Paula

  Very early the next morning, while the family was still sleeping, I slipped out of bed, dressed, and went out to the patio; I circled around the house and went into the kitchen through the back door. The iron and copper pots hung on their hooks; live clams in a pail of salt water sat on the gray granite table beside a cloth sack with yesterday’s bread. I couldn’t open the jar of blancmange, but I cut off a chunk of cheese and a slice of quince paste and went outside to look at the sun, just rising over the hill like an incandescent orange. For no reason at all, I began walking toward the mouth of the river, the center of that small fishing village where it was still too early for any activity. I walked past the church, the post office, the general store, past the section of new houses, all exactly alike with their zinc roofs and wood terraces facing the sea, past the hotel where the young people went at night to dance to old rhythms because the new ones hadn’t yet reached this backwater; I walked down the long market street where vegetables and fruit were sold, past the pharmacy, the Turk’s dry goods store, the newspaper kiosk, the bar, and the billiard hall, still without seeing a soul. I came to the part of town where the fishing families lived, shanties with crude wood counters where seafood and fish were displayed, nets spread to dry like portentous spiderwebs, boots upside-down on the sand, waiting for their owners to recover sufficiently from the Christmas celebrations to go back out to sea. I heard voices, and saw people gathered near one of the farthest shacks, where the river empties into the sea. The sun was higher now and prickled hotly like ants on my shoulders. With the last bit of cheese and quince I reached the end of the street; cautiously I approached the small circle of people and tried to step through, but they pushed me back. At that moment, two policemen appeared on their bicycles; one blew his whistle and the other yelled, “Step aside, goddammit, we’re the law.” The circle parted briefly, and I saw the fisherman lying face up on the dark sand of the riverbed, his arms flung open in a cross, and wearing the same black trousers, the same white shirt, and the same rubber-soled shoes he had worn the day before when he took me into the woods. One of the policemen commented that he had received a blow on the head, and then I saw the dried blood on his ear and his neck. Something exploded in my chest, and my mouth was filled with the taste of bitter grapefruit; I bent over double, rocked by violent spasms. I dropped to my knees and vomited onto the sand a mixture of cheese, quince paste, and guilt. “What’s that kid doing here?” someone said; I felt a hand on my arm but I jerked free and blindly began to run. I ran and I ran, with a piercing pain in my side and that bitter taste in my mouth, not stopping until I saw the red roof of my house, and then I collapsed at the edge of the street, a tiny ball beneath the bushes. Who had seen me in the woods with him? How did Tata find out? I couldn’t think, the only thing I knew for sure was that he would never again dive for sea urchins, that he lay dead on the sand, paying for our mutual crime, that I was free and would not have to meet him, and that he would never again take me to the forest. Much later, I heard familiar sounds from the house: servants preparing breakfast and the voices of my brothers and cousins. The milkman’s jenny went by with rattling milk cans, and the man who delivered bread on his tricycle, and then Margara, grouching on her way to do the shopping. I sneaked into the patio with the hydrangeas, washed my face and hands in the stream from the hill, dabbed at my hair, and went into the dining room, where my grandfather sat before his newspaper and a steaming cup of café con leche. “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, smiling.

