The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos
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Synopsis
Irene dos Santos disappeared at age 15. Believed to have drowned while on holiday with her best friend, Lily Martinez, her body was never found. Now, years later, she appears ghostlike in Lily's dreams, prompting a quest for the truth behind her disappearance. Mysteriously, Lily, eight-months pregnant with her first child, slips and falls on the same day that the statue of Maria Lionza, Patron Saint of their Venezuelan town, cracks in two. Confined to her bed, Lily is surrounded by her family and closest friends, who agree that a Novena to Maria Lionza will guide the baby's spirit safely into the world. Together, through their nine nights of prayer, each offers a story to entertain Lily and her baby. What emerges is a vivid picture of Venezuela during a time of revolution and uncertainty-and the unraveling of the mystery behind Irene dos Santos. "The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos is an intricately woven tale of love and memory from a deeply talented writer." -- Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Secret Son "Mascarenhas uses a 15-year-old girl's disappearance to spin a multilayered history of a Venezuelan family, incorporating folklore, political intrigue and magical realism...This family epic is immersive; no character or event is left unexplored from multiple perspectives. Indeed, the conclusion is like the final piece of an intricate puzzle." -- Publishers Weekly
Release date: June 19, 2009
Publisher: Popular Library
Print pages: 384
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The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos
Margaret Mascarenhas
purple at the base. Pollination is best under humid conditions.
In Lily’s dream it is raining and Irene thunders past on what appears to be a giant wild boar. “Vamos, vamos!” She leans down,
arm extended, hand reaching to pull Lily up in front of her. Lily also reaches, but their hands are wet, their fingers slip,
the grasp does not hold. In that split second, just as their fingertips separate, a lightning bolt strikes Irene full on the
chin; she falls back against the rump of her mount, which continues galloping away into the forest. The dream ends as the
honeyed song of the golden-winged Maizcuba announces the break of dawn in the postcolonial city of Tamanaco.
As the first light filters through the windows of the freshly whitewashed Quintanilla residence, Lily opens her eyes and stretches
her arms. Using her elbows as leverage, she laboriously hoists her body, over eight months heavy with child, into a sitting
position. She leans over to kiss Carlos Alberto, who is still asleep, but her belly gets in the way. She will kiss him later,
from a more comfortable position.
Easing herself awkwardly but quietly out of bed, she slips on an ankle-length kimono, black and white, and pads barefoot to
the kitchen. Her mother’s voice, the voice of her childhood, light and bright, accompanies her down the hallway, reminding
her not to mix too much water in the Harina P.A.N. for the arepas.
The sounds of cooking in the large, airy kitchen with the speckled gray Formica table, where Lily had dutifully done her homework
as a child, are the most comforting sounds she knows. It is in the kitchen that her mother reigned supreme, creating the perfect
arepas, buoyant and filling at the same time. Lily is certain she has never tasted arepas comparable to her mother’s. Or cachapas.
Or hallacas. Or mondongo. Or anything gastronomic. Although she has learned eight of her mother’s most familiar recipes, executing
them with military precision, the result is never as delicious. She suspects Consuelo of withholding a secret ingredient,
but Consuelo, laughing, says the secret is love. “When you are cooking you should pour your love into the pot. You are too
distraída, mi amor, thinking of other things.”
It was in the kitchen that Consuelo taught Lily to dance to the music of the transistor radio, which her father, Ismael, had
installed on the wall over the counter. Merengue and salsa—un, dos, tres...un, dos, tres—Consuelo’s full, rounded hips swirling
sensuously, Lily’s bony ones jerking, awkward. Afterward, their faces flushed with pleasure, they would go out to the garden
and pluck passion fruits from the loaded vine that Ismael had brought all the way from the rain forest. It took twelve passion
fruits to make enough juice to quench their thirst. Then her mother would teach her to draw, the subjects selected from items
at hand—a jar full of carnations, a bowl of fruit, her mother’s face. Lily could never quite master the art of shading, and
her renditions lacked depth.
Consuelo tells her daughter that the preparation of a meal is as much a creative act as drawing or painting. I won’t be around
forever, she says. Debes aprender. But since Lily does not acknowledge the possibility of a world in which her mother is not,
Consuelo might as well have said nothing at all. In any case, there is Marta, who cooks almost exactly like her mother.
