My most tragic memories swirled up in furious waves. I had thought that after going through the experience of losing you, nothing could ever move me that much again, but just the hint that possibly something similar was happening to my son, my remaining child, rocked me off my feet. I had a weight in my chest like a rock, crushing me, and making me short of breath. I felt vulnerable, raw, on the verge of tears every moment. At night, while everyone slept, I heard sounds in the walls of the house, long moans from the doorways, sighs in the unoccupied rooms. It was, I suppose, my own fear. All the sorrow that had accumulated during that long year of your dying was stalking about in the house. I have a scene forever engraved in my memory. One day I went into your room and saw your brother, his back to the door, changing your diaper as naturally and calmly as he did his children’s. He was talking to you, just as if you could understand, of the times in Venezuela when the two of you were teenagers and you would cover for his pranks and save his skin if he got in a jam. Nico didn’t see me; I left and softly closed the door. This son of mine has always been with me, we have shared primordial pain, dazzling failures, ephemeral successes; we left everything behind and have begun again in a new place; we have fought and we have helped each other; in other words, I believe we cannot be separated.
Weeks before the accident at the dentist’s, Nico had had his annual porphyria tests and the results had not been good: his levels had doubled over the previous year. After his fall, they kept rising at an alarming rate, and the doctor, Cheri Forrester, who never took her eye off him, was worried. Added to the constant pain from the injury to his shoulder, which prevented him from lifting his arms or bending over, were the pressure of work, his relationship with Celia—which was going through a wretched stage—the ups and downs with me—I was frequently failing in my intention to leave him in peace—and an exhaustion so profound that he would fall asleep standing up. He was even speaking in a murmur, as if the effort of breathing was too much. Often crises of porphyria are accompanied by mental disturbances that alter the patient’s personality. Nico, who in normal times prides himself on having the happy calm that characterizes the Dalai Lama, was often boiling with anger, but he could hide it thanks to his unusual self-control. He refused to talk about his condition, and he did not want any special consideration. Lori and I limited ourselves to watching him without asking questions, trying not to make him more annoyed than he already was, though we did suggest that at least he resign from his job; it was very far away and it didn’t offer him any satisfaction or challenges. We thought that with his calm temperament, his intuition, and his mathematical ability, he could work as a day trader, but that seemed very risky to him. I told him my dream about the horses, and he told me that was very interesting, but that he wasn’t the one who had dreamed it.
There was nothing Lori could do in regard to his health problems, but she stood by him and gave him moral support, never weakening, though she was suffering herself. She wanted children, and to do that she had to subject herself to the torment of fertility treatments. When she started living with Nico they had of course talked about children. She couldn’t give up the idea of being a mother, she had already put it off too long waiting for a true love. From the beginning, however, Nico had said he didn’t want children; in addition to possibly transmitting his porphyria, he already had three. Nico had become a father at a very young age; he hadn’t experienced the freedom and adventure that filled Lori’s first thirty-five years, and he intended to cherish the love that had fallen into his life, be a companion, a lover, a friend, and a husband. During the weeks the children stayed with Celia and Sally, Nico and Lori were like sweethearts, but the rest of the time they could only be parents.
Lori said that Nico couldn’t understand her terrible emptiness; it seemed to her—perhaps with good reason—that no one was ready to remove a piece of the family puzzle to make room for her; she felt like a stranger. She perceived something negative in the air when she mentioned the subject of another child, and I was responsible for a lot of that; it took me more than a year to realize how important being a mother was for her. I tried not to interfere, not wanting to hurt her, but my silence was eloquent: I thought that a baby would rob Nico and her of the little freedom and intimacy they had. I was also afraid it might displace my grandchildren. The last straw for Lori came on Mother’s Day; one of the girls made an affectionate card, gave it to her, and then a little later asked her to give it back so she could give it to Celia. To Lori, that was a dagger in the heart, even though Nico explained over and over that the child was too young to realize what she’d done. Lori’s sense of duty seemed almost a penalty; she looked after the children and served them with a kind of desperation, as if she wanted to compensate for the fact she couldn’t accept them as her own. And they weren’t, they had a mother, but if they’d adopted Sally they were equally eager to love her.
