Paula

  “Don’t say anything bad about me to Paula and Nicolás,” I asked.

  “I will never speak ill of you. Remember that all three of us love you very much and will be waiting for you.”

  “I’ll come for them as soon as I get a job.”

  “I will not give them to you. You may see them whenever you wish, but if you leave now you lose them forever.”

  “We’ll see about that. . . .”

  In my heart, I was not too alarmed; I felt sure that Michael would have to cave in eventually because he hadn’t the faintest idea what taking care of youngsters involved and until then had fulfilled his fatherly duties from a comfortable distance. His job was a real sticking point: he could not take the children to that half-tamed part of the country where he spent most of his time, but neither could he leave them alone in Caracas. I was sure that before a month had passed he would be desperate and begging me to take charge of them.

  I left the funereal winter of Montevideo to land the next day in the boiling August of Madrid, prepared to live out my love to its ultimate consequences. From the romantic illusion I had invented in our clandestine rendezvous and hasty letters, I fell into the sordid reality of a poverty that nights and days of inexhaustible embraces could not mitigate. We rented a small, dark apartment in one of dozens of identical red brick buildings in a working-class district on the outskirts of the city. There was no touch of green, not a single tree grew there; all you could see were dirt patios, playing fields, cement, asphalt, and brick. That ugliness was like a slap in the face. “You’re a spoiled bourgeois brat,” my lover laughed, smiling between kisses, but underneath the joviality his reproach was serious. In the flea market, we acquired a bed, a table, three chairs, and a few plates and saucepans that a huge, nasty-tempered man delivered in his broken-down van. On an irresistible whim, I also bought a flower vase, although there was never money to buy flowers to put in it. Every morning we went out to look for work, and every evening we returned, exhausted and empty-handed. His friends avoided us, promises dissolved like salt in water, doors were slammed in our faces, no one responded to our applications, and money seemed to melt away. I saw my daughter and son in every child playing in the street; being separated from them pained me physically, and I came to believe that the constant burning in my stomach was either an ulcer or cancer. There were times I had to choose between having bread or buying stamps for a letter to my mother, and those days I fasted. I tried to write a musical comedy with my lover, but the congenial complicity of our picnics in the park and afternoons beside the dusty piano in the Caracas theater had dissipated: our anxiety was coming between us, our differences became more and more pronounced, our defects were magnified. We never spoke of Paula and Nicolás, because any time they were mentioned the breach between us widened; I moped and he was sulky. The most superficial incidents became fuel for a fight; our reconciliations were true tourneys of passion that left us half stupefied. And so three months went by. During that time I had found neither employment nor friends; my last savings were gone, and so was my passion for a man who surely deserved better. It must have been hell to live with my anguish over my absent children, the way I raced to the mailbox, and my trips at night to the airport, where an ingenious Chilean knew how to connect cables to the telephone to make free international calls. There behind the backs of the police, all of us penniless refugees from South America—sudacas, they called us with scorn—gathered to talk to our families on the other side of the world. That was how I found out that Michael had gone back to his job and the children were alone, watched over by my parents from their apartment two floors above ours, that Paula had assumed the household duties and care of her brother with the iron discipline of a sergeant, and that Nicolás had broken an arm and was growing thinner by the day because he didn’t want to eat. In the meantime, my love was unraveling, destroyed by poverty and nostalgia. I had soon discovered that the man I had fallen in love with became demoralized when faced with everyday problems, and fell into depressions or fits of frenetic humor. I could not imagine Paula and Nicolás with such a stepfather, and that is why when Michael finally recognized that he could not care for them and was ready to turn them over to me, I knew I had touched bottom and could not continue to deceive myself with fairy tales. I had followed the flutist in a hypnotic trance, like the mice of Hamelin, but I could not drag Paula and Nicolás into a similar fate. That night, in the bright light of reason, I examined my countless errors of recent years, from the absurd risks I had taken at the height of the dictatorship that finally forced me to leave Chile to the polite silences that separated me and Michael, and the injudicious way I had fled my house without offering an explanation or facing the basic consequences of a divorce. That night my youth ended and I entered a new phase of my life. Enough, I said. At five o’clock in the morning, I went to the airport, managed to put through a free call, and spoke with Tío Ramón, asking him to send money for my plane ticket. I told my lover goodbye, knowing I would never see him again, and eleven hours later I landed in Venezuela, defeated, without luggage, and with no plan but to put my arms around my children and never let them go again. Michael was waiting at the airport. He greeted me with a chaste kiss on the forehead and tear-filled eyes; he said emotionally that everything that had happened was his responsibility for not having taken better care of me, and asked me out of consideration for the years we had shared and my love for the family to give him another chance and begin all over again. “I need time,” I replied, defeated by his nobility and furious without knowing why. In silence, he drove up the hill toward Caracas and as we reached the house announced that he would give me all the time I desired, that he was leaving for his job in the jungle and occasions to see each other would be few.

