Paula

  It does me good to write, even though at times I can barely force myself to it because each word sears like a burn. These pages are an irreversible voyage through a long tunnel; I can’t see an exit but I know there must be one. I can’t go back, only continue to go forward, step by step, to the end. As I write, I look for a sign, hoping that Paula will break her implacable silence and answer somehow in these yellow pages—or perhaps I do it only to overcome my fear and to fix the fleeting images of an imperfect memory. It also helps to walk. A half-hour from our house there are hills and dense forests where I go to breathe deeply when I am choked by anguish or ground down by exhaustion. The landscape, green, humid, and rather somber, reminds me of the south of Chile: the same centuries-old trees, the sharp scent of eucalyptus, pine, and wild mint, the streams that turn to cascades in winter, the cries of birds and shrill of crickets. I have discovered a solitary place where verdant treetops form the high dome of a Gothic cathedral and a thread of water slips with its own music among the stones. I like to sit there, listening to the water and the rhythm of the blood in my veins, trying to breathe calmly and retreat within my own skin, but instead of finding peace, premonitions and memories thunder through my mind. In the most difficult moments of the past, I also sought solitude in a forest.

  From the moment I crossed the cordillera that marks the boundary of Chile, everything began to go badly, and got progressively worse as the years went by. I did not know it yet, but I had begun to live the prophecy of the Argentine seer: many years of immobility. It was not to be within the walls of a cell or in a wheelchair, as my mother and I had conjectured, but in the isolation of exile. My roots were chopped off with a single whack and it would take six years to grow new ones nurtured in memory and in the books I would write. During that long period, frustration and silence were to be my prison. The first night in Caracas, sitting on a strange bed in a bare room, with the uninterrupted uproar from the street filtering through a small window, I took an accounting of what I had lost and contemplated the long road of obstacles and loneliness that lay ahead. The impact of arrival was that of having fallen onto a different planet. I had come from winter, the petrifying order of the dictatorship, and widespread poverty to a hot and anarchical country in the midst of a petroleum boom, an oil-rich society in which profligacy reached absurd limits: everything was flown in from Miami, even bread and eggs, because it was easier to import than to produce them. In the first newspaper that came into my hands, I read about a birthday party, complete with orchestra and champagne, held for some society woman’s spoiled lapdog and attended by other pampered pooches in party togs. For me, raised in the sobriety of Tata’s house, it was hard to believe such exhibitionism; with time, however, I not only got used to it, I learned to enjoy it. Love of revelry, the sense of living in the present, and the optimistic vision of the Venezuelans that at first terrified me later became the lessons I valued most from that period of my life. It took years to learn the rules of that society and to discover a way to slip over the rugged terrain of exile without creating too much friction, but when finally I succeeded, I felt freed of the back-bowing burdens I had carried in my own country. I lost my fear of appearing ridiculous, of social sanctions, of “coming down in the world,” as my grandfather referred to poverty and my own hot blood. Sensuality ceased to be a defect that had to be hidden for the sake of gentility, and was accepted as a basic ingredient of my temperament and, later, my writing. In Venezuela, I cured myself of some ancient wounds, along with new animosities. I shed my old skin and met the world with my nerves laid bare until I grew another, tougher hide. In Venezuela, I educated my children, acquired both a daughter- and a son-in-law, wrote three books, and ended my marriage. When I think of the thirteen years I lived in Caracas, I feel a mixture of incredulity and lightheartedness. Five weeks after my arrival, when it was obvious that a return to Chile anytime soon would be impossible, Michael came and brought the children, leaving the house locked up with our belongings inside. He was not able to rent it because so many people were leaving the country that it made more sense to buy at a bargain price than to pay rent; furthermore, ours was a rustic cabin whose only value was sentimental. While it sat empty, the windows were broken out and the contents stolen, but we didn’t know that until a year later, and by then it didn’t matter. Those five weeks away from my children were a bad dream. I still remember with photographic clarity Paula’s and Nicolás’s faces when they got off the plane holding their father’s hand and felt the hot and humid breath of that eternal summer. They were both wearing wool clothes; Paula had her rag doll under her arm and Nicolás was carrying the heavy iron Christ his teacher had given him. He looked smaller, and thin; I learned afterward that he had refused to eat in my absence. A few months later, thanks to visas obtained with the help of Valentín Hernández, who had never forgotten the promise he made my mother in the Romanian hospital, the entire family was reunited. My parents moved into an apartment two floors above our own, and, after complicated negotiations, my brother Pancho and his family were allowed to leave Moscow and join us in Venezuela. Juan also came, with the intention of staying, but he could not endure the heat and general commotion and so made arrangements to go to the United States on a student scholarship. Granny stayed in Chile, worn down by loneliness and sorrow; overnight, she lost the grandchildren she had raised and found herself facing an empty life of looking after an aged man who spent his days in bed watching television and a neurotic Swiss dog inherited from my mother. She began to drink more and more, and since the children were gone and she had no need to keep up appearances, she made no attempt to hide it. Bottles piled up in corners while her husband pretended not to see them. She practically stopped eating or sleeping; she spent her nights with a drink in her hand, rocking disconsolately in the chair where for years she had sung the children to sleep. Worms of sadness were eating away inside; the aquamarine of her eyes faded and her hair fell out in clumps; her skin grew thick and furrowed, like a turtle’s. She stopped bathing and dressing, and wandered about in her robe and slippers, drying her tears on her sleeve. Two years later, Michael’s sister, who lived in Uruguay, took her parents to live with her, but it was already too late to save Granny.

