* * *
As time went by, the relationship between Alma and Irina became increasingly like that of aunt and niece. Their routines were so settled that they could spend hours together in the cramped apartment without talking or even glancing each other’s way, both of them caught up in their own activity. They needed each other. Besides sorting through the boxes from Sea Cliff, Irina was also responsible for filing Alma’s papers, taking dictation, going to the shops or the laundry, accompanying Alma on her errands, taking care of her cat, and organizing her minimal social life. Irina considered it a privilege to be able to count on Alma’s trust and support, whereas the older woman was thankful for the young woman’s loyalty. She was flattered by Irina’s interest in her past, and she depended on her for practical matters as well as for maintaining her independence and autonomy. Seth had told Alma that when the time came that she needed more help, she ought to either return to the family home at Sea Cliff or take on someone to assist her full-time in her apartment, since money would be no problem. Alma, who was about to turn eighty-two, planned to live another ten years before she needed that kind of support: she did not want anybody to feel they had the right to decide on her behalf.
“I was terrified of being dependent too, Alma,” Dr. Catherine Hope told her one day. “But I’ve realized it’s not such a big deal. You get used to it, and are grateful for the assistance. I can’t dress or take a shower on my own, I have problems brushing my teeth and cutting the chicken on my plate, but I’ve never been more contented than I am now.”
“Why’s that?” Alma asked her friend.
“Because I have time to spare, and for the first time in my life nobody expects anything of me. I don’t have to prove anything, I’m not rushing everywhere; each day is a gift I enjoy to the fullest.”
* * *
Catherine Hope was still in this world thanks only to her fierce determination and the marvels of modern surgery; she knew what it meant to be incapacitated and to feel constant pain. For her, becoming dependent on others had not come gradually, as is usually the case, but overnight, after an unfortunate accident. While mountain climbing, she had fallen down a crevasse and gotten trapped between two rocks, with her arms, legs, and pelvis smashed. Her rescue was a heroic effort that was reported live on the TV news as it was filmed from the air by helicopter. This showed the dramatic scenes from a distance but was unable to get close to the deep chasm where she was lying, in a state of shock and hemorrhaging. It was only a day and a night later that two mountain rescuers succeeded in climbing down to her, in a daring maneuver that almost cost them their lives, and hoisted her up in a harness. Cathy was taken to a hospital that specialized in war traumas, where they began the task of resetting her numerous broken bones. Two months later, she woke up from her coma and, after asking after her daughter, announced she was glad to be alive. That same day, from India the Dalai Lama had sent her a kata, a white scarf he had blessed. Following fourteen complicated operations and years of brave rehabilitation, Cathy was forced to accept that she would never walk again.
“My first life is over, this is the start of the second one. If you see me depressed or exasperated, don’t pay any attention, because it won’t last,” she told her daughter.
Zen Buddhism and her lifelong habit of meditation gave her a great advantage in this situation, since she could bear being immobile in a way that would have driven any other person as athletic and energetic as her crazy. She was also able calmly to accept the loss of her companion of many years, who was less able to come to terms with the tragedy and left her. She discovered that she could practice medicine as a surgery consultant from a studio equipped with TV cameras hooked up with the operating room, but her ambition was to work with patients face-to-face, as she had always done. When she decided to live at the second level in Lark House, she visited a couple of times to talk to the residents who would be her new family and soon saw that there were more than enough opportunities for her to work as she wished.
Barely a week after her arrival she was already planning a free pain clinic for residents with chronic illnesses, and an office where she could attend to lesser complaints. Lark House had doctors on standby, but Catherine Hope convinced them that she was not competing with them, but would complement their work. Hans Voigt offered her a room for the clinic and suggested to the trustees that they pay her a salary; however, she preferred to offer her services as a volunteer and not to have to pay the home’s monthly charges. This agreement suited both parties. Cathy, as everyone called her, quickly became the mother who greeted the new arrivals, listened to their secrets, comforted those who were sad, guided the dying, and handed out the marijuana. Half of the residents had medical prescriptions for its use, and Cathy, who doled it out at her clinic, was generous toward those who had neither permits nor enough money to buy it under the counter. It was not uncommon to see a line of clients waiting outside her door to get the grass in many different forms, including delicious biscuits and sweets. Voigt did not intervene—why deprive them of innocuous relief?—and only demanded they refrain from smoking in the corridors or common spaces, because smoking tobacco was forbidden, and it would be unfair if the same did not apply to marijuana. Even so, some of the smoke escaped through the heating or air-conditioning systems, and occasionally even the residents’ pets were as high as kites.
* * *
After her three years at Lark House, Irina had finally begun to feel safe. She had not spent so long in one place since her arrival in the United States fourteen years earlier; she knew this tranquility could not last and savored every moment of this truce in her life. Not everything was idyllic, but compared to her past problems, those of the present were trivial. She had to have her wisdom teeth out, but her medical insurance did not cover dental treatment. She knew Seth Belasco was in love with her and that it would be increasingly difficult to keep him in check without losing his valuable friendship. Voigt, who had always been relaxed and friendly, had in recent months become so bad tempered that some of the residents were meeting secretly to find a tactful way to get rid of him, although Catherine Hope thought he should be given time, and for the moment her opinion prevailed. The director had twice been operated on for hemorrhoids, only partially successfully, and this had embittered him.