  Two days later, when the coroner authorized it, the fisherman’s wake was held in his modest home. All the town, including summer people, filed through to look at him; it wasn’t often that anything interesting happened and no one wanted to miss the novelty of a murder, the only one anyone could remember in that resort town since the crucified artist. Margara took me even though my mother considered it a grisly spectacle, because Tata—who volunteered to pay for the burial—declared that death is a natural phenomenon and it is better to be exposed to it at a young age. At dusk, we climbed the hill to the clapboard shack decorated with paper garlands, a Chilean flag, and humble bunches of flowers from gardens along the coast. By then, the sound of tinny guitars was fading, and the mourners, foggy from cheap wine, were dozing in rattan chairs set in a circle around the coffin—a simple, unfinished pine box lighted by four candles. The black-clad mother poked at the fire in a wood stove where a sooty tea kettle was boiling, all the while muttering a stream of prayers interspersed with sobs and curses. The neighbor women brought cups to serve tea, and the victim’s younger brothers, in their Sunday shoes and slicked-down hair, ran around in the patio in a flurry of hens and dogs. A black beribboned photograph of the fisherman from his days as a conscript stood on a tottering chest of drawers. All through the night, family and friends would take turns sitting with the corpse before it was lowered into the ground, strumming badly tuned guitars, eating whatever the women brought from their kitchens, and recalling the dead man in the halting language of the drunk and the sorrowing. Margara moved forward, muttering under her breath and yanking my arm because I was hanging back. When we neared the coffin, she made me go up to it and pray an Our Father of farewell, because she believed that the souls of the murdered never find rest and come in the nighttime to punish the living. Laid out on a white sheet was the man whose hands had known my body three days earlier in the forest. I looked first with visceral fear, then with curiosity, searching for a resemblance, but could find none. That face was not the face of my sin, it was a pale mask with painted lips, brilliantined hair parted in the middle, a wad of cotton in each nostril, and a handkerchief tied around its head to keep the jaw from sagging.

  Although the hospital is crowded with people in the afternoons, on Saturday and Sunday mornings it seems deserted. It is still dark when I get there, and I am so tired from the accumulated fatigue of the previous week that my purse is dragging the floor behind me. I walk through the endless, solitary corridors where even my heartbeats echo, and it seems I am walking the wrong way on a moving sidewalk. I am not moving forward, I am always in the same place, more and more exhausted. As I walk, I am whispering magic formulas of my own invention, and the closer I get to the building, to the long corridor of lost steps, to your room, to your bed, the more tightly my chest squeezes with anguish. You are like an overgrown baby, Paula. It is two weeks since you left the intensive care unit, and there is no change to speak of. You were tense after the move, as if you were frightened. Gradually, you have become more calm, but there is no indication of a consciousness, all you do is stare toward the window, absolutely motionless. I have not given up hope; I believe that in spite of the ominous prognosis you will come back to us, and even if you are not the brilliant and vivacious woman you were, you may be able to live an almost normal life and be happy, and I will be responsible for making it happen. Expenses have sky-rocketed. I go to the bank and change money that flies from my wallet so quickly I don’t even know where it goes, but I choose not to make an accounting, this is no time for prudence. I must find a physical therapist, because the hospital offers only minimal services; from time to time two distracted girls show up—reluctantly—to move your arms and legs for ten minutes following some vague instructions from an energetic type with a mustache who seems to be their boss and who has seen you only once. There are too many patients and too few resources, so I exercise you myself. Four times a day I force you to move every part of your body. I begin with your toes, one by one, and work upward, slowly and firmly, because it isn’t easy to loosen your fingers or bend your knees and elbows. I sit you up in the bed and pound your back to clear your lungs; I moisten the harsh hole in your throat with drops of water because the central heating dries the air, and to prevent deformation I place books at the soles of your feet and bind them with strips of bandage. I also separate your fingers with pieces of sponge rubber and try to keep your head straight with a collar improvised from a travel neck pillow and adhesive tape. These make-do measures a
re distressing, though, Paula. Soon I must get you where someone can help you, they say that rehabilitation works miracles. The neurologist asks me to be patient, tells me it is not possible to move you yet, much less take you halfway across the world in an airplane. I spend the day and much of the night in the hospital, and have become friends with the other patients in your room and their families. I give Elvira massages, and we are inventing a language of signs to communicate, since words betray her. I tell stories to the others, and in exchange they give me coffee from their thermoses and hefty ham sandwiches they bring from home. The snail-woman has been transferred to Room 0, she is nearing the end. Every day Elvira’s husband tells me, “Your daughter is more alert,” but I can read in his eyes that deep down he doesn’t believe that. I have shown them photographs of your wedding and told them the story of your life. They know you very well by now, and some weep quietly when Ernesto comes and hugs you and whispers in your ear. Your husband is as tired as I am; he has dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes hang loose on him.

