Paula Read online

  “Get out, children, these are nice people,” Tío Ramón ordered. “You can climb the trees, eat all you want, and also fill this sack. We are filthy rich.”

  I don’t know how he arranged it, but the patients helped us. We soon lost our fear of them, and all of us ended up in the branches, streaming with juice, wolfing down apricots and pulling them from the branches by handfuls to drop into our sack. If we bit into one that wasn’t sweet enough, we threw it away and picked another. We bombed each other with ripe apricots: a true orgy of bursting fruit and laughter. We ate till we could eat no more, then kissed our new friends goodbye and piled into the old Ford for the return trip, continuing to stuff ourselves from the overflowing bag of fruit until stopped by stomach cramps. That day, for the first time ever, I realized that life can be generous. I had never experienced anything similar with my grandfather, or any other member of my family, all of whom believed that paucity is a blessing and avarice a virtue. From time to time, Tata would appear with a tray of little cakes, always counted out, one for each: never too many and never too few. Money was sacred and we children were taught early on how difficult it was to earn it. My grandfather had a fortune, but I never suspected that until much later. Tío Ramón was poor as a churchmouse, but I didn’t know that either, because he always showed us how to enjoy the little we had. At the most difficult moments of my life, when it has seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it.

  My memories of childhood are dramatic, like everyone else’s, I suppose, because the banalities are lost; with me, it may also be my sense of the tragic. They say that geography can determine character. I come from a very beautiful land, but one battered by calamities: summer droughts; winter floods when irrigation ditches overflow and the poor die of pneumonia; rising rivers from melting snow in the mountains and seaquakes that with a single wave wash ships onto dry land, stranding them in the middle of a plaza; wild fires and erupting volcanoes; plagues of flies, snails, and ants; apocalyptic earthquakes and an uninterrupted string of minor temblors that no one even notices; and if to the poverty of half the population we add isolation, there is more than enough material from which to construct melodrama.

  Pelvina López-Pun, the dog that was placed in my cradle from the day I was born, with the idea of immunizing me against epidemics and allergies, was a lascivious bitch that every six months was inseminated by some street cur despite the ingenious subterfuges improvised by my mother—such as outfitting her in rubber pants. When Pelvina was in heat, she would push her rear against the iron fence in the garden as an impatient pack of mutts waited to offer their love through the bars. Often when I came home from school I would find a dog stuck on one side, Pelvina howling on the other, and my uncles, weak with laughter, trying to separate them with blasts of cold water from the garden hose. Afterward, Margara would drown the litter of newborn pups, just like the kittens. One summer we were all ready to leave for vacation but had to postpone the trip because Pelvina was in heat and could not be taken anywhere in that condition; we had no pen at the beach, and it had been demonstrated that the rubber pants were little protection against the onslaught of true passion. Tata threw such a fit that my mother decided to put an ad in the newspaper: “Purebred bulldog bitch, European papers, sweet tempered, seeking loving owners who can appreciate her.” She explained her reasons to us but we thought the whole idea was unspeakable, and deduced that if she was capable of getting rid of Pelvina she could do the same to any of us. We begged in vain. On Saturday a couple came to the house who were interested in adopting her. Hidden beneath the stairway, we could see Margara’s hopeful smile as she led them to the drawing room—that woman hated the dog as much as she did me. Soon Mother came out to look for Pelvina, to show her off to the potential buyers. She searched the house from top to bottom before she found all of us in the bathroom; my brothers and I had locked ourselves in with the dog, after shaving patches on her back and painting them with Mercurochrome. Pushing and threatening, Mother managed to open the door; Pelvina shot down the stairs and leaped onto the sofa with the couple, who at the sight of the apparent sores screamed and fell over one another to get to the door before they were infected. Three months later, Margara had to do away with a half-dozen bastard pups, as we burned in flames of guilt. Soon thereafter, Pelvina mysteriously died; there is little doubt that Margara had something to do with the death.

