Maya's Notebook: A Novel (44 page)

The prisoners used to communicate by tapping and scratching the wooden planks between them, which is how Manuel found out that Vidal had suffered a heart attack on the “grill” while being tortured with electric shocks. His remains, like those of so many others, were thrown into the sea. Getting in touch with Nidia became an obsession for Manuel. The least he could do for that woman he had so loved was to prevent her from wasting her life looking for someone who was already gone and warn her to escape before they disappeared her too.

It was impossible to get messages out of Villa Grimaldi, but by a miraculous coincidence, around that time the Red Cross made its first visit; the denunciations of human rights violations had gone all around the world by then. They had to hide the inmates, clean up the blood, and dismantle the electrified racks for the inspection. Manuel and others who were in better shape were cured as much as they could be, bathed, given clean clothes, and presented before the observ
ers with the warning that their families would suffer the consequences of the slightest indiscretion. Manuel made use of the only seconds he had to whisper a couple of phrases to one of the members of the Red Cross delegation to get a message to Nidia Vidal.

Nidia received the message, knew who it came from, and had no doubt that it was true. She got in contact with a Belgian priest she knew who worked at the Vicarage, and he arranged to get her and her son into the Honduran embassy, where they spent two months waiting for safe-conduct passes to leave the country. The diplomatic residence was overrun with dozens of men, women, and children, who slept on the floor and kept the three bathrooms permanently occupied, while the ambassador tried to arrange for people to go to other countries—his own was full and couldn’t receive any more refugees. The task seemed endless; ever more people persecuted by the regime kept jumping over the wall from the street and landing in his patio. He managed to get Canada to agree to take twenty, among them Nidia and Andrés Vidal, rented a bus, put diplomatic plates and two Honduran flags on it, and, accompanied by his military attaché, personally drove the twenty exiles to the airport and then escorted them to the door of the plane.

Nidia was determined to give her son a normal life in Canada, free from fear, hatred, and bitterness. She told the truth when she explained that his father had died of a heart attack, but she omitted the horrendous details; the boy was too young to take them in. The years went by without finding an opportunity—or a good reason—to elaborate on the circumstances of that death, but now that I had dug up the past, my Nini will have to do so. She’ll also have to tell
him that Felipe Vidal, the man in the photograph he’s always had on his bedside table, was not his father.

A package arrived for us
at the Tavern of the Dead; we knew who had sent it before opening it, because it came from Seattle. It contained the letter I was so desperate for, long and informative, but without the passionate language that would have put my doubts about Daniel to rest. He also sent photos he took in Berkeley: my Nini, looking better than last year, because she’d dyed her hair to cover up the gray, on the arm of my dad in his pilot’s uniform, as handsome as ever; Mike O’Kelly standing up, leaning on his walker, with the torso and arms of a wrestler and legs atrophied by paralysis; the magic house in the shadow of the pines on a resplendent fall day; San Francisco Bay spattered with white sails. There was only one shot of Freddy, possibly taken unbeknownst to the kid, who wasn’t in any of the others, as if he’d avoided the camera on purpose. That sad, scrawny, hungry-eyed being looked just like the zombies in Brandon Leeman’s building. Controlling his addiction might take my poor Freddy years, if he ever manages to; in the meantime, he’s suffering.

The package also included a book about organized crime, which I’ll read, and a long magazine article about the most wanted counterfeiter in the world, a forty-four-year-old American called Adam Trevor, arrested in August at the Miami airport en route from Brazil, trying to enter the United States with a fake passport. He’d fled the country with his
wife and son in mid-2008, outwitting the FBI and Interpol. Incarcerated in a federal prison, facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars, he worked out that he might as well cooperate with the authorities in exchange for a shorter sentence. The information provided by Trevor could lead to the dismantling of an international network capable of influencing the financial markets from Wall Street to Beijing, said the article.

