I slipped into bed beside my daughter, cradling her against my bosom, as I had when she was young. Celia removed the cat, and arranged the two sleeping children so their bodies would warm their aunt’s feet. Nicolás took his sister’s hand; Willie and my mother sat on either side, surrounded by ethereal beings, by murmurs and tenuous fragrances from the past, by ghosts and apparitions, by friends and relatives, living and dead. All during the slow night, we waited, remembering the difficult moments, but especially the happy ones, telling stories, crying a little and smiling a lot, honoring the light of Paula as she sank deeper and deeper into the final sleep, her breast barely rising at slower and slower intervals. Her mission in this world was to unite all those who passed through her life, and that night we all felt sheltered beneath her starry wings, immersed in that pure silence where perhaps angels reign. Voices became murmurs, the shape of objects and the faces of our family began to fade, silhouettes fused and blended; suddenly I realized that others were among us. Granny was there in her percale dress and marmalade-stained apron, with her fresh scent of plums and large blue eyes. Tata, with his Basque beret and rustic cane was sitting in a chair near the bed. Beside him, I saw a small, slender woman with Gypsy features, who smiled at me when our glances met: Memé, I suppose, but I didn’t dare speak to her for fear she would shimmer and vanish like a mirage. In other corners of the room, I thought I saw Mama Hilda with her knitting in her hands, my brother Juan, praying beside the nuns and children from Paula’s school in Madrid, my father-in-law, still young, and a court of kindly old people from the geriatric home Paula used to visit in her childhood. Only a while later, the unmistakable hand of Tío Ramón fell on my shoulder, and I clearly heard Michael’s voice; to my right, I saw Ildemaro, looking at Paula with the tenderness he reserved just for her. I felt Ernesto’s presence materializing through the window-pane; he was barefoot, dressed in aikido attire, a solid figure that crossed the room without touching the floor and leaned over the bed to kiss his wife on the lips. “Soon, my beautiful girl; wait for me on the other side,” he said, and removed the cross he always wore and placed it around her neck. Then I handed him the wedding ring I had worn for exactly one year, and he slipped it on Paula’s finger, as he had the day they were married. Then I was again in the portentous dream I had in Spain, in the silo-shaped tower filled with doves, but now my daughter wasn’t twelve, she was twenty-eight years young; she was not wearing her checked overcoat but a white tunic, and her hair was not pulled back into a ponytail but hanging loose to her shoulders. She began to rise, and I with her, clinging to the cloth of her dress. Again I heard Memé’s voice: No one can go with her, she has drunk the potion of death. . . . But I pushed upward with my last strength and grasped her hand, determined not to let go, and when we reached the top of the tower I saw the roof open and we ascended together. Outside, it was already dawn; the sky was streaked with gold and the countryside beneath our feet gleamed, washed by a recent rain. We flew over valleys and hills, and finally descended into a forest of ancient redwoods, where a breeze rustled among the branches and a bold bird defied winter with its solitary song. Paula pointed to the stream; I saw fresh roses lying along its banks and a white powder of calcined bones on the bottom, and I heard the music of thousands of voices whispering among the trees. I felt myself sinking into that cool water, and knew that the voyage through pain was ending in an absolute void. As I dissolved, I had the revelation that the void was filled with everything the universe holds. Nothing and everything, at once. Sacramental light and unfathomable darkness. I am the void, I am everything that exists, I am in every leaf of the forest, in every drop of the dew, in every particle of ash carried by the stream, I am Paula and I am also Isabel, I am nothing and all other things in this life and other lives, immortal.
Godspeed, Paula, woman.
Welcome, Paula, spirit.
Books by Isabel Allende
THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS
OF LOVE AND SHADOWS
EVA LUNA
THE INFINITE PLAN
PAULA
APHRODITE: A MEMOIR OF THE SENSES
DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE
PORTRAIT IN SEPIA
MY INVENTED COUNTRY
ZORRO
INéS OF MY SOUL
THE SUM OF OUR DAYS
ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA
MAYA’S NOTEBOOK
RIPPER
THE JAGUAR AND EAGLE TRILOGY
CITY OF THE BEASTS
KINGDOM OF THE GOLDEN DRAGON
FOREST OF THE PYGMIES
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
Life at a Glance
Isabel Allende on Destiny, Personal Tragedy, Writing
Our Story
Mission of the Isabel Allende Foundation
About the book
The Year After Paula’s Death
Read on
Have You Read?
