Gabriella

The diary looks innocuous in the morning light.

She lets it sit on the dresser while she has her coffee and breakfast, while she showers, while she dresses, sneaking furtive looks at it, but forcing herself not to touch it.

When she’s ready, she tucks it under her arm, then goes to the kitchen and pours herself another cup of coffee.

She goes to the terrace, where the light is brightest and the hills and the city spread out before her, and the traffic and the shouts from the vendors below remind her that all is well, that things have not come to an end.

Gabriella looks at her mother’s handwriting on the first page curiously. She tries to feel a connection with the strokes of the pen, tries to recognize the curve of the words, the cadence of the language.

Helena’s entire life has been an anecdote for her, up until this point. Now, she can physically touch her. The last thoughts she placed on paper are now hers.

Helena was nearly thirty-one years old. Not so much older than she is now. She couldn’t have imagined that she was writing her last words. Couldn’t have imagined things were going to be all over. What would she have done—what would she have written—the next day or the next or the next had she lived?

Gabriella has never believed in fate. Her mother’s violent death made her a skeptic. Destinies are carved out by individuals, she always says, and in the middle of everything, accidents simply happen, like thunderstorms.

Now, the pages between her fingers seem to mock everything she’s lived by. How many single, independent acts were necessary for this book to end up with her? wonders Gabriella.

She literally holds her mother’s life—what’s left of it—in her hands. The enormity of the thought stops her for a second.

But just as quickly, she surrenders to the joy of the moment, to the thrill of the possibilities that lie in these words her mother wrote. For her.

Then she slowly, methodically, begins to turn the pages, carefully separating each sheet of paper, smoothing it gently before she reads.

The diary is all written in Spanish. The chronicle of her life. Her baby adventures. Her first steps. Her first haircut. The outfits she wore for Halloween the first four years of her life.

Gabriella turns the pages faster and faster, anxious to read the next word and the next, anxious to go back and make sure she has grasped the significance. How important are these entries? How momentous these daily anecdotes?

The time she had a frighteningly high fever and her parents had to rush her to the emergency room. How her mother slept on a chair at her bedside and looked at her frail self in the bed, attached to tubes and monitors, and how she realized that she was part of her now, as vital as the air she breathed.

The writing vacillates from neat to sloppy, from leisurely to rushed. Where was she when she wrote this? What was she wearing?

Gabriella reads, intent, almost tasting the words, so absorbed, the intrusion inside the narrative initially escapes her.

But then, she goes back, and finds it, again and again, as quickly as cigarette burns forever branding the pages.

Only when she finishes reading the entire diary for the third time does she realize that somewhere along the line the entries have stopped being addressed to her. That her story has become her mother’s story, and Gabriella is no longer part of it.

She closes the book firmly on her lap and looks from the terrace at the view before her. It’s noon, and the cries of the cicadas in the park across the street are fierce and insistent.

The sun is suddenly piercing bright and she’s momentarily blinded. But it doesn’t matter. For the first time in months, she has a mental clarity she didn’t know she possessed.

When Lucía tells her to pick up the phone, her mind turns as deliberately blank as her eyes that can’t see.

“Gabriella,” he says, and when she hears her name again, she can almost smell the sound of his voice over the telephone. She no longer considers her father, her grandmother, her cousin, the words that others will inevitably whisper, when she says, “Yes, yes, I want to see you. Yes, I will see you. Yes.”

*  *  *

He drives a black Ford Explorer, and he’s flanked by a battalion of bodyguards, four in an SUV behind him, four in an SUV in front.

Alone in his car with him, she concentrates on the minutiae of the moment: the way he smells of clean soap, the way the muscles in his arms stretch and contract as he navigates the curves up the mountains, how his hair falls against his eyes.

“So tell me something about you that I don’t know, something true,” he says, looking straight ahead as he winds up the mountain.

“Like what?” she asks.

“Mmm. Your favorite movie?”

“Oh, God. That’s too hard. I’ve seen every movie ever made, I swear. I can tell you my favorite movies.”

“No. One.”

Gabriella squeezes her eyes shut. Her world is unraveling and she’s talking about movies. She laughs ruefully.

“The Wizard of Oz,” she finally offers.

