“I don’t want to be a half-time grandmother, Nico. I also need to see the children during the weeks they’re with Celia and Sally.”
“I can’t stop you, but I want you to know that I’m hurt and angry, Mamá. You treat Celia like the prodigal son. She will never take Paula’s place, if that’s what you’re trying to do. You feel indebted to her because she was with you when my sister died, but I was there, too. The closer you get to Celia, the farther you will drive Lori and me away. It’s inevitable.”
“Oh, Nico. There aren’t any fixed rules for human relationships, they can be reinvented, we can be original. With time the anger will wane and the wounds heal—”
“Yes, but that won’t make me feel any better about Celia, that I can promise. So are you really close to my father, or Willie to his ex-wives? This is a divorce. I want to keep Celia at a prudent distance, so I can relax and live my life.”
One memorable night, Nico and Lori came to tell me that I was too much in their lives. They tried to do it with delicacy, but just the same the trauma nearly gave me a heart attack. I threw a childish fit, convinced that they had dealt me a great injustice. My son was throwing me out of his life! He ordered me not to countermand his instructions in regard to the children: no candy before dinner, no money or gifts unless it was a special occasion, no watching television till midnight. So what is a grandmother good for? Did he intend to sentence me to a solitary existence? Willie seemed to be squarely with me, but I think that deep down he was laughing a little. He made me see that Lori was as independent as I am, that she had lived alone for years and was not used to having people troop through her home uninvited. And what on earth made me take a rug to a designer?
As soon as I could control my desperation, I called Chile and talked with my parents. At first they didn’t understand very well what the problem was, since in Chilean families relations tend to be what I had imposed on Nico and Lori, but then they remembered that customs are different in the United States. “Child, we come into this world to lose everything. It costs nothing to let go of material things, what’s difficult is to give your loved ones their freedom,” my mother told me with sorrow. That was her fate; none of her children or grandchildren lived near her. Her words unleashed another torrent of complaints, which Tío Ramón interrupted with the voice of reason to point out that Lori must have made a lot of concessions to be with Nico: moving from the city and her own place, modifying her lifestyle, adapting to three stepchildren and a new family, and on and on, but the worst was the overwhelming presence of her mother-in-law. That couple needed air and space to cultivate their relationship without my hanging over every move they made. He recommended that I make myself scarce, and added that children must be separated from the mother or they will be infantile forever. Whatever my good intentions, he said, I would always be the matriarch, a position that others undoubtedly resent. He was right: my role in the tribe is disproportionate, and I lack the restraint of an Abuela Hilda. Willie’s description of me is “a hurricane in a bottle.”
Then I remembered a Woody Allen film in which his mother, an overpowering old woman with a pile of dyed red hair and the eyes of an owl, accompanies him to a theater program. The magician says he will make someone disappear and asks for a volunteer from the audience, and without thinking twice, the old lady goes up on the stage and crawls into a trunk. The illusionist performs his trick, and she vanishes forever. They look for her inside the magic trunk, in the wings, inside and outside the building. Nothing. At last the police, detectives, and firemen arrive, but their attempts to find her are futile. Her son, thrilled, believes that he has finally rid himself of her, but the evil old woman appears in the sky, ensconced on a cloud, omnipresent and infallible, like Jehovah. That was me, it seems, like the mother in Jewish jokes. Using the excuse of helping and protecting my son and grandchildren, I had turned into a boa constrictor. “Concentrate on your husband; that poor man must be good and sick of your family,” my mother added. Willie? Sick of me and my family? I’d never thought of that. But my mother was right. Willie had put up with your death, Paula, and my long mourning, the problems with Celia, Nico’s divorce, my long absences on trips, my obsessive dedication to writing, which kept me always with one foot in another dimension, and who knows what else. It was time for me to let go of the cartload of people I’d been dragging with me since I was nineteen and focus more on my husband. I was shattered; I threw the key to Nico’s house into the trash and prepared to remove myself from his life—well, not disappear entirely. That night I cooked one of Willie’s favorite dishes, seafood pasta, opened our best bottle of white wine, and waited for him wearing red. “Is something the matter?” he asked when he arrived, dropping his heavy briefcase on the floor.
