Saturdays and Sundays there were very painful but necessary family sessions. My dad asked logical questions: What is crack and how is it used? How much does heroin cost? What is the effect of magic mushrooms? What’s the success rate of Alcoholics Anonymous? The answers he got were not very reassuring. Some people’s relatives revealed their disappointment and distrust. They’d supported addicts for years, unable to understand their determination to destroy themselves and the good life they once had. In my case there was only affection in the eyes of my dad and my Nini, not a single word of reproach or doubt. “You’re not like them, Maya; you peered over the edge of the abyss, but you didn’t fall all the way down,” my Nini said to me on one occasion. Olympia and Mike had warned me against exactly that, against the temptation to believe I was better than others.
Taking turns, each family went into the center of the circle to share their experiences with the rest of us. The counselors managed this round of confessions skillfully, somehow creating a secure atmosphere where we all felt equal. No one felt as if they’d committed original offenses. No one remained indifferent at those sessions; one by one they broke down. Sometimes someone would stay on the floor, sobbing, and it wasn’t always the addict. Abusive parents, violent husbands, hateful mothers, a legacy of incest or alcoholism, we saw it all there.
When it was my family’s turn, Mike O’Kelly came with us into the center in his wheelchair and asked for another chair, which remained empty, to be placed in the circle. I had told my Nini a lot of what had happened since I ran away from the academy, but I’d omitted what I felt would have killed her. However, when Mike came to visit me on his own, I told him everything; nothing could scandalize him.
My dad talked about his job as a pilot, about how he’d kept his distance from me, about his superficiality and about how he’d selfishly left me with my grandparents, without taking on the duties of fatherhood, until I had the bicycle accident when I was sixteen; only then did he start paying any attention to me. He wasn’t angry and he hadn’t lost faith in me, he said, and he’d do whatever was in his power to help me. My Nini described the healthy and cheerful little girl I used to be, my dreams, my epic poems and soccer games, and repeated how much she loved me.
At that moment my Popo walked in, just as he’d been before his illness: big, smelling of good tobacco, with his gold-rimmed glasses and his Borsalino hat. He sat down in the chair that had been left for him and opened his arms. He’d never showed up before with such aplomb, unusual in a ghost. I sat on his lap and cried and cried, begged for forgiveness, and accepted the absolute truth that no one could save me but me, that I am the only person responsible for my life. “Give me your hand, Popo,” I asked him, and since then he hasn’t let me go. What did the rest of them see? They saw me hugging an empty chair, but Mike was expecting my Popo—that’s why he asked for the chair—and my Nini naturally accepted his invisible presence.
I don’t remember how that session ended. I only remember my visceral exhaustion, my Nini accompanying me to my room and, with Loretta, putting me to bed. For the first time in my life I slept fourteen hours straight. I slept for my innumerable nights of insomnia, for the accumulated indignity and tenacious fear. It was a healing sleep such as I’ve never had since. Insomnia was patiently waiting for me behind the door. From that moment on I devoted myself entirely to the program and dared to explore the dark caverns of the past one by one. I went blindly into those caverns to fight with dragons, and when I thought I’d defeated them, another cavern would open and then another, a never-ending labyrinth. I needed to confront the questions of my soul, which was not absent, as I’d believed in Las Vegas, but numbed, shrunken, and frightened. I never felt safe in those black caves, but I lost my fear of solitude, and that’s why now, in my new solitary life in Chiloé, I’m content. What a stupid thing I just wrote on this page! I’m not alone in Chiloé. The truth is, I’ve never had more companionship than on this island, in this little house, with this neurotic gentleman, Manuel Arias.
While I was completing the rehab program, my Nini renewed my passport, got in touch with Manuel, and prepared my trip to Chile. If she could have afforded it, she would have come with me to personally leave me in the hands of her friend in Chiloé. Two days before my treatment finished, I put my things in my backpack, and as soon as it got dark I left the clinic, without saying good-bye to anyone. My Nini was waiting for me two blocks away in her ailing Volkswagen, just as we’d arranged. “From this moment on, you’ve vanished, Maya,” she said with a mischievous wink of complicity. She gave me another laminated photo of my Popo, the same as the one I’d lost, and drove me to the San Francisco airport.
