Paula

  My plane to Caracas left very early; it was still dark when we were awakened by the alarm clock. While I showered, dizzy with exhaustion and unforgettable impressions, Willie brewed a pot of strong coffee that had the virtue of bringing me back to reality. I took my leave of the room that for a few hours had served as a temple, with the strange suspicion that before long I would see it again. On the way to the airport, as the dawn began to break, Willie hinted with inexplicable timidity that he liked me.

  “That doesn’t mean very much. I need to know whether what happened last night is an invention of a confused mind or whether in fact you love me and we have some sort of commitment.”

  So great was his surprise that he had to pull over and stop the car; I didn’t know that you never say the word “commitment” to a North American bachelor.

  “But we’ve just met, and you live on another continent!”

  “Is it the distance that worries you?”

  “I’ll come to Venezuela to visit in December, and we can talk then.”

  “This is October, between now and December, I could be dead.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “No, but you never know. . . . Look, Willie, I’m too old to wait around. Tell me right now whether we can give this love a chance, or if it would be better to forget the whole thing.”

  Pale, he started the motor again, and we drove the rest of the way in silence. His goodbye kiss was prudent, and he repeated that he would come see me during the holidays at the end of the year. The minute the plane took off, I tried very seriously to forget him, but obviously it didn’t work, because as soon as we landed in Caracas, Nicolás noticed something.

  “What is it, Mama? You seem strange.”

  “I’m worn out, Nicolás, I’ve been traveling for two months. I need to rest and get a change of clothes and get my hair cut.”

  “I think it’s more than that.”

  “Maybe I’m in love. . . .”

  “At your age?” He laughed out loud. “Who with?”

  I wasn’t sure of Willie’s last name, but I had his telephone number and address and—at the suggestion of my son, who had the idea I should spend a week in California to get the gringo out of my mind—I sent him by express mail a two-column contract: one outlining my demands and the other listing what I was prepared to offer in a relationship. The first was longer than the second and included several key points—such as fidelity, because experience had taught me that unfaithfulness is destructive and tiring—and other less essential requirements such as reserving the right to decorate our house in my taste. The contract was based on good faith: neither of us would ever intentionally do anything to wound the other; if hurt was inflicted, it would be by error, not malice. Willie was so amused that he forgot his juristic caution, signed in the spirit of prolonging the joke, and sent it back by return mail. With that, I packed a bag containing a few clothes and the assorted fetishes I always carry with me, and asked my son to take me to the airport. “See you soon, Mama. You’ll be back in a few days with your tail tucked between your legs,” was his mocking farewell. From Virginia, where she was working on a master’s degree, Paula expressed her doubts about this adventure by telephone.

  “I know you, vieja, you’re going to get yourself in a terrible jam. Nicolás is wrong, you won’t be over it in a week. If you’re going to visit that man, it’s because you’re prepared to stay with him. Go easy, because if you do, you’re sunk, you’ll have to take on all his problems.” But it was too late for judicious warnings.

  The beginning was a nightmare. I had always thought of the United States as my personal enemy because of its disastrous policy toward Latin America and its participation in Chile’s military coup. I would have to live in this empire and travel it from end to end to understand its complexity, know it, and learn to love it. I had not used my English in more than twenty years; I could barely decipher the menu in a restaurant, I didn’t understand the news on television, or the jokes, much less the language of Willie’s boys. The first time we went to the movies and I found myself sitting in the dark beside a lover wearing a checked shirt and cowboy boots and holding a liter of soda and bucket of popcorn in his lap, while on the screen a madman ripped a girl’s breasts with an ice pick, I thought I had come to the end of my rope. I talked with Paula that night, as I often did. Instead of repeating her warning, she reminded me of the deep emotions that had bound me to Willie from the start and advised me not to waste energy on small things but to concentrate on real problems. In truth, there were matters much more grave than cowboy boots or a tub of popcorn, from doing battle with the bizarre people invading us to adapting to the style and rhythm of a man who had lived eight years as a bachelor and whose lowest priority in the world was a bossy woman in his life. I began by buying new sheets and burning his in a bonfire on the patio, a symbolic ceremony intended to fix forever in his mind the idea of monogamy. “What’s that woman doing?” asked Jason, half-asphyxiated by the smoke. “Don’t worry, it must be a custom of the natives of her country,” Harleigh calmed him. I immediately threw myself into cleaning and straightening up with such fervor that in a careless moment I threw away all of Willie’s tools. He was close to a volcanic eruption, but then remembered the basic point in our contract: it had not been intentional on my part, but a blunder. The broom also swept before it the old Christmas ornaments, the collections of crystal figurines, and the photographs of long-legged lovers, along with four boxes of pistols, machine guns, bazookas, and cannons belonging to Harleigh that were replaced by books and educational toys. The dying fish exited down the drain and I let the mice out of their cage—the poor creatures were leading a miserable existence, anyway, with nothing to do but chew each other’s tails. I explained to Harleigh that the unhappy rodents would find more satisfying activities in our neighbors’ gardens, but three days later we heard a faint scratching at the door and when we opened it saw one of them with its innards spilling out, staring up with feverish eyes and begging to come in with expiring squeaks. Willie picked up the mouse and cuddled it, and for the next few weeks we slept with it in our room, treating it with antibiotics and creams to grow new skin, until it recovered. When the Bulgarian got wind of the new order, he decamped, looking for a more stable environment, and, after stealing his father’s car, Willie’s older son and his sweetheart also disappeared. Jason, who had spent the last year resting by day and partying by night, had no recourse but to get up early, take a shower, clean his room, and go off to school, muttering under his breath. Harleigh was the only one who accepted my presence and tolerated the new rules with good humor, because for the first time he felt secure and attended; he was so happy that with time he even forgave the mysterious disappearance of his pets and arsenal of weapons. Until then, he had never known any kind of limits, he behaved like a small savage, quite capable of breaking out glass with his fists in one of his attacks of rebellion. So deep was the empty place in his heart that in exchange for enough affection and joshing to fill it, he was willing to adopt the alien stepmother who had turned his house upside down and stolen from him a large part of his father’s attention. More than four years of experience in the school in Caracas where we dealt with difficult children were not much help with Harleigh; his problems confounded the most expert, and his need to create a disturbance the most patient, but, by good fortune, the kind of kidding mutual liking we shared was a lot like affection, and helped us get along.

