The Sum of Our Days Page 9

  In a period of quiet meditation during the ceremony, Jason thought he heard his sister’s voice breathing into his ear. “What the fuck are they doing? They don’t have the least idea what happened to me! For all they know I could still be alive, right? The joke is that they’ll never know.” Maybe for that reason, Jason has never stopped looking for her, and now, all these years later, now that we have the DNA tests, he is stubbornly trying to locate her in the infinite police archives of unsolved tragedies. As for me, during the meditation a scene emerged with great clarity in my mind: Jennifer was sitting on the bank of a river, paddling her feet and tossing little stones into the water. She was wearing a summer dress and she looked young and healthy, with no trace of pain. Rays of sun shone through the leaves and illuminated her blond hair and slim body. Suddenly she lay down, curled up on the mossy ground, and closed her eyes. That night I told Willie about my vision and we decided that that was how Jenny had died, and not the way the psychic had told us. She was very tired, she slept, and she never woke up. The next morning we got up early and the two of us went to the forest. We wrote Jennifer’s name on a piece of paper, burned it, and threw the ashes into the same stream where earlier we had scattered yours. You two didn’t know each other in this world, Paula, but we like to imagine that maybe your spirits are playing among the trees like sisters.

  Family Life

  IN THE SPRING OF 1994 Rwanda was often in the newspapers. News of the genocide was so horrible that it was difficult to believe. Children were being hacked to death, pregnant women were ripped open with knives to tear the fetuses from their wombs, entire families were murdered, hundreds of starving orphans were wandering the roads, villages were burned with all their inhabitants.

  “What does the rest of the world care about what’s happening in Africa? It’s only blacks that are dying,” Celia commented indignantly, with that incendiary passion she dedicated to nearly any subject.

  “The killing in Rwanda is terrible, Celia, but I don’t think that’s the only reason you’re depressed. Tell me what’s really happening with you,” I prodded.

  “Imagine if they were hacking my children apart!” and she burst out crying.

  There was no doubt that something was brewing in the soul of my daughter-in-law. She didn’t have a moment of peace; she ran around doing a thousand tasks, she hid around corners to cry, and every day she was more emaciated. In addition, she had developed a true obsession with bad news, which she discussed with Jason, the only one in the family who read all the newspapers and who was capable of analyzing events with a journalist’s instinct. He was the first person I heard relate religion with terror, long before fundamentalism and terrorism were practically synonymous. He explained to us that the violence in Bosnia, the Middle East, and Africa, the excesses of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and other disconnected events were caused by religious as well as racial hatreds.

  Jason and Sally were talking about moving as soon as they could find an apartment somewhere, but they had looked in vain to find something within range of their limited income. We offered to help them, without insisting too much, so we wouldn’t give them the impression that we were throwing them out. It was pleasant to have them with us. I was moved to see Jason in love for the first time and talking about getting married, though Willie was convinced that Sally and his son would not make a good pair. I don’t know where he got that idea, they seemed to get along very well.

  Abuela Hilda stayed in California for long periods of time, and under her influence the house would become a gambling den. Even my grandchildren, innocents still sucking their pacifiers, learned to do tricks with cards. She showed them how to play with such skill that a few years later Alejandro could have earned a living with a deck of cards. Once, when he was a runny-nosed kid of ten, a little sandpiper of a boy with round eyeglasses and teeth like a beaver, he wandered into a group of ominous-looking types who had brought their trailers and motorcycles to the beach and set up camp. The general look of those men—tank tops, tattoos, cowboy boots, and the inevitable bellies of good beer drinkers—did not intimidate Alejandro because he saw that they were playing cards. He went over to them, totally self-assured, and asked if he could sit in. They answered with loud guffaws, but he insisted. “We play for money here, kid,” they warned him. Alejandro nodded, feeling rich because he had five dollars in small change. They told him to sit down, and offered him a beer, which he amiably refused, more interested in the game. After twenty minutes, my grandson had fleeced the seven tough guys and left with bills spilling out of his pockets, followed by a hailstorm of oaths and curses.

  We lived as a tribe, Chilean style; we were almost always together. Abuela had such a good time with Celia and her children that she preferred her company a thousand times more over mine and spent long stretches in her home. We had explained to Abuela that Sabrina’s mothers were lesbians, Buddhists, and vegetarians, three words she was not familiar with. The vegetarianism was the only thing that seemed unacceptable to her, but she made friends with them anyway. More than once she visited them at the Zen Center, where she induced them to eat hamburgers, drink margaritas, and bet on poker. At times my mother and Tío Ramón, my ineffable stepfather, would come from Chile, and, added to them, my brother Juan, who arrived from Atlanta with the tilted head and grave expression of a bishop: he was studying theology. After he had devoted four years to the divine, Juan graduated with honors and then decided he wasn’t cut out to be a preacher and went back to his university position as professor of political science, where he is today. Willie bought food wholesale and cooked for that camp of refugees. I see him in the kitchen, bloody knives attacking a hindquarter of beef, frying bags of potatoes, and chopping tons of lettuce. In moments of inspiration he would make lethally hot Mexican tacos while listening to his ranchera CDs. The kitchen would look like the morning after a night of Carnival, and guests would lick their chops but later pay the consequences of an excess of grease and chilis.