I am driving Manuel crazy: Do you think men fall in love as hopelessly as women do? Would Daniel be capable of coming to bury himself away in Chiloé for me? Do you think I’m fat, Manuel? Are you sure? Tell me the truth! Manuel says he can’t breathe in this house, that the air is saturated with tears and feminine sighs, burning passions and ridiculous plans. Even the animals are acting strange. Literati-Cat, who used to be very clean, has now started throwing up on the computer keyboard, and Dumb-Cat, who used to be so aloof, now competes with Fahkeen for my affections and wakes up in my bed with all four paws in the air so I’ll rub his tummy.
We’ve had several conversations about love—too many, according to Manuel. “There is nothing more profound than love,” I tell him, among other trivialities, and he, who has an academic’s memory, recites a D. H. Lawrence poem about how there are deeper things than love, the solitude of each of us, and deeper still the unknown fire, heavy and alone, and the ponderous fire of naked life, or something as depressing as that for me, who has just discovered the powerful fire of naked Daniel. Apart from quoting dead poets, Manuel keeps quiet. Our talks are more like monologues, with me pouring my heart out about Daniel. I don’t name Blanca Schnake, because she’s forbidden me to, but her presence also floats in the atmosphere. Manuel thinks he’s too old to fall in love and has nothing to offer a woman, but I have a feeling his problem is cowardice; he’s afraid of sharing, depending, suffering, afraid of Blanca’s cancer coming back and her dying before him, or the opposite, leaving her widowed or getting senile when she’s still youthful, which is quite likely, since he’s much older than her. If it weren’t for that macabre little bubble in his brain, Manuel would surely live hale and hearty into his nineties. What would love be like for old people? I mean the physical part. Would they do . . . that? When I turned twelve and started spying on my grandparents, they put a lock on their bedroom door. I asked my Nini what they did in there when they locked the door, and she told me they were saying the rosary.
Sometimes I give Manuel advice. I can’t help it, and he receives and disarms it with irony, but I know he listens to me and learns. He’s gradually changing his monastic habits, getting less obsessed with that mania he has for order and more receptive to me. He doesn’t freeze when I touch him anymore or run away when I start bouncing around and dancing to the sounds in my headphones. I have to exercise, or I’ll end up looking like one of Rubens’s Sabines, these naked fat chicks I saw in the Pinacotheca in Munich. The bubble in his brain is no longer a secret, because he can’t hide his migraines or his double vision, when he can’t see the letters properly on a page or on the screen. When Daniel found out about the aneurysm, he suggested the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, where the top neurosurgeons in the United States practice, and Blanca said her father would pay for the operation, but Manuel didn’t want to hear about it; he already owes Don Lionel too much, he claims. “What difference does it make, man, owing one favor or two? It doesn’t matter,” Blanca countered. I regretted having burned that pile of money in the Mojave Desert; fake or not, it would have come in handy.
I’ve gone back to writing in my notebook, which I’d abandoned for a while in my eagerness to send e-mail messages to Daniel. I’m planning to give it to him when we get back together, so he can get to know me and my family better. I can’t tell him all I want t
o by e-mail, where only the day’s news fits, and one or two words of love here and there. Manuel advises me to censor my passionate outbursts, because everyone regrets the love letters they’ve written. There’s nothing cornier or more ridiculous, he claims, and in my case they’re not even echoed by the guy receiving them. Daniel’s replies are succinct and infrequent. He must be very busy with his work at the clinic, or maybe he’s adhering very strictly to the security measures imposed by my grandmother.
I keep busy so I won’t spontaneously combust, thinking about Daniel. There have been cases like that, people who for no apparent reason burst into flames. My body is a ripe peach, ready to be savored or to fall from the branch and smash into pulp on the ground among the ants. Most likely the second will happen, because Daniel’s showing no signs of coming to savor me. This cloistered life puts me in a terrible mood. I explode at the slightest problem, but I admit that I’m sleeping well for the first time in memory, and my dreams are interesting, although not all erotic, as I wish they were. Since the unexpected death of Michael Jackson, I’ve dreamed of Freddy several times. Jackson was his idol, and my poor friend must be in mourning. What will have become of him? Freddy risked his life to save mine, and I never got the chance to thank him.
