The Sum of Our Days Read online

  I spent several weeks far from my loved ones, moving as if I were hypnotized. At night I would fall into strange beds, anesthetized with sleeping pills, and in the mornings I shook off my bad dreams with black coffee. I spoke by phone with everyone in California and sent my mother letters by fax that faded with time because they were printed with an ink sensitive to light. Much of what happened during that time was lost. I’m sure it’s better so. I counted the hours until I could go back home and hide from the world. I wanted to sleep next to Willie, play with my grandchildren, and console myself making necklaces in my friend Tabra’s workshop.

  I found that in her pregnancy Celia was losing weight instead of gaining it, that my grandson Alejandro was going to day care with a backpack like a big boy, and that Andrea needed an operation on her eyes. My granddaughter was very small, with a head of curly golden hair and eyes that were completely crossed; her left eye simply went its own way. She was very quiet and didn’t romp around; she seemed always to be planning something, and as she sucked a finger she clung to a cotton diaper—her tuto—which she seldom let out of her hands. You never liked children, Paula. Once when you came to visit and you had to change Alejandro’s diaper, you confessed to me that the more you were with the baby, the less desire you had to be a mother. You never knew Andrea, but the night you died she was sleeping, beside her brother, at the foot of your bed.

  An Old Soul Comes to Visit

  IN MAY WILLIE CALLED ME in New York to tell me that, defying the predictions of science and the law of probability, Jennifer had given birth to a little girl. A double dose of narcotics had precipitated the birth, and Sabrina had been born two months before term. Someone had called an ambulance, which took Jennifer to the nearest emergency room, a private Catholic hospital where they had never seen anyone in that state of intoxication. That saved Sabrina, because had she been born in the public hospital in the poor section of Oakland where Jennifer lived, she would have been just one more of the hundreds of babies born only to die, condemned by drugs in the maternal womb. No one would have noticed her, and the tiny infant would have been lost in the cracks of the overloaded social medical system. Instead, she fell into the skilled hands of the emergency room physician who received her when she was spit out into the world, and who in the process became the first person to be seduced by Sabrina’s hypnotic gaze. “This child has little chance to live,” was his diagnosis when he examined her, but he was entangled in the web of her dark eyes and that evening did not go home at the end of his shift. By then a pediatrician had arrived, and the two of them stayed part of the night, keeping watch over the incubator and attempting to figure out how to detox this newborn without harming her more than she already had been, as well as how to feed her, since she couldn’t yet swallow. They had no time to worry about the mother; she had fled the hospital as soon as she could get out of the bed.

  Jennifer had been struck by a pain that threatened to split her apart, and she didn’t remember much of what had happened, only the terrifying shriek of the ambulance’s siren, a long corridor with bright lights, and faces shouting orders. She thought she had given birth to a girl, but she couldn’t stay to confirm it. They had left her resting in a room, but very soon she had felt symptoms of withdrawal and had begun to shake with nausea; she was bathed in sweat, and her nerves were live electric wires. She had dressed however she could and escaped through a service door. A couple of days later, somewhat recovered from the delivery and tranquilized by drugs, she thought of the infant she had left in the clinic and went back to look for her. But Sabrina was no longer hers. The Child Protective Services had intervened and put a monitor on Sabrina’s arm that would activate an alarm if anyone tried to take her from the room.

  I interrupted my tour in New York and returned on the first available flight to California. Willie picked me up at the airport, drove me directly to the hospital, and along the way explained that his granddaughter was very ill. Jennifer, lost in her own purgatory, could not take care of herself, say nothing of take charge of her daughter. She lived with a man twice her age who had been arrested more than once. “I’m sure he’s exploiting Jennifer and getting her drugs,” was my first thought, but Willie, who is much nobler than I, was grateful that the man at least provided a roof over Jennifer’s head.

