Paula Read online

  My grandfather could not accept the loss of his wife. I believe they lived in irreconcilable worlds and at fleeting moments loved one another with a painful tenderness and secret passion. Tata had all the vitality of a practical man: he was healthy, enterprising, and loved sports. She was alien to this earth, ethereal and unreachable. Her husband had to satisfy himself with living beneath the same roof but in a different dimension, never really possessing her. Only on a few solemn occasions—such as the birth of their children, when he received them with his own hands, or when he held her in his arms as she was dying—did he have the sensation that she truly existed. He tried a thousand times to capture the airy spirit that flashed past him like a comet, leaving behind an enduring trail of astral dust, but always ended with the feeling she had escaped him. At the end of his life, after he had lived for nearly a century and all that was left of the energetic patriarch was a shadow gnawed by loneliness and the implacable corrosion of the years, he abandoned the idea of ever owning her completely, as he had hoped in his youth; only then was he able to embrace her on equal terms. It was then that the shadow of Memé took on precise outlines and she became the tangible creature who accompanied him in the meticulous reconstruction of his memories and the ailments of his old age. Newly widowed, however, he felt betrayed. He accused Memé of having abandoned him halfway along the road. His mourning was dark as a crow’s wing; he painted the furniture black and, to avoid further suffering, tried to eliminate affection from his existence—never totally succeeding. He was a man defeated by his own gentility. He lived in a large room on the first floor of the house, where the hours were marked by the funereal striking of a grandfather’s clock. His door was always closed and I never dared knock, but every morning I stopped by to say hello before school, and sometimes he authorized me to search for a chocolate he had hidden for me. I never once heard him complain; his fortitude was heroic, but tears often filled his eyes, and when he thought he was alone, he talked with his wife’s memory. Once bowed by years and sorrow, he could no longer contain those tears; he used to brush them away with his fists, infuriated by his own weakness. “Caramba,” he would growl, “I’m getting old.” When he became a widower he abolished flowers, desserts, and music—any source of joy—from his life; silence spread through his house, and his soul.

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  My parents’ situation was ambiguous because there is no divorce in Chile; it was not difficult, however, to convince Tomás to annul the marriage, and so my brothers and I became the children of a single mother. My father, who apparently had no desire to pay child support, forfeited the oversight of his issue and quietly disappeared, while the social circle around my mother tightened to fend off any scandal. The one thing my father asked for when he signed the annulment was the return of his family coat of arms—three starving hounds on a blue field—a wish readily granted since my mother, indeed, the whole family, burst out laughing every time they saw it. With the withdrawal of that ironic sign of nobility went any blue blood we might claim; a stroke of a pen wiped out our paternal lineage. My grandfather would not allow any mention of his former son-in-law, but neither would he tolerate complaints in his presence; after all, he had warned his daughter not to marry. My mother obtained a modest position in a bank, where the main attraction was the possibility of retiring at full salary after thirty-five years of service, and the major drawback was the lust of the director, who kept pinning her in corners. A couple of bachelor uncles also lived in our large house; their only duty seems to have been to fill my childhood with unpleasant surprises. My favorite was Uncle Pablo, a brooding, solitary young man with dark skin, passionate eyes, flashing teeth, and stiff black hair he combed straight back in the manner of Rudolf Valentino. He was never without his overcoat with huge pockets in which he hid books he stole from public libraries and the homes of friends. I begged him many times to marry my mother, but he explained that incestuous relationships always produce Siamese twins. After that, I shifted my aim and made the same plea to Dr. Benjamin Viel, for whom I felt unreserved affection. Uncle Pablo was a strong ally; he slipped money into his sister’s pocketbook, helped her with us children, and defended her against gossip and other affronts. Opposed to sentimental displays, he never allowed anyone to touch him, or even get within breathing distance; he considered the telephone and the mail to be invasions of privacy, always laid an open book beside his place at the table to discourage attempts at conversation, and then tried to intimidate the person next to him with his barbaric table manners. We all knew, though, that he was a compassionate soul who secretly, hoping no one would suspect, lent a hand to a true army of needy persons. He was Tata’s right arm, his best friend, and his partner in the enterprise of raising sheep and exporting wool to Scotland. The household servants adored him and, despite his unsociable silences, his peculiarities and practical jokes, he had a legion of friends. Many years later, this eccentric man hopelessly bitten by the reading bug fell in love with a delightful cousin who had been reared in the country, where life was lived in terms of hard work and religion. That branch of the family, very formal and conservative, had to call on all their restraint to endure the bizarre behavior of their daughter’s suitor. One day, for instance, my uncle bought a cow’s head in the market, then spent two days scraping it clean inside—to the revulsion of us children, who had never seen anything so foul or monstrous at close range. The next Sunday, when the task was complete, he showed up after mass at his sweetheart’s house, dressed in a tuxedo and wearing the head like a tribal mask. The servant who opened the door never blinked an eye, she just stood aside and said, “Come in, don Pablo.” My uncle’s bedroom was filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and in the center was an anchorite’s cot where he spent a major portion of the night reading. He was the one who convinced me that in the dark the characters escaped and roamed through the house. I used to hide my head under the sheets because I was afraid of the devils in the mirrors and that throng of characters wandering about the house reliving their adventures and desires: pirates, courtesans, bandits, witches, and fair damsels. At eight-thirty I was supposed to turn off the light and go to sleep, but Uncle Pablo gave me a flashlight so I could read under the covers; ever since, I have enjoyed the vice of secret reading.

