The Sum of Our Days Read online

  I had intended on that memorable day to put the final word to the manuscript of the book and offer it to you as a gift. Fu blessed the bundle of papers tied with a red ribbon, and we all toasted with champagne and shared a chocolate cake. There was deep emotion, though it wasn’t an evening of mourning but, rather, a quiet ceremony. We were celebrating that at last you were free after having spent so much time as a prisoner.

  SADNESS. As the therapist had pointed, out, there was sadness in both Willie’s life and mine. It was not a paralyzing emotion but an awareness of the losses and difficulties that colored our reality. We often had to adjust our burdens in order to go forward without falling. Everything was disorganized; we had the feeling we were living at the center of a storm, boarding up doors and windows so the winds of misfortune did not level everything.

  Willie’s office was operating on credit. He accepted hopeless cases, spent more than he earned, maintained a herd of useless employees, and was entangled in a number of tax wrangles. He was a terrible administrator, and Tong, his loyal Chinese accountant, could not control him. My presence in his life brought stability because I could help with expenses in emergencies, run the house, check the bank balances, and do away with most of the credit cards. He moved his San Francisco office to a Victorian house I bought in Sausalito, the most picturesque town on the bay. The property had been built around 1870 and boasted a notable pedigree: it was the first brothel in Sausalito. Later it was converted into a church, then a chocolate cookie factory, and finally, a complete ruin, it passed into our hands. As Willie said, it kept sliding down the social ladder. It sat among sick, centuries-old trees that threatened to fall onto the neighbors’ houses with the first gale. We were forced to cut down two of them.

  The executioners arrived dressed like astronauts; they climbed up the trees with saws and axes, swung from the branches on ropes, and proceeded to draw and quarter their victims, who bled to death quietly, as trees do. I had to run away, unable to witness that massacre any longer. The next day we didn’t recognize the house. It was naked and vulnerable, its wood devoured by time and termites, the shingles twisted, the shutters dangling. The trees had hidden the degree of deterioration; without them the house resembled a decrepit courtesan. Willie enthusiastically rubbed his hands. In some previous life he had been a builder, one of the ones who construct cathedrals. “We are going to make this house as beautiful as it was when it was young,” he said, and set off in search of the original plans to return it to its Victorian grace. He succeeded magnificently and, despite the profanation of tools, its walls still hold the French perfume of the whores, the Christian incense, and the chocolate of cookies.

  In the same rooms where the long-ago ladies of the night made their clients forget their sorrows, Willie today combats the uncertainties of the law. In what was formerly the carriage house, I clashed with my literary ghosts for years, until I had my own cuchitril at our house, where I now write. Using the move as an excuse, Willie got rid of half of his employees and then was able to choose his cases more carefully; his office, nonetheless, was still chaotic and not profitable. “However much you bring in, more goes out. Add it up, Willie. You’re working for a dollar an hour,” I pointed out. Willie was never fond of keeping tabs, but Tong, who had worked for him for thirty years and had more than once saved him from bankruptcy by a hair, agreed with me.

  I grew up with a Basque grandfather who was very cautious with money, and then with my Tío Ramón, who barely survived on his meager salary. My stepfather’s philosophy was, “We are filthy rich,” no matter that out of necessity he had to be very prudent with expenditures. He proposed to live life in grand style, though he had to stretch every cent of his paltry pay as a public servant to maintain his four children and my mother’s three. Tío Ramón would divide his month’s salary and put the money to cover our basic needs, counted and recounted, into four envelopes; each had to last a week. If he managed to save a little here and a little there, he would take us to get ice cream. My mother, who was always considered a very stylish woman, made her own dresses, transforming them again and again. They had an active social life, unavoidable for diplomats, and she had a basic gray silk evening gown to which she added and removed sleeves, belts, and bows, so that in photographs of the day she always appears in a different dress. It never passed through their minds to go into debt. Tío Ramón gave me my most useful guidelines for living, as I discovered in therapy as a mature woman: a selective memory for remembering the good things, a logical prudence to avoid doing anything to ruin the present, and defiant optimism for facing the future. He also instilled a spirit of serving, and taught me not to complain because that will ruin your health. He has been my best friend; there is nothing I haven’t shared with him. Because of the way he and my mother brought me up, added to the alarms of exile, I have a peasant mentality when it comes to money. If it were up to me, I would hide my savings under the mattress, as Tabra’s former suitor did with his bars of silver. The way my husband went through money horrified me, but every time I stuck my nose in his business, it caused a battle.

