Tell Me Something True (21 page)

“Wait!” he calls beseechingly. “There’s something you should see before you go.”

He goes quickly to his desk and unlocks the bottom drawer, takes out folder after folder, until he finds the one folder he
only very rarely looks at now: a simple, military green file folder that is bound with string and fading at the edges. Juan
José smooths it out with his hands, even though there’s nothing to be smoothed.

“I kept the photos from that shoot,” he says, and there’s a quiet softness in his look now. Pride, Gabriella suddenly recognizes.
He is proud of the photos. He was proud of her mother.

He extends the folder toward her, and she hesitates, then reaches out for it.

The first photo is that of a young woman, her black hair slicked tightly back in a lacquered chignon, her mouth pulled back
in a smile, but it’s a smile that doesn’t reach the grimness of her eyes. She’s wearing tights underneath dark sweatpants,
and one hand is extended over her stomach, each finger wrapped in tight bandages. You can see the calluses on her hands.

The trapeze artist.

Gabriella goes through them all. The lion trainer. The juggler. The horseback rider. They’re beautiful pictures, but each
face is filled with quiet, resigned despair.

But her mother’s and Juan José’s aren’t.

His face is framed by the window of the car. He’s smoking as he drives and his widow’s peak accentuates the haughty nose,
the chiseled profile. Tendrils of smoke surround the angles of his face.

This is what he looked like when she fell in love with him, Gabriella thinks. So… Latin. So from here. So different from the
people that surrounded her in Los Angeles. The antithesis of her father.

At the very bottom is her mother’s picture. Whoever took it caught her unawares. She’s eating cotton candy, facing slightly
away from the camera, and from the lens’ vantage point, you can’t see what she’s looking at. She’s just—looking.

But she’s smiling, a wide, delicious smile that appreciates the cotton candy and delights in her surroundings and pops out
even in this vague, nearly twenty-year-old black-and-white photo.

“I will be happy, despite it all!” it seems to say.

Even now, Gabriella can’t help herself. She would have liked to know this woman. This woman whose style would have certainly
been cramped by a little girl.

Gabriella quietly hands the photographs back, and thinks that, after all, it’s not his fault.

“Thank you,” she says again, looking at him intently for a long moment. And this time she leaves.

*  *  *

The sun outside the building blinds her, and Gabriella senses, rather than sees, the hand striking past her face, halting
for the briefest of instances on her neck, tugging hard at her locket until it snaps from around her neck.

She instinctively takes off after him, weaving in and out of the crowded sidewalk, her long runner’s legs gaining on the kid—because
she sees now that he is just a kid, skinny and barefoot—screaming all the way. “Stop him, stop him, thief, thief, ladrón,
ladrón!”

Someone trips the boy, and before he can scramble up, Gabriella kicks him, hard on the back of his legs. She feels his flesh
and bones against the thud of her foot. She’s never kicked a real person before, not since she was a child, and even then,
never hard enough to cause harm. It feels good; she’s able to think in the middle of her muddled frenzy. It felt good, so
good, to be able to finally hurt someone who was hurting her.

“Give it back, give it back!” she screams with each kick, vaguely aware of the crowd gathering around her, egging her on.
It is hot, and the hotness of the air fills her with an almost dreamlike torpidity. As if from a distance, she sees herself,
awkward and menacing, kicking the boy methodically in slow motion, and around her, the growing crowd of people takes on a
red, amorphous shape that eggs her on, prods her to kick him harder, harder, harder.

“Eso, monita, go blondie, kill the punk, kick his ass, fucking rat.”

“Let’s settle this right now,” whispered one woman furiously, tugging at Gabriella’s sleeve. “No cops. Just beat the shit
out of him.”

The woman smells of soil and cooking food; the smell of poverty. It shakes Gabriella out of her daze.

“Take it, take it,” she hears the boy whimpering and realizes he’s been doing so for a while now, his cries swallowed by the
din. He tosses the locket angrily at her feet, bravado still remaining despite the beating and because, after all, she kicks
like an amateur. “It’s just a shit piece of tin anyway,” he mumbles under his breath, but she hears him.

