In fact, he did an excellent job, and Tabra will have the firm breasts of a damsel until she dies at the age of one hundred. The women in her family live very long. Within a few months the first surgeon—he of the failed implants—appeared in the news. He had operated on a patient and left her in his office overnight without a nurse, and the woman had suffered an attack and died. My grandson Alejandro figured the cost of each of his aunt Tabra’s breasts and suggested that she could charge ten dollars for looking and fifteen for touching, and that way recoup her investment in about three years, one hundred and fifty days. Tabra, however, was doing fine with her jewelry and did not have to take such extreme measures.
IN VIEW OF HER BOOMING BUSINESS, Tabra hired a manager full of grandiose ideas. She had created her business from nothing; she had begun selling her pieces in the street, and step by step, with hard work, perseverance, and talent, she had built a model enterprise. I couldn’t understand why she needed a man who had never crafted a bracelet in his life, nor worn one. He couldn’t even boast of black hair. And she knew much more than he did. This business school graduate had a friend in the computer business, and he began by buying a bank of computers that equaled NASA’s; none of Tabra’s Asian refugees learned to use them even though several of them spoke four or five languages and were well educated. He then decided that what was needed was a group of consultants to form a board of directors. Those he selected from among his friends, to whom he paid a handsome salary. In less than a year, Tabra’s business was staggering along like Willie’s office; more money was going out than coming in, and she had to keep an army of employees whose functions no one understood. These expenses coincided with a time in which the economy was taking a dive, minimalist jewelry was in vogue, not Tabra’s large ethnic pieces, and the company was badly administered. That was the moment this financial whiz chose to make a change, leaving Tabra drowning in debts. He was hired as a consultant in other businesses, recommended by the very people he’d hired for Tabra’s board.
For months Tabra struggled with creditors and pressure from the banks, but in the end she had to resign herself and declare bankruptcy. She lost everything. She sold her idyllic property in the woods for much less than she had paid for it. Her belongings were appropriated, from her van to her factory equipment, and most of the inventory she’d acquired during a lifetime. Months before, Tabra had given me vials of beads and semiprecious stones that I kept in our cellar, waiting for the moment that she would have time to teach me how to make a few necklaces, never suspecting that later they would help her get back to work. Willie and I emptied and painted the room that had been yours and offered it to her so she would at least have a family and a roof over her head. She moved with the little bit of furniture and art she could save. We provided her with a large table, and there she began again, crafting her pieces one by one, as she had thirty years before.
We went out almost every day to walk and talk about life. I never heard her complain or curse the man who’d ruined her. “It’s my fault for hiring him, and it will never happen to me again,” was all she said. In the years that I’ve known Tabra, which add up to a lot, my friend has been sick, disillusioned, poor, and with a thousand problems, but I have seen her despair only once: when her father died. She cried for months over that man she adored and for other losses in the past, and I could not console her. In the period of her financial travails her demeanor never changed. With humor and courage she prepared to travel from the beginning the road she’d traveled in her youth, convinced that if she had done it at twenty she could do it again at fifty. She had the advantage of having a name recognized in several countries; anyone in the ethnic jewelry trade knows who Tabra is. Owners of art galleries come to her from Japan, England, the Caribbean islands, and she has clients who collect her work obsessively; they have more than five hundred pieces and keep buying.
TABRA PROVED TO BE AN IDEAL GUEST. Out of courtesy she ate whatever was on her plate, and without our daily walks she would have ended up round. She was discreet, silent, and good company, and in addition she entertained us with her opinions.
“Whales are misogynists because when the female is in rut the males surround her and rape her,” she told us.
“You can’t apply the criteria of Christian morality to cetaceans,” Willie rebutted.
“Morality is morality, Willie.”
“The Yanomamo Indians in the Amazon jungle rape women of other tribes, and they’re also polygamous.”
Then Tabra, who has a great respect for primitive peoples, concluded that you can’t, in fact, apply the same standards of morality to Yanomamos and to whales. And that isn’t even a shadow of the political discussions! Willie is very liberal, but compared to Tabra he belongs among the Taliban.
