The Sum of Our Days Read online

  Celia was acting in what she believed was my best interest, and I failed to jump in and go to my husband’s defense, so the suspicion she had unleashed was left floating without being resolved. I never imagined that their argument was going to have such far-reaching consequences. Willie was deeply wounded, not by Celia, but by me. When finally we could talk about it, he said that I excluded him, that I formed an impenetrable circle with my family and left him outside. I didn’t even trust him. I tried to smooth things over, but it was impossible. We had sunk pretty low. Willie and I didn’t speak for several days, and we harbored a grudge for weeks. This time I couldn’t run away because Tabra was convalescing with us, and my entire family was there in the house. Willie built a wall around himself; he was silent, furious, preoccupied. He went to the office early and returned late; he sat by himself to watch television, and stopped cooking for us. We ate rice and fried eggs every day. Not even the children could get through to him; they went around on tiptoes and got tired of inventing reasons to go to him: Grandpa had turned into an old grump. Nonetheless, we held to our agreement not to speak the word divorce, and I think that despite appearances, we both knew that we hadn’t come to the end of our rope, we still had a lot in reserve. At night we slept on our own corner of the bed, but we always woke up with our arms around each other. Over time that helped us toward a reconciliation.

  I MAY HAVE GIVEN THE IMPRESSION in this account that Willie and I did nothing but argue, Paula. Of course it wasn’t like that. Except for the times I went off to sleep at Tabra’s, that is, at the most heated moments of our skirmishes, we went hand in hand. In the car, on the street, everywhere, always holding hands. It was like that from the first, but within two weeks of our meeting that custom became a necessity because of the affair of the shoes. Given my height, I have always worn high heels, but Willie insisted that I should be comfortable and not like the old-time Chinese women with their painful bound feet. He gave me a pair of athletic shoes that still today, eighteen years later, sit like new in their box. To please him, I bought a pair of sandals I saw on television. They had shown some slender models playing basketball in cocktail dresses and high heels . . . just what I needed. I threw away the shoes I’d brought from Venezuela and replaced them with those prodigious sandals. They didn’t work, I just kept walking out of them. I was so often flat on my face on the floor that for reasons of basic safety Willie has always grasped my hand tight. Besides, we’re fond of each other and that helps whatever the relationship. I like Willie a lot, and I show that in a number of ways. He has begged me not to translate into English the love words I say to him in Spanish because they sound suspicious. I always remind him that no one has ever loved him more than I do, not even his mother, and that if I die he will end his days alone in some home for old folks, so it’s worth his while to spoil me and celebrate me. Willie is not a man to squander romantic words, but if he has lived with me so many years without strangling me, it must be that he likes me a little. What is the secret of a good marriage? I can’t say, every couple is different. The two of us are bound together by our ideas, a similar way of looking at the world, camaraderie, loyalty, humor. We look after each other. We have the same schedule, we sometimes use the same toothbrush, and we like the same movies. Willie says that when we’re together our energies are multiplied, that we have the “spiritual connection” he felt when he first met me. It may be. All I know is that I like sleeping with him.

  In view of our difficulties, we decided to have individual therapy, and Willie found a psychiatrist he got along with from the beginning, a huge bearded bear of a man that I perceived as my declared enemy, but one who with time would play a fundamental role in our lives. I don’t know what Willie wanted to resolve in his therapy; I suppose the most urgent thing was his relationship with his children. In mine, when I began to rake through my memory, I realized that I was carrying a very heavy burden. I had to confront old silences, admit that my father’s having abandoned me at the age of three had marked me and that the scar was still visible. It had determined my feminist posture and my relations with men from my grandfather and Tío Ramón, whom I had always rebelled against, to Nico, whom I treated as if he were a little boy—to say nothing of lovers and husbands to whom I had never completely given myself. In one session, my Buddhist therapist tried to hypnotize me. He didn’t succeed, but at least I relaxed and I could see inside my heart an enormous black granite stone. I knew then that my task would be to rid myself of it. I would have to chip away at it, piece by piece.