During this period several of Lori’s friends got pregnant; she was surrounded by half a dozen women priding themselves on their bellies. They spoke of nothing else; the very air smelled of infants, and the pressure grew for Lori because her chances of being a mother were decreasing month by month, something her specialist made clear. Lori was never jealous of her friends; just the opposite; she spent a lot of time and energy taking their portraits, and she put together a collection of extraordinary images on the subject of pregnancy that I hope one day will become a book.
Nico and Lori were going to a therapist, where I suppose they discussed this subject to the point of nausea, but on an impulse Nico called Tío Ramón in Chile, whose judgment he trusted blindly. “How do you expect Lori to be mother to your children if you don’t want to be father to hers?” was his answer. It was an argument of pristine fairness, and Nico not only yielded, he was enthusiastic about the idea; the weight of that decision, nonetheless, fell on Lori. She submitted, silent and alone, to the fertility treatments that took their toll on her body and spirit. She, who had always been so careful to eat well, to exercise, and live a healthful life, felt poisoned by that bombardment of drugs and hormones. Her attempts failed again and again. “If science doesn’t do it, you have to put it in God’s hands,” my loyal friend Pía contributed from Chile. But neither her prayers, nor those of my Sisters of Disorder, nor the supplications to you, Paula, produced results, and so an entire year went by.
A New House for the Spirits
AT THE TOP OF THE SAME HILL where our house was located, a piece of land went on sale: two acres, with more than a hundred old oaks and a superb view of the bay. Willie wouldn’t leave me in peace until I agreed to buy it, even though to me it seemed an extravagant whim. He put himself in charge of the project, and decided to build the true house of the spirits. “You have the mentality of a castellana, Isabel, the mistress of a castle; you need style. And I need a garden,” he said. In my mind, moving would be a harebrained idea because the house where we had lived for more than ten years had its history and a much-loved ghost, and I couldn’t allow someone we didn’t know to live among its walls. Willie, however, turned a deaf ear to my arguments and went right ahead with his project. Every day he climbed the hill to photograph each stage of the construction. Not a single nail was driven without being recorded by his camera, while I, clinging to my old dwelling place, did not want to know anything about the new one. I went with him a few times, as I felt was my duty, but I couldn’t read the plans; to me it looked like a tangle of beams and pillars, lugubrious and too large. I asked for more windows and skylights. Willie said I was in love with the old Irishman who put in the skylights, because between the two houses I had ordered nearly a dozen. One more and the roof would have crumbled like crackers. Who was going to clean that ocean liner? It needed an admiral to understand that tangle of tubes and cables, the boilers, the ventilators, and other mechanisms to alter the climate. There were too many rooms and our furniture would float around in that immensity. Willie ignored my evil-hearted objections, but he did pay attention to my suggestion concerning the si
ze of the windows and skylights, and when finally the house was done and all that was left was to choose the color of the paint, he took me to see it.
It was a thrilling surprise. It was much more than a place to live, it was a proof of love, my own Taj Mahal. My lover had imagined a Chilean country estate with thick walls and tile roof, colonial arches, wrought-iron balconies, a Spanish fountain, and a cabaña at the back of the garden where I would write. My grandparents’ big house in Santiago, the one that inspired my first book, was never as I described it, not as grand or as beautiful or as luminous as it was in the novel. The house that Willie built is the house I had imagined. It rose proudly on the top of the hill, surrounded by oaks, and in the tiled entry patio stood three palm trees—three tall, slim ladies wearing hats of green plumes—that had been transported with a crane and set into the holes prepared for them. A wooden sign hanging from the balcony read THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS. My earlier resistance disappeared in a sigh; I threw my arms around Willie’s neck, grateful, and took over. I decided to paint the outside a shade of peach, and inside the color of vanilla ice cream. It looked like a cake, but we hired a woman who was seven months pregnant and outfitted with a ladder, a hammer, a blowtorch, and acid, who attacked the walls, the doors, and the iron, and in the space of a week’s time had “aged” them at least a century. If we hadn’t stopped her, the house would have been reduced to a pile of rubble before she gave birth in our patio. The result is a historic oddity: a nineteenth-century Chilean house on a twenty-first century California hilltop.
