Paula Read online

  Shortly after, we left Bolivia forever, and I never saw the ears again. Tío Ramón flew directly to Paris, and from there to Lebanon, while my brothers and mother and I made the long descent by train to a port in the north of Chile; from there we took an Italian steamer to Genoa, then a bus to Rome, and from there we flew to Beirut. It was a journey of two months, and I believe it was a miracle my mother survived. We traveled in the last car of the train, in the company of an enigmatic Indian who never spoke a single word and spent the entire trip kneeling on the floor beside a small stove, chewing his coca, scratching his lice, and gripping an archaic rifle. Day and night his small, oblique eyes watched us, his expression impenetrable. We never saw him sleep. My mother was sure that at some unguarded moment he would murder us, even though she had been assured he had been hired to protect us. As the train moved slowly across the desert, inching past dunes and salt mines, my brothers often jumped down and ran alongside. To upset my mother, they would fall behind, feigning exhaustion, and then yell for help because the train was leaving them behind. On the ship, Pancho caught his fingers so often in the heavy metal hatches that finally no one would respond to his howls, and Juan caused an uproar one day by disappearing for several hours. While playing hide-and-seek, he had fallen asleep in an unoccupied stateroom; he wasn’t found until a blast from the ship’s whistle waked him, just as the captain was prepared to back down the engines and lower lifeboats to search for him; in the meantime, two brawny petty officers were forcibly restraining my mother to prevent her from diving into the Atlantic. I fell in love with all the sailors with a passion nearly as violent as that inspired by my young Bolivian, but I suspect they had eyes only for my mother. Although those slender young Italians stirred my imagination, even they could not cure me of my shameful vice of playing with dolls. Locked tight in my stateroom, I rocked them, bathed them, gave them their bottles, and sang in a low voice—in order to hear anyone coming—while my fiendish brothers threatened to take my dolls up on the deck and expose them to the crew. However, when we disembarked in Genoa, both Pancho and Juan, loyal under fire, were carrying a suspicious, towel-wrapped bundle under one arm while I hung behind, sighing, to bid the sailors of my dreams goodbye.

  We lived in Lebanon for three surreal years, which allowed me to learn some French and to travel to most of the surrounding countries—including the Holy Land and Israel, which in the decade of the fifties, as now, existed in a permanent state of war with the Arabs. Crossing the border by car, as we did more than once, was a sobering experience. We lived in a large, ugly, modern apartment. From the terrace, we could look down on a market and the Guard Headquarters that played important roles later when the violence began. Tío Ramón set aside one room for the consulate, and hung the shield and flag of Chile on the front of the building. None of my new friends had ever heard of that country; they thought I came from China. In general, in that time and in that part of the world, girls were confined to house and school until the day of their marriage—if they had the misfortune to marry—the moment at which they exchanged a paternal prison for a conjugal one. I was shy, and kept very much to myself. Elvis Presley was already fat before I ever saw him in a film. Our family life was not smooth; my mother did not adapt well to the Arab culture, the hot climate, or Tío Ramón’s authoritarianism; she suffered headaches, allergies, and sudden hallucinations. Once we packed our suitcases to return to my grandfather’s house in Santiago because she swore that an Orthodox priest in full liturgical vestments was spying on her bath through a transom. My stepfather missed his own children but had little contact with them; communications with Chile could be delayed for months, contributing to the feeling that we lived at the end of the world. Finances were extremely tight; money was laboriously stretched out in weekly accountings, and then, if anything was left over, we went to the movies or to an indoor ice-skating rink, the only luxuries we could allow ourselves. We lived decently, but on a level different from that of other members of the diplomatic corps or the social circle we frequented, for whom private clubs, winter sports, the theater, and vacations in Switzerland were the norm. My mother made herself a long silk dress for gala receptions; she transformed it in miraculous ways with a brocade train, lace sleeves, or velvet bow at the waist. I suspect that people focused on her face, however, not her clothes. She became expert in the supreme art of keeping up appearances; she prepared inexpensive dishes, disguised them with sophisticated sauces of her own invention, and served them on her famous silver trays; she made the living room and dining room elegant with paintings from my grandfather’s house and tapestries bought on credit on the docks of Beirut, but everything else was at best modest. Tío Ramón’s unbending optimism never flagged. With all the problems my mother had, I have often wondered what kept them together during that time, and the only answer that comes to me is, the tenacity of a passion born of distance, nourished with love letters, and fortified by a veritable Everest of obstacles. They are very different, and it is not unusual for them to argue to the point of exhaustion. Some of their battles were of such magnitude that they were dubbed with a name of their own and given a place in the family archive of anecdotes. I admit that I did nothing to facilitate their living together; when I realized that my stepfather had arrived in our lives to stay, I declared all-out war. Today it shames me to recall all the times I plotted horrible ways to kill him. His role was not easy; I cannot imagine how he was able to rear the three Allende children who fell into his lap. We never called him Papa, because that word brought back bad memories, but he earned his avuncular title, Tío Ramón, as a symbol of admiration and confidence. Today, at seventy-five, hundreds of persons scattered across five continents—including no few government officials and members of Chile’s diplomatic corps—call him Tío Ramón for the same reason.

