The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (8 page)

In Efraín’s favorite dream he is standing on a rooftop looking out at a mountain. He has climbed to the rooftop to escape
the people on the ground. He can see them waving at him, urging him to come down. But he does not want to come down because
the people talk too much, they have too many opinions that they all express at the same time. Their screechy voices hurt his
ears. Efraín decides to ignore the waving people. He looks straight ahead instead of down. From his position on the rooftop,
the mountain appears smaller, accessible. He is sure that if he takes a running leap, his arms will become wings and he will
land on the mountain. But he always awakens before he can find out.

His mother had been frightened when he told her this dream, insisting that he must never, ever, climb any rooftops, much less
try to jump from them. “If you do something like that, you will only break your arms and legs, and maybe your neck,” she said.
“Boys are not birds.” She had been bothered for days about this dream. For weeks afterward, she would wake Efraín in the middle
of the night to remind him about the dangers of jumping from high places.

The only thing that bothers Efraín about the dream is that he never found out whether he could fly to the mountain or not.

For the first year in his new home, some of his dreams had been nightmares. He never told his mother or La Vieja Juanita about
them. Whenever he awoke from a nightmare, he would simply lie quietly in his hammock, clenching and unclenching his teeth.
The nightmares involved mostly the same set of circumstances, with one variation. In one version, he was running hand in hand
with his mother’s boyfriend, Manolo, through the forest. Someone was chasing them, crashing through the undergrowth, gaining
on them. He could smell his own susto. He worried that his own shorter legs would slow Manolo down. If they were caught, he
knew it would be his fault, though Manolo would never say that. His chest hurt from the effort of running. Just as he felt
his lungs could take no more, there would be a shot fired from behind. As Manolo fell, Efraín would feel his hand slip out
of his father’s. “Run, Efraín, run,” Manolo would shout. That was the end of the nightmare.

In the other version he was running with his mother, and it was his mother who would be shot, just as they reached a river.
“Swim, Efraín, swim,” she would say, pushing him into the river just before she fell.

Luckily, the frequency of these nightmares decreased with time, and finally they stopped.

Although he is only eleven, Efraín understands that the nightmares were because of their trouble with the militares. They
had run like hell and they had escaped together. Manolo urged them to get into the first car with La Vieja Juanita, saying
he would follow with Catire. But he did not follow and Efraín’s mother had gone to look for him, and so far neither had returned.
Because of this, every now and then, Efraín feels a shard of misgiving pierce his consciousness. Because what if the dreams
are true? If both his mother and Manolo fell in the dream and disappeared in real life, what did it mean? When these questions
come to mind, he tries not to think about answers. He has found that the best way to achieve not thinking too much is with
smoke.

Lately, Efraín has taken up smoking loose-leaf tobacco with a little coca paste mixed in. The raggedy Guajiro boys he sometimes
hangs around with over at the Children’s Park in Chivacoa introduced him to it last year, on his tenth birthday. He meets
them whenever he and La Vieja Juanita go into town for supplies. The boys are older than Efraín, teenagers. Most of them,
like Efraín, have never been to school. None of them have regular jobs; they lie in wait for unsuspecting, gullible tourists
and wide-eyed Maria Lionza cult types, and offer to be their guides, carry their luggage, find them a hotel room, whatever.
The rest of the time, which is most of the time, they hang out at the Children’s Park, playing cards, or arm wrestling, or
talking about girls. Way to go, carajo, they say, when one of them tells of making it with a girl or fucking a puta. Give
it to me, they say, jutting their hips and punching each other in the arm. It seems to Efraín that their feeling of accomplishment
is the same irrespective of whether the act has been consummated with a girlfriend or a puta. Sometimes the Guajiro boys refer
to women in general, and even to their own girlfriends, as putas, which only compounds Efraín’s confusion. It seems to him
that according to the Guajiro boys, the only women who are not putas are their own mothers. Mothers are out of bounds; none
of the Guajiro boys talk about their mothers. Unless they are making a vow. When one of the Guajiro boys wants to convince
someone that he is telling the truth, he swears on his own mother’s eyes.

La Vieja Juanita thinks it is good for Efraín to be around other Indian boys; she lets him chew the fat with them while she
shops. She knows about the tobacco but not about the coca paste. She has warned the older boys that if they give Efraín coca,
she will make them impotent. Because of La Vieja Juanita’s connection to El Negro Catire, the Guajiro boys do not question
her ability to fulfill her promise; they never enlist Efraín’s services in the cocaine business. They make him swear upon
his mother’s eyes that he will never breathe a word about the coca paste.

The Guajiro boys treat Efraín like a mascot, sending him on errands—to fetch them some soda pop or rolling papers from the
kiosk on the corner. They are genuinely fond of him. Because they are fond of him, they have never told him the rumor. That
before El Negro Catire found her and cured her, the hottest puta in Chivacoa used to be his mother; that for a gram of cocaine,
she would give them a blow job. Besides, people who disappear are presumed dead, and even these boys know it is dishonorable
to speak ill of the dead, not to mention bad luck.

Even though he hasn’t been to school, Efraín knows how to read and write because his mother, who had studied through the tenth
grade, taught him. When one of the older boys needs to write something, he is sure to ask Efraín to help him, even if it is
only graffiti on the wall of the Mercado Costa. The Guajiro boys repay the favor by giving Efraín tobacco, coca paste, and
rolling papers. They tousle his hair and tease him, asking what he thinks about women. The only women Efraín knows well are
his mother and his grandmother, and while he is certain that the Guajiro boys don’t mean
them,
he is not quite certain who they do mean.

