Twenty years later, at some bend of my long peregrination, far from Chile in another corner of the world, I ran across the husband of the woman in the Chanel suit. He had been imprisoned and tortured during the early years of the military dictatorship and was scarred in both body and soul. He was living in exile, separated from his family, and his health was failing because he could not shake the prison cold that was devouring his bones. Even so, he had not lost his charm or his outrageous vanity. He scarcely remembered me; I stood out in his memory only because of the interview, which he had read with fascination.
“I was always crazy to know who that woman was,” he said in a confidential tone. “I discussed it with all my friends. That was all anyone was talking about in Santiago. I would have given anything to have my little visit to that apartment—even better with her two friends. Forgive my lack of modesty, Isabel, but I think those three dames deserved to know what a real man is like.”
“To tell you the truth, I think they did.”
“So much time has gone by now, won’t you tell me who she was?”
“No.”
“At least tell me if I knew her!”
“Yes, you did . . . biblically.”
My job on the magazine, and later in television, was an escape valve from the madness I inherited from my ancestors; without my work, the accumulated pressure would have landed me in a psychiatric ward. The prudish and moralistic atmosphere, the small-town mentality, and the rigidity of Chilean social norms at that time were overpowering. My grandfather soon adjusted to my public life and stopped throwing my articles into the trash; he never commented on them, but from time to time he asked me what Michael thought, and reminded me that I ought to be very grateful to have such a tolerant husband. He did not like my reputation as a feminist or my long dresses and antique hats, to say nothing of my Citroën painted like a shower curtain, but he forgave my extravagances because in real life I carried out my role as mother, wife, and housekeeper. Just for the fun of shocking everyone, I would have marched through the streets with a bra impaled on a broomstick—alone, of course, no one would have accompanied me—but in private life I had internalized the formulas for eternal domestic bliss. Every morning I served my husband his breakfast in bed, every evening I was waiting in full battle dress with his martini olive between my teeth, and every night I laid out the suit and shirt he would be wearing the next day; I shined his shoes, cut his hair and fingernails, and bought his clothes to save him the bother of trying them on, just as I did with my children. That was not only stupidity on my part, it was misdirected energy and excessive love.
I cultivated the external aspects of the hippies but in my actions lived like a worker ant, laboring twelve hours a day to pay the bills. The one time I tried marijuana—offered by a real hippie—I realized it was not for me. I smoked six joints in a row, and was rewarded not with the hallucinatory euphoria I had heard so much about but a headache: my pragmatic Basque genes are immune to the facile happiness of drugs.
I returned to television, this time with a feminist humor program, and collaborated on the only children’s magazine in Chile, which I ended up directing after the founder died suddenly. For years I amused myself by interviewing murderers, seers, prostitutes, necrophiliacs, jugglers, quasi-saints who performed nebulous miracles, demented psychiatrists, and beggars with false stumps who rented babies to put a dent in charitable hearts. I wrote recipes invented on a moment’s inspiration, and occasionally improvised a horoscope, guided by the birthdays of friends. Our astrologist lived in Peru and the mail was often delayed, or lost in the gullies of destiny. Once I called her to say that we had received the March horoscope but were missing February’s, and she told me to publish the one we had, what was the problem? the order didn’t change the outcome. After that, I began fabricating them myself, and had the same percentage of successes as she. The most difficult task was the lovelorn column, which I signed with the pseudonym Francisca Román. Where I lacked personal experience, I called on the inherited intuition of Memé and the counsel of Mama Hilda, who watched all the current soap operas and was a true expert in affairs of the heart. The archive of Francisca Román’s letters could provide material for volumes of short stories—I wonder where those boxes of epistolary melodramas are now? I can’t imagine how I had time for the house, the children, and my husband, but somehow I found it. In my free time, I made my clothes, wrote children’s stories and plays, and exchanged a steady stream of letters with my mother. Michael, meantime, was always close at hand, celebrating the serene contentment into which we had settled with the ingenuous certainty that if we played by the rules, we would live happily ever after. He seemed to be in love, and I certainly was. He was a permissive, rather uninvolved father; at any rate, punishment and rewards were left to me, after all, children were supposed to be raised by their mothers. My feminism did not include sharing household duties, in fact, the idea never entered my mind; I thought liberation had to do with going out into the world and assuming male duties, not with delegating part of my load. The result was a terrible fatigue, as witnessed today by the millions of women of my generation who question feminist movements.
