The backyard looked like a freshly bombed field. Fernanda locked the doors leading out to it and made it a no-go zone. The threat to anyone who went in was not banishment but death. She got the whole staff together and warned them. Not even the gardener could go out there. To drive the idea home, Julio stood next to her, holding Libardo’s pistol, and said, “And anybody who doesn’t like this rule can leave.”
Julio and Fernanda had just put a price on our lives, and they might well turn out to be worth nothing since we’d found nothing in the backyard so far.
“Our own people are going to kill us,” I said. “They’re going to get greedy for what might be buried there.” From a distance, the guards and maids eyed the mounds of soil and the holes that Fernanda and Julio were still digging, now in broad daylight.
“Or the neighbors,” I added.
Sometimes I helped dig, not because I wanted to but because I couldn’t stand Fernanda’s withering looks. Or her rude comments, like the one she offered when I suggested, Ma, don’t you think we should tell the guards we’re going to give them part of what we find. She replied with another question: how did you turn out such a moron, Larry? It’s so they won’t kill us, Ma. She glared at me and left. My fear did make an impression, though; I found out she’d gone to a notary to file an extrajudicial statement saying that if anything happened to us, our employees were the ones responsible, and she left a list of all the people who worked for us and their addresses. Then she brought them back together to tell them she’d done so.
“You’re going to have to keep an even closer watch on us now,” she said.
We dug for a couple more weeks. We no longer limited ourselves to the Xs marked on the map, instead excavating wherever we thought we might find something. We’d destroyed every growing thing in the yard, and even the pool was cloudy with earth. The gleaming marble was obscured at the bottom and on the edges. The motor and filters jammed, and the murky water filled with bubbles and frogs. Fernanda cried at the end of every day, and Julio did what he could to calm her.
“It’s not the end of the world, Ma. We’ve still got enough money to last a long time. Plus, if Dad comes back . . .”
Any remark about Libardo’s return always trailed off. Reduced to a gesture. A sigh, a shrug.
“We need cash,” Fernanda would say. “It’s our only insurance. They can freeze our accounts, confiscate our assets; now they’re saying something about forfeiture.”
We smelled like earth, us and the whole house, just like the backyard and farmhands did. We got blisters from digging, but Fernanda didn’t let anybody else help.
The people who claimed to have Libardo had stopped calling, and the silence had Fernanda on the verge of despair. Until one day she answered a call from a guy named Eloy, who asked, without saying hello, if the digging in the backyard was about what they assumed it was. Fernanda didn’t respond and asked for the other guy, Rómulo, and said she wouldn’t talk to anyone but him. Irate, she hung up and went to interrogate the employees. They all swore they hadn’t leaked word of our search. Even so, Fernanda fired several. Of the seven bodyguards, she kept only three, along with the two maids.
On our last day of digging, we heard a bloodcurdling scream from Fernanda. We thought she’d finally found something. We ran to her and found her writhing in pain in the hole. She’d fallen and hit her head on the shovel, and her forehead was bleeding. And she was crying, of course. We took her to the emergency room despite her objections. Luckily the wound was not serious or deep. The doctors cleaned and dressed it, unaware that the real injury was to her spirit and her pride. When we got home, I put my foot down.
“No more of this treasure hunt bullshit. There’s nothing there. We should think about what we’re going to do instead. It’s been six months since they took Dad, and we’re still in the exact same place.”
“What else can we do?” Fernanda asked. “We’ve looked for him, I’ve tried to negotiate, I’ve given them money. I’ve given anything they’ve asked for to get him back—I know Libardo can start over from scratch, what matters is that he’s alive. But I don’t know what to think anymore.”
She wept, and the swelling on her forehead grew larger. She covered her face with her hands, her fingernails black with soil as if she’d been digging with them. Julio and I looked at each other, disconcerted; he had dirt on his face, on his neck, and I must be just as filthy, just as anxious. Suddenly, I saw it all clearly: we weren’t digging to find some cache that Libardo had hidden. We were digging to exhume him, to have him with us, dead or alive. We were desperately defying God, life, time, with what, for the world and for us, Libardo represented: money. We were looking for anything we could to assuage our guilt over doing nothing for him, keeping quiet. I thought all this but didn’t say it, just as I didn’t dare suggest that we needed to go on with our lives, to pick up our stories where we’d left off when he disappeared.
A month later, I went to spend a weekend at Pedro’s house, and when I got back on Sunday evening I saw that the holes in the yard had been filled in and the pool cleaned. I felt a wave of relief when I saw the house looking like it used to. Though there was no grass, I knew it would grow back.
Another day, Eloy called again and asked Fernanda why we’d stopped digging. This time she played along and told him we’d found what we were looking for. You did?, Eloy exclaimed, so how much did you find? Enough for you to release Libardo and leave us alone, Fernanda said, and hung up. She called us to her bedroom and told us, “I’ve been thinking.”
We looked at each other, afraid of what was coming.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “There’s still one way out we haven’t considered.”
“Which is . . .” Julio said.
“The right one,” Fernanda finished his sentence. “The justice system, the police, the attorney general’s office.”
“But they already know,” I said.
“Yes, but we haven’t gotten them involved,” she said. “It’s time to ask for their help.”
Fernanda was always surprising us. We didn’t say anything about her proposal; it wasn’t rash like some of her other decisions, but I, for one, needed to consider it a little more. All I said was, “They know everything we’re doing already. They’ve got to be keeping an eye on us from one of those buildings.” I gestured around us and said, “We need to move.”
“Not yet,” Fernanda said firmly. “What if they set him free or he escapes, where will he go? How will he find us?”
“He can go to Gran’s, and she’ll tell him where we went,” I said.
Fernanda let out a wild laugh. That’s great, she said, out of the frying pan and into the fire. She shut herself in the bathroom, and we could still hear her fake, sarcastic, venomous ha, ha, ha. Whenever she reacted like that, I felt like I was sitting in front of one of the slot machines where she squandered her time and our money.