  Willie came again from San Francisco. He tries to come often, to ease this long separation that seems to go on forever. When we made our commitment four years ago, we promised we would never be apart, but life has taken it upon itself to sabotage our plans. My husband is pure force, with as many virtues as he has defects; he swallows all the air around him and leaves me shaking, but it really does me good to be with him. Beside him, I sleep without pills, anesthetized by security and the warmth of his body. When I wake up, he brings me coffee in bed and makes me stay an hour longer, resting, while he goes to the hospital to relieve the night nurse. He sits in the waiting room in his faded blue jeans, work boots, black leather jacket, and a beret like the one my grandfather wore, which he bought in the Plaza Mayor. Despite his outfit, he looks like a Genoese sailor from centuries ago, and I expect someone to stop him in the street to ask him for navigational charts to the New World. He greets the patients in a Mexican-accented slang, and sits beside your bed to rub your hands and talk to you about what we will do when you come to California, while the other patients watch with amazement. Willie cannot hide his concern; in his role as a lawyer he has seen countless accident cases, and he has little hope that you will recover. He is preparing me for the worst.

  “We will take care of her, many families do it, we aren’t the only ones. Looking after Paula and loving her will give us new purpose, we’ll learn a different form of happiness. We can go on with our lives and take Paula with us wherever we are. What’s the problem?” he asks consolingly, with that generous and slightly ingenuous pragmatism that seduced me the moment we met.

  “No!” I replied, not realizing I was shouting. “I won’t listen to your dark predictions. Paula will get well!”

  “You’re obsessed. She’s all you talk about, all you think about. You’re falling off the edge so fast you can’t stop yourself. You won’t let me help you, you don’t want to listen to reason. You must put some emotional distance between the two of you or you’ll go nuts. And if you get sick, who will look after Paula? Please let me take care of you. . . .”

