios mío, it seems very complicated!” said the woman, who clearly did not see at all. At which point Coromoto suddenly seemed
to lose interest and began staring into the sea of brightly dressed tourists who floated past like large, colorful fish. Efraín
held out different representations for the lady’s closer inspection, and finally she selected the white version, paid for
it, and went away. The customers that followed were less inclined to ask for explanations. Mostly they picked up the first
mobile that attracted their fancy without really seeing it, nodding disinterestedly when Coromoto pointed out a special feature,
their eyes already seeking out the next stall, the next tourist attraction.

In the glaring heat of the afternoon, when the flow of tourists began to dwindle to a trickle, Coromoto left Efraín in charge
of the stall, saying “Ahora vuelvo.” She walked toward a man standing near the shop that sold Pepsi and cheese tequeños. The
man handed her something too small for Efraín to see, then both disappeared behind the shop. When she returned, her blouse
was buttoned all wrong, her eyes had acquired a brightness that seemed somehow false, and she spoke too fast.

A few days later, when Efraín returned to Sorte with La Vieja Juanita, it was dull and slow at the stall. Taking pity on him,
she said he could go and play until it was time to leave. Efraín used this opportunity to follow the man from the tequeño
and Pepsi shop, who was heading over the bridge. His mother had forbidden him to cross the bridge to the foothills of the
Sorte mountain, but Efraín could not contain his curiosity about the man, and so he followed him. On the other side of the
bridge was a shrine of the author Andrés Bello, who, according to the words of a stone plaque at the foot of his plaster statue,
belonged to the Maria Lionza court and was the saint of Arts and Letters. Scattered about the shrine were framed copies of
diplomas from Marialionceros who believed they had received them with the help of Andrés Bello.

While he was reading the diplomas, Efraín forgot about the man he was following, and by the time he remembered, the man was
gone. Following a group of Guajiro kids, potbellied and stick-legged, their hands and knees stained with the rust of the Yaracuy
earth, he wandered into a small Marialioncero camp at the mountain base, where a healing ceremony was about to begin. At first
he felt like an intruder, but the feeling evaporated when everyone there welcomed him, invited him to stay, offered him strong,
dark coffee, and explained why they were doing this and that.

Efraín crouched on his haunches and watched while a man who said he believed there was a curse on his fields lay on the ground
on a black sheet. Two young women and one old woman covered him up to his chin with a white sheet. In the dirt next to him,
they drew lines in white chalk powder and lit candles of many colors. Across the middle of his body they laid two lengths
of black ribbon and began smoking big handmade cigars. As they smoked, they chanted and blew the smoke over the man’s body.
Then they drenched the man in sugar cane liquor. When the man stood up, he smiled and paid some money to the women.

Efraín got up and walked a short distance to another camp, where a man stood within a chalk circle while a squat, bowlegged
brujo called Banco smoked and chanted nearby. Several men dressed like gypsies tied the man in the circle upside down to a
pole, using soft rope. They washed him in sugar cane liquor while the bowlegged man blew smoke on him. After he was released,
he offered tobacco to the brujo.

At the next camp Efraín visited, there was another brujo called Banco, drinking from a coffee mug and speaking in a strange
high-pitched voice. A dwarfish man with many tattoos stood by to refill the coffee mug as soon as it was emptied.

“What is he drinking?” Efraín whispered to the old man standing next to him, for he had observed that no one in the camps
minded questions. The old man whispered back that it was rum, that no matter how much a Banco drank while in a trance, as
soon as the spirit left the body, the Banco would be stone-cold sober. Only then did Efraín understand that all the Marialioncero
brujos were called Banco, and he was quite pleased at having figured this out all by himself.

A few hundred feet away, on a higher level, eight people lay in a circle, their feet touching, like the spokes of a wheel.
Efraín nearly jumped out of his skin when one of them, a mestiza girl, let out a couple of bloodcurdling shrieks. The presiding
Banco, an enormous, bare-chested black man, spit on the ground and the screaming girl was suddenly silent. “Wash her,” the
Banco commanded. Three mestiza women from the crowd of spectators came forward. Together they lifted the girl, whose body
was rigid, and carried her to the bank of the river.