  In at attempt to provide continuity to my education, I was sent to an English school for girls whose objective was to build character through trials of rigor and discipline—none of which much impressed me because it was not for nothing I had emerged unscathed from my uncles’ famous Ruffin games. The goal of that teaching was for all students to memorize the Bible. “Deuteronomy, chapter five, verse three,” Miss St. John would intone, and we had to recite it without stopping to think. In this way, I learned a little English, and also perfected to absurdity the stoic sense of life already implanted by my grandfather in the big old house with swirling currents of air. Both the English language and stoicism in the face of adversity have been beneficial; most of what other skills I possess Tío Ramón taught me by example and a methodology that modern psychology would consider brutal. He acted as consul general for several Arab countries, using Beirut as his base, a magnificent city that was considered the Paris of the Middle East: traffic was tied up by camels and sheikhs’ Cadillacs with gold bumpers, and Muslim women, draped in black with only a peephole for their eyes, shopped in the souks elbow to elbow with scantily clad foreigners. On Saturdays, some of the housewives in the North American colony liked to wash their cars wearing shorts and bare midriff tops. Those Arab men who rarely saw women without veils came from remote villages, harrowing journeys by burro, to attend the spectacle of the half-naked foreign women. The locals rented chairs and sold coffee and syrupy sweets to the spectators lined up in rows on the opposite side of the street.

  Summers were as hot and humid as a Turkish bath, but my school was ruled by norms imposed by Queen Victoria in a foggy, late-nineteenth-century England. Our uniform was a medieval cassocklike affair of coarsely woven cloth that closed with ties because buttons were considered frivolous; we wore orthopedic-looking shoes and a pith helmet—style hat pulled down to our eyebrows, an outfit that would take the wind out of anyone’s sails. Food was fodder for shaping character; every day we were served unsalted rice, and twice a week it was burned; on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, it was accompanied by vegetables, Tuesday, by yogurt, and Thursday, by boiled liver. It was months before I could refrain from gagging when I saw those pieces of gray or
gans floating in tepid water, but in the end I found them delicious, and eagerly awaited Thursday lunch. Since then, I have never met a meal I cannot eat, including English food. The girls came from many regions, and almost all were boarding students. Shirley was the prettiest girl in the school; she looked good even in our uniform hat. She came from India, had blue-black hair, made up her eyes with a pearly powder, and walked with the gravity-defying step of a gazelle. Behind closed bathroom doors, she taught me to belly dance, an accomplishment that has not done me much good since I have never had enough nerve to seduce a man by shaking and grinding. One day, soon after her fifteenth birthday, Shirley was removed from the school and taken back to her country to be wed to a fifty-year-old merchant her parents had chosen for her, a man she had never seen but knew only from a hand-tinted studio portrait. Eliza, my best friend, was straight out of a novel: an orphan, she was raised like a servant by sisters who had stolen her share of their inheritance; she sang like an angel and had plans to run away to America. Thirty-five years later, we met in Canada. She had fulfilled her dreams of independence; she owned her own business, had a fine mansion, a car with a telephone, four fur coats, and two spoiled dogs, but she still weeps when she remembers her childhood in Beirut. While Eliza was saving her pennies to flee to the New World, and the beautiful Shirley was fulfilling her destiny in an arranged marriage, the rest of us were studying the Bible and whispering about a certain Elvis Presley, whom none of us had seen or heard but who was said to create havoc with his electric guitar and rotating pelvis. I rode the school bus every day, the first to be picked up in the morning and the last to be left off in the afternoon. I spent hours circling around the city, an arrangement I liked because I didn’t much want to go home. When I was eventually delivered, I often found Tío Ramón sitting in his undershirt beneath the ceiling fan, trying to move more air with a folded newspaper and listening to boleros.

