Tío Ramón had a three-sectioned wardrobe that could be taken apart when we moved, in which he locked his clothes and treasures: a collection of erotic magazines, cartons of cigarettes, boxes of chocolates, and liquor. My brother Juan discovered a way to open it with a bent wire, and we became expert sneak thieves. If we had taken only a few chocolates or cigarettes, he would have noticed, but we would sneak an entire layer of chocolates and reseal the box so perfectly it looked unopened, and we filched entire cartons of cigarettes, never a few, or a pack. Tío Ramón first became suspicious in La Paz. He called us in, one by one, and tried to get us either to confess or to inform on the guilty party. Neither gentle words nor threats were any good: we thought that to admit to the crime would be stupid and, in our moral code, betrayal among siblings was unpardonable. One Friday afternoon when we got back from school, we found Tío Ramón and a man we didn’t know waiting for us in the living room.
“I have no patience with your disregard for the truth; the least I can expect is not to be robbed in my own home. This gentleman is a police detective. He will take your fingerprints, compare them with the evidence on my wardrobe, and we will know who the thief is. This is your last chance to confess the truth.”
Pale with terror, my bothers and I stared at the floor and clamped our jaws shut.
“Do you know what happens to criminals? They rot in jail,” Tío Ramón added.
The detective pulled a tin box from his pocket. When he opened it, we could see the black inkpad inside. Slowly, with great ceremony, he pressed each of our fingers to the pad, then rolled them onto a prepared cardboard.
“Have no worry, Señor Consul. Monday you will have the results of my investigation,” the man assured Tío Ramón as he left.
Saturday and Sunday were days of moral torture; hidden in the bathroom and the most private corners of the garden, we whispered about our black future. None of us was free of guilt; we would all end up in a dungeon on foul water and dry bread crusts, like the Count of Monte Cristo. The following Monday, the ineffable Tío Ramón called us into his office.
“I know exactly who the thief is,” he announced, wiggling thick, satanic eyebrows. “Nevertheless, out of consideration for your mother, who has interceded in your behalf, I shall not incarcerate anyone this time. The culprit knows I know who he or she is. It will remain between the two of us. I warn all of you that on the next occasion I shall not be so softhearted. Do I make myself clear?”
We stumbled from the room, grateful, unable to believe such magnanimity. We did not steal anything for a long time, but a few years later in Beirut I thought about it again, and was struck by the suspicion that the purported detective was actually an embassy chauffeur—Tío Ramón was quite capable of playing such a trick. Bending a wire of my own, I again opened the wardrobe. This time, in addition to the predictable treasures, I found four red leather-bound volumes of A Thousand and One Nights. I deduced that there must be some powerful reason these books were under lock and key, and that made them much more interesting than the bonbons, cigarettes, or erotic magazines with women in garter belts. For the next three years, every time Tío Ramón and my mother were at some cocktail party or dinner, I read snatches of the tales, curled up inside the cabinet with my faithful flashlight. Even though diplomats necessarily suffer an intense social life, there was never enough time to finish those fabulous stories. When I heard my parents coming, I had to close the wardrobe in a wink and fly to my bed and pretend to be asleep. It was impossible to leave a bookmark between the pages and I always forgot my place; worse yet, entire sections fell out as I searched for the dirty parts, with the results that innumerable new versions of the stories were created in an orgy of exotic words, eroticism, and fantasy. The contrast between the puritanism of my school, where work was exalted and neither bodily imperatives nor lightning flash of imagination allowed, and the creative idleness and enveloping sensuality of those books branded my soul. For decades I wavered between those two tendencies, torn apart inside and awash in a sea of intermingled desires and sins, until finally in the heat of Venezuela, when I was nearly forty years old, I at last freed myself from Miss St. John’s rigid precepts. Just as in my childhood I hid in the basement of Tata’s house to read my favorite books, so in full adolescence, just as my body and mind were awakening to the mysteries of sex, I furtively read A Thousand and One Nights. Deep in that dark wardrobe, I lost myself in magical tales of princes on flying carpets, genies in oil lamps, and appealing thieves who slipped into the sultan’s harem disguised as old ladies to indulge in marathon love fests with forbidden women with hair black as night, pillowy hips and breasts like apples, soft women smelling of musk and eager for pleasure. On those pages, love, life, and death seemed like a gambol; the descriptions of food, landscapes, palaces, markets, smells, tastes, and textures were so rich that after them the world has never been the same to me.
