Paula Page 5
“Does it hurt a lot, Mama?”
“My head is bursting.”
“I’ll go get you a glass of warm milk and tell my brothers not to make any noise.”
“Don’t leave. Stay here with me. Put your hand on my forehead, that helps.”
I sit on the bed and do as she asks, trembling with sympathy, not knowing how to free her from that crushing pain. Blessed Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen. If she dies, my brothers and I are lost; they will send us to my father. The mere idea terrifies me. Margara is always telling me that if I don’t behave I will have to go live with him. Could it be true? I have to find out, but I don’t dare ask my mother, it would make her headache worse. I mustn’t add to her worries or the pain will grow until her head explodes. I can’t mention it to Tata, either; no one may speak my father’s name in his presence. “Papa” is a forbidden word, and anyone who says it stirs up a hornet’s nest. I’m hungry, I want to go down to the kitchen and drink my cocoa, but I must not leave my mother, and besides, I don’t have the courage to face Margara. My shoes are wet and my feet feel like ice. I stroke my mother’s poor head and concentrate: everything depends on me now. If I don’t move, and pray hard, I can make the pain go away.
I am forty-nine years old. I place one hand over my heart and say in a little girl’s voice: I do not want to be like my mother, I will be like my grandfather—independent, healthy, strong. I will not allow anyone to order me about, and I will not be beholden to anyone. I want to be like my grandfather and protect my mother.
I think Tata was always sorry I wasn’t a boy; had I been, he could have taught me to play jai alai, and use his tools, and hunt. I would have been his companion on the trips he made every year to Patagonia for the sheepshearing. In those days one traveled south by train, or by automobile over twisting dirt roads that could turn into quagmires, immobilizing cars until a team of oxen pulled them free. Lakes were crossed by rope-drawn ferries, and mountains on muleback. Those were demanding expeditions. My grandfather slept beneath the stars, wrapped in a heavy Castilian blanket; he bathed in raging rivers fed by snowmelt from the peaks and ate garbanzo beans and tinned sardines until he reached the Argentine side of the mountain. There a crew was waiting for him with a truck and a lamb roasting over a slow fire. Rough men, they hunkered around the fire in silence. They lived in a vast, forsaken landscape where the wind tore the words from their mouths. With gaucho knives they sliced off great hunks of meat and devoured them, their gaze fixed on the glowing coals. One of them might strum a plaintive song on his guitar while the maté passed from hand to hand, the aromatic brew of bitter green yerba they drink there like tea. I treasure indelible memories of the one trip to the south I made with my grandfather—even though I was so carsick I thought I would die, a mule threw me twice, and then as I watched them shearing the sheep I was struck dumb, unable to speak until we returned to civilization. The sheepshearers, who were paid by the animal, could zip off a fleece in less than a minute, but, however careful they were, they often sliced off strips of skin with the wool, and I saw more than one wretched lamb split open, its guts stuffed back any which way in its belly before being stitched up with an upholstery needle and returned to the flock with the hope it would survive and continue to produce wool.