Freddy resembles Daniel in certain ways, with the same coloring, big eyes with long lashes, and curly hair. If Daniel had a son, he might look like Freddy, but if I were the mother of that child, we’d run the risk of him coming out Danish. Marta Otter’s genes are very strong. I don’t look like I have even a drop of Latina blood. In the United States Daniel is considered black, though he’s light-skinned and could be mistaken for Greek or Middle Eastern. “Young black men in America are an endangered species,” Daniel told me when we talked about it. “So many end up in prison or murdered before the age of thirty.” He was raised among whites in a liberal West Coast city, he moves in privileged circles, where his color has not limited him in any way, but his situation would be different in other places. Life is easier for whites. My grandfather knew that too.
My Popo was the very image of a strong and powerful man: six foot three, 265 pounds, his gray hair, gold-rimmed glasses, and the inevitable hat that my dad used to bring him back from Italy. By his side I felt safe from any danger. Nobody would dare to touch that formidable man. That’s what I believed until the incident with the cyclist, when I was about seven.
The University of Buffalo had invited my grandpa to give a series of lectures. We were staying in a hotel on Delaware Avenue, one of those millionaire’s mansions from the century before last that are now public or commercial buildings. It was cold, and an icy wind was blowing, but he got the idea in his head that we had to go for a walk in a nearby park. My Nini and I were a couple of steps ahead, jumping over puddles, and didn’t see what happened, only heard the shout and the commotion that immediately ensued. Behind us was a young guy on a bicycle who apparently skidded on a frozen puddle, crashed into my grandpa, and fell on the ground. My Popo staggered at the blow, lost his hat, and dropped the umbrella that he was carrying under his arm, but he didn’t fall down. I ran after his hat, and he bent down to pick up the umbrella, then reached out his hand to help the guy up off the ground.
In an instant the scene turned violent. The shocked cyclist started to shout; a car stopped, then another, and a few minutes later a police car arrived. I don’t know how they concluded that my grandfather had caused the accident and threatened the cyclist with his umbrella. Without any questions, the police threw him violently against the patrol car, ordered him to put his hands up, kicked his legs apart, frisked him, and handcuffed him with his arms behind his back. My Nini leaped in like a lioness, confronting the uniformed officers with a stream of explanations in Spanish, the only language she remembers in moments of crisis, and when they tried to get rid of her, she yanked the biggest one by his clothes so hard she managed to lift him an inch or two off the ground, quite an impressive feat for someone who weighs less than 110 pounds.
We ended up at the station, but we weren’t in Berkeley, and there was no Sergeant Walczak offering cappuccinos. My grandfather, with a bloody nose and a cut on his eyebrow, tried to explain what had happened in a humble tone of voice we’d never heard and asked for a telephone to call the university. The only answer he got was a threat to lock him in a cell if he didn’t shut up. My Nini, also in handcuffs, out of fear she’d attack someone again, was ordered to sit on a bench while they filled out a form. None of them noticed me, and I huddled up, shivering, beside my grandma. “You have to do something, Maya,” she whispered in my ear. In her eyes I understood what she was asking me to do. I filled my lungs with air, released a guttural cry that echoed around the room, and fell to the ground with my back arched, writhing with convulsions, foaming at the mouth, my eyes rolled up into my head. I’d faked epileptic fits so many times during my pampered-little-girl attempts to get out of going to school that I could fool a neurosurgeon, let alone a few Buffalo cops. They let us use the telephone. They took my Nini and me to the hospital by ambulance, where I arrived completely recovered from the attack, to the surprise of the policewoman who was guarding us, while the university sent a lawyer to get their astronomer out of the cell that he was sharing with drunks and petty thieves.