  “What did the nuns teach you today?” he would ask.

  I particularly remember one day replying, sweating, but phlegmatic and dignified in my dreadful uniform, “They’re not nuns, they’re Protestant ladies. And we talked about Job.”

  “Job? That idiot God tested by sending every calamity known to mankind?”

  “He wasn’t an idiot, Tío Ramón, he was a saintly man who never denied the Lord, no matter how much he suffered.”

  “Does that seem right? God makes a bet with Satan, punishes poor Job unmercifully, and wants to be loved by him besides. That is a cruel, unjust, and frivolous God. A master who treated his servants that way would deserve neither loyalty nor respect, much less adoration.”

  Tío Ramón, who had been educated by Jesuits, was intimidatingly emphatic and implacably logical—the same skills he used in squabbles with my mother—as he set out to prove the stupidity of the biblical hero whose attitude, far from setting a praiseworthy example, demonstrated a personality disorder. In less than ten minutes of oratory, he had demolished all Miss St. John’s virtuous teachings.

  “Are you convinced that Job was a numskull?”

  “Yes, Tío Ramón.”

  “Will you swear to that in writing?”

  “Yes.”

  The consul of Chile crossed the couple of yards that separated us from his office and composed on letterhead paper a document with three carbons saying that I, Isabel Allende Llona, fourteen years old, a Chilean citizen, attested that Job, he of the Old Testament, was a dolt. He made me sign it, after reading it carefully—“because you must never sign anything blindly”—then folded it and put it in the consulate safe. He went back to his chair beneath the ceiling fan and, heaving a weary sigh, said:

  “All right, child, now I shall prove that you were correct in the first place, and that Job was a holy man of God. I shall give you the arguments you should have used had you known how to think. Please understand that I am doing this only to teach you how to debate, something that will be very helpful in life.” And he proceeded to dismantle his previous arguments and convince me of what I had firmly believed in the first place. In a very few minutes, I was again defeated, and this time on the verge of tears.

  “Do you accept that Job was right to remain faithful to his God despite his misfortunes?”

  “Yes, Tío Ramón.”

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you sign a document?”

  And he composed a second statement that said that I, Isabel Allende Llona, fourteen years old, a Chilean citizen, was retracting my earlier opinion and instead agreeing that Job acted correctly. He handed me his pen, but just as I was about to sign my name at the bottom of the page he stopped me with a yell.

  “No! How many times have I told you not to let anyone twist your arm? The most important thing in winning an argument is not to vacillate even if you have doubts, let alone if you are wrong!”