Trevor began his counterfeit industry in the southern state of Georgia and then moved to Texas, near the permeable border with Mexico. He set up his money-manufacturing machine in the basement of an old shoe factory, closed down several years earlier, in an industrial zone that was very active during the day and dead at night, when he could transport the material without attracting attention. The bills he made were as perfect as Officer Arana had told me in Las Vegas; he acquired offcuts of the same starch-free paper used for authentic money, and he’d developed an ingenious technique to incorporate the metallic security band. Not even the most expert teller could detect them. Furthermore, one part of his production was fifty-dollar bills, which were rarely subject to the same scrutiny as higher-denomination bills. The magazine repeated what Arana had said: that the counterfeit dollars were always sent outside the United States, where organized criminals mixed them with legitimate money before putting them into circulation.

In his confession, Adam Trevor admitted the error of having given his brother in Las Vegas half a million dollars to look after; this brother had been murdered before telling him where he’d hidden the loot. Nothing would have been
discovered if his brother, a small-time drug dealer who went by the name Brandon Leeman, hadn’t started spending it. In the ocean of cash in the Nevada casinos the bills would have passed for years without being detected, but Brandon Leeman also used them to bribe police officers, and with that clue the FBI began to get to the bottom of things.

The Las Vegas Police Department had kept the bribery scandal more or less under wraps, but something leaked to the press. There was a superficial cleanup to calm the public’s indignation, and several corrupt officers were fired. The journalist finalized his report with a paragraph that scared me:

My grandmother and Snow White are convinced that there is no longer any such thing as privacy. People can find out the most intimate details of other people’s lives, and no one can hide; all you have to do is use a credit card, go to the dentist, get on a train, or make a phone call to leave an indelible trail. Nevertheless, every year hundreds of thousands of children and adults disappear for different reasons: kidnapping, suicide, murder, mental illness, accidents; many are running away from domestic violence or
the law; some join a sect or travel under a false identity; not to mention the victims of sex trafficking or those exploited and forced to work as slaves. According to Manuel, there are actually twenty-seven million slaves right now, in spite of slavery having been abolished all over the world.

Last year, I was one of those disappeared persons, and my Nini was unable to find me, although I didn’t make any special effort to hide. She and Mike believe that the U.S. government, using terrorism as a pretext, spies on all our movements and intentions, but I doubt they can access billions of e-mail messages and telephone conversations; the air is saturated with words in hundreds of languages, it would be impossible to put the hullabaloo of that Tower of Babel in order and decipher it all. “They can, Maya. They have the technology and millions of insignificant bureaucrats whose only job is to spy on us. If the innocents need to watch out, there’s even more reason for you to. Mind what I’m saying, I mean it,” my Nini insisted as we said good-bye in San Francisco in January. It turns out that one of those innocents, her friend Norman, that hateful genius who helped her hack into my e-mail and cell phone in Berkeley, started sending jokes about bin Laden around the Internet, and within a week two FBI agents showed up at his house to interrogate him. Obama has not dismantled the domestic espionage mechanisms set up by his predecessor, so no precaution is too great, my grandmother maintains, and Manuel Arias agrees.

Manuel and my Nini have a code for talking about me: the book he’s writing is me. For example, to give my grandma an idea of how I’ve adapted to Chiloé, Manuel tells her that the book is progressing better than expected,
hasn’t yet come up against any serious problem, and the Chilotes, normally so insular, are cooperating. My Nini can write to him with somewhat more freedom, as long as she doesn’t do so from her own computer. That’s how I found out that my dad’s divorce had been finalized, that he was still flying to the Middle East, and that Susan came back from Iraq and was assigned to the security detail at the White House. My grandma keeps in touch with her; they became friends in spite of the run-ins they had at first, when she butted in on her daughter-in-law’s privacy too much. I’ll write to Susan too as soon as my situation gets back to normal. I don’t want to lose her. She was very good to me.

My Nini is still working at the library, volunteering at the hospice, and helping O’Kelly. The Club of Criminals was in the news all over the States because two of its members discovered the identity of an Oklahoma serial killer. Through logical deduction they achieved what the police, with their modern investigation techniques, had not managed to. This notoriety has provoked an avalanche of applications to join the club. My Nini thinks they should charge the new members a monthly fee, but O’Kelly says they’d lose the idealism.

