Then something odd happened.
One day Riojas came in and didn’t beat her. He asked her something instead.
To open her legs for him. Politely requested it. Claudia said no, shut her eyes, waited for a fresh onslaught of pain.
Riojas left the room.
The next time he came in, he was bearing gifts.
French lingerie.
Riojas asked her to try it on for him. Claudia said no.
Again he didn’t touch her.
By the third time, Claudia began to understand something.
She wasn’t experienced with men; she’d had a casual boyfriend or two.
She could tell when someone was in love.
It had happened before—boys in primary school, then university, who’d begin acting stupid around her, wholly outside the realm of normal behavior.
It became increasingly clear that Riojas wasn’t going to kill her.
He was going to court her.
Why?
Maybe because Claudia was Claudia.
Because he coveted what he couldn’t destroy. Love is strange—isn’t that what the songs say?
At some point Claudia began to understand that this adoration might save her. Maybe not forever. Just for a while. Somewhere she stopped wanting to die and began wanting to live.
When he asked her a fourth time to dress in French lingerie, to turn around and please kneel on the bed for him, she said yes. She understood it wouldn’t do to always deny him. Eventually, he’d tire of that. Then he’d tire of her.
There’s something truly pathetic about a captor falling in love with his prisoner. Claudia needed to use that to her advantage. She needed to hold something back. To sometimes give in, but always deny the one thing he wanted more than anything else. Reciprocity.
Her heart—as the poets say.
She began to dine with him, at an actual dinner table. Set with gleaming silver, translucent china. Dressed up in whichever five-hundred-dollar dress he’d picked out for her. Sometimes she’d wear something else, deliberately ignoring his wishes. He’d throw tantrums that subsided only after most of their dinner had ended up on the floor.
He delighted in telling her what he’d done to other women. Women who’d crossed him. That singer—Evi, the pop star who’d thought she could carry on with a musician while seeing him.
I went up to her apartment with my personal doctor. I held her down while he cut out her vocal cords, then I sat there and watched as he sewed her up. She no longer sings very well.
He was trying to evoke fear and obedience. Claudia would act bored. She was convinced if she did the opposite of what he expected, she could survive another day.
He loosened the leash a little.
She was allowed outside—always accompanied by one of his goons. She listened. She observed. She memorized things.
Where were they? She smelled salt in the air. Not all the time, just on the days when the wind blew hard from the north. They had to be on the coast. Even so, they were hopelessly isolated. There wasn’t a single roof in any direction. Just lush palms, overgrown ferns, tumbling birds-of-paradise. Wild parrots serenaded her on her walks around the hacienda.
Then she observed something else.
Something horrible.
Riojas had always used protection with her. Lately, he’d become careless. He was usually drunk or coked up.
She missed a period. Then another.
One morning she woke completely consumed with nausea and spent half an hour on the floor of the marble bathroom, staring at her warped reflection in the gold-leaf fixtures.
She decided she would kill herself.
She came to this decision calmly and rationally.
There were knives in the kitchen.
There were two swords mounted above the fireplace in the den. She would put one of them right through her, through his monstrosity, before anyone could stop her.
Riojas was away. She cleansed her face, meticulously applied the French makeup Riojas had brought for her, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit she thought suitable for a funeral.
The armed guards he kept stationed around the house were fortuitously absent from the den.
The swords appeared to be ceremonial. Japanese, she guessed—delicately curved steel fixed to bright hand-painted hilts. They were hung on nails, crossed at midblade.
She was reaching for one of them when she felt it. Or maybe she just imagined she had.
Like a kick in the gut.
She’d touched the instrument of her own death, and something had moved in the pit of her stomach. She sank to the floor.
She understood. She knew what it was.
More than that. She knew she couldn’t bring herself to kill it.
It was half her.
It means I can have grandbabies for you, she’d once whispered to her mother, Galina. Maybe she remembered saying it that morning. Maybe it gave that tiny movement in her belly a face, a place in the world.
She hovered between despair and worse.
She’d made a decision to live, but it was a decision impossible to live with. So she made another kind of decision.
When Riojas returned from Bogotá, Claudia feigned happiness, guiding his hand onto her stomach as if helping him claim new territory. Another piece of the world ready to be affixed with his monogram—those cartoonish-looking Rs prominently displayed on every one of his handkerchiefs, napkins, undershorts—anything capable of bearing thread.
He began pampering her. Within limits, of course. She wasn’t his wife. He had one of those back in Bogotá, in addition to three obscenely rotund children. He couldn’t squire her around town. But he showed what might be termed deference. The leash grew looser. A captured rebel, even one showered with mink coats and five-hundred-dollar shoes, might run. But a girl carrying his child?
He stopped talking about the women who’d crossed him.
Except for the day she told him.
He asked for sex and she turned him down, pregnancy being a convenient excuse, one to be added to all the others.
Of course, he said, he understood. But before leaving her room he turned and spoke to her.
If you ever try to leave with my baby, I’ll hunt you down and kill you. Both of you. However long it takes, no matter where you’ve gone. Do you understand?
She nodded, forced herself to smile, as if that were a sentiment worthy of admiration. A macho declaration of love.
Good, he said.
She began venturing further. Past the tiger cages. Down a twisting dirt path into the jungle. She had smelled salt air. The hacienda’s property ended on a bluff overlooking the Caribbean, where a small fishing village sat directly below the cliff. Skiffs sat half beached on the sand, spidery nets drying in the sun.
A bodyguard still came with her, but the distance between them seemed to increase in proportion to her swollen stomach. He’d often leave her alone with a book, let her nap undisturbed on one of the hammocks overlooking the water.
She befriended the zookeeper; in addition to the tigers, there were ostriches, llamas, chimpanzees. His name was Benito, and unlike the other men in Riojas’ employ, he seemed to lack the psychotic gene. He’d been trained in zoology. He let her know that feeding live horses to the tigers wasn’t his idea. Feeding two-legged things to them wasn’t either.
A job was a job.
He let her watch as he fed them freshly cut hunks of sheep and cattle, venturing into the cage dangling the day’s lunch from a long hooked pole.