  It was impossible to be bored in a house filled with books and outrageous relatives, a forbidden cellar, litter after litter of kittens—which Margara drowned in a bucket of water—and a kitchen radio that was turned on behind my grandfather’s back to blare popular songs, news of bloodcurdling crimes, and serialized dramas. My uncles invented a game they called Ruffin, for “roughing up the ruffians,” a ferocious entertainment that consisted basically of teasing us children until they made us cry. They never ran out of ideas, from pasting our ten-peso allowances on the ceiling, where we could see them but not reach them, to offering us bonbons from which, using a syringe, they had removed the chocolate filling and replaced it with hot chili sauce. They used to push us from the top of the stairs in cardboard boxes, hold us upside down over the toilet and threaten to pull the chain, fill the washbasin with alcohol and light it, offering us money to put our hands in the flame, and stack up my grandfather’s used tires and drop us inside, where we screamed with fear in the dark, half choked by the smell of rotted rubber. When we traded in an old gas stove for a new electric one, they stood us on the burners, turned them on low, and, as we hopped from one foot to the other, began to tell us a story to see whether the heat on the soles of our shoes was more compelling than our interest in the tale. My mother defended us like a lioness, but she was not always there to protect us. Tata, on the other hand, had the idea that Ruffin built character and was a necessary part of our education. The theory that childhood must be a period of placid innocence did not exist then, this is something North Americans invented later. It was believed that life was hard, and it was therefore good for us to temper our nerves. Didactic methods were based on endurance; the more inhuman tests a child survived, the better prepared
he would be to face the hazards of adulthood. I admit that I suffered no ill effects and that if I had conformed with that tradition I would have martyred my own children and now be doing the same with my grandson—but I am too softhearted. Some summer Sundays, the whole family would go to San Cristobal, a hill in the center of Santiago that used to be a wilderness but today is a park. Sometimes Salvador and Tencha Allende came along with their three daughters and their dogs. Allende was already a well-known politician, the most aggressive deputy on the Left and the target of the Right’s odium, but to us he was just another uncle. We would struggle up the faintly marked trails through weeds and tall grasses, burdened down with baskets and wool shawls. Once there, we looked for an open space with a view of the city below—just as I would do during the military coup twenty years later, but for very different reasons—and kept an eye on the picnic, defending pieces of chicken, boiled eggs, and turnovers from the dogs and the invincible advance of the ants. The adults would rest while we cousins hid in the bushes to play doctor. From time to time you could hear the distant roar of a lion from the zoo on the other side of the hill. Once a week they used to feed them live animals, so that the excitement of the hunt and charge of adrenaline would keep them healthy: the big cats devoured an ancient burro, the boas gorged on mice, and the hyenas feasted on rabbits. Everyone said that was where all the dogs and cats from the pound ended up, and that there was a long list of people waiting for an invitation to watch that bone-chilling spectacle. I dreamed of the poor creatures thrust into the cages with the great carnivores, and writhed in anguish thinking of the early Christians in the Roman coliseum; I knew in my heart that if I was asked to choose between renouncing my faith and becoming lunch for a Bengal tiger, heresy would win hands down. After we ate we would run back down the hill, pushing and shoving, and rolling down the steepest part. Salvador Allende always took the lead with his dogs, and his daughter Carmen Paz and I were always the last, reaching the bottom with scraped hands and knees after all the others had grown tired of waiting for us. Except for those Sundays, and summer vacations, life was all sacrifice and hard work. Those were very difficult years for my mother; she had to contend with poverty, gossip, and the snubs of people who had been her friends. Her salary at the bank was barely pin money, and she rounded it out by making hats. It seems I can see her now at the dining table—the same Spanish oak table I use today as a desk in California—trying out various velvets, ribbons, and silk flowers. She would ship the hats off in round boxes to Lima, where they ended up adorning the heads of the cream of Peruvian society. Even so, she could not have survived without help from Tata and Uncle Pablo. In school, I was given a scholarship that depended on my grades. I don’t know how she obtained it, but it must have cost more than one humiliation. She spent hours standing in line in hospitals with my brother Juan who, thanks to Margara’s wooden spoon, had learned to swallow, but who suffered horrible intestinal upsets and had become a case study for doctors until Margara discovered he was eating toothpaste and cured him with a razor strap. My mother was truly overwhelmed by her responsibilities; she suffered unendurable headaches that kept her in bed for two or three days at a time, leaving her completely sapped. She worked hard and long but had little control over her life or those of her children. Margara, who gradually grew into an absolute tyrant, tried every way she could to come between us. When my mother came home from the bank in the evening, we would already be bathed, fed, and put to bed. “Don’t get the children all stirred up,” she would grumble, and to us she would say, “Don’t bother your Mama, she has a headache.” My mother clung to her children with all the force of her loneliness, and tried to compensate for her absence and the poverty of our lives with flights of imagination. All three of us slept in the same room with her, and at night, the only time we were together, she told us stories about our ancestors and fantastic tales spiced with black humor. She made up an imaginary world where we were all happy and human vices and the merciless laws of nature were forbidden. Those conversations in low voices, all in the same room, each of us in our own bed but so close we could touch, were the best part of those years. That was where my passion for stories was born, and I call upon those memories when I sit down to write.