Efraín had witnessed many similar ceremonies before he remembered the time of day. La Vieja Juanita would be angry if because
of him they missed their bus. On his way back to the bridge he passed an old woman lying in a hammock under a ragged piece
of tarp. She wore a dirty white cassock that was frayed at the neck. Mountain dust had settled into the wrinkles in her face.
She stank of rum. She called out,
huiii, huiii,
and beckoned to him with her skeletal hand. When he approached her cautiously, she said:

“¿Qué quieres saber?”

He remained silent, shuffling his feet before her.

“Don’t worry, there are ways to find the answer even to unasked questions,” she said, and lit a cigar. After it had burned
halfway, she threw it on the ground. It fell, spreading ash in a straight line before it, which fanned out like the wings
of a small bird at the end.

“What does it mean?” Efraín asked, his voice hoarse with apprehension.

The old woman looked surprised. “If the ash falls in the shape of a sickle, it means your wishes for your future will be granted;
if it falls straight, they won’t. Your result is unusual, not sickle-shaped, not straight. I cannot give you an answer.”

As he was leaving, she handed him two small golden feathers. “For you,” she said.

“I don’t have any money or tobacco to give you,” he said.

But the old woman had fallen asleep. By this time it had begun to rain, and within seconds to pour. Efraín quickly tucked
the feathers under his shirt and began to run toward the bridge. By the time he reached the crossing, the river was rising.
He joined a stream of people rushing across the bridge. But, within minutes of his crossing, the rain stopped as suddenly
as it had begun, the sun shone through the clouds, and Efraín was just in time to help La Vieja Juanita pack up for the day.

On the bus to Chivacoa, Efraín reached into his shirt and touched the feathers.

“And what did you learn from your trip across the bridge?” La Vieja Juanita asked.

Efraín was startled. How had she known? Dots of perspiration began to form on his upper lip.

“Anda, tell me. I won’t say anything to your mother.”

Taking a deep breath, Efraín said, “Besides Maria Lionza, the Marialionceros venerate Simón Bolívar very much, and the brujos
say they can see him and have seen him many times. They paint his figure on wooden sticks, which they wave over people. They
worship many other spirits whose names I cannot remember. The brujos are called Banco and everyone goes to ask the Banco what
is going to happen: whether it will rain, or whether the crops will be dry or abundant, or whether they should put a curse
on their enemies or not, things like that. Some people go to be cured of an illness or bad feelings. And the Banco says he
will reply, after having a consultation with los espíritus. After that he blows smoke on them, or washes them with rum, or
sends them to the river. And for this work they give some money to the Banco, or sometimes not money but tobacco. Sometimes
the Banco is a woman who can tell about wishes and the future with her cigar ash.”

“Ah. And did she tell you anything?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“She told me my future was neither straight nor sickle-shaped and gave me two Maizcuba feathers.”

“Hah! What did I tell you—all these Marialionceros are bogus. Just like their false goddess.”

Efraín, who knew he was not expected to answer, stared down at his feet. They rode in silence for the rest of the way.

How was it possible that La Vieja Juanita, who made more beautiful representations of the Immortals than any Efraín had ever
seen, did not believe in them or their powers? Why did she believe that dreams were messages and Mamá not? He pondered these
mysteries frequently, but never voiced his thoughts when his mother and grandmother were quarreling about worlds. He knew
that when it came to such disputes between them, it was best to stay out of the crossfire.

In spite of her repeated assertion that dreams were nothing more than dreams, Efraín’s mother had not been able to resist
asking her son to recount them. When he did, she had listened to him, spellbound, like someone who is parched being offered
a long, cool drink. She had been riveted even when the dreams were full of impossibilities,
especially
when they were full of impossibilities. Afterward, the light would fade from her eyes and she would say, “But you know it
is only a dream.”