Paula

  What was my life like before Willie? It was a good life, filled with intense emotions. I have lived the extremes; few things have been easy or smooth for me, and that may be why my first marriage lasted so long: it was a tranquil oasis, a noncombat zone in between battles. Everything else was hard work, storming the bastion with sword in hand, without an instant’s truce—or boredom: great successes and smashing failures; passions and loves, but also loneliness, work, losses, desertions. Until the day of the military coup I thought that my youth would last forever; the world seemed a splendid place and people essentially good. I believed evil to be a kind of mistake, an aberration of nature. All that ended abruptly on September 11, 1973, when I awakened to the brutality of existence . . . . But I haven’t reached that point in these pages yet, Paula, why confuse you by leaping around in these memories? I did not end up an old maid, as I had predicted in those dramatic statements lying in Tío Ramón’s strongbox; just the opposite, I married too soon. Despite Michael’s promise to his father, we decided to marry before he finished engineering school because the alternative was for me to go to Switzerland with my parents, where they had been named Chile’s representatives at the United Nations. If I cut corners, my salary would be enough to rent a room and keep body and soul together, but at that time in Santiago, the idea of a girl’s being independent at nineteen, with a sweetheart and no oversight, was out of the question. I debated for several weeks, until my mother seized the initiative and spoke to Michael, placing him between the sword and marriage—just as I would do twenty-six years later to my second husband. Michael and I sat down with paper and pencil and came to the conclusion that two people could subsist, barely, on my salary, and that it would be worth taking a chance. My mother immediately launched into enthusiastic activity. Her first move was to sell the large Persian rug in the dining room and then announce that a wedding was an excuse to spend money like a drunken sailor, and that mine would be splendid. Quietly, she began to store provisions in a secret room in the house, so at least we wouldn’t starve. She filled trunks with linens, towels, and kitchen utensils, and found out how we could get a loan to build a house. When she set the papers before us and we saw the amount of the debt, Michael felt faint. He had no job and his father, annoyed by our precipitous decision, was not inclined to help him, but my mother’s powers of persuasion are staggering, and in the end we signed. The civil service took place one fine spring day in my parents’ beautiful colonial house, an intimate gathering attended only by our two families—that is, nearly a hundred people. Tío Ramón had suggested that we invite my father, who, he thought, should not be absent at such an important moment of my life, but I refused, and it was Salvador Allende who represented my father’s family and signed the civil register as my witness to the wedding. Just before the judge appeared, my grandfather took me by the arm, led me aside, and repeated the words he had spoken to my mother twenty years before. “There is still time to change your mind. Don’t marry him, please, think it over. Give me the sign and I will get rid of this mob. How about it?” He thought marriage was a miserable bargain for women; on the other hand, he recommended it without reservation to all his male descendants. One week later, we were married in a religious ceremony, even though Michael was Anglican and I was no longer a practicing Catholic, because the weight of the Church in the world I was born into is like a millstone around one’s neck. Proudly, I walked down the aisle on the arm of Tío Ramón, who made no further suggestion regarding my father until years later, when we were called on to bury him. In photographs taken that day, the new bride and groom look like children playing dress-up: he in a tailored swallowtail coat and I swathed in clouds of the cloth acquired in the Damascus souk. In keeping with English tradition, my mother-in-law gave me a blue garter to wear for luck. The bust of my dress was stuffed with plastic foam, but with the first hug of congratulations, even before leaving the altar, my breasts were crushed concave. I lost the garter in the nave of the church, a frivolous testimony to the ceremony, and we had a flat tire on the car taking us to the reception and Michael had to take off his tailcoat and help the chauffeur change the tire, but I do not believe those were omens of bad luck.

  My parents left for Geneva and Michael and I began our married life in their enormous house, with six months’ rent paid by Tío Ramón and the pantry my mother had stocked like a generous magpie: there were enough sacks of grains, jars of preserves, and even bottles of wine to survive Armageddon. Even so, the house was not practical; we did not have enough furniture to fill so many rooms, or money to heat them or to hire indoor and outdoor domestic help. Perhaps worse, no one was on the property after we left every morning for the office and the university. The cow, the pig, the chickens—the very fruit from the trees—were all stolen; then thieves broke the windows and stripped us of wedding gifts and clothes. Finally, they discovered the entrance to the secret cave of the pantry and carried all that away, leaving a thank-you note on the door as the ultimate irony. That was the beginning of a string of robberies that added unwanted spice to our lives. I calculate that more than twenty times thieves have broken into houses we lived in, taking nearly everything, including three automobiles. By a miracle, my grandmother’s silver mirror was never touched. Between robbery, exile, divorce, and travel, I have lost so many things that now I begin to say goodbye to something almost as soon as I buy it, because I know what a short time it will be in my hands. When the soap vanished from the bathroom and the bread from the kitchen, we decided to leave that empty, rundown, old house where spiders wove their lace on the ceilings and mice sashayed impudently through the rooms. In the meantime, my grandfather had retired, bidding farewell forever to his sheep, and had moved to the ramshackle old beach house to spend his remaining years far from the din of the capital and await death with his memories, in peace, never suspecting that he had twenty more years in this world. He turned his house in Santiago over to us, and we settled in amid solemn furniture, nineteenth-century paintings, the marble statue of the pensive girl, and the oval table in the dining room that was the stage for Memé’s enchanted sugar bowl. We were not there for long, only long enough to build—on audacity and credit—the small house where my children were raised.