To entertain herself following another of the sudden disappearances of Alfredo López Lagarto-Emplumado—this one coinciding with her bankruptcy—Tabra returned to the vice of arranging blind dates through ads in the newspapers. One of the candidates presented himself with his shirt open to the belly button and sporting a half dozen gold crosses on his hairy chest. That, more than the fact that he was white and getting bald on the crown of his head, should have been enough to squelch my friend’s interest, but he seemed intelligent and she decided to give him a chance. They met at a cafeteria, sat talking for a long while, and discovered they had interests in common, like Che Guevara and other heroic guerrillas. On the second date, the man had buttoned up his shirt, and he also brought her a beautifully wrapped gift. When she opened it, she found a penis of optimistic dimensions carved in wood. Tabra came home in a rage, and threw it into the fireplace, but Willie convinced her that it was an objet d’art, and if she collected gourds that covered male privates in New Guinea, he saw no reason for her to be offended by that present. Even with her doubts, she went out once more with her gallant. On this third date, they ran out of topics related to Latin American guerrillas and sat for some time in silence, until Tabra, to say something, told him that she liked tomatoes. “I like your tomatoes,” he replied, and grabbed the breast that had cost her so much money. And since she was paralyzed with outrage, he interpreted her stupor as authorization to take the next step, and invited her to an orgy in which the participants shed their clothes and dived headfirst into a pit of living flesh, to frolic like Romans in the times of Nero. Apparently a California custom. Tabra blamed Willie. She said that the penis had not been an artistic gift but a dishonest proposition and an assault on her decency, as she had suspected. There were other suitors. Very entertaining for us, though much less so for her.
Tabra was not the only person to furnish us with surprises. We learned about then that Sally was planning to marry Celia’s brother, I suppose to provide him with a visa that would allow him to stay in the States. To convince the Immigration Service that it would be a legitimate marriage, they had a party, with a cake, and they took a photo in which Sally is wearing the famous wedding gown that had languished in my closet for years. I begged Celia to hide the picture because there was no way to explain to the children that their mother’s partner was going to marry their uncle, but Celia doesn’t like secrets. She says that everything comes out in the long run and there is nothing more dangerous than lies. And that was precisely why in the end the wedding never took place.
Searching for a Bride
NICO HAD BECOME VERY HANDSOME. He was wearing his hair long, like an apostle, and his grandfather’s features had become more accentuated: large sultry eyes, aristocratic nose, square chin, elegant hands. It was inexplicable to me that there weren’t a dozen women milling about at his front door. Behind Willie’s back—he doesn’t understand these matters—Tabra and I decided to look for a girlfriend for Nico. And that’s exactly what you would have done, daughter, so don’t scold me.
“In India, and many other places in the world, marriages are arranged. There are fewer divorces there than in Western countries,” Tabra explained.
“That doesn’t prove that they’re happy
, only that they have to put up with more,” I contended.
“The system works fine. Marrying for love carries a lot of problems with it, it’s more successful to unite two compatible persons who with time will learn to love one another.”
“That’s a little risky, but I don’t have a better idea,” I admitted.
It isn’t easy to make these arrangements in California, as she herself had proved for years; none of the matchmaking agencies had found a man who was worth her while. The best had been Lagarto-Emplumado, but still she had no news of him. We checked the newspapers regularly to see if Moctezuma’s crown had been returned to Mexico, but found nothing. In view of the negative results obtained by Tabra, I didn’t want to put ads in the papers or go to agencies; that seemed a little indiscreet in view of the fact that I hadn’t as yet consulted Nico. My friends were no help; they were no longer young, and no menopausal woman would take on my three grandchildren, however gorgeous Nico was.