“Those printing plates of Adam Trevor’s could cause a cataclysm in the international economic system. They’re the equivalent of a nuclear bomb,” I told Manuel.

“They’re at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.”

“We can’t be sure of that, but even if they were, the FBI doesn’t know it. What are we going to do, Manuel? If they were looking for me before on account of a bundle of counterfeit bills, now that they know about the plates, they have
even more reason to look. They’re really going to mobilize to find me now.”

Friday, November 27, 2009. Third
woeful day. I haven’t gone to work since Wednesday, haven’t left the house, taken off my pajamas, or eaten. I’m not speaking to Manuel or Blanca. I’m inconsolable, on a roller coaster of emotions. A moment before picking up the phone on that damned Wednesday I was flying way up high, in the light of happiness, then came the fall, like a bird shot through the heart. I’ve spent three days beside myself, screaming and wailing about my love and my mistakes and my aching heart, but today, finally, I said: Enough! I took such a long shower I emptied the water tank, washed away my sorrows with soap, and sat in the sun on the terrace to wolf down the toast with tomato marmalade that Manuel made and which had the virtue of returning me to sanity, after my alarming attack of romantic dementia. I was able to tackle my situation with something approaching objectivity, though I knew the calming effect of the toast would be temporary. I have cried a lot and will carry on crying as much as necessary, self-pityingly, for my unrequited love, because I know what will happen if I try to be brave, as I did when my Popo died. Besides, nobody cares if I cry: Daniel doesn’t hear it, and the world carries on spinning, unmoved.

Daniel Goodrich informed me that “he values our friendship and wants to keep in touch,” that I’m an exceptional young woman, and blah-blah-blah; in other words, that he
doesn’t love me. He won’t be coming to Chiloé for Christmas—in fact he never commented on that suggestion, just as he never made any plans for us to meet up again. Our adventure in May was very romantic, and he’d always remember it, more and more hot air, but he has his life in Seattle. When I received this message at [email protected], I thought it was a misunderstanding, a confusion caused by the distance, and I phoned him—my first call, damn my grandmother’s security measures. We had a brief, very painful conversation, impossible to repeat without writhing in embarrassment and humiliation, me begging, him backing away.

“I’m an ugly, stupid alcoholic! No wonder Daniel doesn’t want anything to do with me,” I sobbed.

“Very good, Maya, flagellate yourself,” Manuel advised me, having sat down beside me with his coffee and more toast.

“Is this my life? Descend to the darkness in Las Vegas, survive, be saved by chance here in Chiloé, fall totally in love with Daniel, and then lose him. Die, revive, love, and die again. I’m a disaster, Manuel.”

“Look, Maya, let’s not exaggerate, this isn’t an opera. You made a mistake, but it’s not your fault—that young man should be more careful of your feelings. And he calls himself a psychiatrist! He’s a jerk.”

“Yeah, a very sexy jerk.”

We smiled, but I soon burst into tears again. He handed me a paper napkin to blow my nose and hugged me.

“I’m really sorry about your computer, Manuel,” I murmured, buried in his sweater.

“My book is safe, Maya. I didn’t lose anything.”

“I’m going to buy you another computer, I promise.”

“How do you think you’re going to do that?”

“I’ll ask the Millalobo for a loan.”

“Oh, no you won’t!” he warned me.

“Then I’ll have to start selling Doña Lucinda’s marijuana. There are still several plants in her garden.”

It’s not just the destroyed computer I’ll have to replace. I also attacked the bookshelves, the ship’s clock, the maps, plates, glasses, and anything else in reach of my fury, shrieking like a two-year-old brat, the most outrageous tantrum of my life. The cats flew out the window, and Fahkeen hid under the table, terrified. When Manuel came home, about nine o’clock that night, he found his house devastated by a typhoon and me on the floor, completely drunk. That’s the worst, what I’m most ashamed of.