The furniture in our house tended to disappear and be replaced by questionable antiques from the Persian Market, where a Syrian merchant traded men’s clothing for anything old. At the rate Michael’s wardrobe was reduced, the house filled up with chipped chamber pots, treadle sewing machines, cart wheels, and gas street-lights. Michael’s parents, alarmed by some of the characters who drifted in and out of our home, did everything possible to protect their grandchildren from potential dangers. My face on the television and my name in the magazine were open invitations to screwball characters like the post office employee who had a correspondence with Martians, or the girl who left her infant baby on my office desk. We kept the little girl with us for a while, and had decided to adopt her, but one evening when we returned home we discovered that her legitimate grandparents had taken her away with a police order. A miner from the north, a seer by trade who had lost his sanity from having prophesied so many catastrophes, slept on our living room sofa for two weeks, until the National Health Service strike was settled. The poor man had come to Santiago to be treated at the psychiatric hospital on the very day the strike began. Out of money and not knowing anyone, but with prophetic faculties intact, he was able to locate one of the few people in that hostile city willing to give him shelter. “That man has a screw loose, he could pull a knife and murder us all,” a highly agitated Granny warned me. She collected her two grandchildren and had them sleep at her house as long as we had the seer, who, incidentally, turned out to be completely harmless and may even have saved our lives. He predicted that in a strong earthquake some of our walls would come down. Michael made a thorough inspection, reinforced certain points, and with the next minor quake only the patio wall collapsed, crushing our dahlias and the neighbor’s rabbit.
Granny and Mama Hilda helped raise the children, Michael gave them stability and decency, the school instructed them, and the rest they acquired with their natural wit and talent. I merely tried to entertain them. You were a wise little girl, Paula. Even as a child, you wanted to educate people—your brother, the dogs, and your dolls all played the part of students. The time you had left from your teaching activities was divided among games with Granny, visiting residents of a neighborhood old folks’ home, and sewing sessions with Mama Hilda—in spite of the exquisite embroidered batiste dresses my mother bought you in Switzerland, you always looked like an orphan in dresses you sewed for yourself. While my father-in-law spent his retirement years trying to resolve the squaring of the circle and other interminable mathematical problems, Granny was enjoying her brood in a true grandmotherly orgy; you climbed to the attic to play bandits, sneaked into the club to swim in the pool, and got decked out in my nightgowns to perform amateurish plays. In the company of that adorable woman, you, Paula, spent the summer baking cookies and the winter knitting striped mufflers for
your friends in the geriatric home; later, after we left Chile, you wrote letters to each one of those great-grandparents you had adopted, until the last one died of loneliness. Those were the happiest and most secure years of our lives. Nicolás and you still treasure the happy memories that sustained you during the hard times when you begged and cried to go back to Chile. By then, though, we couldn’t return. Granny was resting beneath a blanket of jasmine, her husband was lost in the labyrinths of senile dementia, our friends were dead or scattered around the world, and there was nowhere for us in our homeland. Only the house remained. It is still there, intact. Not long ago I went to visit it and was amazed by its size; it looked like a dollhouse with a moth-eaten wig for a roof.