I dreamed you were twelve years old, Paula. You were wearing a plaid coat; your hair was pulled back from your face with a white ribbon and the rest fell loose over your shoulders. You were standing in the center of a hollow tower, something like a grain silo filled with hundreds of fluttering doves. Memé’s voice was saying, Paula is dead. You began to rise off the ground. I ran to catch you by the belt of your coat but you pulled me with you, and we floated like feathers, circling upward. I am going with you, take me, too, Paula, I begged. Again my grandmother’s voice echoed in the tower: No one can go with her, she has drunk the potion of death. We kept rising and rising; I was determined to hold you back, nothing would take you from me. Overhead was a small opening through which I could see a blue sky with one perfect white cloud, like a Magritte painting, and then I understood, horrified, that you would be able to pass through but that the aperture was too narrow for me. I tried to hold you back by your clothing; I called to you, but no sound came. For a few precious instants, I could see as you drifted higher and higher, and then I began to float back down through the turbulence of the doves.
I awoke crying your name, and it was minutes before I realized I was in Madrid, and recognized the hotel room. I threw on my clothes before my mother had time to stop me, and ran toward the hospital. Along the way I found a taxi, and soon I was frantically beating on the door to intensive care. A nurse assured me that nothing had happened to you, that everything was the same, but I begged so hard, and was so visibly shaken, that she allowed me to come see you for a minute. I made sure that the machine was pumping air into your lungs, and that you weren’t cold; I kissed your forehead, and went out in the corridor to wait for morning. They say that dreams don’t lie. With the first light of day, my mother arrived. She brought a thermos of freshly brewed coffee and rosquillas still warm from the bakery.
“Don’t worry, it wasn’t a bad omen, it didn’t have anything to do with Paula. All of the characters are you,” she explained. “You are the twelve-year-old girl, still flying free. But your innocence also ended then. The girl you were died; the potion of death was what all of us women swallow sooner or later. Have you noticed how at puberty the Amazon-like energy we are born with fades and we turn into doubt-filled creatures with clipped wings? The woman left trapped in the silo is also you, a prisoner of the restrictions of adult life. The female condition is a disgrace, Isabel, it’s like having rocks tied to your ankles so you can’t fly.”
“And what do the doves mean, Mama?”
“An agitated spirit, I suppose. . . .”
Every night dreams wait for me crouched beneath the bed with their bag of horrific visions—bell towers, blood, doleful wailing—but also with an ever-renewed harvest of fleeting, happy images. I have two lives, one waking, the other sleeping. In the world of my dreams, there are landscapes and people I already know; there I explore infernos and Edens; I fly through the black night of the cosmos and descend to the bottom of the sea where a green silence reigns; I meet dozens of children of all kinds, impossible animals, and the delicate ghosts of my most loved dead. Through the years I have di
scovered the keys to understanding these stories of the night, and I have learned to decipher their codes; now the messages are clearer and they help me illuminate the mysterious areas of everyday life and of my writing.
But back to Job. I have been thinking a lot about him these days. It occurs to me that your illness is a trial like those visited upon that poor man. It is a terrible arrogance on my part to imagine that you are lying in this bed so that we—we who wait in the corridor of lost steps—can be taught something, but the truth is that there are moments when I believe that. What do you want to teach us, Paula? I have changed a lot during these interminable weeks, all of those who have lived through this experience have changed—especially Ernesto, who seems to have aged a hundred years. How can I console him when I myself am without hope? I wonder whether I will ever laugh with pleasure again, embrace a cause, eat with gusto, write a novel. “Of course you will. Soon you will be celebrating with your daughter and this nightmare will be forgotten,” my mother promises. She is seconded by the porphyria specialist, who assures us that once the crisis is past, patients recover completely. I have a premonition, though, Paula, I can’t deny it. This has gone on too long, and you are no better; in fact, it seems to me you are worse. Your grandmother does not give an inch; she keeps a normal routine, and has the energy to read the newspaper, even to go shopping. “I have only one regret in this life, and that is for the things I didn’t buy,” that sinful woman tells me. We have been here a long time, and I want to go home. Madrid holds bad memories for me; I suffered through a bad love affair here, one I would prefer to forget. During this dreadful time, however, I have made my peace with this city and its inhabitants. I have learned to find my way through its broad majestic avenues and the twisted streets of its centuries-old barrios; I have come to terms with Spanish customs: their smoking, their two-fisted consumption of coffee and liquor, their staying up till dawn, the mind-numbing amount of fat they eat, and their never exercising. Even so, people here live as long as Californians—and much more happily. Once in a while we have dinner at a neighborhood restaurant, always the same one because my mother has fallen in love with the waiter. She likes ugly men, and this one could win a contest. He is burly from the waist up, with the massive hunched shoulders and long arms of an orangutan, but from the waist down he is a dwarf, with spindly little legs. My mother follows him with her seductive gaze, her mouth sometimes agape as she watches him, her spoon frozen in air. For seventy years, she has cultivated the reputation of being spoiled; all of us have protected her from stressful emotions, thinking she could not bear up, but during this crisis her true character has come to light: she is a fighting bull.