My love for heights, and my relationship with trees, originated with that trip. I have returned several times to the south of Chile and I always feel the same indescribable love for the landscape. Crossing the cordillera of the Andes is engraved in my soul as one of the true epiphanies of my existence. Now, and during other critical moments when I try to remember prayers and cannot evoke the words or the rituals, the only vision I can turn to for consolation is that of those misty paths through the chill forest of gigantic ferns and tree trunks rising toward the heavens, the sheer mountain passes, and the sharp profile of snow-covered volcanoes reflected in emerald lakes. To be one with God must be very much like being in this extraordinary realm. In my memory, my grandfather, the guide, and the mules have disappeared. I am alone, walking in solemn silence through that temple of rock and vegetation. I am breathing clean air cold and wet with rain. My feet sink into a carpet of mud and rotted leaves; the scent of the earth is a sword piercing my bones. Effortlessly, I walk and walk along the narrow, misty paths, yet never leave that undiscovered world surrounded with century-old trees, fallen trunks, strips of aromatic bark, and roots bursting through the earth like mutilated, vegetal hands. On the path, my face is brushed by strong spiderwebs, lace tablecloths pearled with drops of water and phosphorescent-winged mosquitoes. Here and there I glimpse the brilliant scarlet and white of copihues and other flowers that live at these heights tangled among the trees like glittering beads. You can feel the breath of the gods, throbbing, absolute presences in this resplendent domain of precipices and high walls of black rock polished by the snow to the sensual perfection of marble. Water, and more water. Thin crystalline serpents slip through fissures of rock into the hidden depths of the mountains and join together in small brooks and sounding waterfalls. Suddenly I am startled by the scream of a bird or thud of a rock rolling from above, but the enveloping peace of this vastness descends again, and I realize I am weeping with happiness. That trip, with all its obstacles and hidden dangers, its desired solitude and breathtaking beauty, is like the journey of my own life. This memory is sacred to me; this memory is my country. When I say Chile, this is what I think of. Time and time again I have tried to recapture the emotion that forest stirs in me, a feeling more intense than the most perfect orgasm, than the longest ovation.
* * *
Every year when the wrestling season began, my grandfather would take me to the Teatro Caupolicán. I always wore my Sunday best, my patent leather shoes and white gloves contrasting sharply with the scruffy appearance of the crowd. Thus attired, and holding tight to the hand of the grand old man at my side, I pushed my way through the roaring spectators. We always sat in the first row, “So we can see the blood,” Tata used to say with ferocious anticipation. Once, one of the gladiators landed right on us, a savage mass of sweaty flesh that flattened us like cockroaches. My grandfather had prepared many times for that eventuality, yet when it came he did not know how to react and, instead of beating the man to a pulp with his cane, as he had always said he would, he greeted him with a cordial handclasp to which the man, equally nonplussed, replied with a timid smile. That was one of the great disillusions of my childhood. Tata was demoted from a barbarous Mount Olympus where he had until then occupied the single throne and reduced to human dimensions. I believe that my rebelliousness dates from that moment.
The favorite of the crowd was The Angel, a handsome man with long blond hair, always costumed in a blue cape with silver stars, white boots, and a ridiculously tiny pair of trunks that barely covered his private parts. Every Saturday he bet his magnificent yellow locks against the challenge of the terrible Kuramoto, a Mapuche Indian who wore a kimono and wooden clogs and pretended to be Japanese. They engaged one another in spectacular combat, biting, twisting necks, kicking genitals, and sticking fingers in each other’s eyes, while my grandfather, holding his beret in one hand and brandishing his cane in the other, yelled “Kill him! Kill him!”—indiscriminately, since it didn’t matter to him who murdered whom. Two out of three contests, Kuramoto vanquished The Angel; with the decision, the referee would produce a pair of scintillating scissors and before the respectful silence of the crowd the phony Nipponese warrior would cut off his rival’s curls. The miracle that one week later The Angel again displayed shoulder-length hair was irrefutable proof of his divinity.