  Our house was magical; it stretched and shrank according to the need. Perched halfway up a hill, it offered a panoramic view of the bay; there were four bedrooms on the first floor and an apartment below. It was there in 1992 that we installed a hospital room where you spent several months without altering the rhythm of family life. Some nights I would wake to the murmur of my own memories and those of the characters escaped from other people’s dreams. I would get up and roam through the rooms, grateful for the quiet and warmth of that house. Nothing bad can happen here, I would think, all the evil has been expelled, and Paula’s spirit is looking after us. Sometimes the dawn would surprise me with its capricious colors of watermelon and peach. I liked to look down at the scene at the foot of the hill, with the fog rising from the lagoon and wild geese flying south.

  CELIA WAS JUST RECOVERING from the battering of her three pregnancies when she had to go to Venezuela for her sister’s wedding. By then she had a residence visa that allowed her to travel abroad and return to the United States. Nico and the children temporarily moved over to our house, a solution that Abuela found ideal: “Why don’t we all live together, the way we should?” she asked. In Venezuela Celia was confronted by everything she had wanted to leave behind when she married Nico. It can’t have been pleasant because she returned with her spirits lower than low, having decided to sever all contact with most of her relatives. She clung to me, and I was prepared to defend her against anything that came along, even herself. She started losing weight again, but we had a family council and forced her to see a specialist, who prescribed therapy and anti-depressants. “I don’t believe in any of this,” she told me, but the treatment helped, and soon she was playing the guitar and making us laugh and rant with her antics. Despite the inexplicable fits of sadness, she had blossomed with maternity.

  Her children were a perpetual circus, and Abuela often reminded us that we must cherish them because they soon grow up and leave home. It was the children, more than the doctors’ prescriptions, that kept Celia going during th
at time. Alejandro, a little shy but very smart, stuttered wise phrases with his mother’s deep voice. That year at Easter, before he went outside with his basket to hunt for Easter eggs in the garden, he whispered to me that rabbits don’t lay eggs because they’re mammals. “Then who leaves the Easter eggs?” I asked, like a fool. “You,” he answered. Ever since Nicole, the youngest, could stand, she’d had to defend herself against her brother and sister. One birthday I had the bad idea of giving Alejandro—who had begged on his knees, batting his giraffe eyelashes—a game of plastic Ninja daggers. First I got specific authorization from his parents, who did not allow him to have weapons, just as they opposed television—both impractical California New Age ideas because you can’t raise little ones in a bubble. Better for them to be contaminated while they’re young, that’s the best way to immunize them. I warned my grandson that he could not attack his sisters, but that was like handing him candy and telling him not to suck it. He had the daggers all of five minutes before he stabbed Andrea, who gave it right back to him, and then both of them turned on Nicole. Next we saw Alejandro and Andrea running for their lives, with Nicole close behind, a dagger in each hand, howling like a serial thriller Apache. She was still in diapers. Andrea was the most colorful. She always wore pink; except for a pair of lime-green plastic sandals; her golden curls peeked from among the adornments she put in her hair—tiaras, ribbons from packages, paper flowers—and she lived lost in her imaginary world. She also had her “pink power,” a magic ring with a stone of that color, a gift from Tabra, which could convert broccoli into strawberry ice cream and send a kick by long distance to the boy who had made fun of her at recess. Once Andrea’s teacher raised her voice to her, and my granddaughter confronted her squarely, pointing the finger with the powerful ring. “Don’t you dare speak to me that way. I am Andrea!” Another time she came back from school very upset, and hugged me.

  “I’ve had a miserable day,” she confessed, sobbing.

  “Wasn’t there even one good minute, Andrea?”

  “Yes. A girl fell and broke two teeth.”

  “But my God, Andrea, what’s good about that!”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  Messages

  Paula WAS PUBLISHED IN SPAIN with a cover photo Willie had taken. In it you are smiling and full of life, and your dark hair is covering you like a mantle. Soon hundreds of letters began pouring in; we had to store them in boxes in the office and Celia couldn’t find enough time to sort and answer them. For years I had received letters from enthusiastic readers, although I admit that not all of them were motivated by appreciation for my books. Some were requests, like the one from the author of sixteen unpublished novels who gallantly offered to work with me and share royalties fifty-fifty, and another came from a couple of Chileans in Sweden who asked me to buy them tickets back to Chile; after all, it was my uncle Salvador Allende’s fault that they’d had to leave the country. Even so, nothing could compare with the avalanche of correspondence that flooded in with the publication of Paula. I tried to answer every one, even if with only a couple of lines scrawled across a card, because each letter had been written from the heart and sent out blind, some to my publishers, others to my agent, and many through friends and bookstores. I spent part of the night making cards with the Japanese papers Miki Shima gave me and little pieces of silver and semiprecious stones from Tabra. The letters that came were so heartfelt that years later, when the book had been translated into several languages, some European publishers decided to publish a selection of that correspondence. Sometimes parents who had lost children wrote me, but most were young people who identified with you, including girls who wanted to meet Ernesto, in love with the widower without knowing him. Tall, well built, dark, and tragic, he attracted women. I don’t think he wanted for consolation; he isn’t a saint, and celibacy isn’t his forte, as he himself has told me, and as you always knew. Ernesto always swears that if he hadn’t fallen in love with you, he would have entered seminary and become a priest, but I doubt it. He needs a woman at his side.

