“Every morning during 1993, I got out of bed with difficulty, dragged myself to my coach house, lit a candle and sat down in front of the computer to cry.”
I don’t know what the purpose of these pages was. I think that I wrote them as a kind of catharsis, with the vague hope that the magic of literature would defeat forgetfulness and keep Paula alive among us. I thought, too, that this meticulous record of what happened was important for Nicolás, who also has porphyria, and my grandchildren, who would have to live with that threat hanging over them. But in truth I wrote it as a form of salvation: in the process of remembering the past, my soul was healed.
My mother, the first to read the manuscript, immediately thought it could be published, but suggested making substantial changes to protect family secrets and the people involved in the story—myself above all. For a week I tried to change this memoir into a novel, but each time I made a change, however small, I felt that I was betraying Paula and the essence of the book itself. Defeated, I decided to leave it how it was. I made various copies of the original and sent them to each of the people mentioned, and all of them, without exception, allowed me to publish it as it was.
The only person that made an observation was Ernesto. “It seems to me that the character of Paula is incomplete,” he said. “You only know her from the perspective of a mother; you don’t know that she was a passionate lover, a tender wife and a wonderful companion. I will send you something very private . . . If Paula knew, she’d die a second time!” Three days later I received a box of the most unexpected treasure: the love letters that Paula and Ernesto had sent each other every day for more than a year. My daughter, who I thought of as an intellectual—the genius of the family, the only one who combined a talent for the arts with the rigor of scientific thinking—revealed herself to me as a sensual woman, uninhibited, playful and with a great need to be spoiled. In the letters she told her lover about her infancy and early childhood: I discovered that she had been very happy, that she only remembered the good things, the love and the traveling, and that she had erased the separations, exile and other uncertainties. I put paragraphs of these letters into the text; they were the only changes I made.
The book was published despite reservations from my agent and various editors, who were frightened of the topic and the fact that I had exposed myself to the public gaze without holding anything back. Until then I had only written fiction and this memoir seemed like a jump into the unknown. Nevertheless, in a few weeks letters started to arrive from readers: men and women who, after reading Paula, felt the generous impulse to communicate with me. Hundreds, then thousands of envelopes from many places—above all Italy, Spain, South America and the United States, but also from more distant shores, such as India and Australia—flooded my desk and my life. None of my earlier books, which had been in print for over thirteen years, had produced the correspondence that Paula provoked in a few months. Letters from parents who had lost children or whose deepest fear was of something happening to them; letters from youngsters who wanted an extended family; from daughters who wanted a relationship with their mothers like the one that Paula and I had—including one girl of thirteen, in the middle of an adolescent crisis, who shared the reading of the book with her mother, as an act of reconciliation after innumerable fights; from doctors who had changed their relations with their patients, and said they would no longer look at them as cases but as people with a history and a family; from terminally ill patients who had found comfort in their last days; from others who suffered from porphyria or similar conditions. I also received a letter from a nurse, who had looked after Paula in the Intensive Care Unit in the hospital in Madrid, who confirmed my worst suspicions and gave me the details of my daughter’s tragedy and the conspiracy of silence surrounding her case. This avalanche of letters proved that the decision to publish the book was the right one.
Opening myself up to my readers made me not more vulnerable, but stronger. I had to hire two helpers to open the envelopes, divide the letters by language, arrange for the ones we didn’t understand to be translated and post the replies. These weren’t letters that could be answered by a secretary with a few stock phrases, because every one of them was very personal.
Perhaps the most numerous letters were from young women who wanted to get to know Ernesto. I sent a lot of them the address of my son-in-law, of course, with the secret hope that there would be one among them capable of helping him in his grief, but I had to give up in the end, because he wouldn’t cooperate. “Stop sending me girlfriends, because I don’t have the energy to talk to all of them and the truth is that I’ll never be able to fall in love again,” he told me. He had grown a beard, was sunk in sadness and appeared a lot older than his 32 years. He talked about becoming a Jesuit priest and even walked with his head slightly tilted, as if he was already in training for chastity and prayer. But in moments of lucidity it irritated me, the tragic neglect of this big man, and I often reminded him of his dedication during the months of Paula’s illness, not just with her but with the other patients in the hospital who had the good fortune to come into contact with him. I couldn’t see him in a cassock. I thought that instead of saving souls he should care for people and one day he told us that he had decided to study medicine or become a teacher.
