Paula Read online

  “I go looking everywhere for God, but He slips away from me, Mama.”

  “God can wait for a while. Right now it’s more urgent to look for a doctor. What’s the matter with you, Paula?”

  “Porphyria,” you replied without hesitation. Since learning several years earlier you had inherited the condition, you had taken very good care of yourself, and regularly consulted one of the few specialists in Spain. When Ernesto found you so weak, he took you to the emergency room; they diagnosed flu, and sent you back home. That night your husband told me that for weeks, even months, you had been tense and tired. As we sat and discussed what we thought was depression, you were suffering behind the closed door of your bedroom; the porphyria was poisoning you, and neither of us saw it. I don’t know how I went on with my obligations; my mind was on you, and in a break between interviews I ran to the telephone to call. The minute I heard you were worse, I canceled the rest of my tour and flew to the hospital. I ran up the six flights of stairs and located your room in this monstrous building. I found you lying in bed, ashen, with a disoriented expression on your face. One glance was enough to realize how ill you were.

  “Why are you crying?” you asked in an unrecognizable voice.

  “Because I’m afraid. I love you, Paula.”

  “I love you, too, Mama.”

  That was the last thing you said to me, Paula. Instants later you were delirious, babbling numbers, with your eyes fixed on the ceiling. Ernesto and I sat beside your bed all night, in a daze, taking turns in the one available chair, while in other beds in the room an elderly patient was dying, a demented woman was screaming, and an undernourished Gypsy girl with signs of a recent beating tried to sleep. At dawn I convinced your husband to go rest, he was exhausted from being up several nights. He kissed you goodbye and left. An hour later the true horror was unleashed: a spine-chilling vomit of blood followed by convulsions. Your tense body arched upward, shuddering in violent spasms that lifted you from the bed. Your arms trembled and your fingers contracted as if you were trying to hold on to something. Your eyes were filled with terror, your face congested, and saliva ran from your mouth. I threw my body on yours to hold you down, and screamed at the top of my lungs for help. The room filled with people in white, and I was dragged out of the room by force. I remember finding myself kneeling on the floor, then being slapped. “Be quiet, Señora; you must be calm or you will have to leave.” A male nurse was shaking me. “Your daughter is better now, you can go in.” I tried to stand but my knees buckled. Someone helped me to your bed and then left. I was alone with you and with the patients in the other beds, who were watching in silence, each deep in her own private hell. Your color was ghostly, your eyes were rolled back, dried blood threaded from your lips, and you were cold. I waited, calling you by all the names I had given you as a little girl, but you were far away in another world. I tried to get you to drink a little water. When I shook you, you looked at me with glassy, dilated eyes, staring through me toward another horizon, and then suddenly you were as still as death, not breathing. Somehow I called for help, and immediately tried to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but fear made me clumsy. I did everything badly. I blew air into your mouth erratically, any way at all, five or six times, and then I noticed your heart had stopped beating, and began to pound your chest with my fists. Help arrived seconds later, and the last thing I saw was your bed hurtling toward the elevator at the end of the corridor. From that moment life stopped for you. And for me. Together we crossed a mysterious threshold and entered a zone of inky darkness.

  “Her condition is critical,” the physician on call in the intensive care unit told me.

  “Should I call her father in Chile?” I asked. “It will take him more than twenty hours to get here.”

  “Yes.”

  People began to come by: Ernesto’s relatives, and friends and nuns from your school. Someone notified the members of the family scattered through Chile, Venezuela, and the United States. Shortly afterward, your husband arrived, calm and gentle, more concerned about others’ feelings than his own, but he looked very fatigued. They allowed him to see you for a few minutes, and when he came back he informed us that you were hooked up to a respirator and being given a blood transfusion. “It isn’t as bad as they say,” he told us. “I feel Paula’s strong heart beating close to mine,” a phrase that at the moment seemed to have little meaning but now that I know him I can better understand. We spent that day and the next night in the waiting room. At times I drifted into an exhausted sleep, but when I opened my eyes I found Ernesto always in the same position, unmoving, waiting.

  “I’m terrified, Ernesto,” I admitted toward dawn.

  “There’s nothing we can do. Paula is in God’s hands.”

  “You find that easier to accept than I do, because at least you have your faith.”

  “It’s as painful to me as to you, but I have less fear of death and more hope for life,” he replied, putting his arms around me. I buried my face in his jacket, breathing his young male scent, racked by an atavistic fear.

  As it grew light, my mother and Michael arrived from Chile, along with Willie, from California. Your father was very pale. He had boarded the airplane in Santiago convinced that he would find you dead. The flight must have seemed an eternity. Devastated, I hugged my mother, and realized that although she may have shrunken with the years, she still radiates an aura of protection. Beside her, Willie is a giant, yet when I wanted a chest to lay my head upon, my mother’s seemed more ample and comforting than his. We went into the intensive care room and found you conscious, and improved over the previous day. The doctors had begun to replace the sodium in your body—which you were losing in alarming amounts—and the transfusion had revived you. That illusion, however, lasted only a few hours; soon afterward, you became very agitated, and with the massive dose of sedatives they used to treat it you descended into the deep coma from which you have not awakened to this day.

