“What does your accountant have against me?” I asked Willie one day.
“Nothing in particular. All the women in my life have been expensive, and since he pays my bills, he would like for me to live in strict celibacy,” he informed me.
“Tell him that I have supported myself since I was seventeen.”
I suppose that he did, because Tong began to look at me with something like respect. One Saturday he found me in the office scrubbing the bathrooms and vacuuming; at that point his respect was transformed into open admiration.
“You marry this one. She clean,” he counseled Willie in his rather limited English. He was the first to congratulate us when we announced we were going to be married.
This long love affair with Willie has been a gift of the mature years of my life. When I divorced your father, Paula, I prepared myself to go on alone, because I thought it would be next to impossible to find a new life companion. I’m bossy, independent, tribal, and I have unusual work habits that cause me to spend half my available time alone, not speaking, in hiding. Few men can cope with all that. But I don’t want to commit the sin of false modesty, I also have a few virtues. Do you remember any, daughter? Let’s see, let me think. . . . Well, for example, I’m low-maintenance, and I’m healthy and affectionate. You always said that I’m entertaining and that no one would ever get bored with me, but that was then. After I lost you, I also lost my desire to be the life of the party. I’ve become introverted; you wouldn’t recognize me. The miracle was finding—where and when I least expected—the one man who could put up with me. Synchronicity. Luck. Destiny, my grandmother would have said. Willie maintains that we have loved each other in previous lives and will continue to do so in future ones, but you know how the idea of karma and reincarnation frightens me. I’d rather limit this amorous experiment to a single life, for that’s enough. Willie still seems such a stranger to me! In the morning, when he’s shaving and I see him in the mirror, I often ask myself who the devil that large, too white, North American man is, and what are we doing in the same bathroom. When we met we had very little in common; we came from very different backgrounds and we had to invent a language—Spanglish—in order to understand each other. Past, culture, and customs separated us, as well as the inevitable problems of children in a family artificially glued together, but by elbowing our way forward, we succeeded in opening the space that is indispensable for love. It’s true that to make my life in the United States with Willie, I left behind nearly everything I had, and adjusted however I could to the disarray of his existence—but he had to make his own concessions and changes in order for us to be together. From the beginning, he adopted my family and respected my work; he has accompanied me in every way he could; he has backed me up and protected me even from myself; he never criticizes me; he gently laughs at my manias; he doesn’t let me run over him; he doesn’t compete with me, and even in the fights we’ve had he acts with honor. Willie defends his territory, but without aggression; he says he had traced a small chalk circle around him, and within it he is safe from me and my tribe: be careful not to invade it. A great pool of sweetness lies just beneath the surface of his tough appearance; he is as sentimental as a big dog. Without him, I wouldn’t be able to write as much and as calmly as I do because he takes care of all the things that frighten me, from my contracts and our social life to the functioning of all our mysterious household machines. Even though I am still surprised to find him by my side, I have become so used to his massive presence that now I couldn’t live without him. Willie fills the house, fills my life.
The Empty Well
IN THE SUMMER OF 1996, an unhinged racist in Oklahoma City used a truck loaded with a thousand kilos of explosives to blow up a federal building. Five hundred people were wounded and one hundred and sixty-eight were killed, several children among them. One woman was trapped under a massive block of cement and they had to amputate her leg without anesthesia to save her. Celia sobbed over that for three days; she said that it would have been better had the poor woman died, since she not only lost her leg in the tragedy, she also lost her mother and her two small children. Celia’s reaction was similar to those she’d had from other tragedies she’d read about, she had few defenses against the outside world; despite our long friendship I couldn’t detect what was bothering her. I thought I knew Celia better than she knew herself, but there was a part of my daughter-in-law’s soul that escaped me, as I realized a few weeks later.
Willie and I decided that it was time to take a vacation. We were exhausted and I could not shake off my grief, although it had been nearly four years since you died and three since Jennifer had disappeared. I didn’t know then that the sadness is never entirely gone; it lives on forever just below the skin. Without it I wouldn’t be who I am, or be able to recognize myself in the mirror. Ever since I finished Paula, I hadn’t written a word of fiction. For years I’d been playing with the idea of a novel about the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush in California, but I wasn’t enthusiastic enough to tackle such a long and demanding project. I was as active as always and few people suspected my state of mind, but deep in my soul I was moaning. I developed a taste for solitude; I wanted only to be with my family; people bothered me, my friends were reduced to three or four. I was spent. I didn’t want to keep making tours to promote my books, explaining what I’d already said in those pages. I needed silence, but it became more and more difficult to find. Journalists came from all over and invaded us with their cameras and lights. On one occasion, some Japanese tourists came to observe our house as if it were a monument, just as a crew from Europe had arrived hoping to photograph me inside an enormous cage with a majestic white cockatoo. That very large bird did not look at all friendly, and it had claws like a condor. It came with a trainer, and he should have controlled it, but it shit on all the furniture and when I went into the cage nearly poked out my eye. However, overall I really couldn’t complain. I had an affectionate public and my books were being read everywhere. My sadness manifested itself in sleepless nights, dark clothing, the wish to live in a hermit’s cave, and an absence of inspiration. I summoned the muses in vain. Even the most bedraggled muse had abandoned me.