  We ran down the corridors of the hospital to the nursery for the premature babies. The nurse already knew Willie, and took us to a little cradle back in one corner. I first took Sabrina in my arms one warm day in May; she was wrapped in a cotton blanket, like a little package. I opened the bundle fold by fold, and in its depths found a little curled-up snail in a diaper that enveloped her from her ankles to her neck. Two tiny wrinkled feet, arms like toothpicks, and a perfect head covered in a knit cap stuck out of the diaper; she had fine features and large, dark, almond-shaped eyes that stared at me with the determination of a warrior’s. She weighed nothing at all. Her skin was dry and smelled of medications; she was soft, pure foam. “She was born with her eyes open,” the nurse told us. Sabrina and I observed each other for a long time, getting acquainted. They say that at that age babies are nearly blind, but she had the same intense expression that characterizes her today. I held out a finger to stroke her cheek and her tiny fist grabbed on to it. I could feel her shivering, and I wrapped her back in her little blanket and held her tight against my breast.

  “How are you related to the baby?” asked a young woman who had introduced herself as the hospital’s pediatrician.

  “He’s her grandfather,” I replied, nodding toward my husband, who was over by the door, timid, or too emotional to speak.

  “Our tests reveal the presence of various toxic substances in the baby’s system. She is also premature; by my calculations she must be barely thirty-two weeks; she weighs three and a half pounds and her digestive system is not totally developed.”

  “Shouldn’t she be in an incubator?” Willie inquired.

  “We took her out of the incubator today because her respiration is normal. But don’t get your hopes up. I’m afraid the prognosis is not very good—”

  “She’s going to live!” the nurse interrupted emphatically as she took Sabrina from me. She was a majestic African-American woman with a tower of tiny braids atop her head and plump arms into which Sabrina promptly disappeared.

  “Odilia, please!” exclaimed the pediatrician, incredulous at this totally unprofessional eruption.

  “That’s all right, Doctor, we understand,” I told her with a weary sigh.

  I HADN’T HAD TIME to change the dress I’d been wearing for weeks on my tour. I had visited fifteen cities in twenty-one days, carrying a small tote that contained the essentials, which in my experience is very little. I would take a plane at the first light of day, reach the appropriate city, where an escort—nearly always a woman as exhausted as I—was waiting to take me to appointments with the press. I would eat a sandwich at noon, have a couple of interviews more, and go to the hotel to shower before the night’s program, in which I faced the public with swollen feet and a forced smile and read a few pages of my novel in English. I carried a framed photograph of you so you would be with me in the hotels. I wanted to remember you that way, with your splendid smile, your long hair, and your green blouse, but when I thought about you the images that assaulted me were other: your stiff body, your empty eyes, your absolute silence. In those publicity marathons, which would pulverize the bones of an Amazon, I traveled out of body, as if on an astral journey, and fulfilled the stages of the tour with a heavy rock in my chest, confident that my escorts would lead me by the hand during the day, accompany me to that night’s reading, and leave me at the airport the following dawn. During the long hours of the flight from New York to San Francisco, I had time to think about Sabrina, but I never imagined the way that granddaughter would change lives.

  “She has a very old soul,” said Odilia, the nurse, after the pediatrician left. “I’ve seen a lot of newborns in the twenty-two years I’ve worked here, but one
like Sabrina . . . never. She takes in everything. I stay with her even after my shift is over, and I came Sunday to see her, because I can’t get her out of my head.”

  “Do you think she’s going to die?” I asked in a choked voice.

  “That’s what the staff say. You heard the doctor. But I know she will live. She’s come to stay; she has good karma.”

  Karma. Again karma. How many times have I heard that term in California? The idea of karma drives me up the wall. To believe in destiny is limiting enough, but karma is much worse; it goes back through a thousand previous lifetimes, and sometimes you have to carry the misdeeds of your ancestors. Destiny can be changed, but to clear your karma takes a lifetime, and even that may not be enough. But that wasn’t the moment to discuss philosophy with Odilia. I felt an infinite tenderness for the baby and gratitude for the nurse who felt real affection for her. I buried my face in the diaper that enveloped Sabrina, happy that she was in the world.