  “Your poor daughter, she doesn’t deserve this. I’m old, why can’t I die in her place?” don Manuel wonders from time to time, his voice barely audible.

  It is so difficult to write these pages, Paula, to retrace the steps of this painful journey, verify details, imagine how things might have been if you had fallen into more capable hands, if they had not immobilized you with drugs, if . . . , if . . . . How can I shake this guilt? When you mentioned the porphyria I thought you were exaggerating and, instead of seeking further help, I trusted those people in white; I handed over my daughter without hesitation. It isn’t possible to go back in time. I must not keep looking back, yet I can’t stop doing it, it’s an obsession. Nothing exists but the unremitting certainty of this hospital; the rest of my life is veiled in heavy mist.

  Willie, who after a few days had to return to his work in California, calls every morning and every night to offer support, to remind me that we love each other and have a happy life on the other side of the ocean. His voice comes to me from very far away, as if I had dreamed him and there was no wood house high above San Francisco Bay, no ardent lover now a distant husband. It also seems I have dreamed my son Nicolás, my daughter-in-law Celia, and little Alejandro with his giraffe eyelashes. Carmen, my agent, comes from time to time with sympathies from my editors or news about my books, but I don’t know what she’s talking about. Nothing exists but you, Paula, and this space without time in which we both are trapped.

  In the long, silent hours, I am trampled by memories, all happening in one instant, as if my entire life were a single, unfathomable image. The child and girl I was, the woman I am, the old woman I shall be, are all water in the same rushing torrent. My memory is like a Mexican mural in which all times are simultaneous: the ships of the Conquistadors in one corner and an Inquisitor torturing Indians in another, galloping Liberators with blood-soaked flags and the Aztecs’ Plumed Serpent facing a crucified Christ, all encircled by the billowing smokestacks of the industrial age. So it is with my life, a multilayered and ever-c
hanging fresco that only I can decipher, whose secret is mine alone. The mind selects, enhances, and betrays; happenings fade from memory; people forget one another and, in the end, all that remains is the journey of the soul, those rare moments of spiritual revelation. What actually happened isn’t what matters, only the resulting scars and distinguishing marks. My past has little meaning; I can see no order to it, no clarity, purpose, or path, only a blind journey guided by instinct and detours caused by events beyond my control. There was no deliberation on my part, only good intentions and the faint sense of a greater design determining my steps. Until now, I have never shared my past; it is my innermost garden, a place not even my most intimate lover has glimpsed. Take it, Paula, perhaps it will be of some use to you, because I fear that yours no longer exists, lost somewhere during your long sleep—and no one can live without memories.

  MY MOTHER RETURNED TO HER PARENTS’ HOME IN SANTIAGO. AT THAT time, a failed marriage was considered the worst fate that could befall a woman, but as yet she did not know that, and returned with her head high. Ramón, the captivated consul, conveyed her, her children, the daunting Margara, the dog, and the trunks and boxes with the silver platters to the ship. As he bid her goodbye, he held her hands in his and repeated his promise to look after her forever, but she, distracted by the task of arranging her part in the limited space of the stateroom, rewarded him with the faintest of smiles. She was not unaccustomed to men’s attentions, and she had no reason to suspect that this insecure-looking official was to play an essential role in her future. Neither had she forgotten that he had a wife and four children. As for the rest, she was besieged by more urgent matters: the newborn was gasping for breath like a fish on dry land, the other two children were sobbing with fright, and Margara had lapsed into one of her surly, reproachful silences. Only when my mother heard the sound of the engines and the hoarse blast announcing the ship’s departure did she feel the first breath of the winds fast overtaking her. She could count on the refuge of her parents’ home, but she could not go back to her single days; it was as if she were a widow, she would have to assume responsibility for her children. She was beginning to wonder how in the world she would cope, when the slamming of the waves brought back the memory of the prawns of her honeymoon and she smiled with relief—at least she was nowhere in the vicinity of her bizarre husband. She was just twenty-five and had no idea how she would support herself, but it was not for nothing that the adventurous blood of that remote Basque sailor flowed through her veins.