Marta, an immigrant from Cuba, has been with the family almost as long as Lily can remember, first working for Consuelo and
now for Lily. Marta thinks of herself as Venezuelan first and Cuban incidentally. Every Sunday morning she takes an hour-long
bus ride to Caracas to visit her Trinidadian friend José Naipaul, who is dying of lung cancer, returning by noon.
On Sundays, Marta is not expected to cook; Lily is in charge of breakfast, Carlos Alberto of lunch, and dinner is comprised
of sandwiches from the week’s leftovers. The only food Carlos Alberto knows how to prepare is steak, which he marinates in
olive oil and parsley, sears, and serves rare, accompanied by heart of palm salad, chilled beer, and a butter-yellow rose
from the garden. After dinner they play cards, or sometimes dominoes, which Marta prefers to cards. By now their Sunday routine
is established, automatic; they never give a single thought to a different type of Sunday.
Though it is from her mother, a painter, that she learned to draw, it is architecture that Lily has chosen as her profession.
Architecturally, and in spite of her self-inflicted culinary deficiencies, the kitchen is her favorite design subject as well
as her favorite room in the house. When designing a house, she always saves the kitchen for last, like dessert. She works
out her preliminary drawings, freehand, on the kitchen table, an arrangement that works well, since it gives Carlos Alberto
full occupancy of the tiny study, where he pens his stories for the producers of telenovelas. Since Lily’s best childhood
memories are from her mother’s kitchen, she has designed her own as almost a replica of Consuelo’s, separated from the living
room by a wide, open arch instead of a wall, though her kitchen table is wood, not Formica. Thus, the living room and the
kitchen are one. There is no dining room.
Lily doesn’t like it when Marta points out similarities between her own life and her mother’s, certain that her taste in kitchen
layout is where the resemblance ends. For example, Lily would never allow her husband to roam the countryside as he pleases,
spending more time away than at home.
It is not that her father doesn’t love her mother, she knows this. It is just that he has other, perhaps equal, loves. Poetry.
Music. The Gran Sabana. The life of one such as her father, who is constantly traveling for inspiration in the jungles or
the plains, is unpredictable. Lily does not appreciate unpredictability. She reads the endings of novels first and never watches
telenovelas, not even those written by her husband, which undergo many nerve-racking twists and turns, and take too long to
come to a resolution. In her work and in her life, she likes straight angles and areas with well-defined, proportionate boundaries,
efficiency of space. She has installed hidden storage units in her kitchen, stocked with utensils and household supplies,
in neat, regimented rows. She stows her passions and desires in the same way. Spontaneous, unexpected bursts of emotion are
quickly reined in, put in their place, though she finds such exercise of control increasingly difficult ever since she became
pregnant. But this, she believes, is simply a matter of hormones; it will pass as soon as her body is her own again.
“Why don’t you let me make the breakfast today; I’ll be out in a moment,” calls Consuelo.
“Don’t worry, Mami, I can manage,” she says.
She pours the milk and the water for coffee into separate pans to boil. She lightly fries the arepas until they have formed
a skin, places them on a brightly hand-painted plate, a souvenir from her father’s travels. She likes this plate because,
besides being cheerful and attractive, it can go in the oven with the arepas.
She squeezes fresh orange juice into a glass pitcher and heaps coffee into the old-fashioned French percolator, which she
received as a wedding present from her godmother, Amparo Aguilar. From the refrigerator, she removes butter, queso blanco,
and ham, and places them on another, less dramatic plate. Around these, she symmetrically arranges slices of avocado sprinkled
with salt, pepper, and a dash of lemon juice. She sets the table for breakfast. Pouring two cups of coffee, to which she adds
frothy boiled milk and a single spoon of sugar, she takes her seat at the table. While she waits for her mother to join her,
she slips her hand into the pocket of her kimono, draws out the letter from Irene, reads it again.
Consuelo enters the kitchen, eyes still puffy with sleep, and kisses her daughter lightly on the lips.
“Buenos días, Mami,” says Lily, placing the letter back in her pocket.