The best news, however, is that he has finally fallen in love. Hardly had Giulia appeared in his life than he felt obliged to bring her to California, where the poor girl had to submit herself to the scrutiny of the tribe, but she passed with flying colors. I can’t stop myself from sharing a detail that would be impossible to include in a novel, because I would be accused of pushing the boundaries of magical realism: Giulia was born on the same day as Paula, her mother is called Paula and her father and I were born on the same day in the same year. Too many coincidences! I think these are obvious signs that Paula approves of Ernesto’s new love.
I never thought I’d write a memoir. The world is full of stories to relate, so why should I turn to my own? The circumstances that led to this book were dramatic; it would have been better if there hadn’t been a reason to write it, but I’m happy with the result and the response it’s had from its readers. I feel that all my previous novels were only training for the moment that Paula would write this book through me.
These pages recount the premature end of a splendid young woman who deserved a long life; they are not a lament, however, but a celebration of life. Two stories interweave within them: that of my daughter Paula and that of my own destiny. The slow death of my daughter gave me the extraordinary opportunity to revisit my past. For a year my life stopped completely; I had nothing to do but hope and remember. Compelled to remain still for the first time, I started a long introspection, a journey inside myself and my past. Until that moment I had lived in a hurry, but in those endless months next to my daughter’s bed, trying to communicate with her lost spirit, I discovered silence. This was one of the best presents that Paula gave me during that time. Now, every day, I look for the quiet peace of nature, for a few minutes of thought, of solitude, which allows me to meet Paula and my own soul.
The other precious present that Paula left me was learning unconditional love. Prostrate in that bed, silent and unmoving, with her eyes turned towards death, my daughter couldn’t give anything, only receive. She, who had before possessed a rare intelligence and a memorable grace, who had spent 28 years in the service of others, was reduced to the condition of a statue. So I had to love her as she was, without desires or hopes, without getting a reply, without even knowing if she noticed my care. And after she died, when I thought I’d lost everything, I discovered I had something that no one could take away from me: the love that I had offered to Paula. In the years that have passed since then I have tried very hard not to forget that experience of love and to repeat it as often as possible, because in reality the only thing we have is that which we give.
At the end of November, when it was obvious that she was starting to irrevocably slip away, when s
he had already stopped appearing to me in dreams and the subtle communication that we had seemed to disappear, I decided to open an envelope that contained a letter written by Paula long before she fell ill and marked “to be opened when I die.” Trembling, I broke the wax seal and took out two pages of Paula’s handwriting. It was a spiritual testament that started by saying: “I don’t want to remain trapped in my body. Liberated from it, I will be closer to those I love, even if they’re in the four corners of the world.” She carries on saying to her husband and us, her family, how much she loves us and how happy she has been, and asks us not to forget her, because while we remember her she will be at our side. She tells us we should be happy because “spirits help, accompany and protect better those who are happy.” Paula, who in this letter was already talking about herself as a spirit, also says that she doesn’t want a stone with her name on, she wants to remain in our hearts and for her ashes to return to the earth. We tried to follow her instructions, and her name isn’t engraved on any stone—which is why it is somewhat ironic that it’s written instead on millions of books throughout the world.
In some editions her face appears on the cover: a girl with long dark hair, thick eyebrows and big eyes, with a captivating smile. Willie took that photo shortly before she fell ill. After her death we looked for the negative in the jumbled boxes that Willie has in the basement and, almost by magic, we were able to find it. I took it to make copies but—and I don’t know how—I lost it in the street. I spent hours running up and down, despairing, until I found it, intact, in a car park, where many wheels must have passed over it. I’ve asked myself many times if Paula, who was a very private person, would have liked to pass from hand to hand . . . I console myself with the idea that this book has opened a space in which its readers and I share our losses and grief as much as our hopes and memories. This mission to bring people together was something that Paula had taken on since she was very small, which is why it occurs to me that she would patiently accept the publicity as a lesser evil. This book has also helped me to keep my daughter alive and always present. Each time I have to sign a copy, she smiles at me from these pages.
Sometimes I have felt clearly that she is talking to me—for example through a letter from a reader, when she replies to a question at the right moment. For my birthday, Mothers’ Day or the 8th January, greetings come from strangers who sign in Paula’s name. A couple of weeks ago, emerging from the darkness of the New York subway, I found myself in the middle of the street, blinded by the light of bright spring reflected in the skyscrapers, and when I was able to focus my gaze, Paula was looking at me. There was an enormous photograph of her in the window of a bookshop. If it’s certain that death doesn’t exist and we only die when we are forgotten, then my daughter will live for a long time.
My life, like my books, is made of sorrow and love. Sorrow makes me learn and love makes me grow. Literature, for me, is an act of alchemy, the ability to transform the banalities of existence into glimpses of wisdom. Perhaps this is what the prodigious power of the written word consists of: it allows us to preserve memory, to transform suffering into strength, to be reborn each season, like old trees who make new leaves after every winter.