  That same year, I was informed at school that babies are not brought by the stork but grow like melons in their mother’s belly, and also that there was no such thing as good old Santa Claus, it was your parents who bought your Christmas presents. The first part of that revelation had little effect on me because I did not intend to have children just yet, but the second part was devastating. I planned to stay awake all Christmas Eve to discover the truth, but my best efforts failed, and I fell asleep. Tormented by doubts, I had written a letter, a kind of trap, asking for the impossible: another dog, a host of friends, and a list of toys. When I woke on Christmas morning, I found a box containing bottles of tempera paint, brushes, and a clever note from that wretched Santa—whose writing looked suspiciously like my mother’s—explaining that in order to teach me to be less greedy, he had not brought what I asked; instead, he was offering the walls of my room, where I could paint the dog, the friends, and the toys I had requested. I looked around and saw that several stern old portraits had been removed, along with a lamentable Sacred Heart of Jesus, and on the bare wall facing my bed was a color reproduction cut from an art book. My disenchantment immobilized me for a few minutes, but finally I pulled myself together sufficiently to examine the picture, which turned out to be a work by Marc Chagall. At first, all I could see were anarchical smudges, but soon I discovered on that small piece of paper an astounding universe of blue brides tumbling head over heels through the air and a pale musician floating amid a seven-armed candelabrum, a red nanny goat, and other mutable characters. There were so many different colors and objects that I was a long time taking in the marvelous disorder of the composition. That painting had music: a ticking clock, moaning violins, bleating goats, fluttering wings, and endless streams of words. It also had scents: lighted candles, wildflowers, an animal in heat, women’s lotions and creams. The whole scene seemed bathed in the nebula of a happy dream; on one side the atmosphere was as warm as an afternoon siesta, and on the other you could feel the cool of a country night. I was too young to be able to analyze the artistry, but I remember my surprise and curiosity: that Chagall was an invitation to a game. I asked myself, fascinated, how it was possible to paint like that, without an ounce of respect for the norms of composition and perspective my art teacher was trying to instill. If this artist can do whatever he pleases, so can I, I concluded, opening the first bottle of tempera. For years I painted—freely, with unbounded pleasure—a complex mural in which were registered my desires, fears, rages, childhood doubts, and growing pains. In a place of honor, surrounded by delirious flora and impossible fauna, I drew the silhouette of a boy with his back turned as if looking at the mural. It was the portrait of Marc Chagall, with whom I had fallen in love as only children can. At the time I was furiously decorating the walls in my house in Santiago, Chile, the object of my love was sixty years older than I; he was famous throughout the world, he had just ended a long period of widowhood with a second marriage, and he lived in the heart of Paris . . . but distance and time are fragile conventions. I thought Chagall was a boy my own age and years later, in April 1985, when he died in the ninety-seventh year of his eternal youth, I found that in fact he had always been the boy I imagined. When we left that house and I had to bid my mural goodbye, my mother gave me a notebook in which to note down things I previously had painted: a notebook to record my life. “Here, write what’s in your heart,” she said. That is what I did then, and that is what I am doing now in these pages. What else can I do? I have time left
over. I have the whole future ahead of me. I want to give it to you, Paula, because you have lost yours.

  Here everyone calls you la niña, “the little girl”; it must be because of your schoolgirl face and the long hair the nurses braid for you. They have asked Ernesto’s permission to cut it—it is an ongoing struggle to keep it clean and free of tangles—but they haven’t done it as yet; the idea makes them sad. They have never seen you with your eyes open, so they think your hair is your most beautiful feature. I believe they are a little in love with your husband because they are so touched by his devotion. They see him leaning over your bed, whispering to you as if you could hear, and wish they could be loved like that. Ernesto takes off his jacket and presses it against your lifeless hands. “Feel it, Paula, it’s me; this is your favorite jacket, do you remember it?” He has recorded secret messages he leaves on your earphones so you can hear his voice when he’s not there; he brings cotton scented with his cologne and places it beneath your pillow so his aroma will stay with you. Love roars down on the women of our family like a gale-force wind; that is what happened to my mother with Tío Ramón, to you with Ernesto, to me with Willie, and I suppose the same thing will happen to generations of our girls to come. One New Year’s Day, after I was living with Willie in California, I called you to give you a long-distance hug and to talk over the old year and ask what your wish was for the 1988 just beginning. “I want a man, a love like yours,” was your immediate response. Scarcely forty-eight hours later, you called me back, euphoric.