That night we were all reunited at the hotel, exhausted. We just had a bowl of soup for dinner, and all three of us climbed into the same bed. My Popo had bruises from being hit by the bike, and his wrists had been hurt by the handcuffs. In the darkness, tucked between their bodies as if in a cocoon, I asked what had happened. “Nothing serious, Maya, go to sleep,” my Popo answered. They lay still for a while in silence, pretending to be asleep, until finally my Nini spoke. “What happened, Maya, is that your grandpa is black.” And there was so much anger in her voice that I didn’t ask anything more.
That was my first lesson on racial differences, which I’d never noticed before and which, according to Daniel Goodrich, should always be kept in mind.
Manuel and I are rewriting his book. I say we’re both doing it because he supplies the ideas and I do the writing. Even in Spanish I write better than he does. The idea arose when he was telling Daniel the Chiloé myths and, as any good psychiatrist would, Daniel wanted explanations for the inexplicable. He said that gods represent different aspects of the psyche, and myths are generally stories about creation and nature or about fundamental human dramas, and normally connected to reality, but the ones from here give the impression of being held together with chewing gum. They lack coherence. Manuel got to thinking, and two days later announced that he’d written a lot about the myths of Chiloé, and his new book wouldn’t contribute anything new unless he could offer an interpretation of the mythology. He talked to his editors, and they gave him four months to submit a new manuscript. We have to hurry. Daniel is very interested and contributes by long distance, giving me another excuse to be in permanent contact with our Seattle consultant.
The winter climate limits activity on the island, but there’s always work: looking after the children and animals, collecting shellfish at low tide, mending nets, making provisional repairs to houses thrashed by the storms, knitting and counting clouds until eight, when the women all get together to watch the soap opera and the men to drink and play truco. It’s been raining all week, the tenacious tears of the southern sky, and the water drips in on us between the roof tiles that got displaced by Tuesday’s storm. We put cans under the leaks and carry rags around with us to dry the floor. When it clears up, I’m going up on the roof; Manuel’s too old to be doing acrobatics; and we’ve given up hope of seeing the maestro chasquilla here before spring. The tapping of the water tends to worry our three bats, hanging head-down from the highest beams, out of reach of Dumb-Cat’s futile swipes. I detest those winged, blind mice because they might suck my blood at night, although Manuel assures me they’re not related to Transylvanian vampires.
We depend more than ever on firewood and the black cast-iron stove, where the kettle is always
ready to make maté or tea; there is an ever-present scent of smoke, a fiery fragrance on clothes and skin. Living with Manuel is a delicate dance: I wash the dishes, he brings in the firewood, and we share the cooking. For a time we shared the cleaning too, because Eduvigis stopped coming to our house, though she still sent Juanito to pick up our laundry and bring it back washed, but now she’s come back to work.
After Azucena’s abortion, Eduvigis kept very quiet, going into town only when absolutely necessary and not talking to anybody. She knew there was gossip about her family, circulating behind her back; lots of people blame her for letting Carmelo Corrales rape their daughters, but there are also those who blame the daughters “for tempting their father, who was a drunk and didn’t know what he was doing,” as I heard someone say at the Tavern of the Dead. Blanca explained that Eduvigis’s meekness about the man’s abuse is common in these cases, and it’s unfair to accuse her of complicity because she was a victim too, like the rest of the family. She was afraid of her husband and could never confront him. “It’s easy to judge others if you’ve never suffered an experience like that,” Blanca concluded. She got me thinking, because I was one of the first to judge Eduvigis harshly. Ashamed of myself, I went over to her house for a visit. I found her leaning over her sink, washing our sheets with a scrubbing brush and harsh blue soap. She dried her hands on her apron and invited me in for un tecito, a little cup of tea, without looking at me. We sat down in front of the stove to wait for the kettle to boil, then drank our tea in silence. The conciliatory intention of my visit was obvious, but it would have been uncomfortable if I’d asked her forgiveness and a lack of respect to mention Carmelo Corrales. Both of us knew why I was there.
“How are you, Doña Eduvigis?” I finally asked, when we’d finished our second cup of tea, all from a single tea bag.