The day before Efraín’s mother disappeared, La Vieja Juanita said she had a plan to guarantee food on the table. Her plan
was simple: Coromoto, who looked surprisingly like commercial depictions of Maria Lionza, would start having visions of the
goddess in public and create a commotion. People would pay to talk to her, yes they surely would, the Marialionceros were
ripe for a miracle.

Efraín’s mother had scoffed at first, but La Vieja Juanita said, “Isn’t it better than serving drinks to ruffians in a bar,
Coro? Think of it as acting; pretend you are starring in a telenovela. If not for yourself, then do it for the boy.” And she
kept on about it until Coromoto had finally agreed, though Efraín thought it was mostly to make his grandmother stop talking.

The next morning, Efraín and La Vieja Juanita had traveled by minibus from Sorte to Chivacoa to make purchases from the only
store open on Sundays where they could find the supplies required—feathers, beads, scraps of cloth, and natural dyes that
La Vieja Juanita would convert into paint. She also selected some material—three meters of handwoven Wayuu cotton—to make
an appropriate costume for Coromoto. The store was crowded, and it took longer than expected to collect their supplies and
pay for them. The copper-skinned mestiza girl who was operating the cash register, and who Efraín thought was pretty, said
there was news that more Guajiro rebels had escaped across the border. El Negro Catire was reported to be with the rebels
and headed toward the Western provinces. Four rebels were accused of murdering twelve paramilitary troops in their beds, and
it was certain the trackers would try to hunt them down until they found them and killed them on the spot, without trial.
Then the rebels would retaliate. It was all about land.

“It is the gringos who are adding fuel to the fire,” opined the man in line behind Efraín and La Vieja Juanita.

“Those gringos,” said the mestiza girl, handing Efraín the change, and a piece of candy gratis, “who made them the policía
of the world?”

There were rumors that as a countermeasure to the anticipated cross-border posse activity, El Presidente had ordered the Guardia
Nacional to the Western provinces, that a curfew might be imposed. Everyone was in a hurry to make their purchases and get
home before dusk.

Night had fallen by the time the old woman and the boy reached the thatch-topped shack of their one room in the forest. But
the moon was bright and as Efraín pushed the door, he thought he could discern the shape of his mother in her hammock.

“Mamá, we’re home,” he said, lighting a candle, which went out almost instantly.

“We made a killing today,” said La Vieja Juanita, taking the matches from Efraín and lighting the oil lamp. “We will work
late tonight and all day tomorrow. I plan to sell three times the number of mobiles,” she said. “And tomorrow night, Coromoto,
you will become Maria Lionza and make an appearance in Sorte.”

“Guess what, Mamá,” said Efraín, “you were right; on the way home I remembered my dream. It was about you and me and Manolo,
about the time we went to Playa Azul and you taught me how to swim, remember?”

From the hammock there was no reply. There was no gentle rise and fall of the chest, no sigh of a breath. It was too still,
too quiet. It was as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.

Efraín ran toward the hammock in the corner of the hut, pushing the air in front of him as though it were water. In the hammock
there was only a blanket.

“Mamá!” Efraín shouted, running out of the hut. But his mother was gone, and the only sound he could hear was the sound of
his own breath quickening.

It was a bright summer day when they decided to take a trip to Playa Azul, a pristine stretch of sand on the Colombian coastline
that received an ocean the astonishing color of Mexican turquoise. Efraín was only five, but he still remembers that day in
particular because it was the day his mother taught him to swim. From the main beach, they walked along a narrow ledge on
the outer side of a hill to a wide cove with giant brown-gray rocks on either side. With the exception of a few skeletal stray
dogs and a lone fisherman, the cove was deserted.

They spread a blanket on the powdery sand and took off all their clothes, because Coromoto said there was no point to clothes
on a hot, deserted beach. She was different then, daring and dynamic, infecting everyone around her with playful enthusiasm.
She did not have two deep lines between her eyebrows. She laughed all the time.

“Don’t you think he might be a bit young for swimming?” asked Manolo, who could float but could not swim.

“Of course not,” said Coromoto, tossing her hair, bleached blond in places with agua oxigenada. When she tossed her hair that
way, it meant that she had truth on her side and didn’t give a damn who thought otherwise. “Before I met
you,
my love, and began this gypsy life, I lived in an apartment building that had a swimming pool and went to the beach every
weekend. I was swimming like a fish by the time I was three. If Efraín is going to learn at all, he needs to start now. So,
are you coming with us or not? We’re wasting a lot of good waves.”

“The view is better from here,” said Manolo, grinning. “Besides, no man likes to be bested by his woman in any sport.”

“Vamos, take my hand, Efraín, we’ll go into the sea together, you and Mamá, and leave this scaredy cat to tremble on his towel
all by himself.”

Manolo pretended to shake in fear, then shouted, “But afterward I challenge you both to a game of football—two against one.”
Manolo was crazy about football and had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Efraín that football was at least as good a sport
as swimming, if not better. Efraín giggled and took his mother’s hand. Together, they ran naked to meet the blue-green sea.