In terms of the cosmos and the long course of history, we are insignificant; after we die nothing will change, as if we had never existed. Nevertheless, by the measures of our precarious humanity, you, Paula, are more important to me than my own life, or the sum of almost all other lives. Every day several million persons die and even more are born, but, for me, you alone were born, only you can die. Your grandmother prays for you to her Christian God, and I sometimes pray to a smiling, pagan Goddess overflowing with gifts, a divinity who knows nothing of punishment, only pardon, and I speak to Her with the hope that She will hear me from the depths of time, and help you. Neither your grandmother nor I have had any response, we are encased in this abysmal silence. I think of my great-grandmother, of my clairvoyant grandmother, of my own mother, of you, and of my granddaughter who will be born in May, a strong female chain going back to the first woman, the universal mother. I must harness these nurturing forces for your salvation. I do not know how to reach you; I call but you don’t hear me. That is why I am writing to you. The idea of filling these pages was not mine; it has been weeks since I took any initiative. As soon as she heard of your illness, my agent came to give me support. As a first measure, she dragged my mother and me to an inn where she tempted us with suckling pig and a bottle of Rioja wine, which settled like a stone in our stomach but also had the virtue of making us laugh again. Then she surprised us in the hotel with dozens of red roses, nougats from Alicante, and an obscene-looking sausage—the one we are still using to make lentil soup—and in my lap she deposited a ream of lined yellow paper.
“My poor Isabel. Here, take this and write. Unburden your heart; if you don’t you are going to die of anguish.”
“I can’t, Carmen. Something has broken inside. I may never write again.”
“Then write a letter to Paula. It will help her know what happened while she was asleep.”
And this is how I entertain myself in the empty moments of this nightmare.
WILL YOU KNOW I AM YOUR MOTHER WHEN YOU WAKE, PAULA? OUR family and friends never falter; so many visitors come during the evening that we resemble a tribe of Indians. Some come from very far, spend a few days, and return to their normal lives, among them your father, who has a half-finished construction project in Chile, and must go back. During these weeks of shared sorrow in the corridor of lost steps, I have been remembering the good times of our early years together; unimportant grudges have been receding, and I have learned to prize Michael as an old and loyal friend. I feel a quiet consideration for him. It is difficult for me to imagine that once we made love, or that by the end of our relationship I had come to detest him. Two women friends and my brother Juan came from the United States, Tío Ramón from Chile, and Ernesto’s father directly from the Amazon jungle. Nicolás cannot make the trip because his student visa would not allow him to reenter the United States, and also because he should not leave Celia and their son alone. It’s better that way, I would rather your brother not see you as you are. And Willie comes, too, crossing the world every two or three weeks to spend a Sunday with me, and make love as if it were the last time. I wait at the airport in order not to lose even a minute with him. I watch as he deplanes, pulling the little cart with his suitcases, a head taller than anyone else, his blue eyes anxiously looking for me in the crowd, his smile radiant when he spots me from below. We run to meet each other and his embrace lifts me off my feet. I smell his leather jacket, feel the roughness of his twenty-hour beard, his lips pressed hard against mine, and then we are in the taxi; I huddle against him as his long fingers renew their knowledge of me and he whispers, “My God, how I’ve missed you! You’ve lost weight, you’re nothing but bones.” But suddenly he remembers why we’ve been apart, and in a different voice he asks about you, Paula. We have been together for more than four years, and I still feel the indefinable alchemy of our first meeting, a powerful attraction that time has colored with other sentiments but is still the essence of our union. I don’t really know what it consists of, or how to define it, because it is more than sexual attraction, though at first I thought that’s what it was. Willie says that we are two fighters fired by the same kind of energy, that together we have the strength of a racing train; we can achieve any goal together, he says, and united we are invincible. We both trust the other to guard our back, to be loyal, not to lie, to offer support in moments of weakness, to steady the helm when the other goes off course. I think there is also a spiritual component; if I believed in reincarnation, I would think that it was our karma to meet and love each other in every life, but I won’t speak of that yet, Paula, I will just confuse you. In our urgent coming together, desire and sorrow blend into one. I cling to Willie, seeking pleasure and consolation—two things this man who has suffered knows how to give—but your image, Paula, submerged in your mortal sleep, comes between us, and our kisses turn to ice.