About the author
Life at a Glance
Lori Barra
ISABEL ALLENDE was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, and raised in Chile. She fled Chile in 1974, upon the assassination of her uncle, President Salvador Allende. She worked in Venezuela from 1975 to 1984 and then moved to America. She now lives in California with her husband, Willie Gordon.
She has worked as a TV presenter, journalist, playwright, and children’s ? author. Her first book for adults, the acclaimed The House of the Spirits, was published in Spanish in 1982 and was translated into twenty-seven languages.
Isabel holds to a very methodical, some would say menacing, literary routine, working Mondays through Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. She writes using a computer, seated in what she refers to as a “small cabin off my garden.” Her routine shuns music in favor of silence and stands by at least one ritual: “I always start on January 8th.” Asked how she begins a book, she replies, “With a first sentence that comes from the womb, not the mind.”
Her favorite reads include One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez), The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer), La Lumière des Justes (Henri Troyat), The Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges), and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Mario Vargas Llosa), and the poetry of Neruda.
She has written eight novels, among them Zorro, Portrait in Sepia, and Daughter of Fortune. She has also published a celebration of the senses entitled Aphrodite, and My Invented Country, an account of her life in Chile. Her latest book, Maya’s Notebook (published in 2013), is about a young woman who struggles with drugs and alcohol.
Isabel Allende on Destiny, Personal Tragedy, and Writing
“Few people know how to be still and find a quiet place inside themselves. From that place of silence and stillness the creative forces emerge; there we find faith, hope, strength, and wisdom.”
“Life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences”—can you describe that noise, what it is, what it means to you?
We have very busy lives—or we make them very busy. There is noise and activity everywhere. Few people know how to be still and find a quiet place inside themselves. From that place of silence and stillness the creative forces emerge; there we find faith, hope, strength, and wisdom. However, since childhood we are taught to do things. Our heads are full of noise. Silence and solitude scare most of us.
You often talk and write about destiny—what is destiny for you?
We are born with a set of cards and we have the freedom to play them the best we can, but we cannot change them. I was born female, in the forties, from a Catholic and conservative family in Chile. I was born healthy, I had my shots as a child, I received love and a proper education. All that determines who I am. The really important events in my life happened in spite of me, I had no control over them, like the fact that my father left the family when I was three, the military coup in Chile (1973) that forced me into exile, meeting Willie, my husband, the success of my books, the death of my daughter, and so forth. That is destiny.
You use real people in your life as model
s for your novels’ characters. You also use real events to come up with your plots. Yet you have a storyteller’s gift for fleshing out each character and composing beautifully written stories. Do you ever find yourself at a point where your journalistic background clashes with your fiction?
My training as a journalist has been very helpful in my fiction-writing career. From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct an interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there. Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves, they forget the common reader. I never do. I don’t think journalism clashes with my fiction, on the contrary, it helps enormously.
Most fiction writers draw on family events for inspiration. Is it stressful or liberating to write about your family in a memoir, without the cloak of fiction?
I wrote about my family in Paula and then again in My Invented Country and The Sum of Our Days. I don’t find it difficult but sometimes my relatives get angry . . .
How difficult was it to write during this painful period of your life? Or did you find the task of writing somehow cleansing, a way to ease your mind away from the tragedy unfolding before you?
Writing Paula was not difficult, it was very healing. I wrote it with tears, but in one breath, as if Paula herself was dictating those words from the Beyond. I started the book a month after my daughter’s death and I wrote for a year. During that time I was permanently in touch with Paula, remembering, analyzing what had happened, making peace with my loss. The book helped me to understand the tragedy and gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own life.
You have lived more lives than most. You have the gift to reinvent yourself and to adapt to whatever life casts your way. Yet in Paula you write, “I’m lost, I don’t know who I am . . . Too many contradictions . . .” After all you’ve been through, do you believe that we are all multifaceted beings, all of us complex and full of contradictions and capable of much more than we can ever imagine?
I never said I wanted a “happy” life but an interesting one. From separation and loss I have learned a lot, I have become strong and resilient as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don’t even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.
You have written letters all your life, most notably a daily one to your mother. You’ve also worked as a journalist. Which form or experience of writing helped you most when you started writing books?
The training of writing daily is very useful. As a journalist I learned to research, to be disciplined, to meet deadlines, to be precise and direct, to keep in mind the reader and try to grab his or her attention from the very beginning.
How does writing each book change you, if at all?
Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul. Why do I write about certain themes and certain characters only? Because they are part of my life, part of myself, they are aspects of me that I need to explore and understand.
Do you have a favorite book of your own?
