By then, Daughter of Fortune had been published in Europe. According to some critics it was an allegory of feminism: Eliza shed her Victorian corset to dive, with absolutely no preparation, into a man’s world in which she had to dress as a male in order to survive; in the process she acquired something very valuable: freedom. I didn’t have that in mind when I wrote the book; I thought the theme was simply the fever for gold, the tumult of adventurers, bandits, preachers, and prostitutes who gave birth to San Francisco, but that analysis seems valid to me because it reflects my feminist convictions and the desire for freedom that has determined the course of my life. To write the novel I had traveled with Willie across California, soaking myself in its history and trying to imagine what those years were like, the period in the nineteenth century when gold gleamed in the riverbeds and clefts in the rocks, inflaming men’s greed. The distances are still great despite the expressways; on horseback or on foot along narrow mountain paths they must have been infinite. The magnificent geography, the forests, the snow-covered peaks, the rivers with racing waters, invite silence and remind me of the enchanted landscape of Chile. The history of my two homelands, Chile and California, and the peoples who inhabit them, are very different, but the scenery and the climate are very much alike. Often when I return home after a trip, I have the impression of having traveled in a circle for thirty years and ended up again in Chile; there are the same winters of rain and wind, the dry, hot summers, the same trees, the cliff-lined coasts, the cold, dark sea, the endless hills, the clear skies.
After Daughter of Fortune followed Portrait in Sepia, the novel I was writing at that time, which also connects Chile with California. Its theme is memory. I am an eternal transplant, as the poet Pablo Neruda used to say; my roots would have dried up by now had they not been nourished by the rich magma of the past, which in my case had an inevitable component of imagination. Perhaps it isn’t only in my case. It is said that the processes of remembering and of imagining are nearly identical in our brains. The plot of the novel is based on something that happened in a distant branch of my family, when the husband of one of the daughters fell in love with his sister-in-law. In Chile this kind of family history is not aired. Even though everyone knows the truth, a conspiracy of silence is woven around it to keep up appearances. That may be why no one wants to have a writer in the family. The setting was a beautiful country estate at the foot of the Andean cordillera, and the protagonists were the finest people in the world, who didn’t deserve such suffering. I believe that the pain would have been more bearable if it had been talked about instead of hidden behind a veil, if instead of locking in the secret they had opened doors and windows to let the breeze carry off the bad smell. It was one of those dramas of love and betrayal buried beneath layers and layers of social and religious conventions, as told in a Russian novel. Just as Willie says, behind closed doors there are many family secrets.
I didn’t plan the novel as a second part of Daughter of Fortune, although they coincide historically, but several characters, such as Eliza Sommers, the Chinese physician Tao Chi’en, the matriarch Paulina del Valle, and others, made their way into the pages of the new book and there was nothing I could do to stop them. When I was about halfway along in the writing, I realized that I could connect those two novels with The House of the Spirits and make a kind of trilogy that begins with Daughter of Fortune and uses Portrait in Sepia as a bridge. The unfortunate thing is that in one of the books Severo del Valle loses a leg in the war, and in the following book he has two; that is, somewhere there is an amputated leg floating in the dense fog of literary errors.
The research that had to do with California was easy, I had done that for the previous book, but the rest had to be done in Chile, with the help of Tío Ramón, who for months dug through history books, documents, and old newspapers. It was a good excuse to visit my parents more often; they had entered the decade of their eighties and were beginning to look more frail. For the first time I thought of the terrifying possibility that one not too distant day I might be left an orphan. What would I do without them? Without the routine of writing my mother? That year, contemplating the proximity of death, she returned the packs of my letters bundled in Christmas wrapping paper. “Here, you keep them, because if I suffer a sudden stroke it wouldn’t do for them to fall into someone else’s hands,” she told me. Ever since then she has given me my letters every year, with my promise in return that when I die, Nico and Lori will burn them in a purifying bonfire. The flames will carry off our sins of indiscretion. In them we spill out anything that crosses our minds and sling mud on everyone. Thanks to my mother’s epistolary talent and my obligation to answer her, I have in my hands a voluminous correspondence in which events are kept fresh. That is how I have been able to write this memoir. The purpose of that methodical correspondence is to keep pulsing the cord that has joined us since the instant of my conception, but it is also an exercise to strengthen memory, that ephemeral mist in which recollections dissipate, change, and blend together; at the end of our days it turns out that we have lived only what we can evoke. What I don’t write I forget; it is as if it never happened. That’s why nothing significant is left out in those letters. Sometimes my mother calls me to tell me something that has affected her in some major way, and the first thing I think to say is, “Write me about it, so it won’t fade away.” If she dies before I do, which is probable, I will be able to read two letters every day, one of hers and one of mine, until I am one hundred and five years old, and as by then I will likely be deep in the confusion of senility, it will all seem new to me. Thanks to our correspondence, I will live twice.