  To free myself of that dark rock, in addition to therapy and walks in the misty forest of your ashes, I took yoga classes, and I increased the number of calming acupuncture sessions with Dr. Shima, as much for the benefit of his presence as for his science. Lying on his cot with needles all over my body, I slipped away to other dimensions.

  I was looking for you, daughter. I thought about your soul, trapped in an inert body through all that long year of 1992. At times I felt a claw in my throat, I could barely breathe, or I was weighed down by the weight of a sack of sand in my chest and felt as if I were buried in a deep hole, but soon I would remember to direct my breathing to the site of the sorrow, with calm, as it is thought one should do while giving birth, and immediately the anguish would diminish. Then I would visualize a stairway that allowed me to climb out of the hole and reach daylight, the open sky. Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me. Once I said—or wrote somewhere—that after your death I was no longer afraid of anything, but that isn’t true, Paula. I am afraid to lose persons I love or to see them suffer; I fear the deterioration of old age, I fear the world’s increasing poverty, violence, and the world’s corruption. In these years without you I have learned to manage sadness, making it my ally. Little by little your absence and other losses in my life are turning into a sweet nostalgia. That is what I am attempting in my stumbling spiritual practice: to rid myself of the negative feelings that prevent walking with assurance. I want to transform rage into creative energy and guilt into a mocking acceptance of my faults; I want to sweep away arrogance and vanity. I have no illusions, I will never achieve absolute detachment, authentic compassion, or the state of ecstasy known to the enlightened; it seems I do not have the bones of a saint, but I can aspire to crumbs: fewer bonds, a bit of affection for others, the joy of a clean conscience.

  It’s a shame you couldn’t appreciate Miki Shima during those months of his frequent visits to give you Chinese herbs and acupuncture treatments. You would have fallen in love with him, just the way my mother and I did. He wears the suits of a duke, starched shirts, gold cuff links, silk neckties. When I met him he had black hair, but now, just a few years later, he is beginning to show threads of gray, though he still doesn’t have a single wrinkle and his skin is as pink as an infant’s, all thanks to his miraculous ointments. He told me that his parents lived together for sixty years, openly detesting each other. The husband never spoke in the house and the wife, specifically to exasperate him, never stopped, but she served him like a good Japanese wife of that time: she prepared his bath, scrubbed his back, put food into his mouth, fanned him on summer days, “So he could never say that she had failed in her duties,” and in the same manner he paid the bills and slept at home every night, “So she could never say he was heartless.” One day the woman died, even though he was much older than she and by rights he should have had lung cancer because he smoked like a locomotive. She, who was strong and untiring in her hatred, was dispatched in two minutes by a heart attack. Miki’s father had never so much as boiled water for his tea, much less washed his socks or rolled up the mat he slept on. His children expected him to waste away and die, but Miki prescribed some herbs for him and soon he began to put on weight and stand up straight, and laugh and talk for the first time in years. Now he rises at dawn, eats a ball of rice with tofu and the famous herbs, meditates, chants, does his tai chi exercises, and goes off with three packs of cigarettes in his pocket to catch t
rout. The walk to the river takes a couple of hours. He returns with a fish that he himself cooks, seasoned with Miki’s magical herbs, and ends his day with a hot bath and a ceremony to honor his ancestors and, in passing, affront his wife’s memory. “He is eighty-nine years old and he’s fit as a pup,” Miki told me. I decided that if those Chinese herbs had made that Japanese grandfather young again, they could dissolve the frightful rock in my heart.