“Buenos días, cariño. And what were you reading just now with such concentration?”
“I found a letter yesterday in a box of old school things. It revived so many memories.”
“Good memories, I hope?” says Consuelo. “Are you glad I didn’t throw all your things away in spite of all your criticisms
about hanging on to old junk?”
“Yes, you were right, I’m glad you kept them. The letter is from Irene. Do you remember her? Te acuerdas, Mami?”
“Ay,” sighs Consuelo, “who can forget her?”
“I wish I knew what happened to her.”
Not knowing what happened to Irene bothers Lily in the manner of a faint itchiness. Without that knowledge, she feels incomplete,
unresolved, part of a never-ending story. But her mother changes the subject abruptly, “Have you heard from your madrina?
She promised to be here in time for the delivery of your baby.”
“I’m sure she’ll be here; she knows we’re depending on her. Anyway, Mami, about Irene—”
Carlos Alberto comes into the kitchen, sniffing the air hungrily. He is already dressed in brown corduroys and a black pullover,
his Sunday uniform. Carlos Alberto kisses his mother-in-law good morning and moves behind Lily’s chair. He bends and plants
a wet, sucking kiss on her neck in the special place that gives her goose bumps. He smells of lime soap and shaving cream.
She turns her head to catch his lips with hers, but the kiss is interrupted by the doorbell.
Carlos Alberto opens the door. It is Marta’s daughter, Luz. Returning her quick embrace, Carlos Alberto says, “You’re just
in time for our special Sunday breakfast.” He ushers Luz toward the kitchen, where Lily and Consuelo are seated at the table.
“¡Ay, qué bueno, Luz!” says Lily, pulling herself to a standing position, opening her arms in welcome. “What a lovely surprise!”
“So, what are you cooking?” asks Luz, smiling, as she walks toward her embrace.
“We are cooking up life!” Lily says, patting her belly, just before she slips on a patch of spilled milk and crashes to the
floor.
The new girl stood out like a neon sign in her white frilly dress with pink ribbons on the first day of school. Cinnamon skin,
and green eyes far older than her ten years. Her long dark brown hair was primly pinned back from her face on both sides of
her middle parting with delicate gold-plated barrettes, making her look quaint and old-fashioned, a girl from another era.
But what struck Lily was the contrast between the daintiness of the girl’s attire and the tremendous size of her feet, which
were encased in lacy ankle-socks and white patent leather shoes. A size thirty-seven, por lo menos, Lily thought.
“This is Irene Dos Santos,” said Señora Gutierrez, the principal of Academia Roosevelt, the bilingual American school built
with American oil money, which shone like a sparkling jewel in the sun above the filthy, poverty-stricken barrio of Las Ruinas.
Only the medium to very rich could afford to send their children to the prestigious Academia Roosevelt, and even then there
was a long waiting list. To Lily’s good fortune, her godfather was Alejandro Aguilar, media magnate and jefe of the regional
television station TVista. Alejandro Aguilar was also on the board of directors at Academia Roosevelt, and so Lily’s enrollment
had been a foregone conclusion.
Señora Gutierrez was holding the new girl’s hand. “I want you to take Irene to the fifth-grade homeroom and help her get oriented,”
she said to Lily, and to the new girl, “Irene, this is Lily Martinez.”
Irene cast her eyes to the ground, where one self-conscious foot tried to hide the other one.
“Come on,” Lily said, taking her hand and feeling superior in her skintight jeans and platform shoes, “let’s go.”
That was the first and last day Lily saw Irene in a dress.
“You looked so saintly,” Lily said to her later, when they’d become best friends and told each other everything.
“Coño, its true,” she said, “Mercedes made me wear that dress. You must have thought I was an imbecile.” Irene always referred
to her mother by her name, with an intrepid modernity that took Lily’s breath away. Since no one, apart from the maid, was
ever at the Dos Santos residence between three p.m. and eight p.m. or even later, Irene usually came back with Lily, and Lily’s
father would drop her home after dinner.
On most weekdays after school, Consuelo would make the girls sandwiches stuffed with the previous night’s milanesas, before
they rushed off to roller-skate at the Plaza Altamira.
“Cuídense bien, muchachas,” Consuelo would say, kissing them both before they left, “and be back by seven.”
