Blog 14-My son, the one you and Adela never found at Infodes

Sitting close together by the glowing ashes, amid a sea of shelters, under the moonlit sky, I asked Patria the Palenque question, "So who are your Desaparecidos?"She leaned into me. “We're in Palenque to find my oldest son Tomas. Do you remember him? My son, the one you and Adela never found at InfoDes. You can imagine how desperate I had to be back then to go to InfoDes for help. The wife of a City Force teniente asking InfoDes to find the son of a teniente! That was the first time Tomas disappeared for more than a couple of days.”
I laughed. “Good old InfoDes, called DesInfo for good reason." Patria laughed loud. This new laugh still surprised me. She'd been glum and quiet. I'd first met her all those years ago when she was Irma because she was the neighbor of Adela, the Partido friend Machi and I stayed with when I'd tried to move us to Karaya. "InfoDes was mainly good for getting Partido members employed. You'd only been here a few days and right away Adela got you a job there.” She shrugged. “You can't blame InfoDes. By definition the Desaparecidos were disappeared, the whole reason the City disappeared them was so they wouldn't be found. Why would the City pay to actually find them?”
She paused and I said, “InfoDes let the Partido save face, have an excuse to stop the demonstrations, be able to claim a victory.” She shook her head. “When the City created InfoDes it was a real victory no matter that the critics from the left said it was a bone the colonial government and the City tossed the Partido to stop the mass occupations that were screwing up tourism. Even colonial window dressing can be a victory. You need to be able to know when you've won.” For a moment she wore her old glum mask. “Still, it was cruel to give us false hope of finding our loved ones. And now I'm looking for Tomas again. I'm here with my son Elpidio, you call him Lagarto, and my daughter Anacaona. Remember little Tina? She calls herself Anacaona now. Like most of us in Palenque we're here looking and waiting." I stroked her cheek. "Maybe it'll be true for us too that sooner or later everyone turns up in Palenque.”
I poked the ashes and took my cup. “I remember Tomas. He was one of my first intakes at InfoDes. I remember stapling the photo to the top left corner of the pink record form. Did InfoDes ever find anyone?” Patria shook her head. “Certainly not Tomas. That time he finally came home on his own, no thanks to InfoDes. After he'd been gone six months I had almost lost my mind, barely slept or ate, stopped dying my hair, lived on adrenalin, coffee, cigarettes. I only didn't die because I had little Elpidio and Tina to take care of. Adela saved my life. She'd already taken in her own little second cousin Lydia when the Mother ran off with her dour old lover. You were around for that scandal. You could hear the yelling in the big house for days; Adela's uncle blaming his wife. Adela took my Elpidio and Tina under her wing too."
I interrupted her, picked up the part of the story we'd shared. "I remember those days after the Primer Asalto al Presidio. Adela's husband Noel was Desaparecido right after the assault and poor Adela was pregnant. She told me having some of Noel living inside her made her know he had to be alive, and making the children feel safe helped her feel safer, kept her mind off the terror of Noel being gone."
Patria interrupted. "And I remember when you got the call from the City, someone in el Partido called to say your husband had been picked up in a sweep in the City."
"Ori was disappeared and even though we were separated I knew I had to go find him. I packed Machi and me up and went back to the City. Ori and I ended up back together."
She looked at me with compassion, even love. "Until they disappeared him again. Cuanto lo siento."
Her face glowed. I'd never thought of her as beautiful when I knew her before. "Que cosas tiene la vida! You and your marido...and five years ago during one of his leaves my Tomas married Adela's cousin Lydia. Increible, verdad? He married little Lydia. They have a little girl of their own, and he's gone."
Patria finished her cafe and poured a second cup. “There's a reason you didn't find Tomas at InfoDes. It turned out he was never detained after all. He disappeared himself that time. He was living with his crew in the rain forest in El Pico not so far from here in what is now the Territorio Libre, in an old shelter they found far from the paths. He ran away from me. He told me they wanted to live like the Tainos. They did a vision quest snorting something they believed was ground up cohoba. After the vision he decided to come home but to his Father, not to me.
"Elpidio Padre never came back home after the First Presidio. Not to our home, anyway. He went to another home he had, a whole other family I didn't even know about. Tomas said he wanted to go live with his father and get straight. For Elpidio Padre straight meant Tomas should go into the Officer Academy of the City Force and so he did. I was going to lose my son again to this wretched, endless war."
Without interrupting her story Patria refilled our cups. We were almost out of cafe con leche.
“I didn't think he'd make it through the training but he did. I almost lost my mind again when he got deployed not far from here on the border with the Territorio Libre. Can you imagine my relief when he came home from the Island Wars, came home to me and not to Elpidio, after the second time he was deployed? He came home saying he was done with the City Force, he refused to kill his own. The third time he was called he went awol. By then he'd joined the Veterans' Bauba Taino, changed his name to Guarionex. And my little girl Tina, the middle child? He got her to change her name to Anacaona. Right now she's in the City for the week reporting for Verdad...”
Almost in unison we stretched our legs. We had so many stories to tell each other, so much we needed to know. I was stunned. “Little Tina, the daughter of a City Force teniente, in the Partido...Working for Verdad like I used to.” Patria laughed. “Nobody's more shocked than Elpidio Padre. He blames me because our three children are revolutionaries. He wants nothing to do with them. His eldest son is awol, his daughter's in the City covering the mass habeas petitions for the rebels detained in the secret Camp, and his youngest is one of the best Trackers of Desaparecidos..”
“When did they disappear Tomas? How did you trace him to the Camp?”
“He's been gone almost two years. It's the best InfoDes has come up with. We have some good people in there. I choose to believe. And, maybe I don't. They call InfoDes Desinfo for good reason.” She repeated our old joke. “Elpidio and I have done our own tracking since we moved here two years ago. As long as we don't have confirmation we assume all leads are true. The present is an open moment, that's the secret to tracking. Never get dug in. I'm a tracker...I've become a tracker...That's why he sent me to you. He says you're trying to find your husband and wants me to offer to help. He says you're 'Buena Gente'.”
“Oh help me! Please help me. Tell me what to do. Then I'll have something to show Machi. He thinks I'm a complete failure at going after his father.”