Violeta, p.17
Violeta, page 17
Nieves stayed in Las Vegas. Julián wanted to be near her, so he could step in if necessary, but she wouldn’t see him even from a distance, and he couldn’t abandon his business in Miami. I imagine his clients weren’t eager to give him up since it wasn’t so easy to find a pilot willing to fly at night under the radar or make a water landing in alligator-infested swamps to pick up mysterious packages.
To keep an eye on his daughter, he hired a private detective, Roy Cooper. Roy would eventually play a major role in your life, Camilo. He was an ex-convict who specialized in blackmail, as I later found out, but it wasn’t clear whether he earned his living by doing the blackmailing or by helping those to whom it was being done.
Roy’s reports were heartbreaking for Julián. His daughter was on a slippery slope that could only lead to death. She stayed with Joe Santoro for a little while, but quickly left him, or he left her, and Nieves ended up on the street. The famous Summer of Love had ended, but the hippie counterculture was still vibrant in many cities throughout the country, Las Vegas among them. Those young, long-haired kids, tattooed, lazy, and content, who wandered all over California and made history at Woodstock, were not as well tolerated in other places.
Nieves joined the many middle-class white kids who chose to live like promiscuous beggars in a haze of psychedelic music and drugs. Roy was right on her heels, sending frequent reports back to Julián. The pictures showed Nieves dressed in rags decorated with little mirrors, flowers in her hair, at an anti-Vietnam protest with a handful of other kids, sitting cross-legged at the feet of a shaggy guru, or singing love songs and panhandling in a public park. She slept in communes, on the street, in a broken-down car—one night here, one night there, a wandering spirit like so many other young people at the time. She was lured by the attraction of aimless freedom, one-night stands, and intoxicating depravity. She embraced the aesthetic inspired by India, but she wasn’t interested in Eastern philosophy or the movement’s political and social aims. She protested against the war out of defiance of authority, but she had no idea where that country called Vietnam was even located.
Julián’s plan was to throw Nieves a rope once she hit rock bottom. Roy had instructions to make sure the girl didn’t go hungry, and to protect her the best he could, without revealing his connection to her father. It was easy, because Nieves was lost in a cloud of marijuana smoke and acid-induced hallucinations. Swallowing life in big gulps, she also began to sniff heroin. It was impossible for Roy to keep track of all the men Nieves had casual relations with, since she never stayed with anyone for more than three or four days. In the photos he sent Julián, taken from a distance, they all looked like the same guy: beard, long hair, a necklace of beads or flowers, sandals, and a guitar.
The one person that stuck out as different was Joe Santoro, who still came and went from Nieves’s life with a certain regularity. He wasn’t just another hippie. He was a small-time dealer of methamphetamines and heroin, so insignificant that the police didn’t bother with him. His buyers were office workers, third-rate entertainment industry people, and tourists. The hippies preferred marijuana and hallucinogens, which were passed around freely; the majority looked down on hard drugs and alcohol. We’ll never know whether he introduced Nieves to heroin or just supplied her once she was desperate. The path to addiction is straight and well paved; Nieves traveled it quickly.
I didn’t know any of this until a year later, because Julián always assured me over the phone and when he visited that Nieves was fine. He told me that she was sharing an apartment with two girlfriends and studying art. He talked to her a couple of times a week, he said, but he didn’t see her because she wanted to try her wings on her own for a while. She didn’t want me to go see her either, so I shouldn’t worry if she didn’t answer my letters. On one occasion I even flew to Miami to help get Julián’s papers in order, but he found a way to cover up my daughter’s absence. I could’ve tried harder to find out what was going on and I didn’t. I’m guilty too.
Julián and I were held together by a perpetual cycle of hate and lust. And Nieves, of course. Juan Martín doesn’t count because, if it had been up to my son, Julián and I would’ve separated fifteen years earlier. It’s impossible to explain our obscene pattern of attraction and rejection, passion and rage, fighting and making up; I myself don’t understand it. With time we only remember events, emotions fade, and I’m no longer the woman I was back then.