  Today is my birthday, I have lived half a century. Maybe this evening friends will come by to visit; here, people drop in without prior warning, ours is an open house where the living and the dead go hand in hand. We bought it several years ago, when Willie and I realized that our love at first sight was not giving any signs of diminishing and we needed a place larger than his own. When we first saw it, it seemed it had been waiting for us—more accurately, had been calling to us. It had a weary air: the paint was peeling from the wood, it needed many repairs, and it was dark inside, but it had a spectacular view of the Bay and a benevolent soul. We were told that the former owner had died here a few months before, and we thought she must have been happy within these walls because her memory still lingered in the rooms. We signed within half an hour, without bargaining, and in recent years it has become a sanctuary for an Anglo-Latin tribe where words in Spanish and English echo back and forth, something spicy is always simmering on the stove, and at mealtimes we have many guests around the table. The rooms stretch and multiply to accommodate new arrivals: grandparents, grandchildren, Willie’s children, and now Paula, this girl who is slowly turning into an angel. A colony of skunks dwells in the foundations, and every evening the mysterious tortoiseshell cat appears—apparently it has adopted us. Several days ago, she deposited on my daughter’s bed a newly killed, still bleeding, bird with blue wings; I suspect that is her way of repaying our kindnesses. In the last four years, the house has been transformed with large skylights to let in the sun and the stars, white rugs and walls, Mexican floor tiles, and a small garden. We contracted with a crew of Chinese workmen to build a storage space, but they didn’t understand English, confused our instructions and, by the time we realized it, had added to the ground floor two rooms, a bath, and a strange area that ended up as Willie’s workshop. In the basement I have hidden sinister surprises for the grandchildren: a plaster skeleton, treasure maps, and trunks filled with pirate disguises and fake jewels. I have the hope that a scary cellar will act as a stimulus to their imaginations, as my grandfather’s did for mine. At night, the house shudders, moans, and yawns, and I have the feeling that memories of people who have lived here, the characters that escape from books and dreams, the gentle ghost of the former
owner, and Paula’s soul, which at times is freed from the painful bonds of its body, all roam through the rooms. Houses need births and deaths to become homes. Today is a day of celebration; we will have a birthday cake and Willie will come home from the office laden with shopping bags and ready to devote the afternoon to planting his rosebushes in terra firma. That is his gift to me. Those poor plants in wine barrels symbolized the nomadic life of their owner, who always left one door open to escape should life turn a drab ant-brown. That was how it was with all his previous relationships, they reached a point at which he packed his clothes and left, wheeling his barrels to a different destination. “I think we will be here for a long while, it’s time now to plant my roses in the garden,” he told me yesterday. I like this man from a different race who walks with long strides, laughs explosively, speaks with a booming voice, annihilates his chicken at dinner with a few slashes of his knife, and cooks without any fuss—so different from other men I have loved. I celebrate his bursts of masculine energy because he compensates for them with a boundless reserve of gentleness, which he can summon at any moment. He has survived great misfortune without being tainted with cynicism and can today give himself without qualification to our late-blooming love and to this Latin tribe in which he now occupies a central position. Later, the rest of the family will gather; Celia and Nicolás will settle in to watch television while Paula drowses in her chair. We will fill the plastic pool on the terrace for Alejandro, who now feels at ease with his silent aunt, and he can splash around. I think today will be another peaceful Sunday.