“It was my mother’s,” she cries, snatching the little heart up and kicking him again, this time aiming hard for his stomach,
again setting off the crowd that had quieted down with curiosity. “My mother’s. My mother’s! How dare you!” Her voice is getting
shriller with each kick; she sounds, even to her ears, deranged.

The boy rolls up in a ball, covering his head.

“I’m sorry,” he shouts, and this time she hears him sobbing. “I’m sorry. Please, stop. Please, no more.”

Gabriella stops. She is dizzy with heat and her red halter top clings to her chest. She looks at the crowd; their faces are
angry and sweaty and indifferently amused. One more piece of scum to wipe out in a city full of scum. Tonight they might not
even mention it over dinner, because it will have been so run-of-the-mill.

The street is dirty, full of litter and God knows what from the sewers. She looks at the boy—a boy who probably has nothing,
no home, no parents. No mother, like her. No father. Her father would be so ashamed. She feels so ashamed of herself. The
crowd looks at her expectantly as she kneels there beside the boy.

“Hey,” she says, shaking his shoulder. He doesn’t look up. “You can’t have my locket,” she says.

She opens up her bag, takes out the money from her wallet—100,000 pesos. A little more than forty bucks. A small fortune for
someone like him.

“Take this,” she says, nudging his hand with the money. He uncovers his head slowly and looks at her uncomprehendingly. He
doesn’t say anything.

“Take it,” she says again, opening up his fist enough to push the wad of money inside. “It’s okay,” she adds, tired and impatient
now. “I’m not going to call the cops. I’m not going to do anything. Just take it and go.”

Gabriella stands up and looks at the now-silent crowd. Far away a siren wails, and she feels an impossible sadness.

“Leave him alone,” she says simply. “No pasó nada. Nothing’s happened.”

She waits for a moment, until the crowd begins to disperse, until the kid stands up, wobbly, and starts walking away, his
hand clutched tightly around the money. He stops, stoops down, places it inside his shoe, looks back at her once, then walks
off quickly, breaking into a run, never turning around.

She starts walking, too, even though Nini’s building is far and she should never, ever (that’s what Nini always said, never,
ever
) walk alone. She really should take a cab or call someone to come and get her. But she has just given away her money. And
there is no one she wants to see.

She goes the long way home, along the river, past downtown with the locket held tightly in her hand, afraid of letting go
to wipe the sweaty palm on her jeans. It had been a dry summer and the riverbed below looks as brown and wilted as the surrounding
grass, which up close reveals little piles of litter never visible from her usual vantage point inside her air-conditioned
car.

Someone calls out to her and she turns to face an old beggar with a hideous stump for a hand. She shakes her head no, no money,
and hears him curse her as she steps up her pace. “Malparida, whore,” he hisses, and for the first time that day, she is afraid.

He could touch her, she realizes. And hit her and rob her and kill her, and no one would know for days. Her body would be
thrown down the river, and it would reappear weeks later. That, she’d heard, was what was happening with the mafiosos that
were getting their due of late. Men like Angel’s father. Shot and dumped in a river that took the bodies to inhospitable regions.
They could be lost forever.

The factory owners that operated on the river’s edge, farther north, had voiced their protests.

“We refuse to continue fishing bodies out of the water,” a manager had said on the news. “That’s the police’s job. We won’t
do it anymore.”

Since then the bodies piled up at a fork in the river, snagged by the bend and the vegetation. Every Thursday, the army would
come and drag the corpses out, most of them unidentifiable John Does whose bodies were later sent to the morgue of the university
hospital, for the medical students to practice on.

If the victims were missed, few people ventured to say so. Being quiet wasn’t only a virtue; it was a survival skill.

What could I possibly have found pretty about this? she wonders, taking in, really taking in, the dirt and the trash and the
unrepentant chaos.

Juan José had said her mother had given him energy, made him see things he had never seen before.

And all that time Gabriella had been a continent away. Her cries soothed by someone else. Her food cooked by someone else.
Someone else’s voice reading Dr. Seuss to her at night.