  Pancho, the least cowed by our uncles’ “Ruffin,” was a blond little boy, sturdy and calm, but if he lost patience he could turn into a tiny beast with a savage bite. Margara adored him and called him her King; he was lost when she was out of the house. As an adolescent he left home to join a strange sect that lived in the desert region of northern Chile. We heard rumors that they tripped to other worlds on hallucinogenic mushrooms, indulged in unspeakable orgies, and brainwashed the young to make them slaves of the leaders. I never learned the truth, because no one who lived through that experience ever spoke of it—but they were marked by it. My brother renounced his family, cut all emotional ties, and hid behind a shell that nevertheless failed to protect him from pain and insecurity. Eventually, he twice married and divorced two wives, had children, and has lived nearly all his adult life outside Chile. I doubt that he will ever return. There is not much I can say about him because I don’t know him. Like my father, he is a mystery to me.

  Juan was born with the rare gift of likableness. Even now, a solemn professor in the mature years of his life, people immediately are attracted to him. When he was little, he looked like an angel, with dimpled cheeks and a helpless air capable of melting the hardest heart. Small, but prudent and astute, his many illnesses hampered his growth and condemned him to eternal poor health. We thought of him as the intellectual of the family, a true genius. At five, he could recite long poems and instantly calculate how much change we should get from a peso if we bought three caramels at eight cents apiece. He earned two master’s degrees and a doctorate from North American universities, and currently is working toward a degree in theology. He was a professor of political science, an agnostic and a Marxist, but after experiencing a spiritual crisis he decided to seek the answer to humanity’s problems in God. He abandoned his teaching position and began divinity studies. Because he is married, he can never become a Catholic priest, a choice he would have preferred because of family tradition, so he opted to become a Methodist—to the initial discomfort of my mother, who knew very little about that church and could picture the genius of the family reduced to singing hymns in a public square while accompanying himself on the guitar. Such sudden conversions are not rare among my mother’s people; I have many mystical relatives. I cannot imagine my brother preaching from a pulpit, because no one would understand his learned sermons—especially in English—but he will be an outstanding professor of theology. When he learned that you were ill, he dropped everything, caught the first plane, and came to Madrid to give me support. “We must have hope that Paula will get well,” he keeps telling me.