Labyrinth of Sorrows
NICO RECOVERED FROM THE INJURY TO HIS BACK, the porphyria levels began to go down, and he was seriously considering the possibility of getting a different job. In addition, he began to do yoga and practice sports: lift weights he didn’t need to, swim to Alcatraz and back in the icy waters of San Francisco Bay, pedal a bike sixty miles uphill, run from one town to another like a fugitive. He developed muscles where there are no muscles, and he could make pancakes in the yoga tree position: standing on one foot, the other placed against the inside of the opposite thigh, one arm raised, and the other mixing, all the while reciting the sacred word oooom. One day he came to eat breakfast at our house and I didn’t recognize him. The Renaissance prince had been transformed into a gladiator.
All Lori’s attempts to have a baby failed, and with great sadness she said good-bye to that dream. She was worn down by the fertility drugs and all the poking around in her body, but that was nothing compared with the pain in her soul. The relationship between Celia and Nico was close to being hostile, which created tension and greatly affected Lori; she felt attacked. She couldn’t overlook how rudely Celia treated her, no matter how much Nico repeated his mantra to her: It isn’t personal, everyone is responsible for his or her own feelings, and life isn’t fair. I don’t think that was much help. Fortunately, the two couples kept the children on the margin of their problems whenever possible.
The role of stepmother is a thankless one, and I myself contributed my drop of bile to the legend. There isn’t a single good stepmother in either oral tradition or universal literature—except for Pablo Neruda’s, whom the poet called mamadre. In general there’s no appreciation for stepmothers, but Lori put so much into the task that my grandchildren, with that infallible instinct children have, not only love her as much as they do Sally, she is the first person they go to if they need something because she never fails them. Today they can’t imagine their lives without those two women. For years they wanted all four parents—Nico, Lori, Celia, and Sally—to live together, if possible in their grandparents’ house, but that fantasy has evaporated by now. My grandchildren have spent their childhood going from one family to the other, like three backpackers. When they were with one couple, they missed the other. My mother was afraid that the system would produce an incurable Gypsy disorder, but the kids have turned out to be more
stable than most people I know.
That year of 2000 culminated with a simple ritual for saying good-bye to the child that Lori and Nico never had, as well as to other sorrows. One windy afternoon we drove to the mountains, led by one of Lori’s friends, a young woman who is the incarnation of Gaia, the earth goddess. We were equipped with flashlights and ponchos, should night surprise us. From high on a hill, Gaia pointed out a pass and, down below in a valley, a large circular labyrinth outlined with stones, perfect in its geometry. We went down a narrow path between gray hills under a white sky crisscrossed by black birds. Our guide told us that we had met to unburden ourselves of certain sorrows, that we had come to accompany Lori, but that there was no one who didn’t have a pain of his or her own to leave there. Nico had brought a photo of you; Willie, one of Jennifer; Lori, a box and a photo of her young niece. We started walking, following paths traced by stones, slowly, each of us at our own pace, while the large funereal birds circled and cawed in that pale sky. At times we met one another in the labyrinth and I could see that we were all deeply moved.
In the center was a pile of rocks like an altar, where other pilgrims had left memories since soaked by the rain: messages, a feather, wilted flowers, a medallion. We sat around that altar and deposited our treasures. Lori placed on it the picture of her niece, who looked like the child she had wanted so much, with the colors and scents of her family. She told us that from the time she was very young, she had planned with her sister to live in the same neighborhood and raise their children together; hers would be a little girl, Uma, and a boy named Pablo. She added that it was her good fortune that Nico was sharing his children with her, and that she would try to be a loyal friend to them. From the box she took three flower bulbs and planted them in the earth. Beside one of them she set a stone for Alejandro, who likes minerals; by another, a pink glass heart for Andrea, who had not as yet emerged from her horrible pink stage; and by the last one, a live worm for Nicole, who loves animals. Willie silently placed the photograph of Jennifer on the altar and weighed it with little stones so the wind wouldn’t carry it away. Nico explained that he was leaving your photograph so you would accompany their unborn child and all the other sorrows collected there, but that he did not want to let go of his. “I miss my sister and I always will, for the rest of my life,” he said.
After all these years, the sadness of having lost you is still intact, Paula. Only scratch the surface lightly and it bursts forth anew, as fresh as the first day.
A ritual in a labyrinth among the mountains is not enough, however, to supersede a desire to be a mother, no matter how much therapy and will are employed. It is a cruel irony that while other women avoid having children, or abort them, it was Lori’s fate to be denied them. She had to resign herself to not carrying a child; even the fantastic process of implanting another woman’s fertilized egg in her womb had been for naught, but she was left the recourse of adopting. There are many, many little ones who have no family waiting for someone to provide them a generous home. Nico was sure that adoption would exacerbate Lori’s problems: lack of time, too much work, and no privacy. “If she feels trapped now, it would be worse with a baby,” he said to me. I couldn’t offer any advice. The crossroads at which Lori and Nico found themselves was cursed. Whichever of the two yielded, that one would always feel resentful: she because Nico had denied her something essential, and he because she had forced an adopted child on him.