The high point of the night, however, was always The Mummy, who for years filled my nights with terror. The lights in the theater would dim and we would hear a scratchy recording of a funeral march, at which point two Egyptians, profiled against lighted torches, would appear, followed by another four carrying a gaudily painted sarcophagus on a bier. The four would lower the mummy case
to the floor of the ring and take one or two steps backward, all the while chanting in some dead tongue. Frozen with dread, we watched as the lid opened and a gauze-swathed humanoid figure emerged—apparently in perfect health, to judge by all the roaring and breast-beating. The Mummy did not have the mobility of the other wrestlers, but relied on formidable kicks and battering, stiff-armed blows that slammed opponents into the ropes and decked referees. Once, one of those hammer blows split Tarzan’s head, and when we got home my grandfather at last could exhibit some red stains on his shirt. “This isn’t blood, or anything near; it’s tomato sauce,” Margara grumbled as she was soaking the shirt in chlorine. Those showmen occupied a nook in my memory, and many years later I tried to resuscitate them in a story, but the only one that had left a lasting impression was The Widower. He was a wretch of a man in the fortieth year of his miserable existence, the antithesis of a hero, who entered the ring wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit, the kind men wore at the beginning of the century: black wool jersey to his knees, with a U-neck top and suspenders. A rubber swim cap added the last touch of pathos. He was met with a storm of jeers, insults, threats, and projectiles, but by clanging the bell and blowing his whistle the referee finally restored order to the unruly mob. The Widower then raised his reed-thin voice to announce that this would be his last fight because he had serious back trouble and had been profoundly depressed since the passing of his saintly wife—might she rest in peace. When that fine woman had shuffled off this mortal coil, she had left him in sole charge of their two young children. When the boos had reached the noise level of a full-fledged battle, two little boys with sorrowful expressions climbed between the ropes and clung to The Widower’s knees, begging him not to fight because he’d be killed. A sudden silence would fall over the crowd, as I whispered my favorite poem: Hand in hand, two orphan lads / toward the graveyard slowly wend / Upon their father’s tomb they kneel / and up to God sweet prayers they send. “Quiet,” Tata would say, jabbing me with his elbow. In a voice broken with sobs, The Widower would explain that he had to support his children, and so would take on the Texas Assassin. You could hear a flea jump in that enormous hall. In one instant, a savage thirst for mayhem and blood was transformed into teary compassion, and a warmhearted shower of coins and bills rained down on the ring. The orphans quickly gathered the loot and skedaddled, as the Texas Assassin strutted toward the ring, dressed—I never knew why—as a Roman galley slave and slashing the air with a whip. Naturally, The Widower always took an unholy drubbing, but as the winner left he had to be protected by armed guards from a public ready to make mincemeat of him, while the bruised Widower and his young sons were borne off by kindly hands that, as a bonus, also bestowed sweets, money, and blessings.
“Poor devil, it’s a terrible thing, being widowed,” my grandfather would comment, openly moved.
In the late sixties, when I was working as a journalist, I was assigned a feature on the “Grunt and Groan Game,” as Tata called that unique sport. At twenty-eight, I still believed in objective reporting, and had no choice but to write about the miserable lives of the pitiful combatants, to unmask the tomato-pulp blood, the glass eyes clutched in the grappling hook hands of Kuramoto as the blinded loser staggered away howling and covering his face with blood-smeared hands, or to report on the moth-eaten wig of The Angel, now so old he must surely have been the model for Gabriel García Márquez’s best short story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” My grandfather read my article with clenched teeth, and it was a week before he would speak to me again.
My childhood summers were spent at the beach, where our family owned a huge, rundown old house by the sea. We left in December, before Christmas, and returned at the end of February, black from the sun and stuffed with fruit and fish. The trip, today an easy hour on the thruway, was then an odyssey that took the entire day. Preparations began a week in advance, as boxes were filled with food, sheets, and towels, bags and baskets with clothes, and the parrot—a nasty bird that would as soon as not nip off a finger if you got too close—forced into its cage. It goes without saying that Pelvina López-Pun also made the trip. The only ones to stay in town were the cook and the cats, wild creatures by now that fed on mice and pigeons. My grandfather owned a black English touring car that was as heavy as a tank, with a rack on the roof for strapping on the mountain of bundles. Pelvina rode in the open trunk with the lunch, which she never disturbed because as soon as she saw the suitcases she fell into a profound canine melancholy. Margara always brought basins, wet cloths, ammonia, and a bottle of tisana, a sweet, home-brewed chamomile tea to which she attributed the nebulous virtue of contracting the stomach. None of those precautions, however, could prevent carsickness. My mother, we three children, and Pelvina began to languish long before we left Santiago; as we turned onto the highway, we began to moan with agony, and by the time we reached the curving road through the hills, we entered a twilight zone. Tata, who had to stop every so often so we could get down, half swooning, to breathe and stretch our legs, fought the wheel of that old motorcar, cursing the fortune that led us to summer at the beach. We always stopped at farms along the way to buy goat cheese, melons, and jars of honey. Once he bought a live turkey to fatten; the countrywoman from whom he acquired it was large—clearly an understatement—with child, and my grandfather, with his customary chivalry, offered to catch the bird for her. Even half-sick, we were wildly entertained by the memorable spectacle of that lame old man in hot pursuit of the turkey. Finally he hooked his cane around the bird’s neck and tackled it amid a whirlwind of dust and feathers. We watched him as he limped back to the car, covered with droppings but with the trophy safely beneath his arm, its feet tightly bound. How could anyone have foreseen that Pelvina would shake off her lassitude long enough to bite off the bird’s head before we reached our destination? Nothing would take out the blood-stains, which remained for the life of the car as an eternal reminder of those calamitous journeys.