  “I don’t have to love you,” he had said with a defiant face a week after we met, when he saw that it wasn’t going to be easy to get rid of me.

  “Neither do I. We can make an effort and try to love each other, or just treat each other with good manners. Which do you prefer?”

  “Let’s try to love each other.”

  “Good, and if that doesn’t work, we can always fall back on respect.”

  The boy lived up to his word. For years, he tested my nerves with unflinching tenacity, but he also climbed into my bed to read stories, de
dicated his best drawings to me, and even in his worst fits never forgot our pact of mutual respect. He, like Jason, came to be another son in my life. Now they are two strapping young men—one attending the university and the other finishing school after having overcome childhood traumas—whom I still have to hassle about taking out the garbage and making their beds, but we are good friends and can laugh about the fearsome pitched battles of the past. There were occasions when I felt defeated before the confrontation began, and others when I was so tired I looked for reasons not to go home. At those moments, I remembered Tío Ramón’s favorite phrase, Remember that all the others are more afraid than you, and I returned to the fray. I lost every battle with them but, miraculously, I think I am winning the war.

  I was not yet settled in when I was offered a contract at the University of California to teach writing to a group of aspiring young authors. How can you teach someone to tell a story? Paula, by telephone, gave me the key, with a heavy dose of irony: tell them to write a bad book, that’s easy, anyone can do it. And that’s what we did. Each of the students set aside his or her secret dream of producing the Great American Novel and enthusiastically and fearlessly waded into the writing. Along the way, we adjusted, corrected, cut, and polished and, after many discussions and much laughter, out came their opuses, one of which was published with much ballyhoo by a major New York firm. Since then, any time I fall into a period of doubt, I tell myself I am going to write a bad book, and the panic passes. I moved a table into Willie’s room, and there by the window I sat and wrote on a pad of yellow, lined paper like the one I am using now to put down these recollections. From time left over from classes, reading student work, driving back and forth to Berkeley, household chores, and Harleigh’s problems, from that first convulsive year of life in the U.S., almost without my realizing, came several stories with a Caribbean flavor published shortly after as The Stories of Eva Luna. They were gifts from a different dimension; each one came to me whole as an apple, from the first to the last sentence, just as “Two Words” had been manifest in a traffic jam in Caracas. A novel is a long, drawn-out project in which endurance and discipline count most. It is like embroidering a complex needlepoint with many-colored floss; it is worked on the wrong side, patiently, stitch by stitch, taking care to see that the knots are not visible and following a vague design that can be appreciated only at the end when the last thread is in place and the tapestry is turned to the right side to judge the completed effect. With a little luck, the charm of the whole masks the defects and flaws in the execution. In a short story, on the other hand, everything is readily perceived; nothing can be left out, nothing can be added. There is a precise amount of space and limited time, and if the narrative is reworked too much, it loses that gust of freshness that lifts the reader. Writing a short story is like shooting an arrow: it requires the instinct, practice, and precision of a good archer—strength to pull the bow, an eye for distance and velocity, and good luck—to hit the bull’s-eye. A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration. For me the genre is as difficult as poetry, and I don’t think I will attempt it again, unless, like The Stories of Eva Luna, fictions rain on me from the heavens. Once more it was proved to me that time alone with my writing is magical, the hour of sorcery, my only salvation when everything around me threatens to come crashing down.