  I am fifty years old, I have entered the last half of my life but I feel as strong as when I was twenty, my body has not failed me yet. Vieja, old lady . . . , that’s what Paula affectionately called me. Now the word frightens me a little, it suggests someone with warts and varicose veins. In other cultures, elderly women dress in black, tie a kerchief around their heads, grow a mustache, and retire from worldly strife to devote themselves to piety, lamenting their dead, and tending their grandchildren, but here in the United States women go to grotesque lengths to look eternally healthy and happy. I have a fan of fine wrinkles at the corners of my eyes, like tiny scars of past laughter and tears; I look like the photograph of my clairvoyant grandmother, the same expression of intensity tinged with sadness. I am losing hair at my temples. A week after Paula fell ill I found bare spots round as coins; they say they are caused by grief and will grow back, but I honestly don’t care. I had to cut Paula’s long hair and now she has the head of a boy; she looks much younger, a child again. I wonder how much longer I will live, and why. Time and circumstances have placed me beside this wheelchair to watch over my daughter. I am her guardian, and my family’s. . . . I am quickly learning the advantages of disengagement. Will I write again? Every stage of the road is different, and maybe the one having to do with literature is behind me. I will know in a few months, next January 8, when I sit down at my typewriter to begin another novel and test the presence or the silence of the spirits. Recently, I have been empty, my inspiration has dried up, but it is also possible that stories are creatures with their own lives and that they exist in the shadows of some mysterious dimension; in that case, it will be a question of opening so they may enter, sink into me, and grow until they are ready to emerge transformed into language. They do not belong to me, they are not my creations, but, if I succeed in breaking down the wall of anguish in which I am enclosed, I can again serve them as medium. If that doesn’t happen, I will have to find a new calling. Ever since Paula became ill, a dark curtain has separated me from the fantasy world in which I used to move so freely; reality has become intractable. Today’s experiences are tomorrow’s recollections; I have never before lacked for dramatic events to feed my memories, and it was from them all my stories were born. Eva Luna says at the end of my third book: I also try to live my life as I would like it . . . like a novel. I don’t know whether my road has been extraordinary or whether I have written these books out of a banal existence, but only adventures, love, happiness, and suffering are stored in my memory; the petty happenings of everyday life have disappeared. When I look back, it seems to me that I was the protagonist of a melodrama; now, in contrast, everything is suspended, I have nothing to tell, the present has the brutal certainty of tragedy. I close my eyes and before me rises the painful image of my daughter in her wheelchair, her eyes staring toward the sea, her gaze focused beyond the horizon where death begins.

  What will happen with this great empty space that I am today? What will fill me now that not a whiff of ambition remains, no project, nothing of myself? The force of the suction will reduce me to a black hole, and I will disappear. To die. . . . The idea of leaving the body is fascinating. I do not want to go on living and die inside; if I am to continue in this world I must plan the years I have left. Perhaps old age is a new beginning, maybe we can return to the magic time of infancy, to that time before linear thought and prejudices when we perceived the universe with the exalted senses of the mad and were free to believe the unbelievable and to explore worlds that later, in the age of reason, vanished. I have very little to lose now, nothing to defend; could this be freedom at last? I have the idea that we grandmothers are meant to play the part of protective witches; we must watch over younger women, children, community, and also, why not?, this mistreated planet, the victim of such unrelenting desecration. I would like to fly on a broomstick and dance in the moonlight with other pagan witches in the forest, invoking earth forces and howling demons; I want to become a wise old crone, to learn ancient spells and healers’ secrets. It is no small thing, this design of mine. Witches, like saints, are solitary stars that shine with a light of their own; they depend on nothing and no one, which is why they have no fear and can plunge blindly into the abyss with the assurance that instead of crashing to earth, they will fly back out. They can change into birds and see the world from above, or worms to see it from within, they can inhabit other dimensions and travel to other galaxies, they are navigators on an infinite ocean of consciousness and cognition.

  WHEN I DEFINITIVELY RENOUNCED MY CARNAL PASSION FOR THE indecisive Argentine musician, there lay before my eyes a boundless desert of boredom and loneliness. I was thirty-seven years old, and, confusing love in general with a lover in particular, I had decided to cure myself forever of the vice of infatuation, which had, after all, brought me nothing but complications. Fortunately, I did not entirely succeed; the inclination lay dormant, like a seed crushed beneath two meters of polar ice that stubbornly bursts through with the first warm breeze. After I returned to Caracas to be with my husband, my lover persisted for some time, more as a duty than out of any other reason, I think. The telephone would ring, I would hear the characteristic click of international calls and hang up without answering. With the same determination, I tore up his letters without opening them, until finally the flutist’s attempts at communication ended. Fifteen years have gone by, and if you had told me then that the day would come when I would forget him, I would not have believed it; I was sure I had shared one of those rare heroic love affairs that because of its tragic ending constitutes the stuff of opera. Now I have a more modest vision, and hope simply that if at one of the turns of the road I meet him again, I will at least recognize him. That thwarted relationship was an open wound for more than two years; I was literally sick from love, but no one knew it—not even my mother, who watched me closely. Some mornings, crushed by frustration, I could not find the strength to get out of bed, and some nights I was wrung out by memories and raging desires that—like my grandfather—I battled with icy showers. In a fever to sweep away the past, I tore up the scores of the pied piper’s songs and my play, an act that has occasioned regret, because they may have had some merit. I cured myself with the thickheaded remedy Michael had suggested: I buried love in the quicksand of silence. I did not mention what had happened for several years, until it had stopped paining me, and my resolve to eliminate the memory of even the good caresses was so extreme t
hat I went too far, and have an alarming hiatus in my memory that has swallowed not only the misery of that time but also a large part of the happiness.