To Lucia, the bluff did not look very high, but Richard insisted this was deceptive: from that height the impact and the car’s weight would smash the ice. Thanks to the mildness of the winter up until then, the ice on the lake’s surface was not yet thick. They managed with difficulty to line the car up perpendicular to the shore. Richard put it into neutral, and between the two of them they gave it one last push. The car moved slowly forward and its front wheels plunged over the abyss, but the rest got stuck on the edge with a dull thud. The Lexus was left swaying on its chassis, with three-quarters stuck and the rest dangling in midair. They pushed again with all their might but could not budge it.
“That’s all we needed! Behave, you stupid animal!” Lucia exclaimed, giving the car a kick before collapsing on the ground, panting.
“We should have started from farther back so that it would pick up speed,” said Richard.
“Too late. What are we going to do now?”
For several long minutes, covered in snow, they tried to recover their breath. They could see what a disaster it was but could not come up with a solution. Suddenly the front of the car dipped several degrees and with a grinding sound slid forward a few inches. Richard guessed that the heat from the engine was melting the snow underneath. They quickly took advantage of this, giving it a push. A moment later the Lexus plunged over the cliff with the force of a mortally wounded pachyderm. They watched from the summit as it hit the ice nose-first. For an instant it seemed as if it might stay there sticking up vertically like some strange metallic sculpture, but then they heard a tremendous crack, the surface of the lake splintered into a thousand pieces like a mirror, and the car slowly sank with a farewell sigh, throwing up a wave of freezing water together with shards of blue ice. Dumb with amazement, Lucia and Richard watched as the Lexus was swallowed up by the dark waters until it had completely disappeared into the lake.
“The surface will have frozen over again in a couple of days,” said Richard when the last ripple had subsided.
“Until the spring thaw.”
“The lake is deep here, I don’t think anyone will find it. Nobody comes up this way,” Richard said.
“God willing,” said Lucia.
“I doubt God will approve of anything we’ve done,” he said with a smile.
“Why not? Helping Evelyn is an act of compassion, Richard. We can count on divine approval. If you don’t believe me, ask your father.”
“No act of compassion will save me from my own hell,” he murmured.
Richard
Brazil, 1990–1991
The weeks and months following little Pablo’s death were a nightmare from which neither Anita nor Richard could escape. Bibi’s fourth birthday was extravagantly celebrated by the Farinha family in her grandparents’ house, to avoid the sadness that reigned in her own home. The little girl was passed between her grandmother and many aunts; she had always seemed too wise, serene, and well behaved, and yet at night she wet her bed. She would wake up soaked, stealthily take off her pajamas, and tiptoe naked into her parents’ room. She slept between the two of them, and in the morning occasionally found the pillow wet with her mother’s tears.
The delicate balance Anita had succeeded in maintaining during the years of her miscarriages was destroyed by the death of her baby. Neither Richard nor the unswerving affection of the Farinha family could help her, but between them they managed to drag her to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed a whole cocktail of medicines. The therapy sessions took place almost in silence: she refused to speak, and the psychiatrist’s efforts constantly came up against her profound sense of grief.
As a desperate last resort, Anita’s sisters took her to see Maria Batista, a respected lyalorixa, the mother of candomble saints. At transcendental moments in their lives all the women in the family had made the journey to Bahia to visit Maria Batista’s terreiro. She was a voluminous elderly lady with a permanent smile on a face the color of molasses. She dressed in white from her sandals to her turban, with symbolic necklaces cascading down from her neck. Experience had made her wise. She spoke quietly, and stared into the eyes and stroked the hands of all those who came to her to be guided along the uncertain path.
Aided by the buzios, her cowrie shells, she peered into Anita’s destiny. She did not say what she saw, as her role was to offer hope and solutions and give advice. She explained that suffering has no purpose and is futile unless it can be used to cleanse the soul. If she wanted to escape from the prison of memory, Anita must pray and ask for help from Yemaya, the orixa of life. “Your boy is in heaven and you are in hell. Come back to the world,” she told her. She advised the Farinha sisters to give Anita time; her reservoir of tears was bound to dry up at some point, and her spirit would heal. Life is persistent. “Tears are good, they clean inside,” she added.
Anita returned from Bahia as disconsolate as she had been when she traveled there. Indifferent to her solicitous family and husband, she turned in on herself. Apart from Bibi, she cut herself off from everyone. She took her daughter out of day care in order to always keep her within sight, to protect her with an oppressive, fearful love. Stifled by this tragic embrace, Bibi took it upon herself to stop her mother from slipping irrevocably down into madness. She was the only one who could dry her tears and lighten her pain with caresses. She learned not to mention her little brother, as if she had forgotten his brief existence, and pretended to be happy so as to entertain her. She and her father were living with a ghost. Anita spent most of the day dozing or motionless in an armchair, watched over by one of the other women in her family because the psychiatrist had warned about the risk of suicide. Every hour went by exactly the same for Anita; the days crawled slowly past and she had more than enough time to weep for Pablo and her unborn children. Maybe, as Maria Batista had said, the tears would eventually have dried up, but there was not time enough for that to occur.