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.

  “Of course! I’m not jealous of you, Violeta, because you’re part of the past. But if I catch him with another woman, I’ll kill him.”

  She felt perfectly secure in her position as favorite, because she knew every last detail of Julián’s illegal activities and he would never be stupid enough to make her mad.

  “I have him in the palm of my hand,” she told me.

  She was waiting, with laudable patience, for the right moment to make him marry her. She did everything possible to get pregnant, without letting him suspect it, because giving him a child would be her trump card. But she hadn’t been successful.

  “You don’t mind, do you? It won’t represent competition for your kids, since they’re adults now.”

  During those three months I was focused on Nieves, but I was in close contact with José Antonio. The Socialist president had set up a public housing program to solve the problem of the shantytowns, where entire families were crowded into miserable shacks made of cardboard and plywood, without access to drinkable water, sewers, or electricity. José Antonio applied for a government bid, backed by many years’ experience in prefab housing and the prestige of having introduced and perfected the process.

  Rustic Homes was the favorite company of young middle-class couples, who worked hard to acquire their first homes. I knew we would lose prestige if poorer people in marginal neighborhoods had similar houses. “Think of the classist prejudice in our country. Let’s make the same basic beach houses, but we’ll give them a different color and name. Maybe we’ll call it My Own Home, what do you think?” I suggested.

  We won a substantial portion of the contract because no one could compete with our price. The profit margin was very low, but Anton Kusanovic, Marko’s son, who had replaced him the year before, helped us see that we could make it up with the huge volume. The trick was in the speed of producing and installing the homes, and in order to do this we had to offer incentives. We doubled the factory’s installations and began to pay the workers a commission, in addition to their salaries, which helped us appease the labor union.

  * * *

  —

  Our country’s political situation in the early seventies was disastrous; there was a deep social and economic crisis and the government was paralyzed by constant disagreement among its parties and intransigent opposition from the right, willing to stop at nothing to end the Socialist experiment. The opposition had the support of the CIA, as Juan Martín reminded me regularly and Julián justified, saying that we had to destroy the guerrillas. “There are no guerrillas here, Dad, it’s a coalition of centrist and leftist parties elected by the people. The Americans have no business getting involved,” Juan Martín argued.

  None of that affected José Antonio and me. We had more work than we needed and our employees were satisfied, which was a miracle amid the conflict and growing violence, strikes and protests, massive demonstrations in support of the government and similar marches in opposition. The country was polarized, divided into two irreconcilable factions; there was no dialogue, no one was willing to compromise. Despite the contract we’d won, José Antonio and Anton Kusanovic were counted among the Socialist government’s enemies, as were most owners of large companies, which included many of our friends and acquaintances. I voted conservative, following my brother’s lead. The only people I knew who sympathized with the left were my son and Miss Taylor, who at seventy-something years old had not lost the political passion she’d shared with Teresa Rivas. Her role as my brother’s wife had not tamed her in that sense.

  Juan Martín had transferred schools and now studied journalism at the National University, “a nest of Commies,” as his father called it. He was so dedicated to politics that he attended very few of his classes. He was horrified by my neutrality, which he classified as ignorant and complacent. “How can you vote for the right, Mom! Don’t you see the inequality and poverty in this country?” he’d say. I did see it, but I thought there was nothing I could do about it. It was a problem best left to the government or the Church, and I did my part by providing jobs for my employees.

  So much would have to happen before I was brought down to reality, Camilo. I chose not to see, hear, or speak up during the most critical years. I’d surely have continued on in the same way straight through the dictatorship if the iron fist of oppression hadn’t dealt me a direct blow.

  While our country teetered on the brink of tragedy, I spent three years traveling often between Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. The information about our country that circulated in the United States was biased, parroting the right-wing propaganda and depicting us as just another Cuba. I returned home often for work, each time seeing the chaos and violence escalate as Juan Martín slipped further and further away from me. My son had become a stranger. He talked to me in a condescending tone, the way someone speaks to a pet; he’d given up trying to indoctrinate me, considering it a lost cause, categorizing me as a “mummified relic.” He was hostile, with a shaggy beard and dirty hair, skinny and passionate. Little remained of the timid boy he’d once been.

