In spite of Gustavo and the wondrous introduction to love, the center of Irene’s universe continued to be her father. She knew his virtues, as well as his many defects. She had surprised him in countless betrayals and lies; she had seen him act with cowardice, and watched him follow women with the eyes of a hound on the scent of a bitch. She had no illusions about him, but she loved him deeply. One evening Irene felt his presence in her room, where she sat reading, and knew before looking up that this was farewell. She saw him standing on the threshold, and had the impression that he was his own ghost, that he was not there, that he had vanished in a puff of smoke, as she had always feared he would.
“I’m going out for a while, sweetheart,” said Eusebio, kissing her forehead.
“Goodbye, Papa,” the girl replied, certain that he would never return.
And he never did. Four years had passed, but through some subtle compensatory mechanism Irene had not, like everyone else, given him up for dead. She knew he was alive, and that gave her a certain peace of mind; she could imagine he was happy in a new life. Nevertheless, the winds of violence that were currently shaking her world filled her with doubts. She feared for him.
* * *
Francisco and Irene had finished eating. Their figures were silhouetted against the walls, tall wavering shadows projected by the tremulous candlelight. They were speaking almost in whispers, in keeping with the intimacy of the moment. Irene was telling Francisco the sad story of the philanthropic butcher shop, and he was thinking that, after this, nothing about Irene’s family could ever surprise him.
“It all began when my father met the envoy from Arabia,” she said.
The Arab had been appointed by his government to buy sheep. He met Eusebio Beltrán at a reception in the Arabian Embassy, and because each was driven by the same unremitting obsession for beautiful women and lavish parties, they became friends on the spot. After the reception, Irene’s father invited his new friend to prolong the festivities at the house of a certain well-known lady, where they continued to celebrate with champagne and beautiful mercenaries until the evening ended in a noisy bacchanal that would have dispatched other, less hardy souls straight to hell. The next morning, the two men awoke with queasy stomachs and blurred memories, but after a shower and a thick, spicy clam chowder, they began to revive. Abstemious, like any good Muslim, the Arab was suffering real torment from his hangover, and for hours Irene’s father offered him companionship and consolation with natural remedies such as camphor rubdowns and cold cloths on the forehead. By dusk, they were brothers and had poured out their life secrets to each other. That was when the foreigner suggested to Eusebio that he take charge of the sheep operation, because there were tons of money in it for the man who knew how to take advantage of it.
“Well, I’ve never seen a ewe on the hoof, but if they’re anything like heifers or hens, I shouldn’t have any trouble,” said Beltrán, with a laugh.
So began the business arrangement that would lead to Beltrán’s financial ruin, even to his oblivion, as his wife had prophesied long before she had evidence to support her convictions. Beltrán traveled to the extreme south of the continent where such animals proliferate, and set about constructing a slaughterhouse and refrigeration plant, investing a large portion of his own fortune in the project. When everything was ready, a holy man from the heart of Araby was sent to supervise the ritual killings and thereby insure that everything would be carried out according to the strict laws of the Koran. Kneeling toward Mecca, the holy man was to say a prayer for every slaughtered sheep; further, he was to confirm that the animal was beheaded by a single stroke of the blade and bled in the hygienic manner prescribed by Mohammed. Once they were sanctified, cleaned, and frozen, the carcasses were to be air-expressed to their ultimate destiny. In the first weeks, the proceedings were carried out with appropriate rigor, but the Imam soon lost his initial enthusiasm. He had no incentive. No one around him understood the importance of his duties; no one spoke his language; no one had read the Holy Book. To the contrary, he was surrounded by foreign ruffians who laughed in his face as he chanted his Arabic prayers and constantly taunted him with obscene gestures. Debilitated by the cold southern climate, by nostalgia and culture shock, his spirit was quickly broken. Eusebio Beltrán, always a practical man, suggested that to avoid interruption in the operation, the Imam should record his prayers on a tape recorder. After that, the Imam’s decline was apparent to all. His malaise reached alarming proportions; he stopped coming to the slaughterhouse altogether; he capitulated to idleness, gambling, oversleeping, and the vice of liquor—everything his religion forbade—but no one is perfect, as Beltrán consoled him when he found the Arab lamenting his human frailty.