  After the manuscript of Paula was sent to Spain and had safely arrived in the hands of Carmen Balcells, I was overcome by a profound weariness. I was extremely busy with family, travels, lectures, readings, and the bureaucracy of my office, which had been growing until it had reached terrifying proportions. Time refused to do my bidding; I was circling around in the same spot like a dog chewing its tail, and not producing anything worthwhile. I kept trying to write. I had even finished most of the research for a novel about the gold fever in California. I would sit before my computer with my head filled with ideas but be unable to transfer them to the screen. “You have to give yourself time, you’re still grieving,” my mother reminded me in her letters, and Abuela Hilda softly repeated the same advice. During that time, she was taking turns between staying at her daughter’s house in Chile and then ours or Nico’s in California. This kind woman, the mother of Hildita, my brother Pancho’s first wife, had been warmly adopted as grandmother by all of us, especially Nico and you, whom she spoiled from the moment you were born. She was my accomplice in any madness I dreamed up in my youth and companion in your and Nico’s adventures.

  Marijuana and Silicone

  ABUELA HILDA, TIRELESS, TINY, AND CHEERFUL, had managed through a lifetime to avoid things that might cause her anguish. That was probably the secret of her astounding disposition. She had the mouth of a saint: she never spoke ill of anyone, she fled from arguments, she quietly tolerated others’ stupidity, and she could make herself invisible at will. One time when she had a full-blown case of pneumonia, she kept on her feet for two weeks, until her teeth began to chatter and fever misted her eyeglasses; only then did we realize that she was near leaving us for the other world. She spent ten days in an American hospital where no one spoke Spanish, mute with fright, but if we asked how she felt, she said she was doing fine, and added that the Jell-O and yogurt there were better than what we had in Chile. She lived in a fog; she didn’t speak English, and we would forget to translate the medley of tongues we spoke in our house. Since she couldn’t understand the words, she observed body language. A year later, when Celia’s drama erupted, she was the first to have her suspicions, since she picked up signals that the rest of us simply didn’t notice. The only medications she took were some mysterious green pills she tossed into her mouth when the atmosphere around her grew too tense. She could not deny your death, Paula, but she pretended that you were on a trip and spoke of you in the future tense, as if she would see you the next day. She had limitless patience with my grandchildren, and although she weighed ninety-five pounds and had the bones of a turtledove, she carried Nicole everywhere she went. We were afraid my youngest grandchild would be fifteen years old before she learned to walk.

  “Cheer up, mother-in-law! What you need for literary inspiration is a joint,” Celia counseled. She had never smoked marijuana, but she was dying to try.

  “Pot clouds your
mind, it won’t inspire you at all.” Tabra’s opinion came from experience. She was on her way back from such experiments.

  “Why don’t we try it?” asked Abuela Hilda, to put an end to our doubts.

  And that was how the women of the family ended up smoking marijuana at Tabra’s house, having told everyone that we were going on a spiritual retreat.

  The evening began badly, because Abuela wanted Tabra to pierce her ears and the ear-piercing gun jammed and stuck in her earlobe. When Tabra saw the blood, her knees buckled, but Abuela did not lose her composure. She held the apparatus, which weighed over a pound, until Nico arrived an hour later, equipped with his toolbox. He dismantled the gun, and freed her. The bloody ear had doubled in size. “Now, Tabra, pierce the other one for me,” Abuela requested. Nico stayed long enough to take the gun apart a second time, and then left out of respect for our “spiritual retreat.”