While her mother made him see things he’d never seen before.

When she gets to the contemporary art museum, she stops and climbs up the steps to the outdoor fountain. She feels safe here,
surrounded by people that come in and out of the gift shop and a new, trendy café that serves fruit shakes and salads. She
looks longingly toward the entrance, but the thought of people repels her. Instead, she sits at the water’s edge, feeling
the noon sun hit her in waves timed to the steady chirping of the cicadas.

She’s hot and thirsty and needs to pee and needs to cry.

She could call Edgar, but the thought of going back to Nini’s right now is unbearable, having to give explanations surrounded
by her mother’s things.

Her mother, who’s been dead for seventeen years, yet remains inextricably linked to everyone and everything that Gabriella
knows in this place, down to this museum whose gift shop still sells her book and whose permanent collection still includes
some of her photographs.

Maybe her mother had gone back to Los Angeles, saw her, carried her, heard her read, and heard her play “Aura Lee” on the
piano, and maybe she fell in love with her all over again. Maybe she really had decided to stay with them.

Or maybe Gabriella wasn’t good enough for her, not good enough to keep her home.

This is what wives must feel when their husbands leave them for someone younger, more beautiful, more accomplished.

Not saddened. Ashamed.

The secret she can’t tell is literally making her dizzy. She’d like to lie down alone for a week, empty herself of all this.

Gabriella looks at the river across the street, and from this short distance, it looks beautiful again.

When she picks up the phone to call him, she doesn’t think about the horrible incident in the car last week or the roses he’s
sent every day since or her grandmother’s vocal disapproval or what her father would say about her choice of friends.

She wants to hear his voice, and when he speaks her name—“Gabriella?”—softly and tentatively and happily, she starts to cry.

“Gabriella!” he repeats, alarmed now, but she can’t stop.

“Where are you?” he asks urgently. “Just tell me where you are, I’ll come get you.” She stammers the words out, holding tightly
to her phone, not moving at all until he pulls up twenty minutes later, alone, without the guards—or at least, none that she
can see—and takes her hand and gently guides her to his car.

Inside, he holds her fingers with one hand and drives with the other.

“Did someone hurt you?” he says calmly.

She shakes her head.

“Can you talk?” he asks.

She shakes her head again. Tears are pouring down her face.

He reaches back for a box of Kleenex and hands it to her, watches her take five at a time.

“Should I take you home?” he finally asks.

This time she shakes her head vigorously. No.

“Okay, Gabriella,” he says again, steadily, reasonably. “I’m going to take you to my house. We can talk. And you can stay
there as long as you want. Okay? Is that okay?”

She nods.

She leans back into the leather seat, tears still streaming down her face. He looks at her hand, clenched in a fist on the
black leather upholstery, and every so often, his fingers tighten around hers.

The apartment is big and airy, with a panoramic view of the city. It’s on the west side of town, up in the hills where, as
in her grandmother’s neighborhood, stately homes have been torn down to make way for high-rise, luxury buildings.

She’s surprised that his place is cozy, that the floor is wooden, that the decoration is subdued: leather couches and beige
linen curtains. She expected the glitz and shining armor of his father’s house; the wide, open slabs of marble. He’s right,
she thinks, ruefully. She sees him as a cliché, and he’s not.

The biggest surprise is the baby grand piano, sitting in the corner of the living room.

She walks toward it automatically, runs her hands gently over the keys, plays an arpeggio to test the action.

He’s always been proud of his piano, even though he’d originally gotten it as a prop. If he was going to promote concerts,
wouldn’t it be nice if he had a piano in his living room? his decorator had asked. He’d agreed.

In Cali, not exactly a bastion of piano stores, they’d had a hard time finding a brown piano to match the furniture, and he
categorically refused to buy a used instrument. In the end, they had to order it from Baldwin’s catalog and have it shipped
through a dealer in Medellín.

Moving the piano had been a hassle, and word had even leaked to his father in prison, who’d confronted him in his next visit.

“What’s this fag bullshit I hear about taking piano lessons?” he had demanded. “Don’t you have anything better to do with
your time and my money?”