Lori Comes in Through the Front Door
THAT WAS A PERIOD OF MANY ADJUSTMENTS in the family’s relationships. I think that my need to create and hold together a family, more accurately, a small tribe, had been a part of me since my marriage when I was twenty years old, had grown stronger on leaving Chile—when my first husband and children reached Venezuela we had no friends or relatives except my parents, who had also sought asylum in Caracas—and was consolidated when I found myself an immigrant in the United States. Before I came into Willie’s life he had no idea what a family was; he lost his father when he was six, his mother retired into a private spiritual world to which he had no access, his first two marriages failed, and his children had very early set off on the path of drugs. At first, it was difficult for Willie to understand my obsession with gathering my children around me, to live as close to them as possible and to add others to that small base to form the large, united family I had always dreamed of. Willie considered it a romantic fantasy, impossible to carry out on the practical level, but in the years we’ve lived together not only has he realized that this is the way people live in most parts of the world, but also that he likes it. A tribe has its inconveniences, but also many advantages. I prefer it a thousand times to the American dream of absolute individual freedom, which, though it may help in getting ahead in this world, brings with it alienation and loneliness. For those reasons, and for all we had shared with Celia, losing her was a hard blow. It had wounded us all, and it had completely disrupted the family we had worked so hard to bring together. Even so, I missed that girl.
Nico tried to keep Celia at a distance, not just because that’s the normal thing to do in a divorce, but because he felt that she was invading his territory. I hadn’t measured the depths of his feelings or thought it was necessary to choose between them; I thought that my friendship with Celia had no connection to him. I didn’t give him the unconditional support that as his mother I owed him. He felt that I had betrayed him, and I can imagine how much I must have hurt him. We weren’t able to speak openly because I avoided the truth; his eyes would fill with tears and the words wouldn’t come out. We loved each other very much but we didn’t know how to handle a situation in which inevitably we wounded each other. Then Nico wrote me several letters. Alone with the page he could express himself and I could hear him. How badly we needed you, Paula! You always had the gift of seeing things clearly. At last we decided to go together for therapy, where we could talk and cry and take each other’s hand and forgive.
While your brother and I were trying to better understand our relationship, delving into the past, and into the real person each of us was, Lori was focused on curing Nico of the wounds left by his divorce. She made him feel loved and desired, and that transformed him. They took long walks, went to museums, theaters, and good movies; she introduced him to her friends, nearly all artists, and piqued his interest in traveling, something she had done since she was a girl. She gave the children a calm home, as Sally did in the other house. Andrea wrote in a composition at school that “having three mothers is better than just one.”
In the matter of a year or two, Lori’s office was no longer profitable. Clients believed that they could replace the artist’s vision with a disc, and
thousands of designers were out of a job. Lori was one of the best. She had done such a remarkable job with my book Aphrodite that my editors in twenty countries used the design and illustrations she had chosen. Because of the design, not the content, the book attracted attention. It wasn’t a subject to be taken seriously, and, in addition, a new drug had just been launched that promised to end male impotence. Why study my ridiculous manual and serve oysters in your negligee if all that was needed was a blue pill? The tone of the letters some readers sent me regarding Aphrodite was noticeably different from those I received after Paula. A seventy-seven-year-old gentleman invited me to participate in hours of intense pleasure with him and his sex slave, and a young Lebanese man sent me thirty pages extolling the advantages of the harem. All this while in the United States the scandal involving President Bill Clinton and a plump White House intern obscured the successes of his government and would later cost the Democrats an election. A soiled dress and a pair of panties came to have more weight in American politics than the outstanding economic, political, and international accomplishments of one of the most brilliant presidents the country has known. His affair precipitated an investigation worthy of the Inquisition, and cost a trifling fifty-one million dollars to taxpayers. During that period, I was asked to be on a live call-in radio program. Someone asked me what I thought about the matter, and I said that it was the most expensive blow job in history. That phrase would follow me for many years. It was impossible to hide from the kids what was going on because even the most obscene details were shown on TV.
