Paula

  My mother keeps bargaining with God. Now she is offering him her life for yours. She says that, after all, seventy years is a long time, a lot of weariness and pain. I would gladly take your place, too, Paula, but there are no illusionist’s tricks that can let me do that; each of us, grandmother, mother, daughter, must live out her own destiny. At least we are not alone, we are three. Your grandmother is tired; she tries to hide it but her years weigh on her, and during these months of suffering in Madrid the winter has crept into her bones. There is no way to keep her warm; she sleeps beneath a mountain of blankets and in the daytime she goes around in sweaters and wool scarves but can’t stop shivering. I had a long talk with Tío Ramón by telephone, asking him to convince her that it’s time for her to go back to Chile. I hadn’t been able to write for several days. Only now that you are beginning to emerge from death’s grip do I return to these pages.

  My discreet relationship with Michael flowered circumspectly, in the old-fashioned way, in the living room of Tata’s house, between cups of tea in the winter and ice cream in the summer. The discovery of love and the happiness of feeling accepted transformed me; my shyness was replaced by a more explosive temperament, and the long periods of angry silence of my childhood and adolescence ended. Once a week, we went on Michael’s motorcycle to hear a concert. Every other Saturday I was allowed to go to the movies, as long as I got home early, and some Sundays my grandfather invited Michael to the family dinner, a true tourney of endurance. The feast alone was a bone-crushing ordeal: seafood appetizers, spicy meat pies, cazuela, a hearty chicken and corn and vegetable dish, or pastel de choclo, a corn soufflé over a meat base, a blancmange-filled cake—torta de manjar blanco—wine and fruit, and a gigantic jug of pisco sours, the most lethal of Chilean drinks. In that agape, everyone at the table tried to outdo the other in how much they could down, and sometimes, just for the thrill of the challenge, they asked for fried bacon and eggs before the dessert. The survivors won the privilege of demonstrating their particular madness. By the time coffee was served, everyone was arguing at the top of his lungs and, before the dessert liqueurs were passed, they had sworn this would be the last Sunday for the family bash. The following week, nevertheless, and with only minor variations, they suffered through the same mortification, because not to attend would have been an inconceivable snub my grandfather would never have forgiven. I dreaded those gatherings almost as much as the luncheons at the home of Salvador Allende, where his daughters, my cousins, always stared at me with veiled scorn because I didn’t know what the devil they were talking about. They lived in a small, cozy house crowded with works of art, good books, and photographs that if they still exist are valuable historical documents. Politics was the one topic in this intelligent and well-informed family. The conversation was on a high plane, primarily about world events but occasionally coming down to earth to include the latest inside gossip about Chile, but in either case, I was in outer space. The only books I was reading then were science fiction, and while with socialist fervor the Allendes plotted the transformation of the nation, I was wandering from asteroid to asteroid in the company of extraterrestrials as elusive as my grandmother’s ectoplasms.

  The first time that Michael’s parents came to Santiago, he took me to meet them. My future in-laws were waiting to take five o’clock tea: starched tablecloth, hand-painted English porcelain, homemade cakes. They welcomed me graciously; I felt they had accepted me even before they met me, grateful for the love I showered on their son. Michael’s father washed his hands a dozen times during my brief visit and when he sat down at the table, pushed back the chair with his elbows in order not to soil his hands before eating. Toward the end of my visit, he asked me whether I was related to Salvador Allende, and when I said yes, his expression changed but his natural courtesy prevented him from stating his views on that subject at our first meeting, there would be other times. Michael’s mother charmed me from the moment I met her; she was an innocent, incapable of a mean thought; her goodness glowed in her liquid aquamarine eyes. She accepted me without reservation, as if we had known each other for years, and that afternoon we sealed a secret pact of mutual aid that would be very comforting through the painful trials to come. Both of Michael’s parents must have wished for their son a calm, discreet girl from the English colony; it could not have been difficult for them to perceive my character flaws from the beginning. It is, therefore, all the more admirable that they opened their arms to me so promptly. I began working when I was seventeen, and haven’t stopped since. I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation, I should have considered attending the university, but I was confused. I wanted to be on my own, and besides, I intended to be married soon and have children, because that was what girls did in those days. My mother, who knew me better than anyone, suggested I study theater, but I thought that idea was preposterous. Since I wasn’t trained for anything else, I started looking for a job as a secretary the day after graduation. I had heard that they paid well at the United Nations, and decided to capitalize on my knowledge of English and French. In the telephone directory, prominently displayed, I found the strange designation FAO and, without the least idea of what it stood for, showed up at their doorstep, where I was greeted by a young man with a colorless face.