The sheep continued to leave the plant, stiff and cold as lunar rocks, without anyone’s being the wiser; no one knew that their impurities had not been bled through the jugular, or that the tape recorder was reeling off boleros and rancheras instead of the obligatory Muslim prayers. All this would have been of little consequence had his Arab government not sent—without previous warning—a second Imam commissioned to monitor his South American associate. On the same day the new arrival visited the plant and saw how the precepts of the Koran were being subverted, the sheep business was shut down and Eusebio found himself saddled with both a vociferously repentant Muslim mystic, who was nonetheless reluctant to return home immediately, and a mountain of worthless frozen sheep, which Eusebio could not sell because their flesh was not appreciated in his country. Then it was that the magnanimous aspect of Eusebio’s personality came into play. He betook himself and his merchandise to the capital, where he drove his truck through the neighborhoods of the poor, giving away meat to the most needy. He was sure that his initiative would be imitated by other wholesalers, whose generosity would be challenged and who would also give a portion of their products to the destitute. He dreamed of a fraternal chain formed by bakers, greengrocers, fishmongers, and storekeepers, by impresarios of pasta, rice, and caramels, by importers of tea, coffee, and chocolate, by processors of preserves, liquors, and cheeses; in a word, Beltrán dreamed that every industrialist and businessman in the land would contribute a part of his earnings to alleviate the evident hunger of the downtrodden, the widows, the orphans, the unemployed—all the afflicted. But none of this came to pass. The butchers termed his grand gesture the work of a clown, and everyone else simply ignored him. But because he enthusiastically continued his crusade in the face of all odds, he was threatened with death for trying to ruin the business and prestige of honorable merchants. When they called him a Communist, it was almost more than Beatriz Alcántara’s nerves could stand. She had summoned up sufficient strength to tolerate her husband’s extravagances, but she could not bear the brunt of that dangerous accusation. Eusebio Beltrán, personally, continued to hand out legs and shoulders of lamb from a truck plastered with huge posters and equipped with a loudspeaker announcing his program. Soon he was being watched by the police and stalked by hired killers; his competitors had decided to put an end to the whole business. He was harassed with jeers and death threats, and his wife received anonymous letters of unimaginable obscenity. When his truck with its PHILANTHROPIC BUTCHER SHOP sign appeared on television, and the lines of the poor swelled to a throng beyond the control of the guardians of law and order, Beatriz Alcántara lost her last shred of patience, and unleashed all the bile stored up in a lifetime of bitterness. That was when Eusebio had left, never to return.
“I’ve never worried about my father, Francisco. I was sure that he’d left to get away from Mother and from his creditors, from the damned sheep that had begun to rot when he couldn’t get rid of them,” said Irene. “But now I’m not sure about anything.”
Her nights were filled with fear: in her dreams she saw the ashen bodies in the Morgue; Javier Leal dangling like some grotesque fruit from a tree in the children’s park; the endless lines of women inquiring about their desaparecidos; Evangelina
Ranquileo, barefoot and in her nightgown, calling from the shadows. Among so many alien ghosts she also saw her father, sinking into a quagmire of hatred.
“Maybe he didn’t run away. Maybe they killed him. Maybe he’s a prisoner—that’s what my mother believes,” Irene sighed.
“There’s no reason why a man of his position would have become a victim of the police.”
“Reason has nothing to do with my nightmares, or with the world we’re living in.”
Just then Rosa entered, announcing that a woman was asking for Irene. Her name was Digna Ranquileo.
* * *
Digna carried the weight of the ages on her shoulders, and her eyes had grown pale from so much looking down the road, and waiting. She asked Francisco and Irene to forgive her for coming at such a late hour, and added that it was because she was desperate, she hadn’t known whom to turn to. She couldn’t leave her children by themselves, so it was impossible for her to travel during the day; but Mamita Encarnación had offered to stay with them tonight. Because of the midwife’s kindness, Digna said, she’d been able to catch a bus to the capital. Irene told her she was glad she had come; she led her into the living room, and offered her something to eat, but Digna would accept only a cup of tea. She sat uneasily on the edge of her chair, eyes downcast, hugging her worn black pocketbook to her body. A shawl covered her shoulders and her hose were rolled to her knees, not quite meeting the hem of her narrow wool skirt. Her effort to conquer her shyness was painfully evident.