Michael had commendable patience with me. He was not disturbed by the gossip or criticism I provoked, he never interfered in my projects, no matter how outlandish, and he defended me loyally even in my mistakes; our paths, nonetheless, were growing farther and farther apart. As I gravitated more toward feminists, bohemians, artists, and intellectuals, he devoted himself to his plans, his calculations, his building sites, and his chess and bridge games. He stayed very late at the office, because among Chilean professionals it is fashionable to work from sunup to sundown and never take a vacation; anything else is considered an indication of a bureaucratic mentality and leads to certain failure in the private sector. He was a good friend and a good lover, but I do not remember much about him; he is blurred in my memory like a badly focused photograph. We were brought up in the tradition that the husband provides for the family and the wife takes charge of home and children, but in our case it was not entirely that way. I began working before he did, and carried a large part of our expenses: his salary was earmarked for paying the mortgage on the house and making investments, and mine evaporated in day-to-day expenditures. Michael remained faithful to himself; he has changed very little over his life, but I offered too many surprises. I burned with restlessness, I saw injustices everywhere, I intended to transform the world, and I embraced so many different causes that I myself lost count and my children lived in a state of constant bewilderment. Ten years later, when we were established in Venezuela and my ideals had been crippled by the fortunes of exile, I asked the children—formed in the era of hippies and socialist dreams—how they wanted to live, and they both replied, in unison and without consultation, “like wealthy bourgeois.”
Tío Ramón returned from Switzerland the same year my father died. My stepfather had slowly climbed the ladder of his diplomatic career and gained an important post in the chancellery. He took his grandchildren to the government palace, telling them it was his private residence, and seated them amid plush drapes and portraits of the Fathers of the Nation in the long ambassador’s dining room, where white-gloved waiters served them orange juice. When you were seven, you had to write a composition at school on the theme of the family, and you wrote that your only interesting relative was Tío Ramón, prince and direct descendant of Jesus Christ, owner of a palace with uniformed servants and armed guards. Your teacher gave me the name of a child psychiatrist, but shortly afterward your reputation was saved. I was supposed to take you to the dentist but forgot, and you stood waiting for hours at the school door. The teacher tried unsuccessfully to locate either your father or me, and finally called Tío Ramón. “Tell Paula to stay right there, I will come get her immediately,” he replied and, in fact, a half-hour later a presidential limousine with fluttering flags and an escort of two motorcycle policemen pulled up before the school. The chauffeur got out, hat in hand, opened the door of the backseat, and your grandfather emerged wearing a chestful of decorations and the black ceremonial cape that in a burst of poetic inspiration he had stopped by his house to pick up. You have forgotten that I left you waiting, Paula, but you will always remember that imperial entourage and the face of your teacher, who was so befuddled that she made a deep bow as she greeted your Tío Ramón.
My father died of a heart attack. There was no opportunity to hear the story of his great moments or of his misery because a sudden wave of blood flooded the deepest chambers of his heart and he lay dead in the street like a common beggar. He was taken by Public Assistance to the morgue, where an autopsy determined the cause of death. In going through his pockets the attendants found his papers, connected the name, and contacted me to identify the body. When they gave me the name, I never dreamed it was my father; I hadn’t thought of him for years and there was no shadow of him in my life, not even bitterness at having been abandoned by him. Instead, I thought of my brother, whose second name is Tomás and who at the time was still somewhere with the mysterious sect of the Argentine Messiah. It had been months since we heard from him and, because of the family’s natural bent for the tragic, we supposed the worst. My mother had futilely exhausted her energies in trying to locate him, and was inclined to believe rumors that her son had been enlisted by Cuban revolutionaries: the idea that he was following the footsteps of the dead Che Guevara was more palatable than thinking him hypnotized by a charlatan. Before leaving for the morgue, I called Tío Ramón at his office and stammered that my brother was dead. I reached that sinister building before he did and identified myself to an impassive official who led me to an icy room where a form covered in white lay on a bare cot. They turned back the sheet and I saw a pale, naked, heavyset man with a seam stitched from chin to pubis, a man to whom I felt not the remotest connection. Moments later, Tío Ramón arrived; he glanced at the body and informed us that the man was my father. I walked over to take another look, observing his features very carefully because I would never have an opportunity to see them again.