  “Who is the owner here?” I asked pointblank.

  “I don’t know. . . . I don’t think there there is an owner,” he murmured, slightly perturbed.

  “Then who is in charge?”

  “Don Hernán Santa Cruz.” This time there was no hesitation.

  “I want to speak with him.”

  “He is presently in Europe.”

  “So who is in charge of hiring when he isn’t here?”

  The young man referred me to an Italian count. I requested an interview, and as soon as I stood before the impressive desk of the handsome Roman I rattled off that Señor Santa Cruz had sent me to see him about a job. This aristocratic official had no reason to suspect that I wouldn’t know his superior if I saw him, and so he agreed to try me for a month, even after I had presented the lowest score on the typing exam of anyone in the history of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN. They had sat me down before a heavy old Underwood and told me to write a letter with three carbons—failing to mention that it should be a business letter. Instead, I composed a letter of love and despair—as well as one punctuated with errors, the keys seemed to have a life of their own. I also put the carbons in upside down and the copies came out on the back of the page. Hoping to place me where I could do the least damage, they temporarily assigned me as secretary to a forestry expert from Argentina whose mission was to conduct a world census of trees. I was aware that my luck could not hold out forever, and gave myself four weeks to learn to type, answer the telephone, and serve coffee like a professional, secretly praying that the redoutable Santa Cruz would suffer a fatal accident and never return. My prayers, however, went unheard and precisely at the end of one month the director of the FAO showed up, an enormous man with the look of an Arab sheikh and a voice like thunder before whom employees in general and my Italian nobleman in particular bowed with respect, not to say terror. Before he could learn of my existence through other channels, I went to his office and told him I had taken his sainted name in vain and was prepared to do the necessary penance. My confession was met with paroxysms of laughter.

  “Allende? Which Allendes do you come from?” he roared finally, after wiping away his tears.

  “I think my father is named Tomás.”

  “What do you mean, think? How can you not know your father’s name?”

  “We can never be sure who our father is,” I replied haughtily, “only our mother.”

  “Tomás Allende, eh? I know who he is! A very intelligent fellow . . . ,” and Santa Cruz sat staring into space, like someone dying to tell something he can’t.