  “I have it, Mama! Last night at a party I met the man I’m going to marry,” and the words poured out; you told me that from the first instant it was like wildfire; you looked at each other with instant recognition, you knew this was meant to be.

  “You sound like a corny romance novel, Paula. How can you be so sure?”

  “Because it made me so queasy I had to leave. Thank goodness, he came right behind me. . . .”

  A normal mother would have warned you against a passion like that, but I have no moral authority to impose temperance, so what followed was one of our typical conversations.

  “Fantastic, Paula. Are you going to live with him?”

  “I have to finish my studies first.”

  “You’re going to go on with them?”

  “You don’t think I’d throw it all over?”

  “Well, if he’s the man of a lifetime . . .”

  “Slow down, Mama, I’ve only just met him.”

  “Well, I just met Willie, too, and you see where I am. Life is short, Paula.”

  “Shorter at your age than mine. All right, I won’t go for the doctorate, but at least I want to finish the M.A.”

  And that’s what you did. You completed the degree with honors, and then left to go live with Ernesto in Madrid. You both found work, he as an electronics engineer and you as a volunteer school psychologist, and shortly afterward you were married. On the first anniversary of your wedding you were in a coma, and as a gift your husband brought you a love story he whispered in your ear, kneeling beside you, while the nurses watched, moved, and don Manuel wept in the bed beside you.

  Ah, carnal love! My first galloping attack struck when I was eleven. Tío Ramón had been reassigned to Bolivia, but this time he took my mother and the three of us children. They were not free to marry, and the government would pay expenses only for a legal family. Mother and Tío Ramón, however, ignored the malicious gossip and despite formidable obstacles set about nurturing their problem-plagued relationship. They succeeded admirably, and today, more than forty years later, they are a legendary couple. La Paz is an extraordinary city, so near heaven, and with such thin air, that you can see the angels at dawn. Your heart is always about to burst, and your gaze is lost in the consuming purity of endless vistas. Mountain chains, purple hills, rocks and splashes of earth in saffron, violet, and vermilion tones encircle the long, narrow valley from which this city of contrasts spills. I remember narrow streets rising and falling like party streamers, little hole-in-the-wall shops, broken-down buses, Indians dressed in bright wool, the ever-present wad of coca leaves staining their teeth green. The bell towers of hundreds of churches, and the courtyards where Indian women sat to sell dried yucca and purple maize and little mounds of dried llama fetuses for curative poultices, all the while fanning away flies and nursing their babies. The smells and colors of La Paz are inscribed in my memory as an inseparable part of the slow and painful awakening of adolescence. The ambiguity of my childhood ended at the precise moment we moved from my grandfather’s house. The night before we left, I crept out of bed, went downstairs, carefully avoiding the treads that creaked, and felt my way through the dark ground floor to the drawing room drapes where Memé was waiting to tell me that I must not be sad because she had nothing more to do in that house and was ready to go with me; she said that I should get her silver mirror from Tata’s desk, and take it with me. I will be there from now on, she added, always with you. For the first time in my life, I dared to open the door of my grandfather’s room. Light from the street filtered through the slats of the shutters, and my eyes were by now accustomed to the darkness. The grandfather clock struck three. I could see Tata’s motionless body and austere profile; he was lying on his back, rigid as a corpse in that room filled with funereal furniture. I would see him exactly like that thirty years later, when he came to me in a dream to reveal the ending for my first novel. Ever so quietly, I glided toward his desk—passing so close to his bed that I could sense his widower’s loneliness—and opened his drawers one by one, terrified that he would wake and catch me in the act of stealing. I found the baroque-handled mirror next to a tin box I did not dare touch. I took it in both hands and tiptoed out of the room. Safely back in bed, I peered into the shining glass where I had so often been told demons appear at night; I suppose I saw my ten-year-old face, round and pale, but in my imagination I saw Memé’s sweet image, telling me good night. Early the next morning I added the last touch to my mural, a hand writing the word “Adios.” That day was filled with confusion, contradictory orders, hasty farewells, and superhuman efforts to fit the suitcases on top of the automobiles that were to drive us to the port to take the ship north. The rest of the journey would be undertaken on a narrow-gauge train that climbed toward the heights of Bolivia at the pace of a millenarian snail. The sight of my grandfather—in his mourning, and with his cane and his Basque beret—standing at the door of the house where I grew up marked the end of my childhood.

