The Sum of Our Days

by Isabel Allende

  MY GRANDCHILDREN GOT USED to the routine of changing homes every week, and of seeing their mother as a couple with Aunt Sally. It was not an unheard-of arrangement in California, where domestic relationships are very flexible. Celia and Nico went to the children’s school to explain what had happened, and the teachers told them not to worry; by the time the students reached the fourth grade, 80 percent of their classmates would have stepmothers or stepfathers, and often there would be three of the same sex; they would have adopted brothers and sisters of other races, or they would be living with grandparents. The storybook family no longer existed.

  Sally had seen the children being born and she loved them so much that years later, when I asked if she didn’t want to have children of her own, she answered, “Why? I already have three.” She assumed the role of mother with open heart, something I had never been able to do with my stepchildren, and for that alone I have always respected her. Nonetheless, I was once wicked enough to accuse her of having seduced half of my family. How could I have said something so stupid? She wasn’t the siren enticing victims to crash on the rocks; everyone involved was responsible for his or her own acts and feelings. Besides, I had no moral authority to judge anyone; during my lifetime I’d done several insane things for love, and who knows whether I may do more before I die. Love is a lightning bolt that strikes suddenly, changing us. That is what happened to me with Willie, so why wouldn’t I understand the love between Celia and Sally.

  I received a letter from Celia’s mother in which she accused me of having perverted her daughter with my satanic ideas, and “having stained her beautiful family, in which an error was always called an error, and a sin, a sin,” very different from what I disseminated in my books and my conduct. I suppose that she couldn’t imagine that Celia could be gay and that her daughter’s problem was that she didn’t know it; she married and had three children before she could admit it. What motive could I possibly have to induce my daughter-in-law to wound my family? It seemed extraordinary to me that someone would attribute such power to me.

  “What luck! Now we never have to speak to that woman again,” were Willie’s first words when he read the letter.

  “Seen from outside, Willie, we may give the impression of being very decadent.”

  “You can’t know what happens in other families behind their closed doors. The difference with ours is that everything is out in broad daylight.”

  I was feeling calmer in regard to my grandchildren. I was counting on the dedication of their parents; they had more or less the same rules in both houses, and the school offered stability. The children were not going to end up traumatized but, rather, overly indulged. They had been given such honest explanations that sometimes they chose not to ask because the answer might go further than they wanted to hear. From the beginning, I established the practice of seeing them almost every day when they were with Nico, and a couple of times a week at Celia and Sally’s house. Nico was firm and consistent; his rules were clear and at the same time he lavished tenderness and patience on his children. Many Sundays I surprised him early in the morning asleep with all of them in his bed, and nothing moved me so much as to see him come in the door with the two girls in his arms and Alejandro clinging to his legs. In Celia’s house there was a relaxed atmosphere, clutter, music, and two skittish cats that shed on all the furniture. They often improvised a tent with quilts in the living room, where the children would camp the whole week. I think Sally was the one who kept the seams of that family from ripping apart; without her I think Celia would have gone down in that period of such high stress. Sally had a sure hand with the children; she sensed problems before they happened, and kept a close watch over them without smothering them.

  I reserved “special days” with each child, separately; on that day they got to choose the activity. That is why I had to sit through the animated version of Tarzan thirteen times, and one called Mulan seventeen. I could recite the dialogue backward. They always wanted the same thing on their special day: pizza, ice cream, and a movie, except once when Alejandro showed interest in seeing the men dressed as nuns who’d been on the television. A group of homosexuals, theater people, made themselves up as nuns, painted their faces, and paraded around collecting money for charity. The folly of this enterprise was that they did it during Easter week. It was on the news because the Catholic Church had ordered its parishioners not to visit San Francisco, hoping to cripple tourism in a city that, like Sodom and Gomorrah, lived in mortal sin. I took Alejandro to see Tarzan one more time.