“You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not,” she says smiling. “I’m really not. I love The Wizard of Oz. Do you know it was the first movie that mixed black-and-white with color? Can you imagine what people must have thought when they walked into those huge theaters from back then and then the screen just exploded in color? I used to watch it every month when I was little. I’d see something new every single time. I still do. And Dorothy was all alone in the world, with Toto. And she had to figure everything out on her own. She had to be so grown-up and so responsible.”

Gabriella pictures Dorothy, leaning on the fence, singing “Over the Rainbow.”

“She was so pretty,” she says musingly.

She feels the tears begin to well behind her sunglasses and she stops, horrified, biting down her tongue.

“So it’s your turn,” she says, changing the subject. “Tell me something about yourself that I don’t know. Something true.”

“My favorite movie?” he asks.

“No,” she says slowly. “I bet it’s The Godfather: Part II.”

“How could you possibly know that?” he asks, looking at her incredulously.

“You’re a guy,” she says simply. “All guys who are serious about movies have one of the Godfathers as their favorite. And The Godfather: Part II is the best one. Am I right?”

“Well, it’s on my top five.”

“Okay, so tell me something else,” she says. “Like, your favorite ice cream flavor.”

“Vanilla,” he says without hesitation.

“Oh, I don’t believe that. Vanilla is bland! You’re not bland.”

“That is not true,” he says. “Vanilla is subtle. It goes with everything. It’s adaptable.”

“But you don’t like everything,” Gabriella says, remembering. “You hardly like anything, in fact.”

“No,” he says calmly, shaking his head. “That’s not true, either. I like a lot of things. I just don’t like a lot of people. And there’s nothing more delicious than vanilla ice cream with hot guava sauce on top. Or vanilla ice cream on a chocolate soufflé.”

“Or vanilla ice cream on a hot apple pie,” she says slowly.

“Or plain vanilla ice cream, but the homemade kind, where you can taste the cream and the butter, and it’s so totally rich, you don’t need any other flavor or topping because the purity of the vanilla is enough,” he says seriously, in a way that makes her want to taste what he’s tasted.

Gabriella looks at him obliquely, trying not to stare as she attempts to divine this otherness he is supposed to have but she can’t discern. In the stark light of day, she can see the hint of a beard stubble on his golden skin, the slightest of lines around his eyes—not fine lines from squinting at the sun, but actual creases—though he can’t be much older than her, and a very faint white scar that hooks from his jawline and into his face, like a thin, transparent half-moon.

She wonders yet again what it is about him that makes her want to be so physically close, makes her want to reach out and trace the marks that break up his skin. She feels empowered suddenly. If she were to do just that—touch him—nobody would even know. And if they did, how could it hardly matter. Look at her mother, at her sequence of actions, and not a single consequence as a result.

She feels almost detached from herself, ethereal. It’s been so long since she’s done something, anything, without considering what others will say; she’s forgotten how liberating it can feel to just—be.

“Can I see what music you have?” she asks, even as she leans forward and starts to flip through the iPod hooked to the stereo, until she finds Jorge Celedón and Jimmy Zambrano’s “Qué Bonita Es Esta Vida,” a hymn to positive thoughts, she thinks, and cranks up the volume.

She rolls down her window and leans back on her seat, feeling the air cool down the higher up they go. When his hand finally reaches out for hers, she closes her eyes for just an instant at the impact of his touch, then remains perfectly still, her eyes ever trained on the scenery below as he runs his fingers proprietarily over her knuckles, her wrist, the veins and tendons that run the length of her hands.

He takes her to the house in the mountains. The house her mother photographed for her book. The house his mother bought.

She doesn’t know the destination until they get there, and she recognizes the home, nestled at the foot of a hill as they approach from the road above. He must have thought the gesture over carefully, not anticipating it could be the wrong gesture at the wrong time. She will know this house because her mother wrote about it in her journal, photographed it for her book. But right now, the sight of it takes her breath away, leaves her slightly dizzy.

“Angel,” she says, holding him back as he steps out of the car, looking at the mountains that beckon around them. “Is it safe to hike? Can we hike alone here?”

He looks at her, puzzled. No one hikes anymore for fear of running into stray guerrillas.