  Evenings in La Paz are a conflagration of stars, and on moonless nights you can see them individually, even those that died millions of years ago and those that will be born tomorrow. Sometimes I used to lie on my back in the garden to gaze at those awe-inspiring skies and feel the vertigo of death, falling and falling toward the depths of an infinite abyss. We lived in a compound of three houses that shared a common garden; in front of us was a celebrated oculist, and behind, an Uruguayan diplomat who was rumored to be homosexual. We children thought that he suffered from an incurable disease. We always said hello with great sympathy, and once were so bold as to ask him whether “homosexuality” hurt very much. After school, I sought solitude and silence in the paths of that large garden; I found hiding places for the notebook with the record of my life and secret places to read, far away from the noise of the city. We attended a coeducational school; until then my only contact with boys had been my brothers, but they didn’t count. Even today I think of Pancho and Juan as asexual, like bacteria. For her first history lesson, the teacher lectured on Chile’s nineteenth-century wars against Peru and Bolivia. In my country, I had been taught that the Chileans won battles because of their fearless valor and the patriotism of their leaders, but in that class I learned about the atrocities committed by my compatriots against civilian populations. Chilean soldiers, drugged on a mixture of liquor and gunpowder, swept into occupied cities like barbarian hordes. With fixed bayonets and slaughtering knives, they speared babies, gutted women, and mutilated men’s
genitals. I raised my hand to defend the honor of our armed forces—not yet suspecting what they are capable of—and was greeted by a hail of spitballs. I was sent from the room, amid hisses and catcalls, and told to stand in the corridor with my face to the wall. Holding back my tears, so no one would see my humiliation, I fumed for forty-five minutes. During that traumatic time, my hormones—until then totally unknown to me—erupted with the force of a volcano. “Erupt” is not an exaggeration: that day I had my first menstrual period. In the opposite corner, also facing the wall, stood a fellow culprit, a tall boy, skinny as a broom, with a long neck, black hair, and enormous, protruding ears that from the rear gave him the air of a Greek amphora. I have never seen more sensual ears. It was love at first sight; I fell in love with those ears before I ever saw his face, with such vehemence that in the next months I lost my appetite and then, from eating so little and sighing so much, became anemic. My romantic rapture was devoid of sexuality; I did not connect what had happened in my childhood—the pine forest beside the sea, and the warm hands of a young fisherman—with the pristine sentiments inspired by those extraordinary appendages. I was a victim of that chaste, and therefore much more devastating, love for two years. I remember that time in La Paz as a succession of fantasies in our shady garden, ardent pages in my notebooks, and storybook daydreams in which a pitcher-eared knight rescued me from the maws of a dragon. To top everything off, the entire school knew of my enslavement, and because of my infatuation and my unarguable nationality, I became the prime victim of the most offensive schoolyard pranks. My love was destined for failure; the object of my passion treated me with such indifference that I came to believe I was invisible in his presence. Not long before our final departure from Bolivia, a fight broke out on the playground in which—I shall never know how—I ended up with my arms around my idol, rolling in a dustdevil of fists, hair-pulling, and kicking. He was much larger than I and, although I put into practice every trick I had learned at the Teatro Caupolicán wrestling matches with my grandfather, I was bruised and bloody-nosed at the end. In a moment of blind fury, however, one of those ears came within range of my teeth and I had the satisfaction of stealing an impassioned nip. For weeks I walked on air. That was the most erotic encounter of a long lifetime, a combination of intense pleasure from the embrace and no-less-sharp pain from the pummeling. Given that masochistic awakening of lust, another, less fortunate woman might today be the complaisant victim of a sadist’s whip, but as it worked out, I never again had occasion to practice that particular hold.