  NICO HAD BECOME VERY QUIET, and there was a new hardness in his eyes. Rage had closed him up like an oyster; he didn’t share his feelings with anyone. He wasn’t the only one who suffered, each of us had some part of it, but he and Jason stood alone. I clung to the consolation that no one had acted maliciously, it was simply one of those storms in which the ship’s wheel spins out of control. What had happened between Celia and him behind closed doors? What role did Sally play? It was futile to try to sound him out; he always answered with a kiss on my forehead and some unconnected comment to distract me, but I have not lost the hope that I will find out in my final hour, when he will not dare refuse the wish of his dying mother. Nico’s life was reduced to work and looking after his children. He had never been very sociable; Celia was the one responsible for their friends, and he had made no effort to keep in touch with them. He had isolated himself.

  While all this was going on, a psychiatrist who had the looks of a movie actor and aspirations of a novelist came to wash our windows; he earned more doing that than he did listening to the tiring platitudes of his patients. In truth, he didn’t do the actual work, that was done by two or three splendid Dutch girls. I have no idea where he found them; they were always different, but all were bronzed by California sun, with platinum hair and short shorts. These beauties climbed ladders with rags and pails while he sat in the kitchen and told me the plot of his next novel. It made me angry, not just for the dumb blondes who did the heavy work, which he was paid for, but that this man, not even the shadow of Nico, had all the women he wanted. I asked him how he did it, and he said, “I just lend an ear; women want to be heard.” I decided to pass that information along to Nico. Even with his arrogance, the psychiatrist was easier to take than the old hippie who had preceded him in the window-cleaning department. Before he would accept a cup of tea, he painstakingly checked out the teapot to be sure that it was free of lead; he talked in whispers, and once spent fifteen minutes trying to get an insect off the window without hurting it. He nearly fell off the ladder when I offered him a fly swatter.

  I was keeping close tabs on Nico, and we saw each other nearly every day, but he had become a stranger to me, every day more reserved and distant, although his impeccable courtesy never deserted him. Such delicacy came to irritate me, I would have preferred a little hair pulling. After two or three months, I couldn’t stand it any longer and I decided that we couldn’t keep putting off a really frank conversation. Confrontations are very rare between us, partly because we get along fine without a great show of sentiment and partly because that’s how we are by nature and by habit. Through the twenty-five years of my first marriage, no one ever raised his voice; my children grew up with an absurd British urbanity. Furthermore, we start from good intentions, and if someone is offended, it happens by error or omission, not any spirit of wounding the other. For the first time I blackmailed my son. In a quivering voice I reminded him of my unconditional love, and of all the things I had done for him and his children from the day they were born; I reproached him for withdrawing and keeping everything to himself . . . in sum, a pathetic speech. I have to admit that he has always been a prince with me—with the exception of the time he was twelve and played a nasty trick on me by pretending he had hanged himself. I know you remember the time your brother strung up a harness in a door frame. When I saw him with his tongue protruding and a thick rope around his neck I very nearly departed this world. I will never forgive him for
that! “Why don’t we just get to the point, Mamá?” he asked amiably, after listening quite a while, unable to hide any longer that he was gazing at the ceiling with boredom. At that point, we launched into full attack. We came to a civilized agreement: he would make an effort to be more present in my life, and I would make an effort to be more absent in his. That is, neither bald or with two wigs, as they say in Venezuela. I had no intention of carrying out my part of the deal, as he saw immediately when I suggested that he try to meet women because at his age it’s not good to be celibate: you have to use it or lose it.

  “I heard that at one of your office parties you were talking with a very nice girl. Who is she?” I asked.

  “How did you know that?” he answered with alarm.

  “I have my sources of information. Are you thinking of calling her?”

  “I have all I need with three children, Mamá. I don’t have time for romance,” and he laughed.