For someone who lives to write and lives from what she does write, an internal drought is terrifying. One day I was in Book Passage, killing time with several cups of tea, when Anne Lamott came in; she is a North American writer much beloved for stories filled with humor and spirituality. I told her that I was blocked and she told me that the business of the “writer’s block” is nonsense, and what happens is that sometimes the well has gone dry and has to be refilled.
The idea that my well of stories and my wish to tell them was drying up threw me into a panic, because no one was going to give me a job doing anything else, and I had to help support my family.
Nico had a job as a computer technician in a nearby city and was commuting more than two hours a day and Celia was doing the work of three people, but they couldn’t meet costs for their children, we lived in one of the most expensive areas of the United States. Then I remembered that I was trained as a journalist; if I’m given a subject and time to research it, I can write about almost anything—except politics and sports. I assigned myself a “feature” as different as possible from my last book, one that had nothing to do with pain and loss, the pleasureful sins of life: gluttony and lust. As it would not be fiction, the caprices of the muse had little bearing; all I had to do was my research on food, eroticism, and the bridge that connected them: aphrodisiacs. Calmed by that plan, I accepted Willie and Tabra’s suggestion that we go to India, although I had no desire to travel, and even less to India, the farthest possible point from our home before starting back around the other side of the planet. I didn’t think I would be able to bear the legendary poverty of India, the devastated villages, starving children, and nine-year-old girls sold into early marriages, forced labor, or prostitution, but Willie and Tabra promised me that India was much more than that, and they were
determined to take me if they had to tie me up to do it. Besides, Paula, I had promised you that one day I would visit that country because you had come back from a trip there fascinated, and you convinced me that India is the richest source of inspiration for a writer. Alfredo López Lagarto-Emplumado did not come with us, though he was again visible on Tabra’s horizon; he was planning to spend a month communing with nature, accompanied by a pair of Comanches, tribal brothers. Tabra had to buy him some sacred drums that apparently were indispensable for their rituals.
Willie bought a khaki explorer’s outfit with thirty-seven pockets, a backpack, an Aussie hat, and a new lens for his cameras, about the size and weight of a small cannon. Tabra and I packed our usual Gypsy skirts, ideal because wrinkles and stains wouldn’t show. The three of us set off on a journey that ended a century later when we landed in New Delhi and sank into the city’s sticky heat and its cacophony of voices, traffic, and blasting radios. We were surrounded by a million hands, but fortunately Willie’s head emerged like a periscope above the mass of humanity, and in the distance saw a sign with his name held by a tall man with a turban and authoritative mustache. It was Sirinder, the guide we had hired through an agency in San Francisco. He opened a way with his cane, chose some bearers to carry the luggage, and took us to his ancient automobile.
We stayed in New Delhi several days. Willie was agonizing with an intestinal infection and Tabra and I were roaming around buying bagatelles. “I think your husband is pretty sick,” she told me the second day, but I wanted to go to the quarter where the craftsmen who carved stones for her jewelry had their shops. The third day Tabra pointed out to me that Willie was so weak that he wasn’t even talking, but as we hadn’t as yet visited the street of the tailors, where I wanted to buy a sari, I didn’t take immediate action. I conjectured that what Willie needed was time; there are two kinds of illness: the ones that simply go away and the deadly ones. That night Tabra suggested that if Willie died, it might ruin our trip. Faced with the possibility of having to cremate him on the banks of the Ganges, I called the hotel desk and they soon sent up a doctor: short, oily hair, wearing a shiny brick-colored suit. When he saw my husband looking like a corpse, he did not seem in the least alarmed. He pulled from his battered doctor’s bag a glass syringe like the one my grandfather used in 1945, and prepared to inject the patient with a viscous liquid; the needle was resting in a cotton ball and to every appearance was as ancient as the syringe. Tabra wanted to intervene, but I assured her that there was no need to make a fuss over a possible case of hepatitis when the future of the patient was uncertain anyway. The doctor worked the miracle of restoring Willie to good health in twenty hours, and so we were able to continue our journey.
India was one of those experiences that mark you for life, memorable for many reasons, though as this is not a travelogue it isn’t the place to recount them. I will relate only two relevant episodes. The first gave me the idea of a way to honor your memory, daughter, and the second changed our family forever.
Who Wants a Girl?
SIRINDER, OUR DRIVER, had the expertise and the daring needed to move through the city traffic, dodging cars, buses, burros, bicycles, and more than one starving cow. No one hurried—life is long—except the motorcycles zigzagging at the speed of torpedoes and with five riding aboard. Sirinder showed signs of being a man of few words, and Tabra and I learned not to ask him questions because the only one he answered was Willie. The rural roads were narrow and curving, and he drove them at breakneck speed. When two vehicles met nose to nose, the men at the wheel looked each other in the eye and determined in a fraction of a second which was the alpha male, then the other man ceded right-of-way. The accidents we saw always involved two trucks of similar size that had smashed head-on because it wasn’t clear in time which was the alpha driver. We didn’t have safety belts, we had karma; no one dies before his time. We did not drive with lights at night for the same reason. Sirinder’s intuition warned him that a vehicle might be coming toward us, at which time he flashed on his lights and blinded the driver.