“If we stay within the perimeter, yes,” he says carefully. “But that means we can’t go too far. I had lunch prepared, though.”

“Can we take it?” she asks excitedly. “Let’s take a picnic. With a bottle of wine?”

He considers the proposal, and likes it.

“Okay. Okay,” he says, smiling his slow, lazy smile. “Let’s have a picnic.”

She waits for him outside, her back to the house, as he gives instructions to the cook, to the drivers, to the guards. He goes to them, one by one, speaks quietly, in a tone of voice others can’t pick up. His demeanor is contrary to that of any man in control she’s ever met, men who like to be seen and heard issuing orders, establishing their place.

He doesn’t need to shout to be heard, and momentarily, he reminds her of her father, so preternaturally cool. Except her father doesn’t run the equivalent of a small army, and when she looks down as they climb into the hills, she can see his men, posted around the house, near the road.

“We also have guards outside,” he tells her, noticing her slight apprehension. He’s walking ahead of her, their picnic packed in a backpack, and as he hoists himself up onto a boulder, she sees the bulge of a gun tucked inside his sock.

“Can’t you go out without them?” she asks.

Angel continues to climb farther up to a small plateau before he finally answers.

“No.” He extends his hand to help her up the last step. “Not right now, anyway,” he adds.

They’re at a ledge on the side of the mountain. The air is chilly up here, and below them, the hills spread out in deep, green rolls, peppered with villas of varying sizes, the weekend homes where city dwellers go to escape from the heat, their red-tiled roofs shining between the foliage of the trees.

He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply.

“Man, I haven’t been up here in a long time.” He sighs.

“What do you do?” Gabriella asks him with no preamble. “I mean, do you have a job?”

Only after the words are out does she wonder if the question is extraordinarily naïve or extraordinarily stupid.

“Of course, I have a job,” he says with a snort. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Gabriella is momentarily chastised, then regains her nerve. She deserves to know these things, she thinks. And he needs to know that; otherwise, what in the world is she doing up on this mountain with him?

“Well,” she says carefully, “people say your dad is very rich, and they say he’s in jail, and, I’m sorry, but I… I’d like to know if you work for his business or if you even need to work.…” Gabriella’s voice trails off and is met with silence. She thinks of her mother, pictures her maybe lying beside her father in bed, a trove of secrets between them as she pretended to be someone she wasn’t any longer. And her father oblivious. Or perhaps, just pretending he didn’t see.

She takes a deep breath.

“I’d like to know who you are,” she finally says, quietly. “Everyone talks about your father. But hardly anyone talks about you.”

“I promote concerts,” he says, looking at her speculatively. “Not your kind of concerts,” he adds. “Not classical music. Big pop shows. Dances during the fair.”

“Oh,” she says, surprised. Of all things, she hadn’t expected this. “Like, who are you bringing during the fair?”

“You know, Grupo Niche, salsa bands for Christmas, all kinds of music. Oscar D’León,” he adds with a smile, and she smiles back in complicity, remembering their dance at his party. “I bring music people want to hear,” he says matter-of-factly. “I need to sell tickets. But sometimes, I’ll just bring music I really like, groups that are a little obscure, a little off center, and hope enough people will want to open their ears to something new.”

Angel stops himself. He’s reserved by habit, wary of being measured and used.

“I brought Youssou N’Dour last month to the theater, and it was pretty packed,” he says tentatively, testing her, hoping she’ll say the right thing but still bracing himself for the inevitable “Who?” he’s fielded for weeks.

“I love Youssou N’Dour,” she says simply.

“I thought you would,” he answers, allowing his half smile to tug at the corner of his mouth.

“How did you know I played classical music?” she asks, suddenly registering his full words.

“People talk about your father, but they also talk about you,” he says shortly.

He doesn’t know what compels him to continue answering her. He’s checked her background—something he does with everyone he gets remotely close to—and there’s nothing in her history to trigger any alarms. There is just her. A girl who plays the piano, who is here only fleetingly, once a year. Whose mother died and whose father is known in the realm of film, but whose entire life seems otherwise steeped in normalcy, in comfort, in a cocoon of family and affection utterly removed from the millions of threads that complicate his existence.