  Caracas in 1975 was happy and chaotic, one of the world’s most expensive cities. New buildings and broad highways were springing up everywhere and money was squandered in a surfeit of luxuries; there were bars, banks, restaurants, and hotels for love nests on every corner, and the streets were permanently clogged by the thousands of late-model automobiles that could not move in the pandemonium of the traffic. No one respected traffic lights, but they would stop dead on the freeway to let some distracted pedestrian cross. Money seemed to grow on trees; thick wads of bills changed hands with such speed that there was no time to count them. The men maintained several mistresses, the women went shopping in Miami every weekend, and children considered an annual trip to Disney World to be an innate right. Without money, you could do nothing, as I quickly learned after going to the bank to change the dollars I had bought in the black market in Chile and found to my horror that half were counterfeit. There were slums where people lived in misery, and regions where polluted water killed as many people as it had in the colonial era, but in the euphoria of easy wealth, no one remembered that. Political power was divided in a friendly manner between the two most powerful parties—the Left had been annulled and the guerrilla movement of the seventies, one of the most organized on the continent, defeated. Coming from Chile, it was refreshing to find that no one talked about politics or illness. The men, strutting with power and virility, wore ostentatious gold chains and rings, joked and spoke at a shout, and always had one eye on the women. Beside them, discreet Chileans with their high-pitched voices and delicate Spanish seemed like dolls on a wedding cake. The most beautiful women on the planet, the splendid product of many combined races, swayed their hips to a salsa rhythm, exhibiting exuberant bodies and winning every international beauty contest. The air vibrated
, every opportunity was seized to break into song, radios blasted on the street, in cars, everywhere. Drums, four-string cuatros, guitars, singing, dancing, the country was one continuous fiesta on a petroleum binge. Immigrants came from the four cardinal points to this land to seek their fortunes—especially Colombians, who poured across the border by the millions to earn a living doing jobs no one else wanted. A foreigner was at first accepted only grudgingly, but soon the Venezuelans’ natural generosity threw open the doors. The most disliked immigrants were from the Southern Cone—Argentines, Uruguayans, and Chileans—because they were primarily political refugees, intellectuals, technicians, and professionals who competed with Venezuelans at the higher echelons. I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before. I met people who were truly eminent in their own country yet were unable to revalidate their professional licenses and ended up selling insurance door to door—also nobodies who invented diplomas and pedigrees and somehow fought their way to the top: everything depended on audacity and good connections. Anything could be had through a friend, or by paying the fee for corruption. A foreign professional could be granted a contract only through a Venezuelan associate who sponsored him and lent his name to the deal; otherwise, a newcomer had no chance at all. The going rate was fifty percent; one did the work and the other signed and collected his percentage up front, as soon as the first payments were made. Within a week of his arrival, a job came up for Michael in a broiling region in the eastern part of the country, an area just beginning to be developed because of the boundless treasure beneath the soil. All Venezuela was sitting on a sea of black gold; anywhere you buried a pick in the ground, a thick stream of oil shot up. The natural riches of that country are paradisaical; there are regions where nuggets of gold and raw diamonds are scattered across the earth like seeds. Everything grows in that climate; along the highways you see wild banana and pineapple trees, you toss a mango stone on the ground and within a few days have a tree—a flowering plant even budded