  One month after I was married, I developed pains in my lower abdomen and from pure ignorance and confusion attributed them to a venereal disease. I did not know exactly what that was, but I supposed that it was related to sex and therefore to matrimony. I did not dare discuss it with Michael because I had learned in my family, and he in his English school, that such intimate topics are in bad taste. I certainly did not dare approach my mother-in-law for counsel, and my own mother was too far away, so I bit my lip and bore it until I was scarcely able to walk. One day as I painfully pushed a shopping cart through the market, I met the mother of my brother’s former girlfriend, a suave and discreet woman I knew only slightly. Pancho was still tagging after the new Messiah and his amorous ties with the girl had been temporarily interrupted; years later, he would marry her, divorce her, then marry and divorce her a second time. This extremely pleasant woman asked me politely how I was, and before the words were out of her mouth I had clamped my arms around her neck and babbled that I was dying of syphilis. With admirable composure, she took me to a nearby tea shop, where she ordered coffee and tea cake and then questioned me on the details of my volcanic confession. The minute we finished the last forkful of cake, she escorted me to the office of a physician friend who diagnosed a urinary tract infection, possibly provoked by the icy drafts in my parents’ colonial house. He prescribed bed rest and antibiotics and sent me on my way with a waggish smile. “The next time you have an attack of syphilis, don’t wait so long, come see me right away,” he said. This rescue was the beginning of an unbroken friendship. We adopted each other because I needed another mother and she had room to spare in her heart; she came to call herself Mama Hilda, and has beautifully fulfilled that role.

  My children have determined my life; since the day they
were born I have never thought of myself as an individual but as part of an inseparable trio. Once, years ago, I tried to give priority to a lover, but it did not work out and in the end I left him to return to my family. This is something we must talk about later, Paula, but for now I will pass over it. It never occurred to me that motherhood was optional, I thought it was as inevitable as the seasons. I knew I was pregnant before it was confirmed medically; you appeared to me in a dream, just as your brother, Nicolás, did later. I have not lost that gift, and now can predict my daughter-in-law’s children. I dreamed my grandson Alejandro before his parents suspected he had been conceived, and I know that the child who will be born in the spring will be a girl, and will be named Andrea, though Nicolás and Celia still don’t believe me and are planning to have a sonogram and are making lists of names. In the first dream I ever had of you, you were two years old and your name was Paula. You were a slender child, with dark hair, large black eyes, and a limpid gaze like that of martyrs in the stained-glass windows of some medieval churches. You were wearing a checked coat and hat, something like the classic costume of Sherlock Holmes. In the next months I gained so much weight that one morning when I stooped down to put on my shoes, the watermelon in my belly rolled up to my throat, toppling me head over heels and so definitively displacing my center of gravity that it was never restored: I still stumble my way through the world. Those months you were inside me were a time of perfect happiness; I have never since felt so closely accompanied. We learned to communicate in code. I knew how you would be at different periods in your life: I saw you at seven, fifteen, and twenty, I saw you with your long hair and happy laugh, in your blue jeans and your wedding dress, but I never dreamed you as you are now, breathing through a tube in your throat . . . inert . . . unconscious. More than nine months passed, and as you showed no intention of abandoning the tranquil grotto in which you floated, the doctor decided to take drastic measures and, on October 22, 1963, he opened my abdomen to bring you into the world. Mama Hilda was the only one at my side during that crisis, because Michael was in bed with a case of nerves, my mother was in Switzerland, and I did not want to notify my in-laws until everything was over. You were born with fine hair over all your body, giving you a slight resemblance to a little pink fairy armadillo, but I would not have traded you for the world, and besides, you soon shed that fuzz, leaving a delicate and beautiful baby girl with two glowing pearls in her ears that my mother insisted on giving you to continue a long-standing family tradition. I went back to work right away, but nothing was the same as before; half my time, my attention, and my energy were given to you, and I developed antennas to divine your needs even from a distance. I went to my office with dragging feet and looked for any excuse to escape; I got there late, left early, and pretended to be sick in order to stay home. Watching you grow and discover the world seemed a thousand times more interesting than the United Nations and their ambitious plans to improve the fate of the planet. I couldn’t wait for Michael to get his engineering degree and support the family, so I could be with you. In the meantime, Michael’s mother and father had moved to a large house a block away from where we were building ours, and were preparing to devote the rest of their lives to spoiling you. They had a naive view of life, because they had never stepped outside the small circle that protected them from ill winds; for them, the future looked rosy, just as it did to us. Nothing bad could happen if we did nothing bad. I wanted to be a model wife and mother, even if I didn’t know exactly how. Michael planned to find a good job in his profession, live comfortably, travel a little, and much later inherit his parents’ large house, where he would spend his old age surrounded by grandchildren and playing bridge and golf with his lifelong friends.

