That night I tried to speak with my husband and explain what was happening but before I could get a word out, he announced an upcoming business trip to Europe and invited me to go with him while my parents took care of the children for a week. “You must keep the family together, lovers come and go without leaving scars; go to Europe with Michael, it will be good for you two to be alone,” my mother advised. “Don’t ever admit an infidelity, even if you’re caught in bed, because you’ll never be forgiven for it,” was Tío Ramón’s counsel. So we went to Paris, and while Michael was working I sat in the sidewalk cafés along the Champs-Élysées to think about the soap opera I was swallowed up in, tortured by the choice between memories of a flute on hot, rainy tropical afternoons and the natural pinpricks of guilt, wishing a lightning bolt would flash from the heavens and put a drastic end to my doubts. I saw the faces of Paula and Nicolás on every child walking by; of one thing I was sure: I could not be separated from my children. “You don’t have to leave them, bring them along,” came the persuasive voice of my lover, who had obtained the name of the hotel where I was staying and kept calling from Madrid. I decided I would never forgive myself if I did not give love a chance—possibly my last, since I thought that at thirty-six I was on the verge of decrepitude. Michael returned to Venezuela and I, using the excuse that I needed to be alone for a few days, took the train to Spain.
That clandestine honeymoon—strolling arm in arm through cobbled streets, eating by candlelight in ancient taverns, sleeping in each other’s arms, celebrating the incredible fortune of having stumbled upon this love unique in all the universe—lasted exactly three days, the time it took Michael to come looking for me. When I saw him, pale and flustered, and he took me in his arms, the more than twenty years we had shared fell over me like an inescapable cloak. I realized that I felt great affection for this prudent man who offered faithful love and represented stability and hearth. Our relationship lacked passion, but it was harmonious and secure. I did not feel strong enough to face a divorce or to create further problems for my children, they had enough with being immigrants. I said goodbye to my forbidden love among the trees in El Retiro park, which was coming alive after a long winter, and took the plane to Caracas. “The past doesn’t matter, it will all work out, we will never mention this again,” said Michael, and he was true to his word. In the months that followed, I tried several times to talk with him but it was impossible, we always ended up skirting the issue. My infidelity remained unresolved, an unconfessable dream hovering like a cloud above our heads; had it not been for the persistent calls from Madrid, I would have thought that the whole matter was another invention of my fevered imagination. During his visits, Michael was seeking peace and rest; he needed desperately to believe that nothing had changed in his orderly existence and that his wife had completely recovered from her mad escapade. Betrayal had no place in Michael’s mental processes. He did not understand the nuances of what had happened, but assumed that if I had come back to him it was because I no longer loved the other man; he believed that our marriage could be the same as it had been, and that silence would heal the wounds. It was not the same, however, something had broken, something we would never be able to repair. I would lock myself in the bathroom and cry my heart out, while in the bedroom Michael pretended to read the newspaper so he wouldn’t have to ask the reason for my tears. I had another serious car accident, but this time, a fraction of a second before the impact, I was aware that it was the accelerator I had jammed to the floorboard, not the brake.
Granny began to die the day she was separated from her two grandchildren; the agony lasted three long years. Doctors blamed alcohol; they said she had destroyed her liver—she was bloated and her skin was a dirty color—but the truth was that she was dying of grief. The moment came when she lost all sense of time and place, and days lasted two hours and nights did not exist; she stayed close beside the door, waiting for the children, and she never slept because she heard their voices calling her. She lost interest in her house, closed her kitchen, and never again flooded the neighborhood with the aroma of cinnamon cookies; she stopped cleaning inside or watering her garden; the dahlias languished and worms infested the plum trees heavy with rotted, unpicked fruit. My mother’s Swiss dog, now with Granny, lay down in a corner to die inch by inch, like her new mistress. My father-in-law spent that winter in bed, nursing an imaginary cold because he could not face his fear of life without his Young Lady, he thought that by ignoring the facts he could change reality. The neighbors, who thought of Granny as the community’s fairy godmother, at first took turns calling on her and keeping her occupied, but eventually they began to avoid her. That gentlewoman with the celestial blue eyes, impeccable in her flowered cotton dresses, forever busy with the delicacies of a kitchen where the door was always open to the neighborhood children, rapidly turned into a balding old crone who babbled incoherently and asked anyone she saw if they had seen her grandchildren. When she could no longer find her way around her own house, and looked at her husband as if she didn’t know who he was, Michael’s sister had to intervene. She had gone to visit her parents and found them living in a pigsty; no one had cleaned in months and garbage and empty bottles were piled high; decay had definitively taken over the house and the soul of its inhabitants. Frightened, she realized that the situation had gone too far; it was no longer a question of mopping floors, picking up, and hiring someone to look after the old people, as she had thought, she would have to take them with her. She sold some of the furniture, stored the rest in the attic, closed up the house, and set off for Montevideo with her parents. In the confusion of the last hour, the dog sneaked away and no one ever saw her again. Before a week had gone by, Michael’s sister notified us in Caracas that Granny had used up her last ounce of strength, was too weak to get out of bed, and had been taken to the hospital. Michael was at a critical stage in his work; the jungle was devouring the construction site, the rain and swollen rivers had swept away the dams, and the next day crocodiles were swimming in excavations dug for the foundations. Once again, I left the children with my parents, and flew to say my farewells to Granny.