on our television antenna. Nature there is still in a stage of innocence: warm beaches with white sand and matted trees, mountains with snowy peaks where lost ghosts of conquistadors still roam, vast lunar plains suddenly interrupted by prodigious tepuys, towering cylinders of live rock that look as if they were set there by giants from other planets, impenetrable jungles inhabited by ancient tribes that have yet to discover the Iron Age. Everything gives of itself unstintingly in that enchanted land. Michael became part of a gigantic project on one of the largest dams in the world, in a green and overgrown region of snakes, sweat, and crime. The men were housed in temporary camps, leaving their families in nearby cities, but my chances of finding work in that part of the country, or of finding good schools for the children, were nonexistent, so we three stayed in Caracas and Michael came to visit us every six or seven weeks. We lived in an apartment in the noisiest and most densely populated district of the city. For the children, who were used to walking to school, riding their bicycles, playing in their garden, and visiting Granny, it was hell; they couldn’t go out alone because of the traffic and violence in the streets, they were bored to tears confined within four walls watching television, and every day they begged me, Please, could we go back to Chile? I did not help them bear the anguish of those early years; on the contrary, my bad humor rarefied the air we breathed. I could not find employment in any of the jobs I knew how to do, and past experience was less than useless—all doors were closed. I sent out hundreds of résumés, answered countless newspaper ads, and filled out a mountain of applications, all without a single bite; everything was left hanging while I awaited an answer that never came. I hadn’t caught on that in Venezuela the word “no” is considered in bad taste. When I was told to “Come back tomorrow,” my hopes were renewed; I failed to understand that postponement was an amiable form of rejection. From the modest celebrity I had enjoyed in Chile from my television and feminist reporting, I slumped to the anonymity and daily humiliation of a person looking for work. Thanks to a Chilean friend, I published a weekly humor column in a newspaper and continued to do so for several years just to keep a byline, but I was working for love of the art—the remuneration was equivalent to what I paid the taxi when I delivered the article. I did some translating, wrote some television scripts, and even a play. For some of my efforts, I was paid royally but the work never saw the light of day; in other cases, it was used but I never saw a cent of payment. Two floors above me, Tío Ramón dressed every morning in one of his ambassador suits and went out to look for work, but, unlike me, he never complained. His fall was more to be lamented than mine because he had risen higher, had lost more, was twenty-five years older, and must have had twice the dignity to be injured; even so, I never saw him depressed. On weekends, he organized trips to the beach with the children, veritable safaris that he tackled head on at the wheel of the car, with Caribbean music on the radio and a joke on his lips, sweating, scratching mosquito bites, and reminding us not to forget we were filthy rich, until finally we could take a dip in the warm turquoise ocean, elbow to elbow with hundreds of others with the same idea. Occasionally, on some blessed Wednesday, I would escape to the coast and enjoy a clean, empty beach, but such solitary excursions were filled with risks. In those times of loneliness and impotence, I more than ever needed some contact with nature—the peace of a forest, the silence of a mountain, the whisper of the sea—but women were not expected to go alone to the movies, much less somewhere in open country where anything could happen. I felt like a prisoner in the apartment, and in my own skin, just as my children did, but at least we were safe from the violence of the dictatorship, sheltered in the vastness of Venezuela. I had found a secure place to scatter the soil from my garden and plant forget-me-nots, but I didn’t know that yet.