  Nieves disappeared for months after leaving rehab. Julián mobilized all his contacts to look for her in Miami, but she hadn’t left the faintest trail. He checked with the airlines and bus companies, with no luck. In my search for her, I dove deep into the underworld of panhandlers, addicts, and life on the mean streets. Julián participated in drug trafficking and crime on a larger scale but had never found himself in a squalid alleyway crowded with zombies. He was oblivious to this other realm, though I grew to know it well. What must they have thought of me? A middle-class woman, well dressed and desperate, crying as she asked about a girl named Nieves. Some of the young people I met broke my heart, but I didn’t try to save them; my only goal was finding my daughter. I spent a few weeks doing that—the hardest weeks you can imagine, Camilo—and all I found out was that no one in Miami knew Nieves.

  That’s what we were going through when Roy called to say that he had located her in Las Vegas. He’d given up trying to find her, but happened to cross paths with Joe Santoro, and the boy led him to Nieves. Julián and I flew out immediately.

  * * *

  —

  The girl that Roy had seen didn’t run with the bands of wandering kids left over from the hippie movement, but instead “worked” the famous Strip with other young people of both sexes. She had very short hair dyed platinum blond, dramatic almost-white makeup, and provocative attire that would’ve looked gaudy anywhere else, but blended in on the Strip. According to Roy, she slept on the street or in random rented rooms, dealing drugs, stealing, or prostituting herself. Her time in the rehab clinic in Miami had done nothing to help her, and she was right back to her old ways, only more alone and desperate than before.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Santoro was her pimp,” the detective told us.

  “He’s going to regret it!” Julián exclaimed, enraged.

  Julián invited Nieves and me to stay at Caesars Palace, where I shared a room with my skittish daughter because she refused to sleep in her father’s suite, which had two bedrooms, a living room, a panoramic view of that artificial city, and even a white grand piano, which they told us belonged to Liberace. I felt awkward in her presence, guilty and ashamed. I saw myself through Nieves’s eyes, resented and despised; she tolerated her father and me only to get money out of us, but I couldn’t hold it against her because my brief stroll through her world was enough to inspire immense compassion. I would’ve given her everything I possessed in this world, Camilo, if I thought it could’ve helped her.

  The first thing Nieves did was take a long bubble bath. I brought her a cup of tea and found her asleep in the water, almost cold. I helped her out of the tub, and as I was wrapping a towel around her I saw that she had a huge scar across her back.

  “What happened, Nieves!” I exclaimed, alarmed.

  “Nothing. A scratch,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders.

  She never told me what had happened, just as she refused to speak of the life she led, or of Joe Santoro.

  “I don’t know anything about him. I haven’t seen him in a year,” she lied.

  My daughter’s worldly possessions fit into a small bag: a pair of pants, sneakers, and makeup; she didn’t even own a toothbrush. As I kept her company, or more accurately, kept watch, Julián bought her a suitcase and filled it with designer clothes from the best luxury shops on the Strip. Spending money on her was his way of dealing with the overwhelming panic constricting his chest.

  Nieves stayed with us in the hotel for almost a week, long enough to make Julián think he could save her, but I didn’t share his optimism. I could clearly see the signs I’d witnessed before: itchiness, insomnia, shivering, cramps, joint pain, nausea, dilated pupils, confusion, and anxiety. Whenever I turned my attention away for a moment, Nieves would leave the room and return calmed; there were always dealers around, and she knew how to find them. I think they even sent drugs up to her, hidden in the room-service tray or the laundry. That brief respite at Caesars Palace ended abruptly, as soon as she’d gotten enough money out of her father. She stole my watch, a gold chain, and my passport, then vanished once again.

  This time Julián knew where to find her, and enlisted Roy and another man to kidnap Nieves, just as they’d done before. He refrained from telling me because he knew I would have been opposed. Nieves was walking down the street one evening when a car stopped and she walked over, thinking it was a possible client. Roy and his goon both got out at the same time, threw a jacket over her head and forced her into the car. She fought like a wild animal in a trap, but the jacket muffled her screams. No one stepped in to help her, although I’m sure several people, including some security guards, witnessed the spectacle; it was the busiest time of night for the casinos and restaurants.