The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos by Margaret Mascarenhas Read Free Book Online

can answer, there is a shriek from the study, where Marta is listening to the radio. Luz, Consuelo, and
     Carlos Alberto come running from different parts of the house, thinking something has happened to Lily. But Lily points to
     Marta who now emerges from the study pale as chalk, wringing her hands.
    “You’ll never imagine what has happened!” Marta pauses dramatically while all regard her expectantly.
    “What in God’s name is the matter, Mamá?” says Luz.
    “The statue of Maria Lionza in the capital—this morning it cracked in two! All the radio channels are carrying the story.”

Like all plants, passiflora grown in a pot is likely to have the nutrients washed out of its soil during watering. If these
     nutrients are not replaced, the plant will die.

Efraín
    O n Monday morning, more than two hundred kilometers from the city of Tamanaco, Efraín rubs the sleep from his eyes as a beam
     of light from a hole in the palm-leaf roof of the hut falls upon his face. He tries to remember what he has been dreaming,
     but his awakening is too abrupt; a fragment, the image of a vast expanse of blue-green ocean, is all he can retrieve. He is
     disappointed, for he is fond of recounting his dreams in their entirety to his grandmother, La Vieja Juanita.
    Sitting up, he swings his legs down from his hammock, his toes barely touching the dirt floor. He looks across the cylindrical
     one-room thatch hut and he is greeted by the familiar sight of his grandmother preparing breakfast on the wood-burning stove.
     Though there is no one in the doorway, he imagines he sees his mother in the open frame, brushing her long hair. Efraín forgives
     the sun for stealing his dream, as it is replaced by the vision of his mother’s long mane spilling into the sunshine.
    “Buenos días, mi cielo,” says his mother-memory, turning at that moment, “and what did you dream last night?”
    “I can’t remember,” says Efraín mournfully to his mother in his head.
    “Don’t worry, perhaps it will come back to you later. And, if not, there will always be other sueños.” Her eyes are filled
     with love and tenderness, no longer the deep tristeza that had consumed her after they had fled Santa Marta.
    It is almost two years to the day that, in the dead of night and with soldiers hot on their trail, they had made their way
     from the coast to Castilletes. In the terrifying pandemonium of flight, Efraín and his mother had been separated from Manolo
     at a river crossing on the border. They had traveled to a Guajiro refugee settlement near Escondido, where they had rested,
     but only for a few hours. The next day they left for San Felipe, where La Vieja Juanita waited to accompany them to their
     final destination—an illegal Quechuan hut in the Yurubí forest. But Manolo had never rejoined them, and after a year and a
     half of waiting, his mother, Coromoto, had gone to look for him. At least that is what Efraín believes. One day she was there,
     brushing her hair in the doorway, the next day she was not.
    Neither Efraín nor La Vieja Juanita speak of those who are missing, for fear of jinxing their destinies. Yet, nameless, they
     are always present.
    Efraín checks the position of the sun in the sky and concludes that he has overslept by more than an hour. On most days La
     Vieja Juanita wakes up first, Efraín last. Earlier, it had been his mother who woke up last because she worked nights as a
     bartender at a truck stop thirty-five kilometers away. Since there were no longer any buses plying her route by the time she
     got off work, a waiter called Gustavo would give her a lift on his motorcycle to the hole in the fence on the road past San
     Felipe that borders the Yurubí. Then, exchanging her sandals for the sneakers she carried in a fraying tote, she would walk
     for half an hour. By the time she got back to the hut, it would be nearly two in the morning. Even in his sleep, Efraín could
     feel her lips on his when she kissed him