The same was not true of my parents, however. Tío Ramón saw himself approaching seventy and wanted to go back to Chile to die, as he announced with certain drama, eliciting belly laughs from all of us who know him to be immortal. Two months later, we watched him pack his suitcases and, shortly after, he left with my mother to return to a country where they had not set foot in many years and where the perennial general continued to govern. I felt like an orphan, and I was afraid for them; I had a foreboding that we would never live in the same city again and readied myself to resume the old routine of the daily letters. As a send-off, we gave a large party with Chilean wines and dishes and presented the last performance of the theater company. Using song and dance, actors and puppets, we narrated the torturous life and illegal loves of my mother and Tío Ramón, played by Paula and Ildemaro—outfitted with diabolical false eyebrows. This time we did have a public, because nearly all the good friends who had been so hospitable to my parents in that warm country attended. In a place of honor was Valentín Hernández, whose generous visas opened the doors to us. It was the last time we saw him, because shortly afterward he died of a sudden illness, leaving behind a grief-stricken wife and descendants. He was one of those loving and watchful patriarchs who gather all his loved ones beneath his protective cloak. It was not easy for him to die because he did not want to go while his family was exposed to the gales of these terrifying modern times and, in his heart of hearts, he may have dreamed of taking them with him. One year later, his widow convened her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild to commemorate her husband’s death in a happy way, as he would have wished, by taking them for a vacation. Their plane crashed, and few were left of that family to weep for the missing.
In September 1987, my third novel, Eva Luna, was published in Spain; this one was written in the full light of day on a computer in the large studio of a new house. The two preceding books had convinced my agent that I intended to take literature seriously, and me that it was reasonable to risk leaving my job to devote myself to writing, even though my husband had not emerged from bankruptcy and we still had unpaid debts. I sold my shares in the school and we bought a large house perched on a hillside—a little ramshackle, it’s true, but Michael remodeled it, making it into a sunny refuge with room to spare for visitors, relatives, and friends, and for Mama Hilda to install herself comfortably in a sewing room and me in an office. In the foundations of the house, midpoint on the hill, was a bright and well-ventilated cellar, so large we planted in the middle of a tropical garden the vine that replaced the forget-me-nots of my nostalgia. The walls were lined with bookshelves, filled to overflowing, and right in the middle of the room I set a large table, the only piece of furniture. That was a period of great change. Paula and Nicolás, now independent and ambitious young adults, were attending the university; they were on their own now, and it was obvious they did not need me, but the complicity among the three of us was immutable. After her love affair with the young Sicilian, Paula became more serious about her studies in psychology and sexuality. Her chestnut hair fell to her waist; she did not use makeup and her long white cotton skirts and sandals accentuated her virginal appearance. She did volunteer work in the roughest slums, places even the police didn’t venture after sunset. By then, violence and crime had skyrocketed in Caracas; our house had been broken into several times and there were horrible rumors of children kidnapped in shopping centers in order to harvest their corneas and sell them to eye banks, of women raped in parking lots, of people murdered simply to steal a watch. Paula would go off in her little car, carrying a bag of books, and I would be sick with apprehension. I begged her a thousand times not to go into those parts of the city, but she didn’t listen because she felt she was protected by her good intentions and her belief that everyone knew who she was. Paula had a mature mind, but had not outgrown girlish emotions; the same woman who in the airplane memorized the map of a city she had never visited, rented a car at the airport, and drove straight to the hotel, or who in four hours could put together a course on literature that I used for university lectures, fainted when she was vaccinated and was nearly traumatized in vampire movies. She practiced her psychology tests on Nicolás and me, and confirmed that her brother has an IQ approaching genius and, in contrast, that her mother suffers severe retardation. She tested me again and again, but the results never varied, they always produced an embarrassing intellectual coefficient. Happily, she never experimented on us with the paraphernalia from the seminar on sexuality.
With Eva Luna, I was finally aware that my path was literary, and for the first time dared say, “I am a writer.” When I sat down to begin that book, I did not do so as I had with the two earlier ones, filled with excuses and doubts, but in full control of my will and even with a certain measure of arrogance. “I am going to write a novel,” I said aloud. Then I turned on the computer and without a second thought launched into the first sentence: My name is Eva, which means “life” . . .