  The last piece of that collection, “And of Clay Are We Created,” is based on a tragedy that occurred in Colombia in 1985, when the violent eruption of the volcano Nevado Ruiz produced an avalanche of melted snow that flowed down the mountainside and completely buried a village. Thousands perished, but the world remembers the catastrophe specifically because of Omaira Sánchez, a thirteen-year-old girl who was trapped in the mud from the slide. For three days, she died an anguishingly slow death before photographers, journalists, and television cameras flown in by helicopter. Her eyes staring from the television screen have haunted me ever since. I still have her photograph on my desk; again and again I studied it, trying to comprehend the meaning of her martyrdom. Three years after the event, in California, I tried to exorcise that nightmare by telling her story. I wanted to describe the torment of that poor child buried alive, but, as I was writing it, I realized that was not the core of the story. I gave it a different turn and tried to narrate from the point of view of the man who stayed by the young girl’s side those three days, but when I finished that version, I understood I still hadn’t captured the essence. The real story is about a woman—and I am that woman—who watches the televised struggle of the man holding the girl. It is about my feelings and the inevitable changes I experienced while witnessing the agony of that child. Once the collection of stories was published, I thought Omaira was out of my life, but I soon learned that was not the case; she is a dogged angel who will not let me forget her. When Paula fell into a coma and became a prisoner in her bed, inert, dying slowly before the helpless gaze of all around her, I remembered the face of Omaira Sánchez. My daughter was trapped in her body, as the girl had been trapped in mud. Only then did I understand why I had thought about her all those years, and finally could decipher the message in those intense black eyes: patience, courage, resignation, dignity in the face of death. If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving. . . .

  Given that the devastating fury of my broom had not fully penetrated the levels of chaos in that household, I convinced Willie that it would be easier to move than to clean, and that is how we came to live in this house of the spirits. That was the year Paula met Ernesto, and they moved in together for a time in Virginia, while Nicolás, alone in the large house in Caracas, complained that we had abandoned him. Before long, Celia appeared in his life to reveal to him certain mysteries, and in the euphoria of recently discovered love his sister and his mother were relegated to the background. We talked by telephone in complicated three-way conversations to tell each other our latest adventures and to comment ecstatically on the amazing coincidence of all three of us having fallen in love at the same time. As soon as Paula finished her studies, she and Ernesto would move to Spain, where they would begin the second phase of their life together. Nicolás explained to us that his sweetheart belonged to the most reactionary wing of the Catholic Church; there was no question of sleeping under the same roof before they married, and so they planned to wed as soon as possible. It seemed difficult to understand what he could have in common with a girl whose ideas were so different from his own, but he replied circumspectly that Celia was sensational in all other ways and, if we did not press her, he was sure her religious fanaticism would ebb. Once again, time proved him right. My son’s unbeatable strategy is to plant his feet firmly, play out a lot of rope, and wait, thus avoiding useless confrontations. He wins by outwaiting his opposition. When he was four years old and I was trying to teach him to make his bed, he replied in his semi-baby talk that he was willing to do any domestic chore except that one. It was useless to try to force him; first he bribed Paula and then he begged Granny, who sneaked in through a window to help him until I surprised her, precipitating the only fight we ever had. I thought that Nicolás’s stubbornness could not last forever, but for twenty-two years he slept on the floor with the dogs, like a beggar. Now that he had a sweetheart, the problem of the bed was out of my hands. While he was falling in love with Celia and studying computer science at the university, he learned karate and kung fu in order to defend himself in an emergency, because the criminals in Caracas had singled out our house and had broken and entered in broad daylight, perhaps with the blessing of the police.

  Through our unabating correspondence, my mother was up to date on the details of my adventure in the United States, but, even so, she was shocked when she arrived to visit my new home. To make a good impression, I had starched tablecloths, hidden dog stains under potted plants, and made Harleigh swear to behave like a human being and his father not to curse in Spanish in my mother
’s presence. Willie not only cleaned up his language, he put away the cowboy boots and went to a dermatologist to have the tattoo on his hand erased with a laser, but left the skull on his arm because only I see it. My mother was the first to speak the word “marriage,” as she had been years before with Michael. “How long do you intend to be his concubine? If you’re going to live in this combat zone, at least get married, that way, no one can talk, and you will be eligible for a decent visa—or,” she asked in the tone of voice I know so well, “do you plan to be an illegal alien all your life?” Her suggestion caused an outburst of enthusiasm from Harleigh, who by then was accustomed to having me around, and a panic attack in Willie, who had two divorces behind him and a string of unsuccessful love affairs. He told me he needed time to think it over, which seemed reasonable to me. I said he could have twenty-four hours, or I was going back to Venezuela. We got married.