  Willie and I left the nursery holding each other up. We went down several identical corridors looking for the exit, until we came to an elevator. Its mirror returned our images. It seemed to me that Willie had aged a century. His shoulders, always so arrogant, now slumped in defeat. I noticed the wrinkles around his eyes, the line of his jaw, less bold than before, and how at some point his little remaining hair had turned white. How quickly the days go by. I hadn’t seen the changes in his body and I didn’t see him as he was but as I remembered him. To me he was still the man I had fallen in love with at first sight six years before: handsome, athletic, wearing a dark suit that fit him a little snugly, as if his shoulders were challenging the seams. I liked his spontaneous laughter, his confident attitude, his elegant hands. He inhaled all the air around him, occupied all the space. One could see that he had lived and suffered, but he seemed invulnerable. And me? What had he seen in me when we met? How much I had changed in those six years, especially these last months? I had also been seeing myself through the same charitable filter of habit, never noticing the inevitable physical decline, the less firm breasts, the thicker waist, the sadder eyes. The mirror in the elevator revealed to me how exhausted we both were, something more profound than weariness from my travel and his work. Buddhists say that life is a river, that we are carried on a raft to our final destination. The river has its current, rapids, sandbars, whirlpools, and other obstacles that we can’t control, but we are given a pair of oars to guide our craft. The quality of the voyage depends upon our skill, but we cannot alter the course because the river always empties into death. Sometimes we have no choice but to give ourselves to the current, but that wasn’t the case here. I took a deep breath, stretched to my full, albeit meager, height, and slapped my husband on the back.

  “Stand up straight, Willie, we have to row.”

  He looked at me with that confused expression he tends to have when he thinks my English is deserting me.

  A Nest for Sabrina

  I NEVER DOUBTED THAT Willie and I would take charge of Sabrina: if the parents can’t do it, it becomes the responsibility of the grandparents; it’s a law of nature. However, I soon discovered that it would not be that simple. It wasn’t just taking a basket to the hospital to pick up the baby when they released her in a month or two. There were matters to be taken care of. The judge had already determined that she could not be handed over to Jennifer, but the man she lived with was still in the picture. I didn’t believe that he was the father because Sabrina didn’t have his African features—though I was assured that she was not purely Caucasian and that her skin would darken over the course of the weeks. Willie asked for a blood test, and although the man refused to take one, Jennifer had confirmed that he was the father, and that was all that was needed legally. From Chile, my mother advised us that it would be insane for us to adopt Sabrina, that Willie and I were worn too thin for a task of such magnitude. Willie had enough problems with his children and his office, and I had no break in my writing and traveling.

  “That baby will have to be cared for day and night. How do you plan to do that?” she asked.

  “The same way I cared for Paula,” I pronounced.

  Nico and Celia came to talk with us. Your brother, slim as a birch and still with the face of a runny-nosed kid, had a child in each arm. It was obvious from her belly that Celia was six months pregnant; she looked tired and her skin was sallow. Once again, I was amazed when I looked at Nico, who inherited nothing from me; he is a head and a half taller than I am, composed and rational, he has elegant manners, and is blessed with a gentle sense of irony. His intellect is pristinely clear, focused not only on mathematics and science, which are his passions, but also on any human activity. I am constantly surprised by what he knows, by his opinions. He finds solutions for all kinds of problems, from a complex computer program to another, no less complex mechanism for hanging a bicycle from the ceiling with no fuss. He can fix almost any object of practical use, and does it with such care that it comes out better than it was originally. I have never seen him lose control. He has three basic rules that he applies in his relationships: it isn’t personal, everyone is responsible for his or her own feelings, life isn’t fair. Where did he learn that? From the Mafia, I suppose. Don Corleone. I have tried in vain to follow his path of wisdom but . . . for me everything is personal, I do feel responsible for the feelings of other people, even those I scarcely know, and I have for more than sixty years been frustrated because I can’t accept that life is unfair.

  You had very little time to know your sister-in-law well, and I suspect that you weren’t overly fond of her since you were rather stern. I was a little afraid of you myself, Paula, I can tell you that now: your judgments tended to be concise and irrevocable. Besides, Celia raised people’s dander on purpose, it was as if she took great pains to shock everyone. Let me remind you of one conversation at the table.

