3.
When I was very young, I wanted to be a detective or, even better, a spy. I often said I wanted to be a doctor, but I think I was just trying to sound clever, as the sight of blood has always made me feel faint. The reality is that I wanted to solve mysteries. To further this ambition, at age eight, I started a spy club with my maternal cousins and a few friends. We had read and been inspired by Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. We were unfazed by the fact that we lived in the tropics and not in rainy England. We called it the Mysterious Boot Club. My friend Carolina and I had chosen the name carefully. Carolina, a year older than I, was one of the best students in her class at the British School. We had known each other and got along not because our families were friends but because she understood, like I did, the gravity of our investigative endeavors. We had initially thought of naming it the Mysterious Footprint, but that seemed too bookish and obvious for a club of young detectives. We did not want our enterprise to be dismissed as childish—we needed to be taken seriously by the other children and, more important, by the adults. Too many pages in books with mystery stories were filled with enigmatic footprints in the mud. So we decided to call it after the boot that had made the puzzling footprints—it seemed better somehow, less silly: both more cryptic and more worldly.
Nestled along the garden’s northernmost wall, surrounded by trees cackling with parrots and the odd wild monkey or sloth, sat a large disused kennel: the official clubhouse of the Mysterious Boot Club. I had asked my father to give us a tin of white paint and some thick brushes so we could make it look the part. He had obliged and we duly decorated the kennel. Carolina had the best handwriting and she fastidiously inked the letters CBM (Club Bota Misteriosa) in bold black permanent marker on a part of the outside wall that was protected from the rain. Every Saturday before the meetings, we would crawl through the low doorway next to the letters. Equipped with a small broom and a box of tissues that we had borrowed from the supply cupboard, we swept the cement floor, cleared the cobwebs, and attempted to shoo away the caterpillars, ants, and bugs that had sought shelter in its tin walls. Wooden crates served as bookshelves, stools, and a table. The place was stuffed with mystery books and notepads half-filled with our attempts at finding enigmas to spice up our mundane and protected lives.
In the absence of substantive mysteries with which to wrestle, I had occupied myself in composing bylaws that set out the hierarchy and objectives of the club. Given that role, I was unsurprisingly appointed president. The two most sensible and organized members of our group, Carolina and my cousin Rodrigo, were the vice presidents. We had decided that all prospective members should undertake IQ and physical agility tests. The intelligence test I had torn from a Reader’s Digest left lying around the kitchen, and the agility test consisted mostly of running ahead of the not very furious dogs with pockets full of kibble before climbing a tree. We had to bend the rules a little sometimes to ensure that anyone invited could belong. A disappointed aunt heard about our bylaws and coerced us into accepting my youngest cousin, Patricia, who tended to bite when angry and was too young to read, let alone pass, any written test. My parents were adamant that I behave in a kind and inclusive manner, so the entrance requirements were malleable and existed principally to give the members a certain aura of prestige.
On those Saturday mornings, we would swap books and collect pocket money in a washed-out mayonnaise jar with a slit on the lid, for club supplies and to help an old people’s home down the road. We would all bring notebooks and spy on the people who lived, visited, or worked in my house. We would set one another tasks in half-hour slots and then gather at the clubhouse to drink mango or watermelon juice and read out our reports in serious tones.
The bulletins were mostly tedious. We all, of course, pretended that they were riveting. Oftentimes, we had to spy while taking turns guarding the tiny biting cousin. Carolina observed that the gardener repeatedly picked up leaves from the same patch in the garden, over and over, week after week. It was clear to her, she solemnly reported, toying with a dark curl of her long hair, that he was simply killing time. My older cousin Eloy, who had big blue eyes and a musical voice, read in great detail his notes about a cleaner whom he had watched dusting and who had suspiciously moved books from one library shelf to another. He had also seen her as she switched around LPs in my father’s color-coded collection. Rock and roll (alphabetically arranged by band with red tape on the spine) had been exchanged with opera (alphabetically arranged by composer with yellow tape). Eloy could not detect whether this had been an act of playfulness, defiance, or absentmindedness. He said what we all knew: when my father spotted the displacement, he would be irate. My father’s constant desire for organization was mystifying and slightly unnerving to all the members of the Mysterious Boot Club.
We would ask everyone who visited or worked in the house if they had seen anything out of the ordinary. Months would pass and our gatherings continued, in the main, identical. We diligently monitored the activity in the house and patiently recorded every mundane detail. We would encounter small puzzles, gather, and whisper excitedly only to realize with abject disappointment that, after a few queries, all was too easily explained.
I remember once feeling exhilarated, during school holidays, when we found a red waxy rind in the rubbish after the worried cook had complained that an entire ball of Edam cheese was missing. We ineffectively dusted the rind for fingerprints and patrolled with an ink pad that I had borrowed from my father’s desk, demanding that everyone at the house cooperate and be fingerprinted. It turned out that Maria, the Galician lady who was missing two fingers and came to do the daily ironing, had skipped breakfast and lunch that day, was famished, and had a passion for the imported yellow cheese. She confessed wearily just as Carolina and I asked to press her remaining fingers against the ink pad. There always seemed to be a straightforward explanation for such puzzles. All of us children yearned desperately for a real conundrum against which to test our skills.
Then one day my cousin, after what seemed like hundreds of unmemorable reports, the gentle and pragmatic Rodrigo, relayed that my father had moved a strange gray box from a locked drawer in the watch workshop to a cupboard in the library.
Quite why that particular bulletin caught my attention, I cannot say. Perhaps it was because Rodrigo told us that my father had been acting awkwardly and seemed to move more slowly than he should, considering he was just carrying a cardboard box. He reported that it seemed to contain something heavy or precious. After my father left the library, Rodrigo had opened the cupboard but had not dared touch the box.
I did not disclose the slightest interest in the incident to my fellow spies. I am not sure why. Perhaps it was because it involved my father.
That afternoon, as soon as the spies left after their lunch and swim, I went to look for the box. I found it easily enough. It was dark gray and made of board and cloth. It sat below the shelf where the checkers board and the wooden chess set were kept. It was not concealed, it just lay there inside a cupboard in which it did not belong. I remember thinking at the time that it may be filled with broken watches. I moved it and, contrary to Rodrigo’s intelligence, was struck by how very light it was.
I sat on the carpet in front of the bookcase and lifted the lid with the tips of trembling fingers. I sensed that this was the mystery we had been waiting for. The box contained only five or six papers and cards. On the top was a long-expired Venezuelan passport, much smaller than the ones I had seen. It was dated 1956 and bore a picture of my father as I knew him, smiling and already wrinkled, with glasses balanced on a boxer’s nose. Underneath the passport lay other documents, thin and fading.