  That is how I came to grow up in my grandparents’ house. Well, I say “grow” in a manner of speaking; the truth is that I never did grow much. With tremendous effort, I reached five feet, where I remained until a month ago when I noticed that the bathroom mirror seemed higher on the wall. “Oh, piffle, you’re not shrinking, it’s just that you’ve lost weight and you’re not wearing your heels,” my mother consoled me, but I noticed she was observing me with a worried look. When I say it was hard work to grow, I am not speaking metaphorically; they tried everything possible to make me taller, except hormones. When I was young they were still experimental, and Benjamin Viel, our family physician and my mother’s enduring Platonic love, was afraid I would grow a mustache—although a mustache wouldn’t have been all that bad, you can always shave it off. Instead, for years I went to a gym where they suspended me from a system of cords and poles in the hope that gravity would stretch my skeleton. In my nightmares, I see myself hanging upside down by my ankles, but my mother swears that is pure fantasy, I never experienced anything that cruel. I was suspended by my neck, using an apparatus that prevented instantaneous death by hanging. The torment was for naught, however; all it did was lengthen my neck. The first school I attended was run by German nuns, but I didn’t last long there. I was expelled at the age of six for perversion, having organized a contest to show off our underpants, although the true reason may have been that my mother had scandalized a prudish Santiago society by not having a husband. From the nuns, I went to a more understanding English school, where such underwear exhibitions had little consequence as long as they were performed discreetly. I am sure that my childhood would have been different had Memé lived longer. My grandmother was training me to be an Illuminata; the first words she taught me were in Esperanto, an unpronounceable mishmash she expected to be the universal language of the future, and I was still in diapers when she first sat me down at the table of the spirits. All those splendid possibilities ended with her death. Our family home, a delight when she was presiding over it with her gatherings of intellectuals, Bohemians, and lunatics, became at her death a cheerless and empty place populated only by currents of air. Smells from that time endure in my memory: paraffin stoves in the winter and burnt sugar in summer, when a huge bonfire was lighted in the patio to make blackberry jam in a gigantic copper kettle. After my grandmother died, no birds sang in the cages, no more sonatas were played on the piano, all the plants and flowers withered and died, the cats escaped to run wild on the rooftops, and one by one all the other domestic animals perished: the rabbits and hens ended up in stews, and the nanny goat got out in the street one day and was run over by the milkman’s cart. The only survivor was the dog, Pelvina López-Pun, dozing beside the drapes that divided the drawing room from the dining room. I wandered among heavy Spanish furniture, marble statues, and pastoral paintings, calling my grandmother’s name, seeking her among the piles of books that filled every corner and reproduced at night in an uncontrollable orgy of printed paper. A tacit boundary divided the part of the house occupied by the family from the kitchen, patios, and servants’ quarters where I spent most of my life. Theirs was a badly ventilated, dark subworld of rooms furnished only with a cot, a chair, and a rickety chest of drawers, and decorated with calendars and color prints of saints. That was the sole refuge of those women who labored from sunup to sundown, the first to get up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night, after serving dinner and cleaning up the kitchen. They were free every other Sunday. I don’t remember their ever having a family or taking a vacation. They grew old serving, and died in our house. Once a month a large, slightly dim-witted man came to wax the floors. He strapped steel wool on his feet and danced around in a pathetic samba, scrubbing the parquet clean; then on hands and knees he applied wax with a rag, and finished with a stout brush to bring the wax to a high shine. The laundress also came once a week, a nondescript woman, all skin and bones, with two or three little ones clinging to her skirts and a mountain of dirty clothes balanced on her head. Each piece was counted, so that nothing would be missing when it was returned clean and ironed. Every time I happened to witness the humiliating process of counting the shirts, napkins, and sheets, I ran to hide among the plush drapes of the drawing room, to be close to my grandmother. I didn’t know why I was crying. I know now; I was crying of shame. Memé’s spirit reigned in the drapes—I suppose that is why the old dog never moved from there. The servants, on the other hand, believed my grandmother roamed the cellar, the origin of mysterious sounds and faint lights, and so never went down there. I knew the source of those phenomena very well, but had my own reasons for not telling. I searched for my grandmother’s translucent face on the theatrical curtains of the drawing room; I wrote messages on scraps of paper, folded them with care, and pinned them onto the heavy cloth where she would find them and know I had not forgotten her.

  Memé left this world with great simplicity. No one took note of her preparations for her journey to the Beyond until the end, when it was too late to intervene. Aware that it requires supreme airiness to detach oneself from the earth, she lightened her load. She rid herself of earthly goods and eliminated all superfluous emotions and desires, keeping only the barest essentials. She wrote a few letters and then, as her last act, took to her bed, never to get up again. She lay dying for a week, attended by her husband, who used every medication within his power to prevent her from suffering, as her life drained away and a muted drum thudded in her chest. There was no time
to inform anyone, yet her friends from the White Sisterhood received a telepathic message and came at the last instant to deliver messages for the benevolent souls that for years they had summoned to the Thursday sessions around the three-legged table. This marvelous woman left no physical trace of her presence other than a silver mirror, a prayer book with mother-of-pearl covers, and a fistful of wax orange blossoms, remnants of her bridal headdress. Neither did she leave me many memories, and those I have are surely deformed by a child’s view of that time and by the passing of years. None of that matters, though, because she has always been with me. When her asthma or anxiety made it hard for her to breathe, she hugged me close so my warmth would relieve her. That is the most vivid image I have of her: rice paper skin, gentle fingers, the wheezing, her affectionate hug, the scent of cologne, and an occasional hint of the almond lotion she rubbed on her hands. I heard people talk about her, and I hoard her few remaining relics in a tin box. All the rest I have invented, because we all need a grandmother. Not only has she played that role to perfection—despite the inconvenience of her death—but she also inspired the character I love most of all those in my books: Clara . . . clearest, clairvoyant Clara, of The House of the Spirits.