“Your mother is such a great cook, and really sweet, tan linda,” said Irene.
“I know,” said Lily, “I don’t know what I would do without my mother. Probably starve.” And then they giggled in that hormone-induced
borderline psychotic schoolgirl way.
Life at the Dos Santos residence and that at the Martinez residence was as different as night and day. At Lily’s house people
sat round the table together and talked about food, art, and politics, whereas at Irene’s nobody sat at the table and the
focus was on diets, fashion, cute boys, and the right combination of Johnson’s Baby Oil and iodine to make the most effective
suntan lotion.
Irene lived in a luxurious penthouse apartment with expansive terraces in the upmarket Urbanización of Prados, along with
her older sister, Zulema, who was studying interior design, and her parents, Mercedes and Benigno.
In a large enclosure in the midst of the terrace garden, Irene kept a baby water boa as a pet. Sometimes, while she did her
homework, she liked to hang it around her neck. Lily thought this wildly and wonderfully adventurous, though she herself was
never brave enough to try it. The Dos Santos family had moved to Tamanaco from the capital when Irene’s father, an engineering
expert on earthquakes and landslides, was transferred by the Ministerio de Obras Públicas.
Mercedes and Benigno. A couple of such extraordinary incongruity that Lily was taken by surprise each time she saw them together,
which was rarely. Benigno Dos Santos was a large man, bearded to disguise a weak chin, a polished passive-aggressive personality
of few words who spent his time after office hours in his study with a view of the mountains, sipping vodka martinis and listening
to Italian opera on the stereo. Which always seemed strange and disappointing to Lily, given that he was half Brazilian; Lily
had expected Carnival in Rio. The voluptuous Mercedes, a mestiza of Chilean, African, and Guajiro descent, spent five days
a week in the coastal town of Puerto, where she had a successful gunrunning business, a beach house, and a string of young,
adoring lovers. Mercedes Dos Santos hated Pavarotti. Billy Ocean was more her speed.
“Pero, Benigno, why does your music have to be at TODO VOLUMEN?” she would yell when she came home on the weekend.
“Perdón, mi amor,” he would say, cranking up the volume even louder.
Mercedes slept separately from her husband, in a room off the kitchen that was technically the servant’s quarters but was
actually the brightest and best-ventilated room in the apartment. No one was allowed to use the kitchen when Mercedes was
home. The noise and smells bothered her, she said. This was probably why the Dos Santos family never sat down to dinner together.
In fact, there was rarely any normal food in the house. At the Dos Santos residence everyone drank strong black coffee and
dined at odd hours on expensive snacks—anchovies on toast, caviar on cream crackers, grapes and cheese, and their all-time
favorite, sandwiches stuffed with Diablitos. That is, whenever Mercedes had remembered to stock the kitchen at all, which
was about fifty percent of the time. The other fifty percent of the time, the refrigerator contained only beer.
In all likelihood, it was pure hunger that prompted Irene and Lily to fry bacon and eggs, purchased with their pocket money
from the kiosk down the road, on the flat of an electric clothing iron in the bathroom. Somehow, these messy concoctions always
ended up tasting more delicious to Lily than even her mother’s cooking. Stomachs appeased, they would invade Zulema’s closet
and try on all her clothes, taking whatever they wanted for school the following day.
Mercedes Dos Santos, a devotee of the goddess Maria Lionza, believed in commemorating a girl’s passage into womanhood with
the onset of menses using rituals entirely of her own invention.
“Okay, muchachas,” said Mercedes on the day Irene got her period (Lily was ahead of her friend by a month), “today, we are
celebrating your womanhood. Ya son todas unas mujercitas. I’m going to teach you how to walk.”
“Ay, don’t be ridiculous, Mami,” said Irene. “We know how to walk.”
“You walk like boys,” said Mercedes. “That is not the way for a woman to walk. A woman must walk like this.” She strolled
across the terrace, moving her hips in an exaggerated figure eight. “Vamos, muchachas, now you try it. Muevan las caderas.”
They spent the afternoon swinging their hips around on the terrace until Irene said she felt like throwing up. Then Mercedes,
in a rare display of maternity, put her to bed with a hot water bottle.