As we drove out from the city, the landscape became sere and golden, then dusty and reddish. The villages were farther and farther apart, and the plains stretched forever, but there was always something to attract our attention. Willie carried his camera bag, tripod, and cannon-sized lens everywhere, a rather complex apparatus to set up. It is said that the only thing a good photographer remembers is the photo he didn’t take. Willie will remember a thousand, like an elephant painted with yellow stripes and dressed as a trapeze artist, all by itself in that open countryside. On the other hand, he was able to immortalize a group of workers who were moving a mountain from one side of the road to the other. The men, wearing nothing but loin cloths, were piling rocks into the baskets the women carried across the road on their heads. The women were graceful, slim, dressed in threadbare saris of brilliant colors—magenta, lime, emerald—and they moved like reeds in the wind, carrying their burden of rocks. They were classified as “helpers,” and they earned half of what the men did. When it was time to eat, the men squatted in a circle, holding their tin plates, and the women waited a respectful distance away. Later they ate anything the men left.
After still more hours of driving we were tired; the sun was beginning to go down and brushstrokes the color of fire streaked the sky. In the distance, in the dry fields, stood a solitary tree, perhaps an acacia, and beneath its branches we could see some dark figures that looked like huge birds but as we went closer turned out to be a group of women and children. What were they doing there? There wasn’t any village or well nearby. Willie asked Sirinder to stop so we could stretch our legs. Tabra and I walked toward the women, who started to back away, but their curiosity overcame their shyness and soon we were together beneath the acacia, surrounded by naked children. The women were wearing dusty, frayed saris. They were young, with long black hair, dry skin, and sunken eyes made up with kohl. In India, as in many parts of the world, the concept of personal space we defend so fiercely in the West doesn’t exist. Lacking a common language, they greeted us with gestures, and then they examined us with bold fingers, touching our clothing, our faces, Tabra’s red hair, something they may not have seen before, and our silver jewelry. We took off our bracelets and offered them to the women, who put them on with the delight of teenagers. There were enough for everyone, two or three each.
One of the women, who could have been about your age, Paula, took my face in her hands and kissed me lightly on the forehead. I felt her parted lips, her warm breath. It was such an unexpected gesture, so intimate, that I couldn’t hold back the tears, the first I had shed in a long time. The other women patted me in silence, disoriented by my reaction.
From the road, a toot of the horn from Sirinder told us that it was time to leave. We bade the women good-bye and started back to the car, but they followed us. One touched my shoulder. I turned, and she held out a package. I thought she meant to give me something in exchange for the bracelets, and tried to explain with signs that it wasn’t necessary, but she forced me to take it. It weighed very little, I thought it was a bundle of rags, but when I turned back the folds I saw that it held a newborn baby, tiny and dark. Its eyes were closed and it smelled like no other child I have ever held in my arms, a pungent odor of ashes, dust, and excrement. I kissed its face, murmured a blessing, and tried to return it to its mother, but instead of taking it, she turned and ran back to the others, while I stood there, rocking the baby in my arms, not understanding what was happening. A minute later Sirinder came running and shouting to put it down, I couldn’t take it, it was dirty, and he snatched it from my arms and started toward the women to give it back, but they ran away, terrified by the man’s wrath. And then he bent down and laid the infant on the dry earth beneath the tree.
By that time, Willie had come too, and he hustled me back to the car, nearly lifting me off the ground, followed by Tabra. Sirinder started the engine and we drove off, as I buried my head in my husband’s
chest.
“Why did that woman try to give us her baby?” Willie murmured.
“It was a girl. No one wants a girl,” Sirinder explained.
There are stories that have the power to heal. What happened that evening beneath the acacia loosened the knot that had been choking me, cleaned away the cobwebs of self-pity, and forced me to come back to the world and transform the loss of my daughter into action. I could not save that baby girl, or her desperate mother, or the “helpers” who were moving a mountain rock by rock, or millions of women like them and like the unforgettable woman I saw crying on Fifth Avenue that winter in New York, but I promised at that moment that I would at least attempt to ease their lot in life, as you would have done. For you, no act of compassion was impossible. “You have to earn a lot of money with your books, Mamá, so I can start a shelter for the poor and you can pay the bills,” you told me one day, entirely serious. The money I had made, and was still making, from the publication of Paula was sitting in a bank waiting for me to decide how to use it. At that moment, I knew. I calculated that if the capital would grow with every book I wrote in the future, something good would come of it: only a drop of water in the desert of human need, but at least I wouldn’t feel helpless. “I am going to establish a foundation to help women and children,” I told Willie and Tabra that night, never imagining that with the years that seed would become a tree, like the acacia.
The Sum of Our Days Page 13