  “I think they ought to ship all the queers to an island and make them stay there. It’s their fault that we have the AIDS epidemic,” said Celia.

  “How can you say something like that!” you exclaimed, horrified.

  “Why do we have to pay for those people’s problems?”

  “What island?” Willie asked, to be annoying.

  “I don’t know. The Farallons, for example.”

  “The Farallons are very small.”

  “Any island! A gay island where they can take it in the ass until they die!”

  “And what would they eat?”

  “Let them plant their vegetables and tend their chickens! Or we can use tax money to set up an airlift.”

  “Your English has improved a lot, Celia. Now you can articulate your bigotry to perfection,” my husband commented with a broad smile.

  “Thank you, Willie,” she replied.

  And that was how the conversation went as we sat around talking, until you left, indignant. It’s true. Celia tended to express herself in rather bold fashion, at least for California, but we have to remember that for several years she was involved with the Opus Dei, and that she came from Venezuela, where no one’s tongue is tied when it comes to saying anything they want. Celia is intelligent and contradictory; she has tremendous energy and an irreverent sense of humor that, translated into the limited English she had at that time, caused havoc. She worked as my assistant, and more than one journalist or unwarned visitor left my office put off by my daughter-in-law’s jokes. But I want to tell you something you may not know, Paula: she looked after you for months with the same tenderness she devoted to her children; she was with you in your last hours; she helped me prepare your body in the intimate rites of death; and she stayed beside you, waiting a day and a night, until Ernesto and the rest of the family that had traveled long distances arrived. We wanted you to receive them in your bed, in our house, for the final good-bye. But back to Sabrina. Nico and Celia joined us in the living room, and for once she had nothing to say; her eyes were glued on her wool socks and Franciscan monk’s sandals. It was Nico who did the talking. He began
with my mother’s argument that Willie and I were not of an age to be taking on the care of a baby. When Sabrina was fifteen, I would be sixty-six and Willie seventy-one.

  “Willie is no genius when it comes to raising children, and you, Mamá, you’re trying to replace Paula with a sick little baby. Would you be strong enough to bear grief like that again if Sabrina doesn’t survive? I don’t think so. But we’re young, and we can do it. We’ve already talked it over and we’re prepared to adopt Sabrina,” my son concluded.

  For a long moment, Willie and I couldn’t speak.

  “But very soon you’re going to have three children of your own,” I managed to say finally.

  “And what is one more stripe to the tiger?” Celia mumbled.

  “Thank you, I really do thank you, but that would be madness. You have your own family and you need to get ahead in this country, which won’t be easy. You can’t be responsible for Sabrina, that’s up to us.”

  In the meantime, behind our backs the days were going by and the cumbersome machinery of the law was following its inexorable course. The social worker in charge of the case, Rebecca, looked very young, but she had had a lot of experience. Her job was not one to be envied; she had to work with children who had suffered abuse and neglect, children who were shuttled from one institution to the next, who were adopted and then returned, children terrorized and filled with rage, children who were delinquent, or so traumatized that they would never lead a more or less normal life. Rebecca fought the bureaucracy, the institutionalized negligence, the lack of resources, the irremediable wickedness of humankind, and, especially, she fought time. There weren’t enough hours to study cases, visit the children, rescue the ones in the most urgent danger, find them a temporary refuge, protect them, save them, follow their cases. The same children passed through her office again and again, their problems growing worse with the years. Nothing was resolved, only postponed. After reading the information she had before her, Rebecca decided that when Sabrina left the hospital she should be sent to a foster home that specialized in children with serious illnesses. She filled out the necessary documents, they leaped from desk to desk until they reached the proper judge, and he signed them. Sabrina’s fate was sealed. When I learned that, I flew to Willie’s office, pulled him from a meeting, and loosed a barrage in Spanish that nearly flattened him, demanding that he go to speak with the judge immediately, file suit if it were necessary, because if they put Sabrina in a hospice for babies she would die no matter what. Willie got into gear and I went home to tremble and await results.