Nico and I sometimes went out to a café to have breakfast together, to catch up on everyday events and secrets of the soul. For a year, the predominant theme of those private conversations was Lori’s distress and the question of adoption. Nico could not understand that motherhood was more important than the love between them, which was being threatened by her obsession. He told me that they had been born to love each other, that they complemented each other in every way, and that they had the resources to live an ideal life, but instead of appreciating what they had, Lori was suffering for what they didn’t have. I explained to Nico that without that need that engulfs us women our species wouldn’t have survived. There is really no sensible reason to subject your body to the prodigious effort of carrying and giving birth to a child, to defend it like a lioness at the cost of your own life, to devote every instant to it for years and years until it can get along on its own, and then, having lost it, watch from afar with nostalgia . . . all children do break away sooner or later. Nico argued that the business of being a mother is neither that absolute nor that clear; some women lack that biological imperative
“Paula was one of them, she never wanted to have children,” he reminded me.
“It’s possible she feared the consequences of the porphyria, not just the risk for her but because she could transmit it to her children.”
“Long before she suspected she had porphyria, my sister said that children are adorable only at a distance, and that there are ways to fulfill oneself other than by being a mother. There are also women in whom the maternal instinct is never awakened. If they get pregnant, they feel they’re invaded by a strange being that is consuming them, and then they don’t want the child. Can you imagine the scar that’s left in the soul of someone who is rejected at birth?”
“It’s true, Nico, there are exceptions, but by far the largest majority of women want children and when they do have them sacrifice their lives for them. There’s no danger that humanity will fade out for lack of children.”
Mail-Order Bride
LILI CAME FROM CHINA on a prospective bride’s visa that was good for three months, at the end of which she had to marry Tong or return to her country. She was a pretty, healthy woman who looked about twenty, though she was almost thirty, and she was very little contaminated by occidental culture, just as her future husband wished. She didn’t speak a single word of English; so much the better, for that would make it easier to keep her submissive, was the opinion of her future mother-in-law, who from the first applied ancient traditions in making her daughter-in-law’s life impossible. We found her moon face and sparkling eyes irresistible; even my grandchildren fell in love with her. “Poor girl, it’s going to be difficult for her to adapt,” Willie commented when he learned that Lili got up at dawn to do the housework and prepare the complicated dishes demanded by the old woman, who in spite of her minuscule size pushed Lili around. “Why don’t you tell the old bitch to go to hell?” I asked Lili with signs, but she didn’t understand. “Keep your nose out of it,” Willie recited once again, and added that I knew nothing about Chinese culture . . . but I knew more than he did, I had at least read Amy Tan. The mail-order bride was not as fainthearted as Willie had reported when he met her, of that I was sure. She had a peasant stolidity, broad shoulders, determination in her look and actions; with a flick of her wrist she could break Tong’s mother’s neck, and his too, if she chose. No sweet little dove there.
After three months, when Lili’s visa was about to expire, Tong told us that they were getting married. Willie, as a lawyer and friend, reminded him that the girl’s only reason for marrying was to stay in the United States. She would need a husband only two years; after that she could divorce and get her residence permit. Tong had thought about it; he wasn’t so naive as to believe that a girl off the Internet had fallen in love with him when she saw his photograph, however much Lori had retouched it; he believed, however, that both of them had something to gain from the arrangement: he, the possibility of a son, and she, a visa. They would see which of the two came first, it was worth the risk. Willie advised him to have a prenuptial contract drawn up, otherwise she would be entitled to part of the savings he had accumulated with such sacrifice, but Lili said she would not sign a document she couldn’t read. They went to a lawyer in Chinatown, who translated it. When she realized what Tong was asking of her, Lili turned the color of a beet and for the first time raised her voice. How could they accuse her of marrying for a visa! She had come to make a home with Tong! she protested, immersing the groom and the lawyer in a flood o
f repentance. They were married without the agreement. When Willie told me about it, sparks were shooting out of his ears; he couldn’t believe that his bookkeeper was so dumb; what was making him do such a stupid thing? he was fucked for good now; couldn’t Tong remember how he, Willie, had been fleeced by every woman who passed by? and on and on with a litany of gloomy prognoses. For once, I had the pleasure of getting back at him: “Keep your nose out of it.”
Lili enrolled in an intensive English class and wore headphones all day, listening to the lesson until she fell asleep, but her apprenticeship was slower and more difficult than she’d expected. She went out to look for a job, but in spite of her hard-earned education and her experience as a nurse she couldn’t find anything because she didn’t speak English. We asked her to clean our house and pick up the children at school because by then Ligia wasn’t working for us anymore. One by one she had brought her children from Nicaragua and put them through school, and now they were all professionals. At last she could rest. If Lili was working for us, she could earn a decent salary until she found something appropriate for her skills. She gratefully accepted, as if we had done her a favor, when she was the one who was helping us.
The Sum of Our Days Page 22