“What is oral sex?” Nicole asked, a term she had heard ad nauseam on television. “Oral? That’s when you talk about it,” replied Andrea, who had the vast vocabulary of every good reader.
I recall that one magazine decided to feature one of my books with an interview and photographs taken in our house, which Lori was to supervise since I didn’t understand what the devil they meant to do. Three days in advance, two artists came to take light readings, color samples, measurements, and Polaroids. For the article, seven people came in two vans loaded with fourteen boxes filled with all sorts of things, from knives to a tea strainer. These invasions happen with some frequency, but I never get used to them. In this case, the team included an artistic director and two chefs, who took over the kitchen to prepare a menu inspired by my book. The dishes were produced with mind-numbing slowness; they placed each lettuce leaf as if it were the feather on a hat, precisely in the angle between the tomato and the asparagus. Willie got so nervous he had to leave, but Lori seemed to comprehend the importance of the damned lettuce. In the meantime, the artistic director replaced the flowers in the garden, which Willie had planted with his own hands, with others more colorful. None of this appeared in the magazine, the photos they used were all close shots: half a clam and a lemon slice. I asked why they had brought the Japanese napkins, the tortoiseshell serving spoons, the Venetian lanterns, but Lori shot me a look that said I should keep quiet. This lasted the entire day, and since we couldn’t attack the meal before it was photographed, we put away five bottles of white wine, and three red, on empty stomachs. By the end, even the artistic director was stumbling. Lori, who had drunk nothing but green tea, had to carry the fourteen boxes back to the vans.
LORI KEPT AFLOAT LONGER than other designers, but the day came when it was impossible to ignore the red numbers in her account books. At that point, I proposed that she take full charge of the foundation I had established on my return from India, inspired by the infant beneath the acacia, something she had been doing part-time for a while. Every year I earmarked a substantial part of my income for the foundation that evolved from your plan to do good, financed by the sale of my books. During the year that you were sleeping you taught me a lot, daughter. Paralyzed and mute, you still were my teacher, just as you had been all the twenty-eight years of your life. Very few people have the opportunity you gave me; to have quiet time and silence to think and remember. I was able to review my past, to become aware of who I am in essence, once vanity was not a factor, and to decide how I want to be in the years I have left in this world. I appropriated your motto: “You have only what you give,” and I discovered, to my surprise, that it is the keystone of my contentment. Lori has your integrity and compassion. She could carry out the proposal “to give till it hurts,” as you used to say. We sat at my grandmother’s magical table and talked for days, until we had a clear outline of our mission: to help the poorest of women by any means within our reach. The most backward and miserable societies are those in which women are oppressed. If you help one woman, her children do not die of hunger, and if families are bettered, the village benefits, but this very evident truth is ignored in the world of philanthropy, where for every dollar destined to programs for women, twenty go to projects for men.
I told Lori about the woman wrapped in the black plastic bag I’d seen crying on Fifth Avenue, and also about Tabra’s most recent experience. She had just returned from Bangladesh, where my foundation maintained schools for girls in remote villages and a small clinic for women. Tabra went there with a friend of hers, a young dental hygienist who wanted to offer her services at the clinic. They filled suitcases with medications, syringes, toothbrushes, and any supplies they could collect from dentist friends. When they reached the village there was already a line of patients at the door, a hot building infested with mosquitoes, where there was little to be seen other than the walls. The first woman had several rotten molars, and had been maddened for months by persistent pain. Tabra acted as assistant while her friend, who had never pulled a tooth, anesthetized the woman’s mouth with trembling hands and proceeded to extract the bad molars, trying not to faint in the process. When she finished, the unfortunate woman kissed her hands, grateful and relieved. That day they saw fifteen patients and removed nine molars and a variety of other teeth, while in a tight circle outside, the men of the community observed and commented. The next morning Tabra and her friend arrived early at the improvised clinic and found the first patient of the previous day with a face swollen the size of a watermelon. Her husband was with her, irately shouting that they had ruined his wife, and that the men of the village were meeting to take revenge. Terrified, the hygienist gave the woman antibiotics and painkillers, praying that there would be no fatal consequences.