I devoted myself to looking for a potential sweetheart everywhere I went, and in the process my eye grew sharper. I made inquiries among people I knew, I scrutinized the young women who asked for my autograph in bookstores, I even brazenly stopped a pair of girls in the street, but that method was inefficient and very slow. At that pace Nico would be seventy and still a bachelor. I studied women, and in the end would discard them for different motives: serious or tedious, talkative or shy, smokers or macrobiotic fiends, dressed like their mothers or with a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe on their backs. This was for my son; the choice could not be made frivolously. I was beginning to lose hope when Tabra introduced me to Amanda, a photographer and writer who wanted to make a trip to the Amazon with me for a travel magazine. Amanda was very interesting, and beautiful, but she was married and planned to have children very soon; she wasn’t, unfortunately, a good candidate for my romantic designs. However, during one conversation, the subject of my son came up and I told her the whole drama—there was no secret about what had happened with Celia; she herself had broadcast it right and left. Amanda told me she knew the ideal girl: Lori Barra. Lori was her best friend; she had a generous heart, she had no children, she was pretty, refined, a graphic designer from New York who now lived in San Francisco. She had an obnoxious boyfriend, according to Amanda, but we’d find a way to get rid of him and leave Lori available to meet Nico. Not so fast, I said. First I need to know this girl through and through. Amanda organized a lunch, and I took Andrea with me; it seemed to me that at least the young designer ought to have a vague idea of what she would be taking on. Of the three children, Andrea was without doubt the most peculiar. My granddaughter came dressed like a beggar, with pink rags tied around different parts of her body, a straw hat with faded flowers, and her Save-the-Tuna doll. I was on the verge of dragging her somewhere to buy a more presentable outfit, but I decided it was best for Lori to know her in her natural state.
Amanda had said nothing to her friend about our plans, nor I to Nico; we didn’t want to alarm them. The lunch in the Japanese restaurant was a good strategy; it didn’t raise Lori’s suspicion; she wanted to meet us only because she loved Tabra’s jewelry and she had read a couple of my books: two points in her favor. Tabra and I were very impressed with her; she was a calm pool of simplicity and charm. Andrea observed her without saying a word, as she tried in vain to get pieces of raw fish into her mouth with chopsticks.
“You don’t get to know a person in one hour,” Tabra warned me afterward.
“She’s perfect! She even looks like Nico. They’re both tall, slim, handsome, have noble bones, and they wear black. They look like twins.”
“Looking like twins isn’t the basis of a good marriage.”
“In India they have horoscopes, and let’s say that isn’t very scientific either. It’s all a question of luck, Tabra,” I answered.
“We need to know more about her. We have to see her in difficult circumstances.”
“You mean like in a war?”
“That would be ideal, but they’re all pretty far away. What do you say we invite her to go with us to the Amazon?” was Tabra’s suggestion.
And that was how Lori, who had seen us only once, over a plate of sushi, ended up flying with us to Brazil in the role of assistant to Amanda.
WHEN WE PLANNED THE ODYSSEY to the Amazon, I had imagined that we’d be going to a very primitive place where the character of Lori and others in the expedition would stand out clearly, but unfortunately the trip turned out to be much less dangerous than I’d expected. Amanda had seen to every last detail, and we reached Manaus without a hitch. We stopped for a few days in Bahía to meet Jorge Amado; Tabra and I had read all of his books and I wanted to know if the man was as extraordinary as the writer.
Jorge Amado and his wife, Zélia Gattai, received us in their home; he was seated in a large easy chair, amiable and hospitable. At eighty-four, half blind and not very well, he still had the sense of humor and the intelligence that characterize his novels. He was the spiritual father of Bahía. There were quotations from his books everywhere: chiseled in stone, adorning the facades of municipal buildings, in graffiti and primitive paintings on the huts of the poor. Plazas and streets proudly bore the names of his books and his characters. Amado invited us to try the culinary delights of his land in the restaurant run by Dadá, a beautiful black woman who was not the inspiration for his famous novel Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands—she was a child when he wrote it—but fit the description of the character: pretty, small, and agreeably plump without being fat. This replica of Doña Flor regaled us with more than twenty succulent dishes and a sampling of her desserts, which ended with little cakes of punhetinha, which in the local slang means “masturbation.” Needless to say, all of this was very helpful for my Aphrodite.