In contrast to me—I always had my suitcase packed to escape—the one time that Willie really was tempted to divorce me was during the move. It’s true that I acted like a Nazi colonel, but in two days’ time it looked as if we’d been there a year. The entire tribe participated, from Nico with his tool belt for installing lamps and hanging paintings, to friends and grandchildren who put cups and saucers in the cabinets, unpacked boxes, and carried off bags of trash. In that uproar we nearly lost you, Paula. Two nights later, we considered the task finished, and the fourteen persons whose backs we’d broken in the move dined at the “table of the castellana,” as Willie had called it from the beginning, complete with candles and flowers: shrimp salad, a Chilean stew, and flan. None of that Chinese food ordered by telephone. And so in style we inaugurated a way of life we’d never had till then.
If I was going to delight in my new situation as castellana, that was nothing compared to Willie, who needs a view, space, and high ceilings to expand in, a large kitchen for his experiments, a grill for the unfortunate steers he often barbecues, and a noble garden for his plants. Despite the million allergies that have tormented him from childhood, he goes outside several times a day to count the buds on each bush and breathe in great mouthfuls of the fresh aroma of laurel, the sweet perfume of the mint, and the penetrating pungency of pine and rosemary, while the crows, black and wise, mock him from the skies. He planted seventeen virginal rosebushes to replace those he left at the other house. When I first met him, he had seventeen roses in wheelbarrows, transported for years along the roads of divorce and moving, but he set them in terra firma when he surrendered to his love for me. From the first year, he has cut flowers for my cuchitril, the only place he can put them, since they’re death to him. My friend Pía came from Chile to give her blessing to the house, and brought with her, hidden in her suitcase, a cutting from “Paula’s rosebush” that grows beside the little chapel in her garden, and which two years later would delight us with a profusion of pink blossoms. From her town of Santa Fe, where she lives, Carmen Balcells every week sends a prodigious bouquet of flowers, and those, too, I can’t put anywhere near Willie. My agent is as lavish with her gifts as the hidalgos of imperial Spain. Once she gave me a suitcase of magical chocolates that two years later still turn up in my shoes or in some handbag; they reproduce mysteriously in the dark.
From May to September we heat the pool to the temperature of soup, and the house fills with our own and other children that materialize out of thin air, and visitors who come without announcing themselves, like the mailman. More than a family, we’re a village. Mountains of wet towels, flip-flops, plastic toys; piles of fruit, crackers, cheeses, and salads on the long kitchen counter; smoke and grease on the grills where Willie makes fillets, ribs, hamburgers, and sausage dance. Abundance and uproar, which compensate for the winter months of withdrawal, solitude, and silence, the sacred time for writing. The summer belongs to the women; we sit around in the garden amid the carnival of flowers and bees in their striped yellow suits to tan our legs and watch the children, in the kitchen to try new recipes, in the living room to paint our toenails, and in special sessions to exchange clothes with friends. Nearly all my clothing comes from Lea, an imaginative designer who makes everything for me on the bias, and long; that way it stretches, shrinks, adapts, and is equally good for a battalion of women of different sizes—including Lori, with her model’s body, who by now had given up the obligatory all-black uniform of New York and adopted California colors. Even Andrea likes to put on my dresses, but not Nicole, who has a pitiless eye for teenager fashion. Half the family birthdays, and those of many close friends, fall within those summer months, and we all celebrate together. It’s the season for partying, gossip, and laughter. The children bake cookies and fix snacks of quesadillas and fruit smoothies. I suppose that in every commune there’s one person who takes on the most unpleasant chores; in ours it’s Lori. We have to arm-wrestle Lori to keep her from taking on the job of washing the hills of bowls and plates single-handed. If we’re not careful, she’s capable of mopping the floor on her knees.