In the evening, Lily wandered into her mother’s kitchen, swaying her hips in a figure eight and feeling very grown up—toda
una mujer.
“What is wrong with you?” asked Consuelo, raising her eyebrows, and exchanging an amused glance with Marta.
“Nothing,” said Lily, and went back to her room to practice the woman-walk.
When they were thirteen, Lily and Irene auditioned for the Roosevelt school play, since Irene thought she might want to be
an actress when she grew up. That year it was The Wizard of Oz. They appeared together for two auditions—one to assess their spoken English-language skills, the other to determine their
musical talent. Both girls were selected: Irene as Dorothy, and Lily as the Good Witch. Exuberantly, they embarked on a shopping
expedition for red shoes in Irene’s size, but they were unsuccessful in their quest.
“Let’s look in my mother’s closet,” Lily suggested. Together, they foraged in Consuelo’s closet until they found what they
were looking for: a pair of old-fashioned but well-preserved red satin pumps lying inside a box that also contained some letters
tied with blue ribbon. Irene wanted to read the letters, but Lily said her mother wouldn’t like it. “Try the shoes on.” They
were a tight fit, but Irene managed to squeeze into them. Consuelo had gone to the grocery store, and they had to get back
to the theatre for the dress rehearsal, so Lily said, “Just take them. She won’t mind if we just borrow them; she never wears
them. I’ll tell her about it later.”
The rehearsal went well, though Lily forgot one of her lines, and the director commented favorably on the red shoes. “Perfect,”
she said. “When the light shines on them, they look like rubies.” Afterward, the girls took a taxi to Irene’s, where they
sat on the floor in the bathroom smoking stolen Astors from the silver cigarette case in Benigno’s study.
“I’m bored,” said Irene, after they had finished their cigarettes.
“Me too,” said Lily, mirroring, as always, Irene’s mood. “What shall we do?”
“Have you ever studied yourself aquí?” asked Irene, pointing to her vagina.
“Asco. Don’t be disgusting,” Lily said.
“No, I mean it,” said Irene. “I do it all the time. You should try it. We can do it together, right now.” Nothing embarrassed
Irene.
“Forget it,” said Lily.
Though Irene could usually persuade Lily to follow her lead, Lily had more conventional ideas of what was acceptable and what
was not, and sometimes Irene went too far. Like the time they both had their periods during the same week. Irene had tried
to convince her that if they mixed their menstrual blood together and buried it in the garden, they would be bound as sisters
and their children would be hermanos.
Lily can’t pinpoint when it all turned around—when they had exchanged roles and she, Lily, mutated fully from leader into
disciple. Perhaps this gradual, imperceptible shift in the balance of power originated with Irene’s discovery that she could
fit perfectly into her sister Zulema’s designer jeans, which were much more expensive and cooler than theirs. Irene wasn’t
selfish about her discovery, though, and readily lent Lily anything she coveted from Zulema’s brimming walk-in closet. And
Zulema didn’t seem to mind, as long as they didn’t choose anything she wanted to use on one of her dates the same night. Irene
and Lily were the same size. Except for their feet. Only Lily could fit into Zulema’s tiny shoes. Still, that didn’t give
her any advantage in the power equation. Irene had clearly become the controller in their society of two.
It was Irene who taught Lily how to French-kiss. They practiced on each other for three weeks before they were ready to try
it with boys. And Irene tried it first. It was also from Irene that Lily inherited Elvis Crespo, a thirteen--year-old boy
from the Prados neighborhood with jet-black hair and roguish grey eyes, who loved girls at an age when most boys still hated
them.
“He’s too young,” said Irene. “I like them to be older than me. But he’s a fantastic kisser.”
Though the general consensus would be otherwise, it wasn’t really Irene’s fault that their Spanish teacher from the Academia
Roosevelt caught Elvis and Lily with their tongues swirling around each other’s mouths.