I don’t read my own books, and as soon as I finish one I am already thinking of the next one. I can hardly remember each book. I don’t have a favorite but I am grateful to The House of the Spirits, my first novel, which paved the way for all the others, and to Paula, because it saved me from depression.
Our Story
I STARTED the Isabel Allende Foundation on December 9, 1996, to pay homage to my daughter, Paula Frias. Paula’s untimely death in 1992 broke my heart. She was only twenty-eight years old when she died, a graceful and spiritual young woman, the light of our family.
During her short life Paula worked as a volunteer in poor communities in Venezuela and Spain, offering her time, her total dedication, and her skills as an educator and psychologist. She cared deeply for others. When in doubt, her motto was: “What is the most generous thing to do?” My foundation, based on her ideals of service and compassion, was created to continue her work.
Seed funding for the foundation came from the income I received from Paula, a memoir I wrote after her death. To this day, I get innumerable letters from people touched by Paula’s spirit.
Since 1996, I have contributed to the foundation annually with income from my other books.
It is a wonderful truth that things we want most in life—a sense of purpose, happiness, and hope—are most easily attained by giving them to others.
Mission of the Isabel Allende Foundation
MY FOUNDATION is guided by a vision of a world in which women have achieved social and economic justice. This vision includes empowerment of women and girls and protection of women and children.
The foundation is small, only a drop of water in the vast desert of human need, so I cannot spread my support too thin. I have found that it is more efficient to concentrate on specific issues and in limited areas. I therefore support select nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chile whose missions are to provide women and girls with:
Reproductive self-determination
Healthcare
Education
Protection from violence, exploitation and/or discrimination
Over the past decade, the Isabel Allende Foundation has made grants and scholarships through the following three programs:
Esperanza Grants
Paula Scholarships
Espíritu Awards
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About the book
The Year After Paula’s Death
“My mother placed a packet tied with yellow string into my hands. It was the 190 letters I had sent her in Chile that year, recounting each stage of the terrible test that Paula and I had passed together.”
DURING THE YEAR that my daughter was ill, I was so busy that I couldn’t think much about myself. After her death, however, I fell into the overwhelming silence of mourning. I went around in a trance the first few days, like a sleepwalker, tripping over Paula’s persistent ghost, who appeared everywhere to me.
One month later, my mother grabbed my hand and took me to the little coach house where I write. “Today is the 8th of January, the date you start all your books,” she said, and I replied that I would never write again. But my mother had prepared everything and is not a woman to let herself be blinded by common sense. Refusing to listen to my protests, she lit a honey-scented candle before Paula’s photograph and placed a packet tied with yellow string into my hands. It was the 190 letters I had sent her in Chile that year, recounting each stage of the terrible test that Paula and I had passed together. She asked me to read them carefully, in the same order that they were written; that way I’d understand that death was the only liberation possible for my daughter.
“Grief is a long, dark tunnel that you must travel alone. On the other side there’s light, but you can’t yet see it. Trust me, Isabel, nothing can save you from this suffering; not antidepressants, nor therapy, nor holidays on a tropical island, not even the love of your husband and grandchildren,” my mother said, and asked me to walk patiently along the tunnel, trusting in the strength of life, because that was the least that Paula could expect from me.
My mother excused herself, saying she was going to buy a vest, leaving me alone with my memories and sorrow. I switched on the computer and without thinking twice I wrote the same sentence with which I’d started the first yellow exercise book in Madrid. “Listen, Paula. I’m going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.” I understood then that the only thing I could write would be this same letter addressed to my daughter. My mother came back to look for me six hours later, without a vest, and found me absorbed.
Every morning during 1993, I got out of bed with difficulty, dra
gged myself to my old coach house, lit a candle and sat down in front of the computer to cry. Celia, my daughter-in-law, who was expecting her third child, and who had become my shadow, my friend and my helper, says that I wrote those pages with tears and kisses. Sometimes the sadness was unbearable and I stayed staring at the screen for hours, unable to get a word out. At other times the sentences flowed as if they were dictated by Paula from the other world. Now and again I headed for the wood where we had scattered her ashes and walked for hours, calling her. But it wasn’t all crying; I often caught myself laughing at my memories, both of myself and even of Paula. A year later I glimpsed the end of the tunnel, amazed, as my mother had promised, and I realized that I no longer wanted to die, but to carry on living. I had 400 pages on my table and they were not depressing; they were, more like, a celebration of life. Like in paintings by old Flemish masters, color sprung out of large areas of shadow; this book was chiaroscuro, made of contrasts.