  Will you get well, Paula? I look at you in that bed, connected to a half dozen tubes and wires, unable even to breathe without help. I scarcely recognize you; your body has changed and your mind is in shadows. What goes through your thoughts? Tell me about your loneliness and your fears, about the distorted visions, the pain in your rock-heavy bones, the menacing silhouettes leaning over your bed, the voices, the murmurs, the lights. Nothing must make any sense to you. I know you hear because you flinch at the sound of metal on metal, but I don’t know whether you understand what it is. Do you want to live, Paula? You spent your life trying to be one with God. Do you want to die? Perhaps you have already begun. What meaning do the days have for you now? Have you returned to the place of total innocence, to the waters of my womb, like the fish you were before you were born? I count the days, and they are too many. Wake up, Paula, please wake up. . . .

  I place one hand over my heart, close my eyes, and concentrate. There is something dark inside. At first it is like the night air, transparent shadow, but soon it is transformed into impenetrable lead. I try to lie calmly and accept the blackness that fills my inner being as I am assaulted by images from the past. I see
myself before a large mirror. I take one step backward, another, and with each step decades are erased and I grow smaller, until the glass returns the reflection of a seven-year-old girl. Me.

  It has been raining for several days; I am leaping over puddles, my leather bag bouncing against my back. I am wearing a blue coat that is too large for me and a felt hat pulled down to my ears; my shoes are sodden. The huge wooden entry door, swollen by rain, is stuck; it takes all my weight to pull it open. In the garden of my grandfather’s house is a gigantic poplar with roots growing above the ground, a scrawny sentinel standing guard over property that appears abandoned—shutters hanging from their hinges, paint peeling from walls. Outdoors it is just getting dark, but inside it is already deepest night. All the lights are off, except in the kitchen. I walk through the garage toward the light. The walls of the cavernous kitchen are spotted with grease, and large blackened saucepans and spoons hang from iron hooks. One or two fly-specked lightbulbs cast a dull light on the scene. Something is bubbling in a pot and the kettle is whistling; the room smells of onion, and an enormous refrigerator purrs in a corner. Margara, a large woman with strong Indian features and a thin braid wound around her head, is listening to a serial on the radio. My brothers are sitting at the table with cups of hot cocoa and buttered bread. Margara does not look up. “Go see your mother, she’s in bed again,” she scolds. I take off my coat and hat. “Don’t strew your things about; I’m not your slave, I don’t have to pick up after you.” She turns up the volume on the radio. I leave the kitchen and confront the darkness in the rest of the house. I feel for the light switch and a pale glow barely fills the hall with its several doors. A claw-foot table holds the marble bust of a pensive girl; there is a mirror with a heavy wood frame, but I don’t look because the Devil might be reflected in it. I shiver as I climb the stairs; currents of air swirl through an incomprehensible hole in this strange architecture. Clinging to the handrail, I reach the second floor. The climb seems interminable. I am aware of silence and shadows. I walk to the closed door at the end of the hall and tiptoe in without knocking. A stove furnishes the only illumination; the ceilings are covered with the accumulation of years of paraffin soot. There are two beds, a bunk, a sofa, tables and chairs—it is all I can do to make my way through the furniture. My mother, with Pelvina López-Pun asleep at her feet, is lying beneath a mountain of covers, her face half-hidden on the pillow: straight nose, high cheekbones, pallid skin, finely drawn eyebrows above closed eyes. “Is it you?” A small, cold hand reaches out for mine.