MY MOTHER HAS COME TO CALIFORNIA FOR A VISIT. I NEARLY DID NOT recognize her at the airport: a small elderly woman in black, a porcelain great-grandmother, with a quavering voice and a face ravaged by sorrow and the fatigue of the twenty-hour flight from Santiago. She began crying as she hugged me, and continued to cry all the way to the house, but, once there, she went straight to a bathroom, took a shower, dressed in cheerful colors, and came downstairs with a smile to say hello to Paula. Even expecting to find her worse, she was shocked when she saw her; Mother still has a vivid memory of her favorite granddaughter as she used to be. One of Paula’s caregivers tried to console her: “She is in limbo, Doñita, with all the babies who died without being baptized and the souls rescued from purgatory.” “What a waste, my God, what a waste!” my mother kept repeating, but never near Paula, because she thinks she may be able to hear. “Don’t project your anxiety and wishes on her, Madame,” advised Dr. Shima. “Your granddaughter’s former life is ended; she is living now in a different state of consciousness.” As could have been foreseen, my mother was taken with Dr. Shima. He is an ageless man with a timeworn body, young face and hands, and a thick head of dark hair; he uses suspenders and wears his pants up beneath his armpits. He walks with a slight limp and laughs with the malicious expression of a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Both of them pray for Paula, she with her Christian faith, and he with his Buddhist. In my mother’s case, it is the triumph of hope over experience, because for seventeen years she prayed for General Pinochet to pass on to his reward, and not only is he in good health, he still has the frying pan by the handle. “God is slow, but He will come through,” she replies when she is reminded of this. “I assure you that Pinochet is headed for the grave.” As are we all, from the moment we are born, dying a little every day. In the afternoons, this ironic grandmother sits down with her knitting beside her granddaughter’s bed and talks to her with no thought for the sidereal silence into which her words fall. She chats about the past and recounts the latest gossip, comments on her own life, and sometimes, a little out of tune, sings a hymn to the Virgin Mary, the only song she can remember all the way through. She thinks that from her bed, Paula works subtle miracles, obliges us to grow, and teaches us the paths of compassion and wisdom. She suffers for Paula and suffers for me, two pains that cannot be avoided.
“Where was my daughter before I brought her into the world? Where will she go when she dies?”
“Paula is already in God. God is what binds, what holds together the fabric of life . . . what you call love,” my mother replied.
Ernesto is here, taking advantage of a week’s vacation. He still maintains the illusion that his wife will recover sufficiently for him to have a life with her, even if very limited. He used to think a higher power would intervene and suddenly, with a long yawn, she would awake, grope for his hand, and in a voice rusty with disuse ask what happened. “Doctors are wrong all the time,” he told me, “and they know very little about the brain.” Now, however, he did not rush in impetuously
to see her, but cautiously, as if afraid. We had taken special pains with Paula’s hair and dressed her in the clothes he brought her on his last visit. He put his arms around her with great tenderness, as her caregiver scurried toward the kitchen, teary-eyed, and my mother and I sought refuge on the terrace. For the first few days, he spent hours scrutinizing Paula’s reactions, looking for some spark of intelligence, but gradually he stopped; we watched him slump, shrink, until the optimistic aura of his arrival darkened into the penumbra that envelops us all. I tried to suggest that now Paula is not his wife but his spiritual sister and that he must not feel he is bound to her, but he looked at me as if he were hearing a sacrilege. The last night he broke down and realized finally that no miracle is going to give him back his eternal bride and that, however much he looked, he would find nothing in the unfathomable abyss of her empty eyes. He woke up terrified from a nightmare and came in the dark to my room, shaking and wet with sweat and tears, to tell me the dream.
“I dreamed that Paula was climbing a long extension ladder, and when she got to the top she leaped off into emptiness before I could stop her. I was desperate. Then I saw her lying on a table, and for a long time she lay there, unchanged, while my life went on. Then she began to lose her hair, and weight, until she suddenly sat up and tried to tell me something but I interrupted her to reproach her for having abandoned me. She went back to sleep on the table, wasting away, without completely dying. Finally, I realized that the only way I could help her would be to destroy her body, so I took her in my arms and placed her on a fire. Her body turned to ashes, which I scattered in a garden. Then her ghost came to say goodbye to the family, and last, she turned to me to tell me she loved me, and immediately began to fade away. . . .”