“Have you learned anything about Evangelina, señora?”
Digna shook her head and, after a long pause, she told them that she’d given up hope for Evangelina; everyone knew that searching for someone who’d disappeared was a task that had no end. She hadn’t come about Evangelina, but about Pradelio, her oldest son. Her voice faded to an almost inaudible whisper.
“He’s hiding,” she confessed.
Pradelio had fled from Headquarters. Because the country was in a state of war, he could pay with his life for this act. Once, all you had to do to resign from the police was to go through some red tape, but now they were part of the armed forces and had the same responsibilities as soldiers on the field of battle. Pradelio Ranquileo was in a dangerous position; if they caught up with him, he would be in bad trouble; his mother understood how bad after she’d seen him hunted like an animal. Hipólito, her husband, was the one who made the important decisions in the family, but he’d hooked up with the first circus that set up its tent nearby. All he had to do was hear the boom of the bass drum announcing the spectacle, and he would pull out the suitcase containing the trappings of his trade, join in the hullabaloo, and be off on circuits through villages and towns, and she could never catch up with him. And Digna had not dared tell her problem to anyone else. For several days, she mulled it over, not knowing what to do, until she remembered her conversation with Irene Beltrán and the journalist’s interest in the misfortune that had befallen the Ranquileo home. She thought of Irene as the only person she could turn to.
“I have to get Pradelio out of the country,” she whispered.
“Why did he desert?”
Digna didn’t know. One night he had come to the house, pale and drawn; his uniform was hanging in shreds, and he had the look of a crazy man. He would not tell her anything. He said he was starving, and he wolfed down anything he could find in the kitchen: raw onions, huge chunks of bread, dried meat, fruit, tea. Once he had had his fill, he folded his arms on the table, rested his head on his arms, and slept like a baby. Digna watched him while he slept. For more than an hour she sat by his side, trying to imagine the long journey that had brought him to this point of exhaustion and fear. When he woke up, he said he didn’t want to see his brothers and sisters, because they might forget and tell someone he’d been there. It was his plan to flee into the mountains where not even the buzzards could find him. The only purpose for his visit was to say goodbye to his mother, and to tell her they would never see him again, because he had a mission and he intended to carry it out, even if it cost him his life. Later, during the summer, he would cross the border through a pass. Digna Ranquileo asked no questions. She knew her son: he would not share his secret—not with her, not with anyone. She limited herself to reminding him that to cross those endless peaks without a map, even in good weather, was madness; many men had wandered through these mountains until they were overtaken by death. Then the snow fell and covered them, and they disappeared until the next summer when some traveler came across their remains. Digna suggested that he hide until they got tired of looking for him, or head south where the cordillera was not so high and it would be easier to cross.
“Let me be, Mother,” Pradelio interrupted. “First I must do what I have to do, and then I’ll get away the best I can.”
He had gone up into the mountains, led by his younger brother Jacinto, who knew the hills like no one else. High at the summit he had found a hiding place; for food, he ate lizards, rodents, roots, and what little his brother could bring him from time to time. Digna resigned herself to seeing him fulfill his destiny, but when Lieutenant Ramírez had come and searched the area house by house looking for him, threatening anyone who might be concealing him, and offering a reward for his capture, and when Sergeant Faustino Rivera, dressed in civilian clothes, silently turned up one night at her house to warn her in whispers that if she knew where the fugitive was hiding, to tell him that they were going to comb the hills until they found his hideout, his mother had decided not to wait any longer.
“Sergeant Rivera is like one of the family, that’s why he felt obliged to warn me,” Digna clarified.
For a countrywoman who had lived her entire life in the place where she was born, and who knew only the nearest towns, the idea that a son of hers would end up in another country was as inconceivable as his hiding at the bottom of the sea. She could not imagine the size of the world beyond the peaks outlined against the horizon, but she suspected that the world stretched to regions where they spoke in other tongues and where people of different races lived in unimaginable climes. In those regions it was easy to stray from the straight and narrow and be swallowed up by bad luck, but to go was better than dying. She had heard talk of people going into exile, a frequent topic of conversation in recent years, and she hoped that Irene could help Pradelio escape the same way. Irene tried to explain the insurmountable difficulties of the plan. Anything as audacious as trying to outwit armed police, leaping over an iron fence and safely seeking asylum in an embassy, was out of the question—and no diplomat would give protection to a deserter from the armed forces, particularly one fleeing for reasons unknown. The only solution was to try to find someone connected with the Cardinal.