After every trip I made to Miami in those years, I returned to my house in Sacramento or to the apartment I shared with my son in the capital determined to never again heed a summons from Julián Bravo. But inevitably I always gave in, like a trained, beaten dog. He would call me as soon as the chaos threatened to suffocate him so that I could put things back in order, and he came to see me whenever he needed to flee a disaster related to women or money. His presence was a typhoon that completely upset my well-regulated existence and the peace of mind that I felt in his absence. Those were the only times I ever got drunk and smoked marijuana, which according to Julián I needed in order to enjoy life like a normal person. “I like you when you’re relaxed. I can’t have fun with you when your head is filled with worries and work,” he’d say.
This was a recurring source of conflict: my business. I have a nose for making money, as you know, Camilo; I saved, invested wisely, and lived frugally. To Julián my prudence with money was simply greed, another of my defects. He criticized me, then turned around and blew a year’s savings in five minutes.
15
My brother and Josephine Taylor, the only ones who knew about Julián’s abusiveness, criticized me often for putting up with him. At their insistence, I went to see a psychiatrist to help resolve that destructive emotional dependence.
Dr. Levy was a Jewish man who had studied with Carl Jung. He was a university professor and author of several books—an eminent figure. I’d guess he was around eighty, but it’s possible he was younger and merely worn down from so much suffering. The doctor knew Julián because he was one of the immigrants Julián had secretly flown into the country after the war. He had lost his entire family to the concentration camps, but that monumental grief didn’t leave him bitter; he instead had an infinite compassion for human fragility. I was embarrassed to have a Holocaust survivor waste his time on my miserable emotional problems, but with a glance he put my mind at ease. He closed the door to his office and time stood still in that room crammed with books; nothing else existed: only he and I.
“I’ve led a banal life, Dr. Levy. I’m mediocre,” I said to him in one session.
He responded that all lives are banal and we’re all mediocre, depending on who we compare ourselves to.
“Why would you want a tragic life, Violeta?” he asked me, and his voice broke, surely thinking of the suffering he’d witnessed. “There’s a Chinese curse that is applicable here: I wish you an interesting life. The corresponding blessing would be: I wish you a boring life,” he added.
Thanks to Dr. Levy, who held my hand through the process, I finally managed to leave Julián. He guided me down a long road of introspection, beginning in my childhood at Camellia House, where I discovered my father’s body, and traveling the landscapes of my memory: Miss Taylor, my aunts, the Rivas farm, the itinerant school, the assault by Pascual Freire and Torito’s rescue, Fabian, Julián and my children, until finally reaching age fifty, weary from conflict and loneliness.
The first thing I did was inform Julián that he could no longer count on me to clean up his messes, finance his extravagances, pay his debts, work accounting miracles, or pick up the pieces of the disasters he created. I would also never again set foot in the pink cake in Miami; no more poop-covered dollars in the washing machine, gangsters, or spies for me. If he wanted to come see me, he’d have to stay in a hotel and treat Juan Martín with respect. Lastly, he had to know that if he ever laid a hand on me again he’d be truly sorry.
“You’re going to need strength and mental clarity to hold him to this, Violeta. I’d advise you to refrain from alcohol when you’re with Julián,” Dr. Levy said.
Up to that moment I’d never connected drinking with the power Julián held over me.
Julián thought my departure was another of the empty threats I’d been repeating for years, but this time I had Dr. Levy’s support. Two months later, tired of begging me to fly to Miami to help him, he found someone else to manage that jigsaw puzzle he called a business but was really a smuggling operation. The new person in charge was Zoraida Abreu, his longtime lover, with whom I drank martinis at the Fontainebleau Hotel. As it turned out, his choice couldn’t have been more perfect, because she was an accountant by trade, in addition to being efficient, discreet, and eager to serve him out of love, just as I’d once been. While I’d worked out the crazy numbers of his double books on pure instinct, she was meticulous and had a thorough knowledge of American law. She knew how to manage secret accounts, evade taxes, and launder money. Julián was much better off with her than with me.