  That is how I learned to defend myself, and years later in Chile I participated in an intermural debate between our girls’ school and San Ignacio, which was represented by five boys with the mien of criminal lawyers, and two Jesuit priests whispering instructions to them. The boys’ team arrived with a load of books they consulted to support their arguments and intimidate their opponents. My only resource was the memory of those afternoons with Job and my Tío Ramón in Lebanon. I lost, of course, but at the end my team paraded me around on their shoulders as our macho rivals retreated haughtily with their cartload of arguments. I do not know how many statements with three carbons I signed in my adolescence on topics as wildly diverse as biting my fingernails and the threatened extinction of whales. I believe that for a few years Tío Ramón kept some of them—for example, the one in which I swear that it is his fault that I will never meet any men and will end up an old maid. That was in Bolivia, when at age eleven I threw a tantrum because he did not let me go to a party where I thought I would see my beloved Big Ears. Three years later I was invited to a different party, this one in Beirut at the home of the U.S. ambassador and his wife. That time I had the good sense not to want to go because the girls had to play the part of passive sheep; I was sure that no boy in his right mind would ask me to dance, and I could not think of a worse humiliation than being a wallflower. That time my stepfather forced me to attend because, he said, if I did not overcome my complexes I would never have any success in life. The day before the party, he closed the consulate and dedicated the afternoon to teaching me to dance. With single-minded tenacity, he made me sway to the rhythm of the music, first holding the back of a chair, then a broom, and finally him. In several hours I learned everything from the Charleston to the samba. Then he dried my tears and drove me to buy a new dress. As he left me at the party, he offered a piece of unforgettable advice, one I have followed at crucial moments of my life: Remember that all the others are more afraid than you. He added that I should not sit down for a second, but should take up a position near the record player . . . oh, and not eat anything, because it takes tremendous courage for a boy to cross a room and go up to a girl anchored like a frigate in her chair and with a plate of cake in her hand. Besides, the few boys who know how to dance are the same ones who change the records, so you want to be near the player. At the entrance to the embassy, a cement fortress in the worst fifties style, there was a cage of huge black birds that spoke English with a Jamaican accent. I was greeted by the ambassador’s wife—in some sort of admiral get-up and with a whistle around her neck for giving instructions to the guests—and led to an enormous room swarming with tall, ugly adolescents with pimply faces, all chewing gum, eating french fries, and drinking Coca-Cola. The boys were wearing plaid jackets and bow ties, and the girls had on circle skirts and angora sweaters that left a flurry of hair in the air but revealed enviable protuberances on their chest. I, on the other hand, had nothing to put in a brassiere. They were all wearing bobby socks. I felt totally alien; my dress was a disaster of taffeta and velvet, and I didn’t know a soul there. Panic-stricken, I stood and fed cake crumbs to the black birds unt
il I remembered Tío Ramón’s instructions. Trembling, I removed my shoes and headed toward the record player. Soon I saw a male hand stretched in my direction and, unable to believe my luck, was borne off to dance a sugary tune with a boy who had flat feet and braces on his teeth and was not half as graceful as my stepfather. It was the time when everyone danced cheek-to-cheek, a feat usually denied me even today, since my face comes about to a normal man’s breastbone; at this party, barely fourteen and not wearing my shoes, my head was at the level of my partner’s belly button. After that first ballad, they played a whole record of rock ’n’ roll. Tío Ramón had never even heard of that, but all I had to do was watch the others for a few minutes and apply what I had learned the afternoon before. For once, my size and my limber joints were a plus: it was a breeze for my partners to toss me toward the ceiling, twirl me through the air like an acrobat, and catch me just before I broke my neck on the floor. I found myself performing arabesques, lifted, dragged, whipped around, and bounced by a variety of youths who by this point had shed their plaid jackets and bow ties. I had no complaint. I was not a wallflower that night, as I had dreaded, but danced until I raised blisters on my feet, in the process acquiring the assurance that it is not so difficult to meet men after all, and that certainly I would not be an old maid. I did not, however, sign a document to that effect. I had learned not to let anyone twist my arm.