“I can go to my brother José,” Francisco offered finally, very reluctant to jeopardize his organization by letting a military man in on the secret, even if he was a poor guardsman running from his own companions. “The Church has mysterious paths to safe havens, but they will insist on knowing the truth, señora. I will have to talk with your son.”
Digna explained that he was dug into a hole in the cordillera at a height where it was hard to breathe, and that to get there you had to climb a goat trail, picking your way through rocks and brush. It was not an easy climb; the road would be long and hard for someone not accustomed to mountain trails.
“I will try it,” said Francisco.
“If you go, I’m going, too,” Irene declared.
That night Digna timidly eased herself into the bed that Irene had improvised for her, and with dazed eyes spent the hours staring at the ceiling. The next day, after Irene had packed a bundle of provisions for Pradelio, the three of them set off for Los Riscos. Francisco suggested that such a huge backpack might hamper their climb, but when Irene looked at him mockingly, he did not insist.
On the way, Digna told them everything she knew about the ominous disappearance of Evangelina, starting from the ins
tant the lieutenant had dragged her to the jeep that unforgettable Sunday night. Her daughter’s cries had floated across the fields, informing every shadow, until a vicious slap had sealed her lips and stilled her kicking. At Headquarters, the corporal of the guard saw them arrive, but had not dared ask any questions about the prisoner, and was reduced to looking the other way. At the very last moment, after Lieutenant Ramírez had hit the girl so hard she could not stand, and was practically carrying her to his office, the sergeant felt so bad he worked up his courage and asked his superior to go easy on her because the girl was sick and she was the sister of a man in the squad. His superior cut him off short, however, and slammed the door, catching a piece of the girl’s white petticoat that fluttered there like a wounded dove. For a while he heard sobs; then, silence.
Sergeant Faustino Rivera had thought that night would never end. His heart was so heavy he could not go to bed. He passed some time talking with the corporal of the guard; he made a few rounds to be sure that everything was in order, and then went and sat beneath the eaves of the stables and smoked his strong black cigarettes; he felt the spring breeze carrying the distant perfume of the flowering hawthorns, and smelled the stronger scent of fresh horse manure. It was a still, transparent, starry night. Rivera had no clear idea of what he was waiting for, but he sat there until he could see the earliest signs of dawn, perceptible to those who are born close to nature and accustomed to rising early. At exactly three minutes after four—as he told Digna Ranquileo, and later repeated, defying any threats to seal his lips—he watched as Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez left the building carrying something in his arms. In spite of distance and darkness, Rivera had no doubt that it was Evangelina. Ramirez was stumbling slightly, but not from drunkenness, since he never drank on duty. The girl’s hair was almost brushing the ground, and as Ramírez staggered along the path to the parking lot, it actually dragged in the gravel. From where he sat, Sergeant Rivera could hear the officer’s ragged breathing, and guessed that it was not from the effort, because the slim body of the prisoner would weigh very little in the arms of a big, muscular man used to heavy exercise. He was puffing like a bellows because he was nervous. Rivera watched the officer lay the girl down on the cement platform used for unloading bales and provisions. The searchlight that circled all night in the tower to warn of possible attacks kept sweeping the scene, illuminating Evangelina’s childlike face. Her eyes were closed, but she may have been alive; the sergeant thought he heard her moaning. Lieutenant Ramírez walked to a white truck, climbed into the driver’s seat, turned on the motor, and slowly backed toward the platform where he had left the girl. He got out, picked her up, and loaded her into the rear of the vehicle just at the moment the light flashed past. Before Ramírez pulled up the canvas, Faustino Rivera had seen Evangelina, lying on her side, her face covered by her hair and her bare toes protruding through the fringe of a poncho. Then Ramírez had trotted back to the building, disappeared through a kitchen door, and a minute later returned carrying a pick and shovel, which he placed in the back of the truck beside the girl. He climbed back into the truck and drove to the exit gate. The guard on duty recognized his chief, saluted smartly, and opened the heavy gates. The vehicle drove off down the highway, heading north.