That day I learned of the existence of an older half-brother, the son of my father and a lover, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the boy in my mathematics class I had fallen in love with at fifteen. I also learned of three younger children my father had by a third woman, offspring to whom, ironically, he had given our names. Tío Ramón took charge of the funeral and of drafting a document in which we renounced any claims in favor of that other family. Juan and I immediately signed our names, and then falsified Pancho’s signature to avoid unpleasant delays. The next day we walked behind the coffin of that stranger down a path in the General Cemetery; no one else attended the modest burial, my father left very few friends in this world. I have never again had contact with my half-brothers and -sisters. When I think of my father I can only see him lying motionless in the abysmal solitude of that frigid morgue.
My father’s was not the first corpse I had seen so close. From a distance, I had glimpsed bodies in the street during the chaos of the war that shook Lebanon and during an uprising in Bolivia, but they seemed more like marionettes than people. I only remember Memé alive, and of my Uncle Pablo there was nothing left to see. The one true and present death in my childhood happened when I was eight, and the circumstances make it unforgettable. That night of December 25, 1950, I had lain awake for hours, wide-eyed in a darkness filled with the familiar sounds of the beach house. My brothers and my cousins occupied other cots in the same room, and through the cardboard thin walls I heard the night breathing in the next rooms, the constant humming of the refrigerator, and the stealthy scurrying of mice. Several times I wanted to get up and go out on the patio to cool off in the salt breeze, but I was discouraged by the thought of never-ending processions of blind cockroaches. Under a sheet damp with the eternal dew of the coast, I touched my body with amazement and terror, while images of that afternoon of revelations flashed like ragged clouds across the pale reflection of the moon in the window. I could still feel the fisherman’s moist lips on my throat, his voice murmuring in my ear. From far away came the muted roar of the ocean, and every once in a while a car passed in the street, briefly lighting the slits in the shutters. In my chest I felt the vibrations of a campanile, the weight of a gravestone, a powerful claw creeping toward my throat, choking me. The Devil appears at night in the mirrors. . . . There was no one in the room with me; the only thing in the whole ho
use was a flaking rectangle in the bathroom where my mother put on her lipstick, too high for me to see. But the Evil One not only inhabits mirrors, Margara had told me, he also roams in the darkness searching for human sin, and climbs inside perverse little girls to eat their entrails. I put my hand where the fisherman had put his, and immediately drew it back, frightened, confused by the mingling of repugnance and dark pleasure. I felt again his rough, strong fingers exploring my body, the rasp of his badly shaven cheeks, his smell, his weight, his obscenities in my ear. Surely the mark of sin was emblazoned on my forehead. How was it that no one had noticed? When I got back to the house, I had not dared look my mother or my grandfather in the eye; I had hidden from Margara and, pretending to have a stomach ache, had escaped early to bed, after taking a long shower and scrubbing all over with blue laundry soap, but nothing had removed the stains. Dirty . . . I would be dirty forever. . . . Even with all that, it never entered my head to disobey the fisherman’s orders; the next day I would meet him again on the road with the geraniums and, as if in a trance, follow him into the woods, even if it cost my life. “If your grandfather finds out, he’ll kill me,” he had warned. My silence was sacred, his life was in my hands. The proximity of that second meeting filled me with terror, but also with fascination. What could there be beyond sin? The hours passed with excruciating slowness while I listened to the rhythmic breathing of my brothers and cousins and tried to calculate how long it was till dawn. With the first rays of the sun, I would be able to get out of bed and touch bare feet to the floor, because with the light the cockroaches went back to their corners. I was hungry; I thought of the jar of blancmange and cookies in the kitchen; I was cold and wrapped myself in the heavy blankets, but immediately began to rage with the heat of forbidden memories and delirium of anticipation.