  Chile is the size of a pocket handkerchief, and it turns out that this gentleman with the air of a sultan was one of Salvador All
ende’s closest childhood friends; he also knew my mother and stepfather well. For those reasons, he did not kick me out, as the Roman count had expected, but had me transferred to the Department of Information, where someone with my imaginative gifts, he explained, might be better utilized than in copying forestry statistics. They put up with me in the FAO for several years. I made friends there, learned the rudiments of journalism, and had my first opportunity to work in television. In my free time I translated popular novellas from English to Spanish. These romantic—actually, overtly erotic—tales were all cut from the same cloth: beautiful, innocent, and penniless young girl meets mature, strong, powerful, virile, and lonely man disappointed in love in some exotic setting, for example, a Polynesian island where she works as a governess and he owns a plantation. She is always a virgin, even if a widow, with satiny breasts, velvety lips, and eyes like watered silk, while he has silver temples, golden skin, and steely muscles. The landowner is superior to the virgin in every way, although she is good, and pretty. After sixty pages of burning passion, jealousy, and incomprehensible intrigues, they marry, of course, and the material maiden is deflowered by the metallic male in a racy final scene. It took enormous character to remain faithful to the original versions, and even with all Miss St. John’s stalwart efforts behind me, mine was not sufficiently strong. Almost without realizing, I began to slip in small modifications to better the heroine’s image; it began with subtle changes in the dialogue, so she would not seem completely moronic, then gradually I followed the flow of my inspiration and changed the denouement so that sometimes the virgin might end her days selling arms in the Congo and the plantation owner set off for Calcutta to care for lepers. I did not last very long in this work; in fact, after only a few months, I was let go. By then my parents had returned from Turkey and I was living with them in a large Spanish-style adobe and red tile—roof house in the foothills, where it was difficult to catch a bus and nearly impossible to obtain a telephone. The house had a tower, five acres of orchards, a melancholy cow that never gave milk, a pig we had to chase out of the bedrooms with a broom, hens, rabbits, and a huge squash vine growing in the roof tiles. The large, ripened fruit tended to roll off, endangering anyone who had the bad luck to be standing below. Catching the bus to get back and forth from the office became an obsession. To get there on time, I got up every morning at dawn, but by the time I got off work the buses were always full, so I started going to my grandfather’s house to visit and wait to squeeze onto a later one with fewer passengers. That was the origin of my custom of seeing him every day, and it became so important to both of us that I missed only when he lived at the beach, when my children were born, a few days at the beginning of the military coup, and once when I wanted to dye my hair yellow and the beautician bungled the job and it turned green. I didn’t dare show up at Tata’s until I had bought a wig in my own color. In the winter our house was a clammy dungeon with holes in the roof, but in the spring and summer it was enchanting, with big clay pots spilling over with petunias, buzzing bees, songbirds, the perfume of flowers and fruit, the pig bumbling between visitors’ legs, and pure mountain air. Sunday dinners were moved from Tata’s house to my parents’, where the tribe continued to meet faithfully every week, following some urge to destroy itself. Michael, who had come from a placid home ruled by extreme courtesy, and who had been conditioned to hide his emotions at all times—except on the sports fields where one was free to behave like Genghis Khan—was a mute witness to the outlandish passions of my family.

  That year my Uncle Pablo died in a bizarre accident. He was flying over the Atacama Desert in a small plane when it blew up in midair. Witnesses saw the explosion and an incandescent ball of fire flashing through the skies, but there were no traces of the crash and after meticulously combing the area the rescue teams returned empty-handed. There was nothing to bury; the funeral was held with a symbolic coffin. The disappearance of this man I had loved dearly was so abrupt and total that I cultivated the fantasy that he had not really been reduced to ash and scattered across the dunes; perhaps he had miraculously been saved but had suffered irreparable trauma, and today, somewhere, a serene septuagenarian with no memory is wandering about unmindful of the young wife and four children he left behind him years ago. He was married to one of those rare individuals with a diaphanous soul destined to become even more pure with hard times and suffering. My grandfather received the bitter news without a flicker of emotion; his lips tightened, he stood up, leaned on his cane, and hobbled outside so that no one could see the expression in his eyes. He never again spoke of his favorite son, just as he never mentioned Memé. For that valiant old man, the deeper the wound, the more private the grief.

  I was three years into a relatively chaste love affair when I first heard the women in the office talking about a marvelous pill that would prevent pregnancy; it had revolutionized the cultures of Europe and the United States, they said, and was now available in a few local pharmacies. I investigated further and learned that one had to have a prescription to buy it. I did not dare go to the ineffable Dr. Benjamin Viel, who by then was the guru of family planning in Chile, but neither could I work up the nerve to talk with my mother. She had enough problems with two adolescent sons, and didn’t need to add magic pills for an unmarried daughter to her list. My brother Pancho had vanished, following the footsteps of a weird prophet who attracted disciples by proclaiming himself the new Messiah. The fact was that he owned a grocery store, and his whole program was nothing more than an elaborate theological scam, but the truth came out only much later, after my brother, and many other young people, had wasted years pursuing a myth. My mother did everything she could to retrieve her son from that mysterious sect, and more than once went to bring him home when he had scraped bottom and wanted help from the family. She would find him in some dark hovel, hungry, ill, and let down, but as soon as he gained enough strength he would disappear again and it would be months before we knew where he was. Once we heard that he was in Brazil, learning voodoo, and another time in Cuba training to be a revolutionary; none of those rumors was reliable and the truth was we never really knew anything. During this same period, my brother Juan was spending a couple of miserable years enrolled in the National Air Academy. Almost immediately, he realized that he lacked the aptitude or the endurance for that career, that he detested the absurd principles and military ceremonies, that he really didn’t give a damn about the nation itself, and that if he didn’t get out of there soon he would either perish at the hands of the older cadets or commit suicide. He did run away one day but his desperation did not carry him very far; he arrived home with his uniform in tatters, terrified, and stammering that he had deserted and when they caught him he would be subjected to a military trial, and even if he escaped the firing squad for having betrayed his country he would spend the rest of his young life in the black hole. My mother acted expeditiously; she hid him in the pantry, made a vow to the Virgen del Carmen, patron saint of Chile’s armed forces, in exchange for her aid, made a quick trip to the beauty salon, and then put on her best outfit and requested an audience with the director of the Academy. Once there, she did not give him an opportunity to open his mouth; she threw herself on him, got a firm grip on his jacket, and shouted that he alone was responsible for her son’s situation, and why was he not aware of the humiliation and torture the cadets suffered, and that if anything happened to Juan she would drag the good name of the Academy through the mud, and then continued to bombard him with arguments and shake him until the general, conquered by those panther eyes and the vehemence of unleashed maternal instinct, allowed my brother to return to the ranks.