  Occupied with the letters, I had no time for writing, and even my exchange with my mother slowed down. Instead of the daily messages that had kept us united for decades, we talked by phone or sent brief faxes, avoiding confidences that might be exposed to a stranger’s curiosity. Our correspondence during that period is very boring. Nothing like the mail, the good old snail mail with its privacy. Nothing like the pleasure of waiting for the mailman, opening the envelope, taking out the pages my mother had folded, and reading the then two-weeks-old news. If it was bad, it didn’t matter any longer, and if it was good, it was never too late to celebrate.

  Among the letters came one from a young nurse who had attended you in the intensive care unit in the hospital in Madrid. Celia was the one who saw it first. She brought it to me, pale as wax, and we read it together. The nurse said that after reading the book she had felt as if it was her duty to tell me what had happened. Medical incompetence and a power failure that interrupted the oxygen had caused severe brain damage. Many people knew what had happened but tried to hide it, perhaps with the hope that you would die and they would avoid an investigation. For months, the nurses had watched me waiting all day long in the corridor of lost steps, and they had often wanted to tell me the truth but didn’t dare face the consequences. The letter left me reeling for days. “Don’t think about it, daughter, there’s nothing we can do about it now,” my mother wrote when I told her. “That was Paula’s fate. Now her spirit is free. Your daughter will never have to suffer the troubles life always visits upon us.” Right. And following that reasoning, we would all be better off dead, I thought.

  That memoir brought more interest from the public and the press than all my previous books combined. I made lots of trips, gave hundreds of interviews, dozens of readings and lectures, and signed thousands of books. One woman wanted me to inscribe nine books for her, one for each of her friends who had lost a child, and one for her. Her daughter had been left a paraplegic in an automobile accident, and as soon as she could manage a wheelchair, she drove it into a swimming pool. Pain and more pain. By comparison, mine was bearable; at least I had been able to take care of you to the end.

  Four Minutes of Fame

  THE MOVIE BASED ON MY FIRST NOVEL, The House of the Spirits, was announced with great fanfare because it had a formidable cast of the great stars of the day: Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Vanessa Redgrave, Winona Ryder, and, my favorite, Antonio Banderas. Now, several years later, when I think of them, those actors seem as far away in time as the stars of the silent screen. Time is implacable. When my first novel was published, several members of my mother’s family were upset with me, some because our political ideas are diametrically opposed, and some who believed I had betrayed family secrets. “Dirty linen is washed at home” is Chile’s watchword. To write that book I had used my grandparents, some uncles, and other bizarre characters in my large Chilean tribe as models, as well as political happenings of the time and anecdotes I’d listened to my grandfather tell for years, but I’d never imagined that some people would take it literally. Mine is a twisted and exaggerated version of events. My grandmother could never move a billiard table with the power of her mind, like Clara del Valle, nor was my grandfather a rapist and murderer, like Esteban Trueba in the novel. For many years those relatives didn’t speak to me, or at best avoided me. I thought that the film would be like throwing salt in the wound, but it was just the opposite. The power of film is so enormous that the movie became the official history of my family, and I have found that now photographs of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons have replaced those of my grandparents. It was rumored that the film would sweep the Academy Awards in Hollywood, but before it was even shown negative articles began to appear recounting how Hispanic actors had not been given the chance to work in a film with a Latin American theme. In the early days, they wrote, when a black actor was needed on the screen they painted a white with shoe polish, and now that a Latino was
required, they pasted a mustache on a white man. The movie was filmed in Europe by a Danish director, with German money, Anglo-Saxon actors, and an English sound track. There was little about it that was Chilean, but to me it seemed better than the book and I was sorry that bad will was building in advance. Months earlier, the director, Bille August, had invited Willie and me to the filming in Copenhagen. The exteriors were done on an estate in Portugal, which later became a tourist attraction, and the interiors in a house built on a studio set in Denmark. The furniture and decor were rented from antique stores in London. I recall that there was a little enamel box I wanted to slip into in my pocket as a souvenir, but each object had a coded number, and someone was charged with keeping track of them. Then I asked for the head of Vanessa Redgrave, but they didn’t give it to me. I’m referring to a wax model that was supposed to appear in a scene in a hat shop but was omitted for fear of causing hilarity in the audience rather than the desired fright. I wonder what ever became of that head? Perhaps Vanessa has it on her night table, to remind her of just how tenuous life is. I would have used it for years to break the ice in conversations, and to scare my grandchildren. In the cellar I kept hidden skulls, pirate maps, and treasure trunks; nothing better than a childhood of terror to stimulate the imagination.