“What have I done? She’s deformed!” she moaned when the two left.
“That wasn’t from your procedure,” their interpreter informed them. “Her husband beat her last night because she didn’t get home in time to fix his meal.”
“That’s the life most women live, Lori. They are always the poorest of the poor. They do two-thirds of the work in this world, but they own less than one percent of the assets.”
Up to that point, the foundation had distributed money on impulse, or yielding to the pressure of a just cause, but thanks to Lori we established priorities: education, the first step to independence in every sense; protection, because too many women are trapped in fear; and health, without which nothing else helps much. I added birth control, which for me has been essential. Had I not been able to decide something as basic as the number of children I would bring into the world, I couldn’t have done any of the things I have. Fortunately, the pill was invented or I would have had a dozen little ones.
Lori threw herself into the work of the foundation, and in the process demonstrated that she had been born for the job. She is idealistic and organized, she notices the least detail, and she is a workaholic—no job is too big for her. She made me see that it was no good to distribute money by tossing it up in front of a fan; you had to evaluate the results and support programs for years, the only way that aid does any good. We also had to concentrate our efforts; we could not put patches on something in a remote place where no one supervised, or bite off more than we could chew; it was better to give more to fewer organizations. Within a year she changed the face of the foundation, and I was able to delegate everything to her. All she asks of me is to sign the checks
. She has succeeded so admirably that not only has she multiplied the funds we give out, she has built up the capital as well, and now she manages more money than we had ever imagined. Everything goes to the mission we proposed: carrying out your plan, Paula.
Mongolian Horsemen
IN THE MIDDLE OF THAT YEAR I had a spectacular dream, and I wrote it down to tell my mother; we always did that, even though there’s nothing as boring as listening to other people’s dreams. That’s why psychiatrists cost you so much. Dreams are essential to our lives; they help us understand our reality, and bring into the light the things that are buried in the caverns of our souls. I was standing at the foot of a wind-eroded cliff, on a white sand beach with a dark sea and clear blue sky. Suddenly, at the top of the cliff, I saw two enormous warhorses, with riders. Beasts and men were arrayed like Asian warriors of old—Mongolia, China, Japan—with silk standards, ball fringe, plumes, and heraldic adornment: all the splendid paraphernalia of war gleaming in the sun. After an instant’s hesitation at the edge of the precipice, the steeds reared, whinnied, and with the glory of centaurs, leaped into the void, forming in the sky a broad arc of cloth, plumes, and pennants. Their daring took my breath away. It was a ritual act, not suicide, a demonstration of bravery and skill. An instant before they touched ground, the horses bent their necks and landed on one shoulder, curled into a ball, and rolled over, raising a cloud of golden dust. And when the dust and the noise subsided, these stallions struggled to their feet in slow motion—the horsemen had not been unseated!—and galloped off down the beach toward the horizon. Days later, when I still had those images fresh in my memory, trying to make sense of them, I ran into a friend who writes books on dreams. She gave me her interpretation, which was not unlike what the shells of the jogo de búzios had said in Brazil: a long and dramatic fall had tested my courage, but I had risen and, like the steeds, had shaken off the dust and run on toward the future. In the dream, the mounts had known how to roll and the horsemen how to sit their horses. According to my friend, past trials had taught me how to fall and now I didn’t have to fear because I could always land on my feet. “Remember those horses when you feel yourself weaken,” she said.
The Sum of Our Days Page 19