  To get back to the pill, however. Michael and I never talked about the gross details of sexual relationships, our puritanical upbringing was too inhibiting. Our petting in some dark corner of the garden left us both exhausted, and me furious. I was slow to understand the mechanics of sex because I had never seen a man naked—except for marble statues with little baby peters—an
d I was not very clear about what an erection consisted of: when I felt something hard in Michael’s pants pocket, I thought it was motorcycle keys. My secret reading of A Thousand and One Nights in Lebanon had left my head filled with metaphors and poetic flourishes; what I needed was a simple manual. Later, when the differences between men and women became clear, and I was apprised of the function of something as uncomplicated as a penis, I felt cheated. I didn’t see then, and I don’t see now, the moral difference between those steamy sessions of unsatisfactory pawing and renting a hotel room and doing whatever your fancy dictates, but neither Michael nor I dared suggest that. I suspect that many girls my age did not hold back, but in those days of collective hypocrisy the subject was taboo. Everyone improvised as best he or she could, suffering inflamed hormones, a guilty conscience, and the fear that after “going all the way” the boy not only might evaporate from the scene but, even worse, divulge his conquest. The role of the male was to attack and ours to defend, pretending that sex did not interest us because it was not good form to appear to be collaborating in your own seduction. How different things were for you, Paula! You were sixteen when you came one morning to ask me to take you to a gynecologist because you wanted to learn about contraceptives. Mute with shock—because I realized your childhood had ended and you were beginning to escape my influence—I went with you. “Let’s not say anything about this, please; I don’t think anyone would understand that you helped me,” you advised me. When I was your age, I was in a muddle, cowed by apocalyptic warnings: Be careful about accepting a drink, it might be drugged with those powders they give cows to bring on their breeding season, or, Don’t get into his car because he will take you somewhere in the country and you know what can happen then. From the beginning, I rebelled against the double standard that allowed my brothers to go out all night and come back at dawn smelling of liquor, with never a word of rebuke. Tío Ramón used to call them in and close the door for a private “man’s talk,” things my mother and I had no right to comment on. It was considered normal that they would slip into the maid’s room at night, and they made jokes about it that made it doubly offensive to me, because added to macho arrogance was abuse of class. Imagine the scandal if I had invited the gardener to my bed! In spite of my rebelliousness, though, I was paralyzed by fear of the consequences of sex; nothing cools one off like the threat of an unwanted pregnancy. I had never seen a condom—except those fish rubbers the Lebanese merchants sold to marines in Beirut, the ones I thought were birthday party balloons. The first condom I ever held in my hand you showed me in Caracas, Paula, when you were going around everywhere with that kit for your human sexuality course. “That takes the cake! To think that at your age you don’t know how to use one of these,” you said that day. I was over forty, had published my first novel, and was writing the second. Now I am astonished by such ignorance from someone who had read as much as I. There was also that incident in my childhood that should have given me some inkling about sex, or at least provoked my curiosity about learning more, but I had locked that in the deepest corner of my memory.