“Let her go, Ernesto,” I begged him.
“Can you do that? If you let her go, then I will, too,” he answered.
It came to me how for countless centuries women have lost their children, how it is humanity’s most ancient and inevitable sorrow. I am not alone, most mothers know this pain, it breaks their heart but they go on living because they must protect and love those who are left. Only a group of privileged women—in very recent times and in advanced countries where health care is available to all who can afford it—can hope that all their children will live to be adults. Death is always hovering nearby. Ernesto and I went to Paula’s room, closed the door, and, just the two of us, proceeded to improvise a brief ritual of parting. We told Paula how much we loved her, we reviewed the wonderful years we had lived together and assured her she would always be in our memories. We promised her we would be with her until her last moment in this world and that we would find her again in another, because in fact we would not be separated. “Die now, my love,” Ernesto pleaded, on his knees beside her bed. “Yes, Paula, go now,” I added in silence, because my voice failed me.
Willie insists that I talk and walk in my sleep, but that isn’t true. At night I wander barefoot and silent through the house so I won’t disturb the spirits or the skunks that slip upstairs to devour the cat’s food. Sometimes we meet face to face, and they raise their beautiful striped tails, like furry peacocks, and stare at me, their noses quivering, but they must have become accustomed to my presence, because until now they have never shot their ominous spray inside the house, only in the basement. I don’t walk in my sleep, I walk in my sorrow. “Take a pill and try to rest a few hours,” Willie begs me, exhausted. “You need to see a psychiatrist, you’re obsessed, and from thinking about Paula so much, you’re seeing visions.” He maintains that my daughter does not come to our room at night, that it’s impossible, she can’t move, and I’m just having nightmares like so many dreams that seem more true than reality. But who knows . . . maybe there are other means of spiritual communication besides dreams, and, incapacitated though she is, Paula has found a way to talk to me. My senses have been sharpened so that I perceive the invisible, but I am not mad. Dr. Shima comes by often, and he tells me that Paula has become his guide. The three months have passed, and the psychics, hypnotists, seers, and mediums have all gone; now only Dr. Forrester and Dr. Shima are attending my daughter. Sometimes he merely meditates a few minutes beside her; other times he examines her meticulously, uses his needles to relieve the pain in her bones, administers Chinese medications, then shares a cup of tea with me where we can talk freely without being overheard. I had the courage to tell him that Paula comes to visit me at night and he didn’t find it strange, he said she also talks to him.
“How does she do that, Doctor?”
“I wake in the early morning to the sound of her voice.”
“How do you know it’s hers? You’ve never heard her. . . .”
“Sometimes I see her clearly. She points out places where she has pain, suggests changes in the medicines, asks me to help her mother in this ordeal—she knows how much you are suffering. Paula is very tired and wants to go, but her body is strong and she may live a long time.”
“How much longer, Dr. Shima?”
From his magic case, he took out a velvet bag containing his I Ching sticks, concentrated on a secret prayer, shook them, and threw them on the table.
“Seven. . . .”
“Seven years?”
“Or months or weeks, I don’t know, the I Ching is very vague. . . .”