Angel lies down on the blanket, legs stuck straight out, his face up to the sky, and slowly brings his cigarette to his mouth, visibly relaxing as he blows the smoke into the clear air.

“I used to go skiing in Switzerland in the winters, and people used to say they have the bluest sky there,” he says pensively. “But it’s nothing like this. Or, I don’t know. It never seemed to be so blue. Whenever I’m here, I feel like I’ve been inside this gray place that’s suddenly dipped into a can of paint, you know? Like your Wizard of Oz.”

Gabriella lies down beside him, her face, too, turned to the sky, and she watches legions of clouds, forming and disintegrating, their bodies plump and white against the shocking blue of the heavens. It’s one of those days of extraordinary contrasts. The mountains are etched in sharp relief against the sky, every tree clearly delineated in its upward progress, all the way to the point where their tops meet the permanent fog at the highest portion of the peak. If she looks deeply into the sky, she can see a tiny moon, visible even in the early afternoon.

“Yeah, I know,” she says. “I think it’s something about the tropics. The colors are just brighter. Even the air smells different here. Not that it’s—purer. It’s just more real. More raw. I’ve tried to explain it to people that haven’t been here, but I don’t think they really understand.”

Angel laughs.

“You can’t explain the things that go on here to other people,” he says. “It’s too crazy.”

“Angel,” she says, still looking at the sky. “I know you need bodyguards, but why so many? Do they want to kidnap you, or do they want to kill you?”

“I’m not sure,” he says, truthfully, carefully. “But they definitely want something,” he says, looking away from her again.

“Is it because of your dad or because of you?” she asks softly.

No one asks me these things, he wants to tell her. But when he turns around to look at her, all he sees is her profile, deliberately avoiding his eyes as she stares at the sky. There’s something in her that makes him want to talk, to say at least some of the things he can never say. To anyone.

Sometimes, he still thinks back to when he was a little boy, when he didn’t know he was any different from anyone else. They lived in a smaller house then, and to the best of his knowledge, his father had a job, a job that required him to get up in the mornings in time to see Angel off to school. He would walk down the stairs, smelling of fresh aftershave, his hair still wet from the shower, his tie hanging undone around his neck, and he would kiss him as he ate his cereal at the kitchen table and cuff him lightly on the side of his head. Angel had friends then and birthday parties, and one time he was even allowed to go to a sleepover.

And then, the money started to seriously come in, inexorably transforming everything it touched, as if a flicker of fairy dust had suddenly descended on his existence, making his world bigger, shinier, newer. It began with the cars—no longer the staid, run-of-the-mill Mazdas, but a procession of SUVs and Mercedes-Benzes and a silver Jaguar for his mother that arrived one morning, tied in a gigantic red bow. He stopped taking the bus to the elite British school he had gone to since kindergarten—a luxury his father could barely afford—and was driven instead by a chauffeur in a black Bronco, followed by a jeep with two armed guards.

The new furniture came next—bright and lacquered. Then they moved to the new house and things were never the same. He was only twelve, but he immediately perceived the difference, surrounded by an opulence he had never seen—not even in movies, and certainly, not in the homes of even his wealthiest classmates. They were, finally, the ones who told him one afternoon when he invited a group of them to swim at his house after a heady game of soccer where he actually scored a goal.

They looked at each other, mildly uncomfortable, and Juan Luis, his best friend since the first grade, finally said it: “Man, Angel, you know we’re not allowed to go to your house anymore.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, genuinely perplexed because he still hadn’t noticed the small fissures in their relationship, hadn’t sensed the subtle changes in behavior, the slowdown in invitations, the little social niceties that mothers tune in to first, but children seldom grasp.

“You know,” said Juan Luis, looking down, kicking softly at the worn grass with his soccer cleats. “Your dad.”

“What about my dad?” asked Angel, utterly at a loss.

Everyone looked at Juan Luis expectantly, waiting for him to fix the awkwardness of the moment.

“Well, you know, he’s a mafioso,” Juan Luis said, finally looking Angel in the eye.

“Liar!” said Angel angrily, instinctively pushing Juan Luis hard enough so he fell to the grass with a thud, hands quickly coming down to break the fall.

“Come on, Angel,” someone else said. “Everybody knows. Your dad’s a drug dealer.”