  DURING THE PROCESS OF THE EAR PIERCING, Tabra’s breasts several times brushed against Abuela Hilda, who kept looking at them out of the corner of her eye, until finally she couldn’t stand it any longer and asked what it was she had in them. My friend speaks Spanish, so she was able to explain that it was silicone. She told Abuela that when she was a young schoolteacher in Costa Rica, she had a rash on her arm and had to go to the doctor. He asked her to take off her blouse, and when she explained that the problem was confined to one arm, he insisted. She took it off. “Woman! You’re flat as a pancake!” he exclaimed when he saw her. Tabra realized it was true, and then he suggested a solution that would benefit them both. “I intend to specialize in plastic surgery but I don’t have patients yet. What do you think about letting me experiment on you? I won’t charge you anything for the operation, and I’ll give you some knockout tits.” It was such a generous proposition, and expressed so delicately, that Tabra couldn’t refuse. Nor did she dare refuse when he showed a certain interest in going to bed with her, an honor accorded to only a few of his patients, the doctor made clear. She did, however, refuse when he wanted to extend his offer to her younger sister, who was only fifteen. And that was how Tabra had ended up with her marble prostheses.

  “I’ve never seen such hard boobs,” commented Abuela Hilda.

  Celia and I had to touch them too, and then we wanted to see them. No question about it, they were strange; they looked like footballs.

  “How long have you been carrying this burden around, Tabra?” I asked.

  “Oh, about twenty years.”

  “Someone needs to examine you, this doesn’t seem normal.”

  “Don’t you like them?”

  The rest of us women took off our blouses to compare. Ours would never be spread across the pages of men’s magazines, but at least they were soft to the touch, as nature created them, and not like hers, which had the consistency of truck tires. My friend agreed to let us take her to see a specialist, and soon after there began what we in the family called “the odyssey of the boobs,” a series of unfortunate mishaps, the setting of which was the office of a plastic surgeon and the one advantage the fact that it solidified my friendship with Tabra.

  At nightfall we built a bonfire among the trees and roasted hot dogs and toasted marshmallows on sticks. Then we lit one of the joints, which had cost us no little trouble to obtain. Tabra inhaled a couple of times, announced that pot made her meditative, closed her eyes, and dropped like a stone, anesthetized. We carried her back to the house, no small job, deposited her on the floor, covered her with a throw, and we went back to the shelter of the blossoming trees in the garden. There was a full moon, and the stream, fed by rain, was leaping among the stones in its bed. Celia played her guitar and sang her most nostalgic songs, and Abuela started knitting between joints, which had not had the effect of making us high, as we’d expected, but produced only giggles and insomnia. We stayed in Tabra’s woods, telling each other stories about our lives until dawn, when Abuela announced that it was time to have a whisky, seeing that the marijuana hadn’t even warmed her bones. Ten hours later, when Tabra came to and checked the ashtray, she calculated that we’d smoked a dozen joints with no visible consequences, and deduced, to her amazement, that we were invulnerable. Abuela thought the cigarettes must have been filled with straw.

  The Angel of Death

  IN EARLY AUTUMN, when an unusual climate of peace was reigning in the house and we were beginning to abandon ourselves to a dangerous complacency, we received a visit from an angel of death. It was Jennifer’s companion, with his dark, puffy face and the dull eyes of a hard drinker. In his drawn-out, unintelligible jargon, which Willie could barely decipher, he told us that Jennifer had disappeared. He hadn’t heard anything from her since she’d left three weeks before to visit an aunt in another city. According to the aunt, the last time she had seen her, she’d been in the company of some rough-looking men who’d come by in a van and picked her up. Willie reminded the man that often months went by without news of his daughter, but he repeated that she had disappeared, and added that she had been very sick and could not have gone far in her condition. Willie began a systematic search through jails and hospitals; he spoke with the police, contacted federal agencies in case his daughter had crossed a state line, and hired a private detective, all without success. In the meantime, Fu and Grace set the members of the Zen Center, and I my Sisters of Disorder, to praying. The story the man told us smelled fishy to me, but Willie assured me that in such cases the first person to be suspected in the eyes of the law is the one living with the missing person, especially if he has a long rap sheet, as this man did. No question that he had been thoroughly investigated.