Uruguay during that period was a country for sale. Using the pretext of eliminating the guerrillas, the military dictatorship had established the dungeon, torture, and summary execution as a style of governing. Thousands of people disappeared or were killed; almost a third of the population emigrated, escaping from the horror of the times, while the military and a handful of their cronies grew rich on the spoils. Since people leaving the country could not take much with them, they were forced to sell their belongings; signs for sales and auctions went up on every block, and property, furniture, cars, and works of art were sold at bargain prices. Collectors from the rest of the continent gathered like piranhas to snap up antiques. On a gray August dawn, the dead of winter in the Southern Cone, the taxi bore me from the airport to the hospital through silent streets where half of the houses stood empty. I left my suitcase in the porter’s lodge, climbed two flights of stairs, and ran into a night-duty nurse who led me to Granny’s room. I didn’t recognize her; in those three years she had metamorphosed into a small lizard, but then she opened her eyes and through the clouds I glimpsed a spark of turquoise. As I fell to my knees beside the bed, she murmured, “Hello, dear, how are my children?” but before she could hear the answer, a wave of blood washed her into unconsciousness and she never waked again. I sat beside her, waiting for daylight, listening to the gurgling of the tubes suctioning her stomach and breathing air into her lungs, remembering the happy and the tragic years we had shared, and treasuring her unconditional affection. “Let go, Granny, don’t fight and suffer any longer, please, go quickly,” I begged her, while I stroked her hands and kissed her feverish forehead. With the sunlight, I remembered Michael, and called to tell him to take the first plane and join his father and sister, for he should not be absent in this crisis.
Dear, sweet Granny hung on patiently until the next day, so her son could
see her alive for a few minutes. We were both beside her bed when she stopped breathing. Michael went out to console his sister, and I stayed to help the nurse bathe my mother-in-law, giving back to her in death the infinite care she had lavished on my children in life, and as I sponged her body and smoothed the few remaining hairs on her skull and sprayed her with cologne and dressed her in a clean gown her daughter had brought, I told her about Paula and Nicolás, about our life in Caracas, about how much we had missed her and how much I had needed her in this hapless stage of my life when our home was being lashed by adverse winds. The next day we left Granny in an English cemetery beneath a blanket of jasmine, in the precise place she would have chosen to rest. I went with Michael’s family to pay our last respects, and was amazed to see them without tears or emotion, restrained by that refined sobriety Anglo-Saxons exhibit when they bury their dead. Someone read the ritual words, but they didn’t register because all I could hear was Granny’s voice humming her grandmotherly songs. Each of us dropped a flower and a handful of dirt on the coffin, hugged one another in silence, and slowly walked away. Now she was alone, dreaming in a garden. And ever since, anytime I smell jasmine, Granny appears.
When we got back to the house, my father-in-law went to wash his hands while his daughter prepared afternoon tea. In a few minutes, he came to the dining room, still in his dark suit, with his hair slicked down and a rosebud in his lapel, handsome and young looking; he pushed back the chair with his elbows to avoid touching it with his fingers, and sat down.
“And where is my Young Lady?” he asked, surprised not to see his wife.
“She isn’t with us any longer, Papa,” said his daughter, and we all looked at each other, alarmed.
“Tell her tea is served and we’re waiting for her.”
That was our notice that time had stopped for him and that he had not absorbed the fact that his wife was dead. He lived with that delusion for the rest of his days. He had been oblivious during the funeral, as if he were attending the burial of a distant relative, and from that instant on had retreated into his memories; a curtain of senility dropped before his eyes and he never again connected with reality. The only woman he had ever loved was beside him, forever young and happy, and he forgot that he had left Chile and lost everything he owned. For the next ten years, until he died in a nursing home, shrunken to the size of a child, he was convinced he was in his house beside the golf course, that Granny was in the kitchen making plum jelly, and that at bedtime they would sleep in the same bed they had every night for forty-seven years.
The moment had come to talk with Michael about things too long unspoken, he could not continue to dwell comfortably in a fantasy the way his father did. The following day, on a rainy afternoon, bundled up in wool ponchos and mufflers, we went for a walk on the beach. I don’t remember the exact moment I had finally accepted the idea that I must leave him, perhaps it had been as I watched Granny die, or when we filed out of the cemetery, leaving her beneath the jasmine, or maybe I had decided weeks before. Neither do I remember how I told Michael that I was not going back to Caracas with him, that I was going to Spain to try my luck, and taking the children with me. I told him I knew how difficult it would be for them, and that I was very sorry there was no way to prevent this new hardship, but the young have to follow their mother’s destiny. I chose my words carefully, weighing them so as to inflict the least pain, bowed by my sense of guilt and by the compassion I felt for Michael: within a few hours this man had lost his mother, his father, and now his wife. He replied that I was totally out of my mind and incapable of making decisions, so he would make them for me in order to protect me and protect our children. I could go to Spain, if that was what I wanted, and this time he would not come looking for me, nor would he do anything to stop me—but he would never let me take Paula and Nicolás. In addition, I was not, he said, entitled to any of our savings, because by abandoning our home, I forfeited all my rights. He begged me to reconsider, and promised that if I gave up this insane idea, he would forgive everything, we would wipe the slate clean and begin with a fresh start. Only then did I realize that I had worked for twenty years and had nothing to show for it since the returns for my efforts had been absorbed in day-to-day expenses; Michael, on the other hand, had wisely invested his earnings and the few assets we had were in his name. Without money to support the children, I could never take them with me—even if their father allowed them to go. It was a calm discussion that lasted barely twenty minutes, without raised voices, and ended with a sincere farewell embrace.