  I was sure that Nico could attract any woman he pleased; he had the looks of an Italian Renaissance nobleman. He had a good disposition—he got that from his father—and he wasn’t stupid—he got that from me—but if he didn’t get in gear he was going to end up in a Trappist monastery. I told him about the psychiatrist with his court of Dutch girls who washed our windows, but he didn’t evince the least interest. “Keep your nose out of it,” Willie said, as he always does. Of course I was going to stick my nose in, but first I would have to give Nico a little time to lick his wounds.

  Part Two

  The Onset of Autumn

  ACCORDING TO THE DICTIONARY, autumn is not only the golden season of the year, but also the age when we cease to be young. Willie would soon be sixty and I was striding firmly through the decade of my fifties, but my youth ended at your side, Paula, in the corridor of lost steps in that Madrid hospital. I felt my maturing as a journey inward and the beginning of a new kind of freedom: I could wear comfortable shoes and I no longer had to diet or please half the world, only those who truly mattered to me. I had always had my antennae extended to capture the male energy in the air; after fifty those antennae began to droop and now only Willie attracts me. Well, maybe Antonio Banderas too, but that’s purely hypothetical. Willie and I aged, our bodies and minds changed. His prodigious memory began to stutter a little, he no longer remembers the phone numbers of all his friends and acquaintances. His shoulders and knees grew stiff, his allergies grew worse, and I got used to hearing him coughing every minute like an old locomotive. As for him, he resigned himself to my peculiarities: emotional problems tie my stomach in knots and give me headaches; I can’t watch bloody movies, I don’t enjoy parties, I eat dark chocolate in secret, I fly off the handle, and I spend money as if it grew on trees. In this onset of autumn we finally came to know each other and accept each other unconditionally; our relationship grew richer. Being together is as natural as breathing, and sexual passion turned into calmer and more tender moments. But chastity? No. We’re bound together, we don’t want to be separated, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have an occasional fight. I never lay down my sword. Just in case.

  On one of our trips to New York, an obligatory stop on all the tours for promoting my books, we visited Ernesto and Giulia in their home in New Jersey. When they opened the door, the first thing we saw as we went in was a small altar holding a cross, Ernesto’s aikido weapons, a candle, two roses in a vase, and a photograph of you. The house had the same air of whiteness and simplicity as the spaces you had decorated during your brief life, perhaps because Ernesto shared the same tastes. “She protects us,” Giulia told us, gesturing toward your photo as we passed, in a completely natural voice. I realized that this young woman had been intelligent enough to adopt you as a friend instead of competing with your memory, and in that way she had gained the admiration of Ernesto’s family, who adored you, and of course ours. Right then I began to plan how I could get the couple settled in California, where they could be part of the tribe. But what tribe? There wasn’t much left: Jason in New York, Celia with a new partner, Nico angry and absorbed by the kids, my three grandchildren going and coming with their little clown suitcases, my parents in Chile, and Tabra traveling the unknown corners of the world. Even Sabrina was going to preschool; she had her own life and we seldom saw her. She could now get around with a walker, and had asked for a bigger bicycle for Christmas.

  “We’re running out of tribe, Willie. We have to do something soon or we’ll end up playing bingo in some geriatric retirement community in Florida, like so many American senior citizens who might as well be living on the moon.”

  “And what is the alternative?” my husband asked, undoubtedly thinking of death.

  “Be a burden to the family, but to do that, we have to add to it,” I informed him.

  I was joking, of course, because the worst thing about old age isn’t loneliness but being dependent. I don’t want to inflict my decrepitude on my son and grandchildren, though it wouldn’t be bad to spend my last years near them. I made a list of priorities for my eighties: health, financial resources, family, dog, stories. The first two would allow me to decide how and where to live, the third and fourth would keep me company, and the stories would keep me quiet and entertained and not driving anyone crazy. Willie and I are both terrified of losing our minds, in which case Nico, or even worse, strangers, would have to take charge of us. I think of you, Paula, spending months at the mercy of other people before we could bring you to California. How many times had you been mistreated by a doctor, a nurse, or an employee and I didn’t know about it? How many times had you wished in the silence of that year to die soon, and in peace?