It was an afternoon of liquid blue sky, like this one, and above the white netting of the goal, Angel could see what looked like hawk—or maybe just a vulture—slowly circling the perimeter, the wings barely moving against the stillness of the air.

He looked down at Juan Luis, still on the ground, gazing up at him expectantly with a glimmer of defiance, but also a touch of fear in his eyes. Angel wondered what he looked like; wondered if his eyes showed his sudden panic, the realization that they could be right, that it all made sense. And then Juan Luis slowly, carefully, extended his hand, and Angel instinctively leaned over and grasped it and helped him up.

“We’ll go to my house, okay?” said Juan Luis, and Angel nodded, but he could still see the glimmer of fear that had appeared in Juan Luis’s eyes, and it wasn’t the same that day, and it was never the same again, not really.

That night, he ate dinner alone, as he usually did, and much later, in the early morning, he heard his father come home, with a cavalcade of cars behind him.

He didn’t confront him; you didn’t do that with his dad. But by then, he didn’t need to. He knew. And save for the time he got sent away to Switzerland to school, everybody in his lifetime has known.

The unspeakable topics, the knowing looks, the business deals that, no matter how legitimate, are always executed quietly. In almost everyone he deals with, he sees an underlying layer of fear.

But in Gabriella, he sees curiosity. No, he corrects himself. He sees interest. She is interested. She truly wants to know.

“My father has a lot of enemies,” he says carefully, sitting up and looking closely at the face that doesn’t look at him. “He’s in jail,” he continues. “And I’m his only son. I’m a very easy target. It could be that they’re not interested in me at all. I’m not part of his business. But we can’t take that risk. So, until he gets out, until he does whatever it is he needs to do to resolve things, I need an army.”

“But why don’t you go live somewhere else in the meantime,” she asks logically.

“I don’t want to,” he says flatly. “I don’t want to be anywhere else. I love it here. And I want to be close to my father.”

“But Angel,” she says, and finally looks at him directly, her eyes cloudy with concern but clear in their intent. “He…” Gabriella stops herself short.

She wonders how involved he is, wonders how much he really does. She wills herself, for this moment at least, to believe that he indeed stands alone, apart, like her mother stood alone and apart, close to her father but so completely separate he never knew.

“Are you close to your father?” she finally questions, because this much she can handle, this much she could share with him.

Angel considers her. A nice girl. From a nice family. The last time he dated a girl like her, she went to bed with him, but milked him in the process, made him buy her Prada bags and Jimmy Choo shoes. Then her parents sent her to study in Miami and she never returned his calls again.

He knows better now.

He looks at this girl who he wants to make love to so very badly his stomach hurts. He could have simply insisted his father is in the “import-export” business, the standard line for people like him. He could insist on the other standard line—he’s been wrongly jailed.

But she’s not stupid, he knows. He does neither.

“Princesa,” he finally says, the term of endearment slipping from his lips so easily, so softly she feels she could reach out and capture it in her hand. “My father isn’t perfect. He’s had to do what he’s had to do, and a lot of it hasn’t been that pretty. But he had a horrible life. Everything he has, everything I have, he worked for. I don’t always agree with him, and I definitely do things differently, but he’s my father. He’s the only father I have, and I love him, even when I know he’s not right. And now, he wants me to do well.

“And I’ve done well. I have my own business; I make my money. And it’s legit. But he’s in jail, and I’ll support him as long as I have to. And that’s the package, princesa,” he says, slightly defiant.

She is silent for a long time, looking at the sky, deliberately thinking of nothing again, because she can’t think of anything today; the weight of it all would crush her.

“Okay,” she finally says. “Okay.”

He stubs out his cigarette, and when he leans over, she can smell tobacco on his breath, and for the second time in her strict, antismoking life, she wants more of that smell, and when he leans down to kiss her, she reaches up and pulls him closer, to taste the cigarette he’s been smoking.

She has no makeup on, and her skin is very white and tinted with a high, feverish blush, and her hair is very black underneath the many streaks of color, and her eyes have the same hue as the rain-filled clouds that now sit on top of the mountain ridge in front of them, and he thinks that she doesn’t look like anyone else he knows and that each of her contrasts fits into this landscape and that every dip and curve and joint in her body fits underneath his hands.