  The healers come in the evenings; I don’t know how they get in, but they are determined to bring you energy and health. In their everyday lives they are clerks, technicians, officials, ordinary people, but in their free time they study esoteric sciences and attempt to cure with the power of their convictions. They are sure they can charge the spent batteries of your sickly body, that your spirit is growing, renewing itself, and that from this immobility will emerge a different and better woman. They say I must not look at you with a mother’s eyes, but with the golden eye, and then I will see you floating on another plane, imperturbable and indifferent to the terror and misery of this hospital room. They also, however, counsel me to be prepared, because if you have fulfilled your destiny in this world and are ready to continue the long voyage of the soul, you will not come back. They are part of a world organization and are in communication with other healers, so that they, too, will send you strength, just as the nuns are in contact with other congregations praying for you; they say that your recovery depends on your own will to live: the ultimate decision is in your hands. I don’t dare tell any of this to my family in California, I know they would not look favorably on these spiritual physicians. Ernesto does not approve of their invasion, either; he does not want his wife to be a public spectacle, but I don’t see how it can harm you, you’re not even aware of them. The nuns participate in the ceremonies, too; they ring the Tibetan prayer bells, burn incense, and implore their Christian God and all the heavenly court, while the other patients watch the healing ceremonies with a certain reserve. Don’t be afraid, Paula, they’re not dancing with feathers pasted to their bodies or wringing roosters’ necks to sprinkle you with blood, they merely fan you a little to remove any negative energy, then place their hands on your body, close their eyes, and concentrate. They ask me to help, to imagine a beam of light entering the top of my head, passing down through my body and coming out of my hands toward you, to visualize you healthy, and to stop crying, because sadness contaminates the air and perturbs the soul. I don’t know whether any of this does any good, but one thing is sure: the spirit of the rest of us in the room has changed, we’re happier. We have decided to control our sadness: we tune the radio to lively music, we share cookies, and we warn visitors not to come with long faces. The story hour has also been enlarged, now I’m not the only one telling, everyone is taking part. The most loquacious is Elvira’s husband with a geyser of anecdotes; we take turns telling each other our lives, and when we run out of personal adventures, we begin to invent them, and from so much embroidering and giving free rein to our imaginations, we have perfected our form, and people come from other rooms to listen. In the bed where the snail-woman used to be, we have a new patient, a small dark girl covered with cuts and bruises, raped by four brutes in a park. Her belongings are marked with a red circle and the staff will not touch her without gloves, but we incorporate her into the strange family in this room, and wash her and feed her. At first, she thought she had awakened in an insane asylum, and covered her head with the sheet and shivered, but little by little, between the Tibetan bells, the radio music, and our baring our souls, she gained confidence and has begun to smile. She has become a friend of the nuns and the healers, and because she can’t lift her head from her pillow, she asks me to read her gossip about movie stars and European royalty. Opposite Elvira now is a patient named Aurelia, who has been transferred here from the Department of Psychiatry; she suffers from convulsions and must have an operation for the brain tumor that causes them. At dawn on the day scheduled for her surgery, she carefully dressed and put on her makeup, told each of us goodbye with a warm hug, and left. “Good luck,” “We’ll be thinking about you,” “Be of good cheer,” we called as she went down the corridor. When they brought the bed to take her to the pavilion of torture she was gone; she had left the hospital and would not return until two days later, after the police had given up looking for her. A second day was set for the operation, and a second time they could not perform it, now because Aurelia had stuffed herself with half a serrano ham she had hidden in her purse and the anesthetist said he would be crazy to work with her under those conditions. Now the surgeon has gone off on his Easter vacation and who knows how long it will be until an operating room is available but, at least for the moment, our friend is safe. She attributes the source of her illness to the fact that her husband is “imminent”; from her gestures, I deduce she means “impotent.” “It’s his dinkus that doesn’t work and my noodle they’re going to split open,” she laments with resignation. “If he could just do it, I’d be happy as a clam, and being sick would go right out of my mind. All the proof you need is that my spells began on our honeymoon, when old limp-wick was more interested in listening to boxing matches on the radio than in my nightgown with marabou trim.” Aurelia dances and sings flamenco; she speaks in rhymes and, unless I keep a close watch, she sprays you wi
th her lilac perfume and paints your lips bright red. She makes fun of doctors, healers, and nuns alike, she thinks they are all a gang of butchers. “If your daughter hasn’t been cured up till now by her mother’s and her husband’s love, then there’s nothing to be done,” she says. In the meantime, the police drop by to question the raped girl, and the way they treat her you would think she was the perpetrator, not the victim, of the crime. “What were you doing alone in that neighborhood at ten o’clock at night? Why didn’t you scream? Were you on drugs? This is what happens when you go out looking for trouble, Missy, I don’t know what you’re complaining about.” Aurelia is the only one with enough brass to take them on. She plants herself before them with her hands on her hips, and bawls them out. “Cut that crap, this isn’t what you’re paid to do. It’s always us women who get the short end of the stick.” “Keep out of this, now,” they reply indignantly, “this doesn’t have anything to do with you,” but the rest of us applaud, because except for her seizures, Aurelia is amazingly lucid. She has three suitcases of flashy clothes under her bed, and changes several times a day; she piles on the makeup and whips her hair into a mousse of bleached curls. At the least provocation, she strips to show us her Renaissance flesh, and challenges us to guess her age and to look at her waist—the same measurement as before she was married. It runs in the family, she says, her mother was a beauty, too. And she adds with a touch of pique that her attributes don’t do her much good since her husband is a eunuch. When he comes to visit, he sits dozing in a chair, bored, while she insults him and the rest of us make a tremendous effort to pretend we don’t hear.