I can picture Miss Boricua Rum, all curves and leonine mane, lording her authority over Julián’s associates and clients, keeping his short-lived lovers at bay. She’d told me she was methodical, a necessary requirement for her profession, and had little tolerance for squandering money; her parents were very strict and she’d been educated in a school run by nuns. She called from time to time to fill me in on the latest drama or ask for advice. She was imposing, bossy, sure of herself and her opinions, which contrasted comically with her annoying childlike way of speaking. I doubt that Julián was able to intimidate her and I think that in a brawl she’d have crushed him like a cockroach.
Zoraida’s presence was a blessing; she helped me cut my last emotional ties to Julián.
Around this time, ironically, Julián started to visit our country more often. He was there on top-secret missions related to the German commune, Colonia Esperanza, which we’d first heard about from my ex-husband, Fabian. I pointed out that the missions couldn’t be all that secretive if he’d told me about them over a lunch of oysters and sea urchin at a restaurant in the port.
“You’re my soul, Violeta. You know me better than anyone. I have no secrets from you,” he responded.
I refrained from asking him if he had secrets from Zoraida, because it was better that he didn’t suspect our unusual comradery.
Julián seldom saw his son. Juan Martín politely declined the few invitations to Miami that his father extended, using school as an excuse, and when Julián came to the capital they interacted as little as possible. They both avoided getting into any deep discussions, especially on politics, which was the spark that could ignite a mutual hostility. For Julián, his son was a permanent disappointment, and to Juan Martín, his father was a crook who’d sold out to Yankee imperialism.
The presidential election had just been won by a Socialist, representing a coalition of leftist parties that Juan Martín had campaigned for tirelessly. His father was convinced the man wouldn’t last more than a few months in power because the right wing and the United States wouldn’t permit it, but he didn’t tell his son that. He preferred to warn him through me.
“Tell your son to be careful. This country isn’t going to be another Cuba. It’ll be a bloodbath.”
I didn’t need to ask how he knew.
Roy, the man Julián had hired as a private detective, saved Nieves’s life. On one of those hot afternoons in the Nevada desert he realized it had been over a week since he’d sent his client a report. Spying on the girl was a frustrating job, beneath someone so experienced in criminal enterprise, but it was good money.
He searched in vain for her in the usual places, including the street corners where Nieves might offer herself to passersby on her more desperate days. He didn’t tell her father this, but Julián must’ve suspected, as it was a common recourse for a girl in dire need of another dose. Roy knew that a man like Julián Bravo was familiar with the world of drugs, from production, transportation, down to the ultimate degradation of the addict. It was a painful irony that his own daughter was one of the victims. Concerned, because he’d never lost track of her for so long, Roy asked among the hippies she ran with—groups of young people in vacant lots, far from the champagne and dazzling lights of the Strip—and found out that someone had seen Nieves with Joe Santoro.
It was already dark out when Roy tracked Joe down at a bowling alley—clean, well dressed, and freshly shaved—drinking beer with a couple of friends.
“Nieves? I’m not her babysitter,” he rudely responded.
The girl no longer interested him; he merely sold her hard drugs. He didn’t use them himself and had warned her that it was usually a one-way trip, he said. Roy grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into the bathroom, where he started with a knee to the groin that knocked the boy flat on the floor, wet with urine. Then he pulled him up by his belt and was about to bust open his nose, when Joe stopped him, covering his face and blubbering that Nieves was “in the bus.”
Roy knew what he was referring to. It was a stripped bus with no wheels, entirely covered in graffiti, parked in the courtyard of an abandoned building. Roy had been to that very building, a den of addicts and drifters, hours earlier, but he hadn’t thought to check inside the bus. He found Nieves unconscious on the floor, between two young men who were either sleeping or high. He tried to sit her up, but the girl melted in his arms. He slapped her a few times and shook her to wake her up, tried fruitlessly to find her pulse, then finally picked her up and ran with her to his car. Nieves weighed as much as a small child, pure skin and bones.