Before he left, he gave me some mysterious herbs; he believes that anxiety runs down the body’s and the mind’s defenses, and that there is a direct relationship between cancer and sorrow. Dr. Forrester also prescribed something for depression. This extraordinary woman is full of compassion; she has nothing of the usual cynicism that most doctors have. I have the bottle put away in the basket with my mother’s letters, hidden beside the sleeping pills, because I have decided not to seek relief in drugs; this is a road I must travel bleeding. Images of Celia giving birth come back to me often; I see her sweating, ripped by her pains, biting her lips, progressing step by step through that long travail without the aid of tranquilizers, serene and conscious, helping her daughter into life. I see her in her climactic effort, open as a wound, as Andrea’s head emerges; I hear her triumphal shout and Nicolás’s sob, and again experience our blessing in the holy quiet of this room where now Paula is sleeping. My daughter’s strange illness may be like that birth; I must grit my teeth and have courage, knowing that this torment will not be forever, that one day it will end. And how? It can only end with death. . . . I hope that Willie will have the patience to wait for me because it may be a long while, perhaps the seven years of the I Ching. It isn’t easy to keep love alive in these conditions, everything conspires against intimacy; I am always weary in body and my soul is not in me. Willie doesn’t know how he can help me, and I don’t know what to ask of him; he doesn’t dare press any harder for fear of alienating me, yet, at the same time, he doesn’t want to abandon me. In his pragmatic mind, the most reasonable move would be to put Paula in a hospital and try to get on with our lives, but he never mentions that possibility because he knows it would drive an irrevocable wedge between us. “I wish I could take your burden and carry it myself, my shoulders are broader,” he says hopelessly, but he already has enough with his own problems. My daughter is gently failing in my arms, but his is killing herself with drugs in the back alleys across the Bay; she could die even before mine, of an overdose, the slash of a knife, or AIDS. His older son wanders like a homeless man through the streets, stealing and trafficking. If the telephone rings at night, Willie leaps out of bed with the latent foreboding that the body of his daughter is lying in some ditch by the port, or that the voice of a policeman will inform him of some new crime committed by his son. He lives under shadows from the past, and frequently something leaps out to rip and claw him, but now not even the worst news crushes him; he is dropped to his knees, but the next day he is on his feet again. I often ask myself how I wound up in this melodrama. My mother attributes it to my taste for truculent stories, and believes that is the principal ingredient in my feelings for Willie, and t
hat another woman with more common sense would have bolted at the sight of such calamity. When I met Willie, he made no attempt to hide the fact that his life was in chaos; I knew from the beginning about his delinquent children, his debts, and the complications in his past, but in the impetuous arrogance of new love, I decided there were no obstacles we could not overcome.
It is difficult to imagine two men more different than Michael and Willie. By the middle of 1987, my marriage had nowhere to go; tedium was absolute and to avoid waking at the same hour in the same bed I went back to my old habit of writing at night. Depressed, out of work, and stuck in the house, Michael was going through a bad time. To escape his constant presence, I sometimes fled and lost myself in the jungle of Caracas expressways. Fighting the traffic, I resolved many scenes in Eva Luna, and ideas came to me for other stories. On one memorable jag, trapped for a couple of hours in my car in heat like molten lead, I wrote “Two Words” at one stretch, on the backs of my checks, a kind of allegory about the hallucinatory power of narration and language that then became the key for a collection of short stories. Although for the first time I felt secure in the strange craft of writing—with my two earlier books, I had the feeling I had accidentally landed in a slippery mud pit—Eva Luna insisted on writing itself. I had no control over that fractious story; I had no idea where it was going or how to end it. I was ready to massacre all the characters in a hail of bullets to get out of the mess and be rid of them. As the last straw, halfway through I was left without a male protagonist. I had planned everything for Eva and Huberto Naranjo, two poor, streetwise, orphaned children who grew up in parallel circumstances, to fall in love. Midbook, the expected encounter took place, but, when finally they embraced, it turned out that the only thing that interested him were his revolutionary activities; he was, besides, a terribly clumsy lover. Eva deserved more; that was what she let me know and there was no way to convince her of the contrary. I found myself on a dead-end street with a frustrated heroine tapping her foot while the hero sitting on her bed cleaned his rifle. About that time, I had to go to Germany on a book tour. I landed in Frankfurt, and from there traveled across the rest of the country by car, driven by an impatient chauffeur who flew along frosty autobahns at suicidal speeds. One night in a northern city, a man came up after my talk and invited me to have a beer, because, he said, he had a story for me. Sitting in a small café where we could scarcely see each other’s faces through the gloom and cigarette smoke, as rain poured down outside, this stranger told me about his past. His father had been an officer in the Nazi army, a cruel man who mistreated his wife and children and who in the war had been given the opportunity to satisfy his most brutal instincts. He told me about his retarded younger sister, and how his father, steeped in pride of race, had never accepted her but forced her to live like an animal, silent, huddling under a white cloth—covered table so he wouldn’t have to see her. I wrote all that, and a lot more he gave me that night as a gift, on a paper napkin. Before we said good night, I asked whether it was mine to use, and he said yes, that was why he had told me. When I returned to Caracas, I fed the paper napkin into the computer and out came Rolf Carlé, head to toe, an Austrian photographer who became the novel’s protagonist and replaced Huberto Naranjo in the heart of Eva Luna.