  The years slip by, stealthily, on tiptoes; they whisper behind our back, making fun of us, then suddenly one day they frighten us when we look in the mirror, they drop us to our knees or drive a dagger into our backs. Old age attacks us every day, but it seems to be most evident at the end of every decade. I have a photo of me at forty-nine, at the launch for The Infinite Plan in Spain. It’s the picture of a young woman, hands on her hips, defiant, with a red shawl thrown around her shoulders, her fingernails painted, and wearing Tabra’s long earrings. It was that same moment, with Antonio Banderas at my side and a glass of champagne in my hands, that they came to tell me that you were in the hospital. I ran out of there, never imagining that your life and my youth would be coming to an end. Another of my photos, a year later, shows a mature woman, hair cut short, eyes sad, clothing dark, no adornment. My body had become a burden; I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. However, it was not only sorrow that suddenly aged me; when I look through the family photo albums I can see that when I turned thirty, and later forty, there was also a drastic change in my appearance. It will be that way in the future, except that instead of noticing at the end of a decade, it will be with every leap year, my mother tells me. She is twenty years ahead of me, leading the way, showing me how it will be at every stage of my life. “Take calcium and hormones so your bones don’t get brittle, like mine,” she advises me. She repeatedly tells me to pamper myself, savor the hours because they go very quickly; I should never stop writing, it keeps my mind active, and I should do yoga so I can bend over and put my shoes on by myself. She adds not to work too hard trying to look young because your years show no matter what, however much you try to disguise them, and there’s nothing as ridiculous as an old woman done up like Lolita. There are no magic tricks to prevent deterioration, you can only postpone it a little. “After turning fifty, vanity becomes equivalent to suffering,” says this woman with a reputation for being a beauty. But I fear the ugliness of old age, and I plan to fight it as long as I’m healthy, which is why I had cosmetic surgery, since the snake oil that will rejuvenate cells has yet to be discovered. I wasn’t born with the splendid raw material of a Sophia Loren, I need all the help I can get. The operation is like detaching muscles and skin, cutting away the excess, and sewing the flesh back to the skull, snug as a ballerina’s tights. For weeks I had the sensatio
n that I was wearing a wood mask, but in the end it was worth the pain. A good surgeon can trick time. This is a subject I can’t discuss with my Sisters of Disorder, or with Nico, because they believe that old age has its own beauty, including varicose veins and those warts with hairs. You agree with them. You always preferred old people to children.

  In Bad Hands

  ON THE SUBJECT OF PLASTIC SURGERY, one early Wednesday morning Tabra called, somewhat disturbed, with the news that one of her breasts had disappeared.

  “Is this a joke?”

  “It went flat. One side is smooth, but the other breast is like new. Nothing hurts. Do you think I should see a doctor?”

  I immediately picked her up and took her to the surgeon who’d done the procedure. He assured us it wasn’t his doing, the fault lay with the implant manufacturer; sometimes they are defective, they burst, and the fluid spreads through the body. It wasn’t anything to worry about, he added, it’s a saline solution that over time is absorbed with no danger to your health. “But she can’t go around with one breast!” I intervened. That seemed reasonable to him, and a few days later he replaced the punctured implant, although it didn’t occur to him to give her a discount on the price of his services. Three weeks later, the second breast deflated. Tabra came to our house wearing a poncho.

  “If that bastard doesn’t take responsibility for your tits, I’ll sue him!” Willie bellowed. “I’ll see that he replaces that one for nothing!”

  “I really don’t want to bother him again, Willie. He might get angry. I went to see a different doctor,” she admitted.

  “And does this one know anything about breasts?” I asked.

  “This is a very decent man. He goes to Nicaragua every year to operate on children who have a harelip. Free of charge.”