  I awaited Michael’s rare visits with impatience, but when finally we were together I felt inexplicably disillusioned. He arrived worn out from work and life in the camp; he was not the man I had invented in the suffocating nights of Caracas. In the following months and years, we ran out of words; it was all we could do to manage a neutral conversation sprinkled with commonplaces and polite phrases. I had the impulse to seize Michael by the shirt and shake him and scream at him, but I was inhibited by the rigorous sense of fairness instilled in my English schools and, instead, welcomed him with a tenderness that welled up spontaneously when I saw him but disappeared within minutes. The man had just spent weeks in the jungle working to support his family, he had left Chile, his friends, and the security of a good job to follow me in an unpredictable adventure, and I had no right to bother him with my heart’s impatience. “It would be much healthier if you two would grab each other by the hair the way we do,” was the comment of my mother and Tío Ramón, my only confidantes in that period, but it was impossible to confront a husband who offered no resistance; all Michael’s aggression had sunk out of sight, converted into boredom in the cottony texture of our relationship. I tried to convince myself that despite the difficult circumstances nothing actually had changed between us. I did not succeed, but in trying I deceived Michael. If I had spoken frankly, the final disaster might have been avoided, but I lacked the courage to do it. I was burning with unanswered desires and worries; that was a time of several love affairs embarked upon to while away my loneliness. No one knew me, I owed no one explanations. I looked for release where I was least likely to find it, because in truth I am not cut out for sneaking around. I am very clumsy in the tangled stratagems of the lie; I left signs everywhere, but Michael was too decent to suspect that anyone could be untrue to him. I argued with myself in secret, and boiled with guilt, divided between disgust and rage against myself and resentment toward a remote husband floating imperturbably in a fog of ignorance—always pleasant and discreet, with unflagging equanimity, never asking for anything but expecting to be waited upon with a distant and
vaguely grateful air. I needed an excuse to break off the marriage once and for all, but he never provided one—just the opposite, during those years his reputation for saintliness actually grew in the eyes of others. I suppose he was so absorbed in his work, and his need to have a home was so great, that he chose not to delve too deeply into my feelings or my activities. A chasm was widening beneath our feet but he did not want to see the signs and clung to his illusions to the last moment, when everything came crashing down with a roar. If he suspected anything, he may have attributed it to an existential crisis, thinking it would go away, like the twenty-four-hour flu. I realized only years later that blindness in the face of reality was the strongest facet of his character; I always assumed total responsibility for the failure of our love, that is, that I wasn’t able to love him as much as he apparently loved me. I never asked myself whether he deserved more dedication, I only wondered why I couldn’t give it. Our paths diverged; I was changing and drifting away from him and could do nothing to prevent it. While he was working in the exuberant vegetation and steamy humidity of a wild landscape, I was butting my head against the walls of the apartment in Caracas like a crazed rat, always looking south toward Chile and counting the days until our return. I never dreamed that the dictatorship would last seventeen years.

  The man I fell in love with in 1978 was a musician, one more political refugee among the thousands from the south who flocked to Caracas in the decade of the seventies. He had escaped the death squads, leaving a wife and two children behind in Buenos Aires while he looked for a place to settle and find work, with a flute and a guitar as his only letter of introduction. I suppose that the love we shared caught him by surprise, when he least desired and needed it, just as it did me. A Chilean theater producer who lighted in Caracas, hoping to make a killing like so many attracted by the oil bonanza, got in touch with me and asked me to write a musical comedy on a local theme. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, I was out of a job and feeling desperate about how my small hoard of savings had evaporated. We needed a composer with experience in this type of show to write the songs, although I’m not sure why the producer preferred someone from the south to one of many excellent Venezuelan musicians. That was how, there beside a dusty baby grand piano, I came to meet the man who would be my lover. I remember very little about that first day; I did not feel comfortable with that arrogant and bad-humored Argentine, but I was impressed with his talent: with no effort at all, he incorporated my vague ideas into precise musical phrases, and he played any instrument by ear. To someone like myself, who can’t sing “Happy Birthday,” he seemed a genius. He was as slim and taut as a toreador, ironic and aggressive, with a Mephistophelian beard, cut rather short. He was as lonely and lost in Caracas as I, and I suppose that circumstance drew us together. A few days later, we went to a park, out of hearing of indiscreet ears, to go over the songs; he took his guitar and I brought a notebook and a picnic basket. That and other long musical sessions turned out to be pointless because, overnight, the producer vanished like smoke, leaving a theater under contract and nine people who never got paid. Some of us had wasted time and effort; others had invested money that disappeared without a trace—at least I was left with a memorable adventure. During that first outdoor repast, we