“Paula cannot make love with her husband for a long time, maybe never again. Ernesto isn’t even thirty yet, and his wife could be an invalid for the rest of her days. How can there be such injustice? Why did it happen to her and not me—I’ve already lived and loved so well.”
“Don’t think about that, there are many ways to love,” Willie tells me.
It’s true, love has unexpected resources. In the brief minutes you can be together, Ernesto hugs and kisses you,
in spite of the array of tubes. “Wake up, Paula, I’m waiting for you; I miss you, I need to hear your voice; I am so filled with love for you I am going to burst. Please come back,” he begs you. I picture him at night when he goes back to his empty house and lies next to the hollow left by your shoulders and hips. He must imagine you beside him, with your fresh smile, recall how your skin felt as he caressed you, the harmony of your silences, the lovers’ secrets whispered in the night. He remembers the times you danced till you were drunk with the music, so attuned to each other’s steps that you seemed a single being. He sees you moving like a reed, your long hair wrapping you both in the rhythm of the music, your slim arms around his neck, your lips on his ear. Oh, your grace, Paula! Your sweetness, your unpredictable intensity, your fierce intellectual discipline, your generosity, your insane tenderness. He misses your jokes, your laughter, your ridiculous tears at the movies and your serious tears when you empathized with someone’s suffering. He remembers the time in Amsterdam you hid from him in the cheese market and he was beside himself, yelling for you everywhere, to the astonishment of the Dutch merchants. He wakes, soaked with sweat. He sits on the side of the bed in the darkness and tries to pray, to concentrate on his breathing and the sensations of his body, seeking peace, as he has learned in aikido. Perhaps he goes out on the balcony to gaze at the stars in the Madrid sky, and repeats to himself that he cannot lose hope, he must be patient, everything will be all right, soon you will be with him again. He feels the blood beating at his temples, his veins throbbing, the fire in his chest, he is choking, and he pulls on his sweatpants and goes for a run through the empty streets, but nothing helps to calm the agitation of frustrated desire. Your love is newly born, the first page in a blank notebook. “Ernesto is an old soul, Mama,” you told me once, “but he hasn’t lost his innocence; he has the gift of play, of amazement, of loving and accepting me unconditionally, without making judgments—the way children love. Since we have been together, something has opened up inside me; I have changed. I see the world differently, and I like myself more because I see myself through Ernesto’s eyes.” And he, Paula, has confessed to me in the moments of his greatest terror that he cannot live without you, that he never imagined he would find the visceral rapture he feels when he takes you in his arms; he says you are his perfect complement, and that he loves you and wants you to a point beyond pain, that he regrets every hour you were apart. “How could I know our happiness would be so short-lived? I dream of her, Isabel,” he has told me, trembling. “I dream constantly of being with her again, and making love till we are senseless. I can’t explain these images that assail me and that only she and I know; her absence is like a hot coal in my heart. I cannot stop thinking of her for an instant, Paula is the only woman for me, the companion I dreamed of, and found.” How strange life is, Paula! Only a short while ago I was a distant, rather formal mother-in-law for Ernesto. Now we are confidantes, the most intimate friends.