Irina’s most urgent problem was an invasion of mice in the old Berkeley house where she rented a room. She could hear them scratching behind the cracked walls and underneath the wooden floorboards. At her neighbor Tim’s insistence, the other tenants decided to lay traps, because it seemed inhumane to poison the creatures. Irina argued that the traps were just as cruel, and had the added disadvantage that somebody had to dispose of the corpses, but no one listened to her. Once, one of the tiny animals survived in a trap and was rescued by Tim, who passed it on to Irina, tears in his eyes. He was someone who ate only vegetables and nuts, because he could not bear the idea of harming any living thing, much less cooking it. Irina had to bandage up the mouse’s broken foot, keep it in a cage with cotton wool, and take care of it until it had recovered from the shock and could walk properly and be released back with the others.
Some of Irina’s duties at Lark House irritated her, such as the bureaucratic paperwork for the insurance companies or fighting with residents’ relatives, who would complain over anything in order to assuage their sense of guilt at having abandoned their loved ones. Worst of all for Irina were the compulsory computer lessons, because no sooner had she learned something than the technology made another leap forward and she was left behind yet again. She had no complaints about the residents in her care. As Cathy had predicted on her first day at Lark House, she was never bored.
“There’s a difference between being old and being ancient. It doesn’t have to do with age, but physical and mental health,” Cathy explained. “Those who are old can remain independent, but those who are ancient need help and supervision; there comes a moment when they’re like children again.”
Irina learned a l
ot from both the elderly and the ancient. Nearly all of them were sentimental, amusing, and had no fear of seeming ridiculous; Irina laughed with them and sometimes cried for them. Many had led interesting lives, or invented them. In general if they seemed very lost it was because they were hard of hearing. Irina made sure their hearing-aid batteries never ran out.
“What’s the worst thing about growing old?” she would ask them.
They never thought about their age, was a common reply; they had once been adolescents, then they were thirty, fifty, sixty, and never gave it a thought, so why should they do so now? Some of them were very restricted, finding it hard to walk or move, and yet there was nowhere they wanted to go. Others were absentminded, confused, or forgetful, but this worried their carers and relatives more than it did them. Catherine Hope insisted that the residents of the second and third levels remain active, and it was Irina’s job to keep them interested, entertained, and connected.
“However old one is, we need a goal in our lives. It’s the best cure for many ills,” Cathy insisted. In her case, the goal had always been to help others, and her accident had not altered this in the slightest.
On Friday mornings, Irina used to accompany the most active residents on their street protests, to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. She also took part in the vigils for noble causes and in the knitting club; all the women who could wield a pair of needles (apart from Alma Belasco) were knitting cardigans for Syrian refugees. The recurring theme was peace; there was argument about everything apart from that. In Lark House there were 244 disillusioned Democrats who had voted to reelect Barack Obama but criticized him for being indecisive, for not having closed the Guantánamo facility, for deporting Latino immigrants, for the use of drones; there were more than enough reasons to send letters to the president and Congress. The half-dozen Republicans were careful not to voice their opinions out loud.
Irina was also responsible for helping with the spiritual needs of the residents. Many of them who were from a religious tradition sought refuge in it, even if they had spent sixty years denying God, while others sought comfort in esoteric and psychological alternatives typical of the Age of Aquarius. Irina brought in guides and masters for transcendental meditation, courses in miracles, the I Ching, the development of intuition, Kabbalah, the mystic tarot, animism, reincarnation, psychic perception, universal energy, and extraterrestrial life. She was the organizer of religious festivals, a potpourri of rituals drawn from several beliefs, so that no one could possibly feel excluded. At the summer solstice, she took a group of the women to the local woods, where they danced barefoot in circles to the sound of tambourines, with flowers in their hair. The rangers knew them and were happy to take photos of them hugging trees and talking to Gaia, Mother Earth, and with their own dead. Irina stopped mocking them inwardly the day she heard her grandparents in the trunk of a sequoia, one of those millenarian giants that unite our world to that of the spirits, as the octogenarian dancers had been quick to remind her. Costea and Petruta did not have much to say when they were alive, and nor did they from within the tree, but what little they did convey convinced their granddaughter that they were watching over her. At the winter solstice, Irina improvised ceremonies inside Lark House, as Cathy had warned her of a possible outbreak of pneumonia if they celebrated in the damp, windy woods at that time of year.