The elderly writer also took us to a terreiro, or temple, in which he served as protective father, to witness a ceremony of Candomblé, a religion African slaves brought to Brazil several centuries ago, and that today has more than two million followers in that country, including urban middle-class whites. The divine rituals had started earlier with the sacrifice of some animals to the gods—orishas—but we didn’t witness that part. The ceremony took place in a building that looked like a modest school, decorated with crepe paper and photographs of the maes, or “mothers,” now dead. We sat on hard wooden benches and soon musicians arrived and began to beat their drums in an irresistible rhythm. A long line of women dressed in white entered and whirled with upheld arms around a sacred pillar, summoning the orishas. One by one they fell in a trance. No foaming at the mouth or violent convulsions, no black candles or serpents, no terrifying masks or bloody rooster heads. The older women carried to another room those who had been “mounted” by the gods and then brought them back adorned with the colorful attributes of their orishas, to keep dancing till dawn, when the liturgy concluded with an abundant meal of the roasted meat of the sacrificed animals, cassava, and sweets.
It was explained to me that each person belongs to an orisha—sometimes more than one—and at any moment of life you may be claimed and have to put yourself at the service of your deity. I wanted to know who mine was. One mae de santo, an enormous woman dressed in a tent of ruffles and lace, wearing a turban made from several kerchiefs and a profusion of necklaces and bracelets, “cast the shells” for us; there it’s called jogo de búzios. I pushed Lori forward to get her reading first and the shells announced a cryptic new love: “Someone she knew but hadn’t yet seen.” Tabra and I had talked a lot about Nico, trying, of course, not to reveal our intention, and if by then Lori didn’t know him it was because she had been on the moon. Will I have children? Lori asked. Three, the shells replied. Aha! I exclaimed, enchanted, but one look from Tabra brought me back to my senses. Then it was my turn. The mae de santo rubbed a handful of little shells between her palms for a long time, had me feel them in mine, and then threw them onto a black cloth. “You belong to Yemayá, the goddess of the oceans, mother of all things. Life begins with Yem
ayá. She is strong, a protector, she cares for her children, comforts them, and helps them in their sorrow. She can cure infertility in women. Yemayá is compassionate, but when she is angry she is terrible, like a storm on the ocean.” She added that I had gone through great suffering, and that it had paralyzed me for a time but was beginning to dissipate. Tabra, who does not believe in these things, had to admit that at least the part about being maternal fit me. “She hit that accidentally,” was her conclusion.
SEEN FROM THE PLANE, the Amazon is green as far as you can see. Below us is a mysterious land of water: vapor, rain, rivers wide as seas, sweat. The Amazon territory occupies sixty per cent of the surface of Brazil, an area larger than India, and it also forms part of Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru. In some regions the “law of the jungle” still rules among bandits and traffickers in drugs, gold, wood, and animals who kill each other and, if they cannot exterminate the Indians with impunity, drive them from their lands. It is a continent in itself, a mysterious and fascinating world. It seemed so incomprehensible in its immensity that I couldn’t imagine how it could serve me as inspiration, but several years later I would use a lot of what I saw there in my first novel for young readers.
To summarize the trip, since the details aren’t relevant to what I’m relating, I can say that it was much safer than I’d wished. We’d prepared for a dramatic adventure in the world of Tarzan, but the closest link was a flea-bitten black female monkey who latched onto me and waited at my door from the break of dawn to climb onto my shoulders, curl her tail around my neck, and comb my head for fleas with her elfin fingers. It was a delicate romance. The rest was an ecotourism stroll; mosquitoes were bearable, the piranhas did not tear out pieces of our flesh, and we did not have to dodge poisoned arrows; smugglers, soldiers, bandits, and traffickers passed by without seeing us; we did not get malaria, and worms did not burrow beneath our skin or fish like needles invade our urinary tracts. We four adventurers got away safe and sound. Nonetheless, this little adventure fully fitted our purposes: I got to know Lori.
The Sum of Our Days Page 17