  We’re told that there is no pain as great as that of the death of a child, but I believe it has to be worse when your child disappears and you live forever not knowing what happened to her. Did she die? Did she suffer? You keep the hope that she is alive, but constantly wonder what kind of life she’s living and why she doesn’t get in touch with her family. Every time the telephone rang late at night, Willie’s heart stopped with hope and with terror. It could be Jennifer’s voice, asking him to come look for her somewhere, but it might also be the voice of a policeman asking him to come to the morgue to identify a body.

  Months later, Jennifer still had not turned up, but Willie clung to the idea that she was alive. I don’t know who it was who suggested that he should consult a psychic who sometimes helped the police solve cases. She had the gift of locating bodies and missing persons, and that was how we ended up together in the kitchen of a dilapidated house near the port. The psychic looked nothing like a divine, no star-patterned skirts, kohl-rimmed eyes, or crystal ball. She was a fat woman in tennis shoes and an apron, who kept us waiting while she finished bathing her dog. In the kitchen—narrow, clean, and orderly—were a pair of yellow plastic chairs, and we took our seat in them. Once the dog was dry, she offered us coffee, and sat down on a small stool facing us. We sipped from our mugs in silence a few minutes, then Willie explained the reason for our visit and showed her a series of photos of his daughter: some in which she was more or less healthy, and the most recent, taken in the hospital, already very ill, with Sabrina in her arms. The psychic examined them one by one, then put them on the table, placed her hands on them, and closed her eyes for long minutes. “Some men took her in a vehicle,” she said finally. “They killed her. They dropped the body in a woods near the Russian River. I see water and a wood tower; it must be a ranger’s lookout.”

  Willie, pale as death, said nothing. I put the payment for her services on the table, three times what it costs to see a physician, took my husband by the arm, and pulled him to the car. I got the key from his pocket, pushed him into the passenger side, and I drove, hands trembling and eyes clouded, across the bridge toward home. “You shouldn’t believe any of this, Willie. It isn’t science, she’s a quack,” I begged him. “I know that,” he replied, but the harm had been done. Even so, he didn’t truly grieve until much later, when we went to see a film about the death penalty, Dead Man Walking,
in which there is a scene of the murder of a girl in a forest, similar to what the psychic had described. In the silence and darkness of the theater, I heard a heartrending cry, like the howl of a wounded animal. It was Willie, doubled over in his seat, with his head on his knees. We felt our way out of the theater, and once in the parking lot, locked in our car, he wailed for his lost daughter.

  One year later Fu and Grace offered to have a ceremony in the Zen Center in Jennifer’s memory, to give dignity to that tragic life and closure to the obscure death that left the family in eternal suspense. Our small tribe, and a few friends, including Tabra, Jason, Sally, and Jennifer’s mother with a few of her friends, met in the same room where we had celebrated Sabrina’s first birthday, in front of an altar that held pictures of Jennifer in her best days, flowers, incense, and candles. They had placed a pair of shoes in the center of the circle to represent the new path she had taken. Jason and Willie were moved by the good intentions of all those present, but they couldn’t avoid exchanging smiles because Jennifer had never had a pair of shoes like those on her feet; they should have found some purple sandals, something more appropriate to her style. Both of them, who knew her well, imagined that if she had been watching that sad reunion from above she would be rolling with laughter, for she thought that anything with a hint of New Age was ridiculous, and besides she wasn’t a person to mourn. She was completely lacking in self-pity; she was daring and bold. Without the addictions that trapped her in a life of misery, she might have lived an adventurous life, because she had her father’s strength. Of Willie’s three children, only Jennifer inherited Willie’s lion heart, and she passed it on to her daughter. Sabrina, like Willie, can be dropped to her knees, but she always gets back up on her feet. That little girl, who almost never even saw her mother but who had her image engraved on her soul before she was born, participated in the rites in Grace’s arms. At the end, Fu gave Jennifer a Buddhist name, U Ka Dai Shin: wings of fire, great heart. It was a proper name for her.