The best part was that a month after we moved in, we began to hear the same inexplicable sounds that had waked us in the other house, and when my mother came from Chile to visit, she verified that the furniture moved at night. That was what the house needed to justify its name. We hadn’t lost you in the move, daughter.
The moment had come to call Ernesto and Giulia, who for months had been considering the possibility of moving to California to become part of the tribe and live in the house we had vacated and was waiting for them. They had married a couple of years before in a ceremony attended by the families of the bride and groom, including Jason, who still hadn’t learned about the brief amorous interlude between Ernesto and Sally. Ernesto, with great embarrassment, would confess that to him much later. Giulia, on the other hand, did know, but she is not the kind of woman to be jealous of the past. The bride, splendid in her simple white satin gown, showed no sign of being aware of the untimely reaction of some of the guests, who nearly ruined the wedding. Ernesto’s parents, though enchanted with Giulia, took turns locking themselves in the bathroom to cry because they remembered you. That wasn’t true in my case; in fact I was very happy. I have always known that you looked for Giulia yourself so your husband wouldn’t be left alone, something you had always joked you would do. Why did you even talk about death, daughter? Did you have premonitions? Ernesto says that you both felt that your love was not meant to last long, that you had to cherish it, enjoy it quickly before it was taken from you.
Ernesto and Giulia’s life in New Jersey was comfortable and they both had good jobs, but they felt isolated and so yielded to my invitation to move into our old house. In order to accept that gift, Ernesto needed a job in California, and as he has a guardian angel, he was hired by a company ten minutes away from his new dwelling. It took them a couple of months to sell their apartment and bring their things across the continent in a truck, and they moved in on the same day in May that several years before we had brought you, Paula, from Spain to spend with us the time you had left to live. That timing seemed to me to be a good omen. We were aware of it because Giulia gave me an album in which she had arranged in chronological order the letters I had written you in 1991, when you were a newlywed in Madrid, and those I sent Ernesto in 1992 when you were ill here in California and he was working in New Jersey. “We will be very happy here,” said Giulia w
hen she walked into the house, and I had no doubt they would be.
Strokes of the Pen
WE HADN’T YET RECOVERED from our brief brush with movie-land fame when Of Love and Shadows was premiered, the film based on my second novel. The actress Jennifer Connelly was so like you—slim, fragile, thick eyebrows, long hair—that I couldn’t stay to see the end of the film. There is a moment when she is in a hospital bed, and her companion, Antonio Banderas, picks her up in his arms and supports her on the toilet. I remember clearly the identical scene between you and Ernesto, a little before you fell into the coma. The first time I saw Jennifer Connelly was in a restaurant in San Francisco, where we’d agreed to meet. When I saw her coming toward me in her faded jeans, her white starched blouse and ponytail, I thought I was dreaming: she was you, daughter, revived in all your beauty. Of Love and Shadows was filmed in Argentina because they didn’t dare make it in Chile, where the legacy of the recent dictatorship still had a lot of weight. I thought it was an honest film and regretted that it came out with so little promotion, although it did circulate later on video and television.
The book is a political adventure based on actual events; it tells of fifteen campesinos who disappeared after being arrested by the military, but it is essentially a love story. On Willie’s fiftieth birthday, a friend gave him that book, which he read on his vacation. Later he thanked her for the book with a note that said, “The author understands love the way I do.” And that is why, because of the love he perceived in those pages, he decided to come meet me when I passed through northern California on a book tour. At our first meeting he asked me about the protagonists; he wanted to know if they existed or whether I had imagined them, whether perhaps their love survived the duress of exile, and whether they had ever returned to Chile. I hear that question frequently; it isn’t only children who want to know how much truth there is in fiction. I began to answer his questions, but after only a few sentences he interrupted me. “No, no, don’t say any more. I don’t want to know. The important thing is that you wrote it and therefore you believe in that kind of love.” Then he confessed that he had always been sure that love like that was possible and that one day he would live it, although up to that time he had not experienced anything even remotely similar. My second novel brought me luck. Because of it I met Willie.
The Sum of Our Days Page 21