  Tata could not put up with the boredom and solitude of the beach for very long. He had to give up his swims in the ocean because the glacial temperature of the Humboldt current fossilized his bones and his fishing expeditions because the oil refinery had wiped out both fresh and saltwater fish. He was increasingly lame and ailing, but remained faithful to his theory that illness is a natural punishment of humankind and pain is felt less if one ignores it. He kept himself going on the gin and aspirins that replaced his homeopathic pills when they ceased to have any effect. It was not too surprising they would, because when my brothers and I were children and could not resist the temptation of that ancient wood medicine cabinet filled with mysterious vials, we not only ate the homeopathic nostrums by the handful but also switched them around in the bottles. So my grandfather spent months of silence reviewing his memories and concluded that life is a crock and there is not much reason to be afraid of leaving it. “We forget,” he often said, “that no matter what we do, we are on the road to death.” Memé’s ghost was lost in the gelid crannies of that house built for summer pleasure, not winter wind and rain. As the last straw, the parrot fell ill of a catarrh and neither the homeopathic pills nor the aspirins dissolved in gin its owner forced into its beak with a dropper did any good. One Monday morning Tata found it stone cold dead at the foot of the perch where it had sat so many years screaming insults. He had it packed in ice and sent to a taxidermist in Santiago, who shortly returned it, stuffed, with new feathers and an intelligent expression it had never worn in life. When my grandfather had made the last repairs on the house, and tired of fighting the ineluctable erosion on the hill and the plagues of ants, roaches, and mice, a year had gone by and solitude had embittered him. As a last desperate measure against boredom, he began to watch soap operas and without realizing it became ensnared in that vice; before long the fates of those cardboard characters became more important to him than those of his own family. He used to follow several at one time, and gradually the story lines blended together and he ended up lost in a labyrinth of vicarious passions. That was when he realized that the moment had come to return to civilization, before old age delivered its last blow and left him half loony. He returned to Santiago just as we were ready to move into our new house, a prefabricated cottage slapped together by a half dozen workmen and crowned by a straw thatch that gave it a touch of Africa. I renewed my old custom of visiting my grandfather in the afternoons after work. I had learned to drive and Michael and I shared a very primitive plastic vehicle with a single door in the front that took steering wheel and controls with it as it opened. I am not a good driver, and dodging through traffic in that mechanical egg was little short of suicidal. My daily visits with Tata provided me with enough material for all the books I have written, possibly for all I will ever write. He was a virtuoso storyteller, gifted with perfidious humor, able to recount the most hair-raising stories while bellowing with laughter. He held back none of the anecdotes accumulated through his many years of living: the principal historical events of the century, the excesses of our family, and the infinite knowledge acquired in his reading. The only forbidden subjects were religion and illness; he considered that God is not a topic for discussion and that anything relating to the body and its functions is private—to him, even looking in the mirror was a ridiculous vanity, and he shaved by memory. He was authoritarian by nature, but not inflexible. When I began to work as a journalist and had finally articulated a language for expressing my frustrations as a woman in that macho culture, my grandfather did not at first want to hear my arguments, which to his ears were pure poppycock, an attack upon the foundations of family and society, but when he became aware of the silence that had settled over our afternoon tea and rolls, he began to question me in an offhand way. One day I surprised him leafing through a book I thought I recognized, and with time he came to accept female liberation as a point of elemental justice; his tolerance, however, did not extend to social changes: politically, just as in religion, he was a conservative, and espoused individualism. One day, he asked me to promise to help him die, because death can be so obscenely clumsy and slow.