  Ballroom Dancing and Chocolate

  ONE OF THE PSYCHOLOGISTS—we had several at our disposal—recommended that Willie and I share some activities that were fun, not just obligatory. We needed more lightness and entertainment in our lives. I proposed to my husband that we should take dancing lessons because we’d seen an Australian movie on that theme, Strictly Ballroom, and I could already see us whirling in the glow of crystal chandeliers, Willie in a dinner jacket and two-tone shoes and I in my beaded dress and ostrich plumes, both of us airy, graceful, moving to the same rhythm, in perfect harmony, as we hoped some day our relationship would be. When we had met that unforgettable day in October 1987, Willie had taken me dancing at a hotel in San Francisco. That gave me the opportunity to bury my nose in his chest and sniff him, and that was why I fell in love with him. Willie smells like a healthy boy. His only memory of that occasion, however, was that I kept tugging him around. It was like trying to break a wild mare, he told me. It seems to me that he asked, “Is this going to be a problem between us?” And he assures me that I answered, in a submissive little voice, “Of course not.” That had been a number of years before.

  We decided to begin with private lessons, so we wouldn’t look ridiculous in front of other more advanced dancers. More accurately, I was the one who made that decision. The truth is that Willie was a good dancer in his youth, fawned over and with a winning record in dance contests, and I, in contrast, had all the grace of a Mack truck on the dance floor. The ballroom of the academy had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on all four sides, and the teacher turned out to be a nineteen-year-old Scandinavian with legs as long as I was tall. She was wearing black stockings with seams down the back, and stiletto-heeled sandals. She announced that we would begin by dancing the salsa. She pointed me to a chair, fell into Willie’s arms, and waited for the precise beat of the music to launch herself across the floor.

  “The man leads,” was her first lesson.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but that’s how it is,” she said.

  “Aha!” Willie crowed with a triumphant air.

  “That doesn’t seem fair to me,” I persisted.

  “What’s not fair about it?” asked the Scandinavian.

  “I think we should take turns. Willie will lead once and then it will be my turn.”

  “The man always leads!” the brutish woman exclaimed.

  She and my husband glided around the dance floor to a Latin beat as the huge mirrors reflected their interlocked bodies to infinity, the long black-stocking-clad legs and Willie’s idiotic smile, while I sat and stewed in my chair.

  After we left the class, we had a fight in the car that came close to ending in fisticuffs. According to Willie, he hadn’t even noticed the teacher’s legs or her breasts. That was all in my head. “Jeez! How stupid can you get!” he cried. The fact that I had spent an hour in that chair while he danced was logical, since the man leads, and once he learned, he could guide me around the floor with the perfection of the courting dance of the heron. He didn’t put it exactly that way, but to me it sounded as if he was mocking me. My psychologist thought that we should not give up, that ballroom dancing was an effective discipline for body and soul. What did he know, a Buddhist green tea drinker who surely had never danced in his life! But all the same, we went to a second and then a third class before I lost patience and punched the instructor. I have never felt more humiliated. The result was that what little we knew about dancing we lost, and since then Willie and I have gone dancing only once. I am recounting this episode only because it is like an allegory of our character: it captures every nuance from head to toe.

  CELIA, NICO, AND THE CHILDREN moved into their new house, and Celia’s brother came to live with them. He was a tall, pleasant, although rather spoiled young man who was looking for his destiny and planned to live in the United States. I believe that like Celia he had never gotten along very well with his family.

  In the meantime, the publication of Paula brought me undeserved prizes and honorary degrees. I was elected a member of assorted academies of the language, and even given the symbolic keys to a city. Caps and gowns piled up in a trunk, and Andrea used them for her costumes—my granddaughter had entered a conservationist stage, and had a doll she named Save-the-Tuna. Luckily I never lost sight of something Carmen Balcells told me. “The prize doesn’t honor the one who receives it as much as the one who gives it, so don’t get any big ideas about yourself.” That was impossible. My grandchildren made sure that I remained humble, and Willie reminded me that resting on your laurels is the best way to crush them.