The detective called Julián from the hospital. It was already close to midnight in Miami.
“The girl’s hit rock bottom. Come quick,” he told him.
Julián arrived in Las Vegas the next day, piloting a small jet that one of his clients had lent him, and landed at a private airport. Nieves was released two days later, and with Roy’s help Julián forced her onto the plane. She’d recovered from the overdose that almost killed her but was suffering terrible withdrawal. Between the two men, they could barely hold her as she fought with a superhuman force, shouting and cursing so loudly that the police would’ve been called if they hadn’t been at a private airport. On the plane, her father injected her with a sedative, which knocked her out for ten hours, enough time to land in Miami and check her in to a rehab clinic.
That’s when Julián finally called to tell me what had happened. I had suspected for years that my daughter was on drugs, but I imagined she was using only marijuana and cocaine, which according to her father wouldn’t affect Nieves’s ability to function normally in the world. I’d managed to ignore the evidence of what was happening to Nieves, just as I hadn’t wanted to admit that Julián was an alcoholic. I’d simply parroted his words: that he knew how to hold his liquor, that he could drink twice as much as any other mortal without being affected, that he needed whiskey to help ease his back pain, and other excuses. Nieves had just survived a near-death experience caused by heroin and was in a strict detox program, but I still didn’t think she was an addict. I believed Julián: It had been an unfortunate accident, it wouldn’t happen again. The girl had learned her lesson.
A week later they let us visit Nieves in the clinic. She’d gotten over the worst of the withdrawal; she was clean, her hair washed, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, silently staring at the floor. I hugged her, sobbing, calling her name without getting any reaction, but when Julián asked her how she was, she managed to focus her eyes.
“The Beings have chosen me, Dad. I have a message to share with humanity,” she said.
The counselor explained that this state of confusion was normal after the kind of trauma she’d suffered and the effects of the sedatives.
I stayed in Miami for the three months that Nieves was in rehab, seeing her as often as they’d let me, at first a few times a week and then almost every day. The visits were very brief and always chaperoned. I learned about the horrors of withdrawal: the terrible distress, insomnia, cramps and stomach pains, cold sweats, vomiting, and fever. For the first few days they eased her pain with sedatives, but after that she had to face the nightmare cold turkey.
During some visits Nieves seemed normal, coming in from the pool or playing volleyball with her cheeks flushed and eyes shining. Other times she begged us to get her out of there, saying they were torturing her, didn’t feed her, tied her up, beat her. She didn’t mention the Beings again. Her father and I had several sessions with the psychiatrist and counselors, who emphasized the need for tough love, limits, and discipline, but Nieves was about to turn twenty-one and after that we’d have no power to protect her from herself.
The day of her birthday she disappeared from the rehab clinic. She left with the clothes on her back and the five hundred dollars her father had given her as a birthday gift, despite the psychiatrist’s warnings. We guessed she’d gone back to Las Vegas, but Roy couldn’t find her. For a while, we had no idea where she was.
Julián wanted me to stay in the horrible mansion while I was in Miami, but I’d vowed to never again spend a night under the same roof as him. If the opportunity presented itself, I knew I’d end up back in his bed and I would regret it. I rented a small studio with a kitchenette, where I had the silence and solitude I desperately needed during that painful period.
Zoraida Abreu didn’t live with Julián either; he’d set her up in a luxury apartment in Coconut Grove, where she was close, but he still had his freedom. He never mentioned her to me and he never knew that she and I met regularly at the Fontainebleau, and that I’d grown fond of the woman. She had the balls I didn’t.
Zoraida kept Julián on a tight leash, but she didn’t feel the need to watch him too closely because she could read his intentions and betrayals with a mere glance. Julián lacked all mystery for her. I asked if she was jealous, and she responded with a loud laugh.