Irina’s salary would barely have been enough for a normal person to live on, but her ambitions were so humble and her needs so modest that sometimes she could even save money. Her income from her dog-grooming business and as an assistant to Alma, who always looked for reasons to pay her more than they had agreed, made her feel rich. Lark House had become her home, and the residents, whose lives she shared every day, replaced her grandparents. She was touched by these slow, pallid old people with all their ailments. Faced with their problems she was infinitely good-humored; she didn’t mind repeating the same answer to the same question a thousand times, and she enjoyed pushing their wheelchairs, encouraging, aiding, consoling them. She learned to deflect the violent impulses that occasionally swept over them like fleeting storms and wasn’t frightened by the avarice or persecution complexes some of them suffered from out of loneliness. She tried to understand what it meant to carry winter on your back, to hesitate over every step, to confuse words you don’t hear properly, to have the impression that the rest of the world is going about in a great rush; the emptiness, frailty, fatigue, and indifference toward everything not directly related to you, even children and grandchildren, whose absence was not felt as it once had been, and whose names you had to struggle to remember. She felt tender toward their wrinkles, arthritic fingers, and poor sight. She imagined how she herself would be as an elderly and then ancient woman.
But Alma Belasco never fit into that category; she didn’t need looking after. On the contrary, Irina felt taken care of by her and enjoyed the role of helpless niece that had been allotted to her. Alma, who was pragmatic, agnostic, and fundamentally skeptical, wanted nothing to do with crystals, zodiacs, or talking trees; keeping her company, Irina found relief from her own uncertainties. She wanted to be like Alma and live in a manageable reality, where problems had definite causes and solutions, where there were no dreadful creatures lurking in her dreams, no lecherous enemies spying from every street corner. Hours with her were precious and Irina would willingly have worked for free. Once she had gone so far as to suggest it.
“I have more than enough money, and you don’t have enough. Don’t ever mention it again,” said Alma in that imperious tone she almost never used with her.
SETH BELASCO
Alma Belasco enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, watched the news on TV, and then went to her yoga class or for an hour’s walk. On her return, she showered, got dressed, and at the time when she calculated a cleaner sent by Lupita was due to arrive, she would escape to the clinic to help her friend Cathy. The best treatment for pain was to keep the patients busy and mobile. Cathy always needed volunteers in the clinic and had asked Alma to give silk-screen classes, but that required space and materials that no one there could afford. Cathy refused to have Alma pay for everything, because as she said, it would not be good for the participants’ morale, as nobody wants to be the object of charity. As a result, Alma reached back to her former experience in the Sea Cliff attic with Nathaniel and Ichimei and improvised theatrical skits that were not only free but provoked gales of laughter. She went to her workshop three times a week to paint with Kirsten. She rarely frequented the Lark House dining room, preferring to eat out at local restaurants where the owners knew her, or in her apartment, when her daughter-in-law sent the chauffeur around with one of her favorite dishes. Irina kept only basic necessities in her kitchen: fresh fruit, oatmeal, whole-grain bread, honey.
Alma and Seth often invited Irina to their ritual Sunday lunch at Sea Cliff, where the family paid the matriarch homage. To Seth, who had previously used any pretext not to arrive before dessert—for even he was unable to consider not putting in an appearance at all—Irina’s presence made the occasion infinitely more appealing. He was still stubbornly pursuing her, but since he was meeting with little success he also went out with previous girlfriends willing to put up with his fickleness. He was bored with them and did not succeed in making Irina jealous. As his grandmother often said and the family often repeated, why waste ammunition on vultures? It was yet another enigmatic saying often used by the Belascos. To Alma, these family reunions began with a pleasant sense of anticipation at seeing her loved ones, particularly her granddaughter, Pauline (she saw Seth frequently enough), but often ended up being a bore, since every topic of conversation became a pretext for getting angry, not from any lack of affection, but out of the bad habit of arguing over trivialities. Seth always looked for ways to challenge or scandalize his parents; Pauline brought to the table yet another cause she had embraced, which she explained in great detail, from genital mutilation to animal slaughterhouses; Doris took great pains to offer her mos
t exquisite culinary experiments, which were veritable banquets, yet regularly ended up weeping in her room because nobody appreciated them; good old Larry meanwhile performed a constant balancing act to avoid quarrels. The grandmother took advantage of Irina to dissipate tension, because the Belascos always behaved in a civilized fashion in front of strangers, even if it was only a humble employee from Lark House. To Irina, the Sea Cliff mansion seemed an extravagant luxury, with its six bedrooms, two living rooms, book-lined library, twin marble staircase, and garden fit for a palace. She was oblivious to the slow deterioration that almost a century’s existence had wrought, which Doris’s determined vigilance barely managed to keep at bay: the rust on the ornamental railings, the uneven floors and walls as a result of two earthquakes, the cracks in the floor tiles, and the termites’ trails in the woodwork. The house stood in a privileged position on top of a promontory between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. At first light, the thick mist rolling in from the sea like an avalanche of cotton wool often obscured the Golden Gate Bridge altogether, but in the course of the morning it would lift and the elegant red iron structure would gradually emerge against a sky dotted with gulls, so close to the Belascos’ garden that it seemed possible to reach out and touch it.