  It was about that time that Willie, Tabra, and I went to Chile to attend the premiere of The House of the Spirits. There were still Pinochet sympathizers in that country who were not ashamed to admit it. Today there are fewer in number because the general lost prestige among his faithful when the story of his thievery, his tax evasion, and his corruption came to light. The same people who had overlooked torture and murders could not forgive the millions he had stolen. It had been almost six years since the dictator had been defeated in a plebiscite, but the military, the press, and the judicial system still treated him with kid gloves. The right controlled the Congress, and the country was run under a constitution Pinochet himself had created; he counted on immunity from the Senate and the shelter of an amnesty law. The democracy was conditional, and there was a tacit social and political agreement not to provoke the military. A few years later, when Pinochet was arrested in England, where he had gone to collect his commissions on arms sales, have a medical checkup, and take high tea with his friend Margaret Thatcher, he was exposed in the world press and accused of crimes against humanity, and the legal edifice he had constructed to protect himself came tumbling down, and at last Chileans dared come out in the street and make fun of him.

  The movie was as welcome as the plague among the extreme right, but it was enthusiastically received by most people, particularly by the young who had been raised under strict censorship and who wanted to know more about what had happened in Chile during the ’70s and ’80s. I remember that during the performance, one senator of the right jumped up and stamped out of the theater, announcing at the top of his lungs that the film was a string of lies besmirching a great patriot, our General Pinochet. Some reporters asked me what I thought about that, and I answered in good faith, since I had heard it said many times: “Everyone knows that gentleman is soft in the head.” I regret that I’ve forgotten the man’s name. . . . In spite of the few snags at the beginning, the film was very successful and now, ten years later, it is still one of the favorites on television and video.

  Tabra, who though she had been to the least-known corners of the planet had never been in Chile, took away a very good impression of my country. I don’t know what she had expected but she found herself in a city that reminded her of Europe, surrounded by magnificent mountains, hospitable people, and delicious food. We had a suite in the most luxurious hotel in town, where each night we were left a chocolate sculpture modeled on some aspect of our indigenous past, such as the cacique Caupolicán armed with a lance and followed by two or three of his Mapuche warriors. Tabra worked hard to eat the last crumb, with the hope of getting rid of it once and for all, but within a few hours it would be replaced with another two pounds of chocolate: a cart with two oxen, or six of our cowboys on horseback, the celebrated huasos, carrying the Chilean flag. And since she had learned as a child never to leave anything on her plate, she would give a great sigh and attack the plate, until the night she was conquered by a replica of Aconca
gue, the highest peak in the cordillera of the Andes in solid chocolate, as massive as the huge dark rock that according to my psychiatrist was sitting in the middle of my chest.

  Children, Those Pint-Sized Lunatics

  WILLIE AND I REALIZED WITH SURPRISE that we had been together for nine years and that we were by now on a much firmer footing. According to him, he had from the first moment felt that I was his soul mate and had accepted me unconditionally, but that wasn’t true in my case. Still today, a thousand years later, I marvel at the fact that we two met in all the world’s vastness, felt attracted to each other, and managed to sweep away problems that at times seemed insurmountable, to form a couple.

  The grandchildren, those pint-sized lunatics, as the Argentine humorist Quino defines them, have been the most entertaining part of our lives. The shadows around Sabrina’s birth had cleared, and the gift her fairy godmother had given her as compensation for her physical limitations was now evident: a strength of character capable of overcoming obstacles that would have paralyzed a samurai. What other children did effortlessly, like walking or putting a spoonful of soup into their mouths, demanded invincible tenacity on her part, and she always achieved it. She limped, because her legs did not perform properly, but no one doubted that she was going to walk in the future, just as she had learned to swim, hang from a tree with one hand, and ride her bicycle pedaling with only one leg. Like her maternal grandmother, Willie’s first wife, she was an extraordinary athlete. The upper part of her body was so strong and she was so agile that she was playing basketball in a wheelchair. She was a beautiful and delicate child the color of burnt sugar, with the profile of the famous queen Nefertiti. She learned to speak very early on and never showed the slightest trace of shyness, perhaps because she lived surrounded by people.