Meeting at the elevator in the lobby of Irene’s apartment building one day after school, Elvis and Lily had pressed the penthouse
button and agreed to kiss all the way up to the fifteenth floor. They were therefore unprepared when the elevator stopped,
impromptu, on the fifth floor and the door slid open to reveal Señora Ramirez, who had been visiting her married daughter
in the same building. Out of the corner of her eye, her mouth still locked on Elvis’s, Lily saw Señora Ramirez raise her manicured
hand to her own mouth, her eyes bulging behind tortoise-shell spectacles. “Ay, Dios mío,” she exclaimed, just as Elvis, without
taking his lips from Lily’s, or removing his left hand from her bottom, reached to the side with his right hand and slammed
the Close Door button with the heel of his hand.
“Mierda. That was my Spanish literature teacher,” Lily said, laughing into his mouth. “Coño, Elvis, did you see her face?
What if she’s having a heart attack at this very moment!”
“Shut up,” said Elvis, grabbing her hips with both hands. “We still have eleven floors to kiss.”
Bursting with righteous indignation and concern for Lily’s welfare, Señora Ramirez called the house the very same afternoon.
It was Luz, Marta’s daughter of the same age as Lily, who took the call. Luz had always been a tattletale.
When Lily got home and saw her mother’s face, she knew she was grounded before she even crossed the threshold.
Irene emotionally rushed to Lily’s defense when Lily phoned to whisper the news while Consuelo was in the shower.
“That bitch!” Irene yelled. “She’s nothing but an old BOLSA FRUSTRADA. She probably hasn’t done it in FIFTY YEARS. Listen,
Lily, do you want me to come over and tell your mother it’s a lie? I’ll do it, if you want me to. I’ll say I was in the elevator
with you and Elvis, and that Ramirez is just one BIG FAT LIAR.”
There were times when even Lily winced at the ferocity of Irene’s language, when she was shocked by Irene’s capacity for deception.
But she knew the point was that Irene wanted to save her if Lily would let her.
“No,” said Lily, “thanks, but I never lie to my mother.”
“It won’t be your lie,” said Irene, who, Lily had observed, lied to Mercedes almost every time they had a conversation, “it’ll
be mine.” And, for a moment, Lily was tempted, knowing that when her father learned of her French-kissing adventure—as he
was bound to, since her mother told her father everything—she’d be grounded until she was an old maid. But Lily also knew
that if she let Irene do this for her, she would never feel right again with her mother, and her mother would know. Consuelo
always knew what Lily was feeling, sometimes even before Lily did herself.
“No,” she said. “I’d rather get it over with.”
“Okay,” said Irene, “but call me back first thing in the morning and let me know what happened.”
One thing about Irene, she always had to know everything. And Lily always had to tell her.
“Okay,” she agreed. But over the weekend her mother and Marta watched her as if they had eyes at the back of their heads,
and Lily couldn’t elude their scrutiny long enough to make the call.
By Monday morning, Lily was enrolled in the school attended by Marta’s daughter, Luz. It was a convent boarding school in
Valencia, two hours’ drive from Tamanaco. Lily could still be in the Roosevelt school play, since it was only one night, and
her parents didn’t want to ruin it for the Academia Roosevelt, but that was it. She was no longer allowed to visit Irene,
or to invite Irene over.
The next time Lily had the opportunity to speak with Irene was in the dressing room of the Carreño Theatre on the night of
their first performance of The Wizard of Oz.
“They’re sending me to a convent boarding school in Valencia where Luz goes,” said Lily morosely, slipping into her white-witch
dress.
“¡No puede ser!” Irene exclaimed.
“I’m not allowed to talk to you after the play is over.”
“Ay, you poor thing. But don’t worry, we can find a way, we can write letters.”
At that Lily brightened slightly. “Don’t forget to return my mother’s shoes, or I’ll be in even worse trouble.”
Though not ordinarily one to place much stock in possessions, when Lily confessed that she’d lent the shoes to Irene for the
play, Consuelo had been upset.
“I met your father in those shoes,” she sighed.
The play received a standing ovation from an audience comprised predominantly of parents, teachers, and American consulate
or oil company personnel. After the performance, as they were leaving the dressing room, Lily recalled her promise to her
mother. But Irene said the red shoes must have accidentally gone back to the school with the costumes and that she would retrieve
them the next day. Several days passed and, in Lily’s presence, Consuelo phoned to congratulate Irene on her performance as
Dorothy and to ask when she could r. . .
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