shared the stories of our lives; I told him about the military coup and he brought me up to date on the horrors of the Dirty War and the reasons why he had to leave Argentina. The conversation ended, to my surprise, with my defending Venezuela against his criticisms, which were the very same I had made the day before. “If you don’t like this country, why don’t you go somewhere else? I for one am very grateful to be living with my family in this democracy; at least here they’re not murdering people the way they are in Chile and Argentina,” I said with an excess of passion. He burst out laughing, picked up his guitar, and began to strum a mocking tango. He made me feel like someone from the sticks, something that would happen many times in our relationship. He was one of those Buenos Aires night-owl intellectuals who frequent its old taverns and cafés, a part of the theater, music, and literary crowd, a voracious reader, a quarrelsome man with a quick answer for everything. He had seen the world and met famous people and was ferociously competitive, and I was seduced by his stories and his intelligence. In contrast, I doubt that I impressed him much at all; in his eyes, I was a thirty-five-year-old Chilean émigré who dressed like a hippie but had bourgeois mores. The one time I scored with him was when I told him that Che Guevara had dined at my parents’ house in Geneva; from that moment on, he showed real interest in me. All my life, I have found that with most men that dinner with the heroic guerrilla of the Cuban Revolution acts as an irresistible aphrodisiac. Within a week, the summer rains had begun and our bucolic meetings in the park became far from private sessions in my house. One day he invited me to his apartment, a squalid, noisy room he rented by the week. We had coffee, he showed me photographs of his family, then one song led to another, and then another, until we ended up playing the flute in his bed. That is not one of the gross metaphors that horrify my mother, he did in fact treat me to a concert. I fell in love like a schoolgirl. After a month, the situation had become untenable; he announced that he was going to divorce his wife, and pressed me to leave everything and go with him to Spain, where other Argentine artists were already successfully established and friends and work were at his disposal. The rapidity with which he made those decisions seemed to me to be irrefutable proof of his love, until I later discovered that he was an unstable Gemini and that just as quickly as he was ready to fly with me to another continent, he could change his mind and return to the original status quo. Had I been a little more astute, or at least had I studied astrology when I was dashing off the magazine horoscopes in Chile, I would have observed his nature and acted more prudently but, as things turned out, I fell headfirst into a trivial melodrama that nearly cost me my children, even my life. I was in such a nervous state that I kept having automobile accidents; once I missed a red light, struck three moving vehicles, and was knocked unconscious for a few minutes. I felt stiff and sore when I came to—completely surrounded by coffins; helpful passersby had carried me into the nearest building, which happened to be a funeral parlor. In Caracas there was an unwritten code that replaced traffic laws; when you came to a corner, you looked at all the other drivers and in a split second decided who went first. The system was fair, and worked better than lights—I don’t know whether it has changed, I suppose it’s the same—but you have to be alert and know how to interpret the other drivers’ expressions. In my emotional state, those signals, and others that allowed me to navigate in the world, were all mixed up. In the meantime, the atmosphere in my house was electric; the children could sense that the floor was moving beneath their feet and, for the first time, began to give me problems. Paula, who always had been a child too mature for her years, starting throwing the first tantrums of her life, slamming doors and locking herself in to cry for hours. Nicolás was acting like an outlaw at school, his grades were a disaster and he was bandages from head to foot: he cut himself, fell, split his head open, and broke bones with suspicious frequency. He discovered the joy of using his sling to catapult eggs against neighboring apartment buildings, as well as at pedestrians in the street below. Despite the fact that we were consuming ninety eggs a week, and that the wall of the building opposite us was one giant omelet baked hard by the tropical sun, I refused to accept the neighbors’ accusations—until the day one of the projectiles was a direct hit on the head of a senator of the republic who happened to be passing beneath our windows. Had Tío Ramón not intervened with his diplomatic skills, they might have revoked our visas and thrown us out of the country. My parents, who suspected the reason for my nocturnal outings and prolonged absences, interrogated me until finally I confessed my illicit love. Mother took me aside to remind me that I had children to watch over and to point out the risks I was running, and also to tell me that, no matter what, I could count on her help if I needed it. T?
?o Ramón also led me aside to advise me to be more discreet—“You don’t have to marry your lovers”—and to say that whatever my decision might be, he would stand by me. “You are coming with me to Spain right now or we will never see each other again,” the man with the flute threatened between two impassioned arpeggios, and as I could not make up my mind, he packed up his instruments and left. Within twenty-four hours, the urgent telephone calls from Madrid began; I was on edge during the day and awake most of the night. Between the children’s problems, automobile repairs, and peremptory amorous demands, I lost track of the days and was taken by surprise when Michael arrived for his visit.