Read on
Have You Read?
More by Isabel Allende
The following books are also available in Spanish from Rayo, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and can be found at www.harpercollins.com.
MAYA’S NOTEBOOK
Abandoned and neglected by her parents, nineteen-year old Maya Vidal has grown up in a rambling old house in Berkeley with her grandparents. Her grandmother, Nidia, affectionately known as Nini, is a force of nature—willful and outspoken, unconventionally wise with a mystical streak, and fiercely protective—a woman whose formidable strength helped her build a new life after emigrating from Chile in 1973 with her young son, Maya’s father. Popo, Maya’s grandfather, is an African-American astronomer and professor—a gentle man whose solid, comforting presence helps calm the turbulence of Maya’s adolescence.
When Popo dies of cancer, Maya goes completely off the rails. With her girlfriends—a tight circle known as the vampires—she turns to drugs, alcohol, and petty crime, a downward spiral that eventually bottoms out in Las Vegas. Lost in a dangerous underworld, she becomes caught in the crosshairs of warring forces—a gang of assassins, the police, the FBI, and Interpol. Her one chance for survival is Nini, who helps her escape to a remote island off the coast of Chile. In the care of her grandmother’s old friend, Manuel Arias, Maya struggles to adapt to this insular community seemingly lost in time. Surrounded by an assortment of unusual new acquaintances, including a torture survivor and a lame dog, Maya tries to make sense of the past, unravels mysterious truths about life and her family, and embarks on her greatest adventure: the journey into her own soul.
ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA
Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité—known as Tété—is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Although her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves.
When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his trunks and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride, the beautiful Eugenia Garcia del Solar—but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.
Against the merciless backdrop of sugar cane fields, the lives of Tété and Valmorain grow ever more intertwined. When the bloody revolution of Toussaint Louverture arrives at the gates of Saint Lazare, they flee the island that will become Haiti for the decadence and opportunity of New Orleans. There, Tété finally forges a new life, but her connection to Valmorain is deeper than anyone knows and not so easily severed.
ZORRO
Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, Diego de la Vega is a child of two worlds. His father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother, a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe, while receiving from his father lessons in the art of fencing and in cattle branding. It is here, during Diego’s childhood, filled with mischief and adventure, that he witnesses the brutal injustices dealt Native Americans by European settlers and first feels the inner conflict of his heritage.
At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Barcelona for a European education. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego follows the example of his celebrated fencing master and joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. With this tumultuous period as a backdrop, Diego falls in love, saves the persecuted, and confronts for the first time a great rival who emerges from the world of privilege.
Between California and Barcelona, the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. After many adventures—duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues—Diego de la Vega, aka Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.
“Allende’s discreetly subversive talent really shows. . . . You turn the pages, cheering on the masked man.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
PORTRAIT IN SEPIA
As a young girl Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that shaped her character and erased from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, she grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribed the lives of women at that time, but tormented by terrible nightmares. When she finds hersel
f alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past, to discover what it was, exactly, all those years ago, that had such a devastating effect on her young life. Richly detailed, epic in scope, this engrossing story of the dark power of hidden secrets is intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.
“[R]ich with color and emotion and packed with intriguing characters.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE
Orphan Eliza Sommers goes on a search for love, but ends up on a journey of self-discovery. Brought up in the British colony of Valparaíso in Chile by the well-intentioned spinster Miss Rose (and her more stuffy brother Jeremy), Eliza falls unsuitably in love with the humble but handsome clerk Joaquín. When he heads to California to take part in the 1849 Gold Rush, Eliza follows him. But in the rough-and-tumble life of San Francisco our unconventional heroine finds that personal freedom might be a more rewarding choice than the traditional gold band on the wedding finger.
“Brilliant.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Like a slow, seductive lover, Allende teases, tempts, and titillates with mesmerizing stories.”
—Washington Post
APHRODITE: A MEMOIR OF THE SENSES
Under the aegis of the Goddess of Love, Isabel Allende uses her storytelling skills brilliantly in Aphrodite to evoke the delights of food and sex. After considerable research and study, she has become an authority on aphrodisiacs, which include everything from food and drink to stories and, of course, love. Readers will find here recipes from Allende’s mother, poems, stories from ancient and foreign literatures, paintings, personal anecdotes, fascinating tidbits on the sensual art of food and its effects on amorous performance, tips on how to attract your mate and revive flagging virility, passages on the effect of smell on libido, a history of alcoholic beverages, and much more.