That summer watering place was a world of women and children. La Playa Grande was a paradise that lasted until a petroleum refinery was set up nearby that forever fouled the clear ocean water and frightened away the sirens, who were never again heard along those shores. At ten in the morning, uniformed nannies would begin to arrive with children in tow. They settled down to knit, watching their charges out of the corner of their eyes, always from the same identical spot on the beach. The oldest families, who owned the grand houses, positioned themselves beneath tents and umbrellas in the precise center; to the left were the newly rich, the tourists, and the middle class who rented the houses on the hills; and at the extreme right were the day-trip hoi polloi who came down from Santiago in rattletrap buses. In a bathing suit, everyone looks more or less equal; every person, nevertheless, immediately recognized his God-given place. In Chile, the upper class tends to have a European appearance; as you descend the social and economic scale, indigenous features become more pronounced. Class consciousness is so strong that I never saw one person violate the defining boundaries. At noon the mothers would arrive, carrying large straw hats and bottles of the carrot juice they used for rapid tanning. About two, when the sun was at its zenith, everyone retired for lunch and a siesta. Soon after, the teenagers appeared, essaying an air of boredom; ripening girls and world-weary young males who lay in the sand to smoke and rub against each other until excitement obliged them to seek relief in the sea. Every Friday night, the husbands arrived from Santiago, and Saturday and Sunday the character of the beach changed. Mothers sent their children on walks with nannies and gathered in groups in their best swimsuits and straw hats, competing for the attention of each other’s spouses, a pointless endeavor, really, since the men scarcely glanced at them; they were much more interested in talking politics—the only topic in Chile—and counting the minutes before they could go back to the house to eat and drink like Cossacks. My mother, seated like an empress at the center of the center of the beach, took the sun in the mornings and in the late afternoons went
to the casino, where she had discovered a system that allowed her to win enough daily to pay her expenses. To prevent our being dragged out to sea and drowning, Margara tied us to her with ropes she kept wound around her waist while she continued to knit endless sweaters for the winter. When she felt a tug, she would look up briefly to see who was in difficulty and then haul the victim back to safety. We suffered that humiliation every single day, but we forgot the other children’s teasing as soon as we jumped into the water. We played until we were blue with cold; we collected conchs and other seashells; we ate sand-sprinkled cakes and half-melted lemon ices sold by a deaf-mute from a little cart filled with salted ice. Every evening, my mother took my hand and walked with me to the rocks to watch the sunset. We waited to make a wish on the last ray, which sparks green fire at the precise instant the sun sinks below the horizon. I always wished for my mother not to find a husband, and I suppose that she wished exactly the opposite. She would tell me about Ramón, whom, influenced by her description, I imagined as an enchanted prince whose principal virtue consisted of distance. Tata left us at the beach at the beginning of summer and returned almost immediately to Santiago. It was the one time he could enjoy a little peace; he liked the empty house, and playing golf and cards at the Union Club. If he appeared some weekend, it was not to indulge in relaxation but to test his strength, swimming for hours in the strong, ice-cold waves, fishing, or making badly needed repairs on a house eternally deteriorating from dampness. He sometimes took us to a place that had milk fresh from the cow, a dark, stinking shed, where a peasant with filthy fingernails squirted milk directly into tin cups. We drank the warm, creamy liquid, along with occasional flies floating in the foam. My grandfather, who did not believe in hygiene and was a proponent of immunizing children through direct contact with the source of infection, would shake with laughter when we swallowed a live fly.