The Sum of Our Days

by Isabel Allende

  “Do you think those children have anything to do with Lori and Nico?” I asked.

  “No! Of course not! They’re the children of the two English ladies,” she replied with calm conviction.

  “What English ladies?”

  “The ones who visit me. The ones who walk through the walls. Haven’t I told you about them?”

  On the scheduled day, Lori was to call the nurse who coordinated the treatment in the fertility clinic, a woman with the vocation of a godmother, who handles each case with delicacy; she knows how much hangs in the balance for these couples. Because of the time difference between Tokyo and California, Lori and Nico set the alarm for five in the morning. As they couldn’t make international calls from the room, they hurriedly dressed and went down to the front desk of the hotel, where at that moment they found no one to help them. Fortunately, Lori knew there was a telephone booth outside. They went out to a side street that during the day was seething with activity, thanks to popular restaurants and shops for tourists, but at that hour was deserted. The antiquated booth was straight out of a ’50s film, and the phone could be operated only with coins, but Lori had thought ahead and brought enough change with her to call the clinic. Blood was pounding in her temples and she was trembling as she dialed the number with a prayer on her lips. Her future was being determined in those instants. From the other side of the planet came the voice of the godmother. “It didn’t take, Lori. I’m so very sorry. I don’t know what happened, the embryos were the very best. . . ,” she said, but Lori heard no more. Stunned, she hung up the receiver, turned, and fell into her husband’s arms. And that man, who at first was so resistant to the idea of bringing more children into the world, sobbed openly; he had been as passionate as she about the idea of their having a child together. They embraced without a word, and minutes later stumbled out onto the empty, silent street, gray in the predawn. Columns of steam rose from the grates in the sidewalks, lending a phantasmagoric air to the scene, a perfect metaphor for the desolation they felt. The rest of their time in Japan was spent convalescing. They had never been so close. In their shared sorrow they came together at a very deep level, naked, defenseless.

  Something in Lori changed after that experience, as if a glass had broken inside her and the obsessive desire that had been her hope and her torment had drained away like water. She realized that she couldn’t live with Nico if she were in a swamp of frustration. It wouldn’t be fair to him. Nico deserved the kind of happy devotion he had tried so hard to build between them. She realized that she had come to the end of a tortuous road, and that she must root out her obsession about being a mother, if she was to go on living. After having tried every possible resource, it was obvious that a child of her own was not to be her destiny, but her husband’s children, who had been with her for several years and who loved her a lot, could fill that void. That resignation didn’t happen overnight; she was sick in body and soul for nearly a year. Lori had always been slim, but within a few weeks’ time she lost so much weight that she was nothing but skin and bones, with large, sunken eyes. She injured a disk in her back and for months was close to being an invalid, trying to function with painkillers so strong that they made her hallucinate. At moments she despaired, but the day came when she emerged from that long grieving, her back healed, her soul at peace, transformed into a different woman. We all could see the change. She gained weight, looked younger, let her hair grow, painted her lips, resumed her yoga and long walks through the hills, but now as a sport, not an escape. We heard her laugh again, the contagious laugh that had seduced Nico, something we hadn’t heard for a long, long time. At last she was ready to give herself to the children with all her heart, with joy; it was as if a fog had dissipated and she could see them clearly. They were hers. Her three children. The children the shells in Bahía and the astrologer in Colorado had predicted for her.

  Striptease

  WILLIE AND LORI HAD WORKED TOGETHER in the Sausalito brothel for years, even sharing one bathroom. It’s amusing to watch the relationship between those two people who could not be more different. To Willie’s chaos, cursing, and rushing about, Lori opposes order, precision, calm, and gentility. At noon, as Lori tosses her macrobiotic salad with tofu, Willie perfumes the atmosphere with the garlic of spicy sausages that would perforate the intestines of a rhinoceros. After he’s taken the dog for a walk, he comes into the office wearing the muddy boots of a ditch digger, and Lori amiably cleans the stairs so some client won’t slip and break his neck. Willie piles mountains of papers on his desk, from legal documents to used paper napkins, and every so often Lori sweeps through and throws them into the wastebasket; he doesn’t even notice, or maybe he does notice but doesn’t kick about it. They share the vice of photography and travel. They consult on everything and celebrate each other with no perceptible signs of sentimentalism; she always efficient and tranquil, he always hurrying and grumbling. She takes care of the computer, and keeps the Web page up to date, and he cooks meatballs for her following her grandmother’s recipe; he shares with her everything he buys wholesale, from toilet paper to papayas, and loves her more than anyone in the family, except me . . . maybe.

  Willie teases her, of course, but he also tolerates her jokes. Once Lori made up an exquisitely lettered bumper sticker she stuck on the back of his car. It read: I LOOK VERY MACHO BUT I WEAR WOMEN’S PANTIES. Willie drove around for a couple of weeks wondering why so many men were waving from other cars. Considering that we live in a part of the world that may have the highest number of homosexuals per capita, it wasn’t difficult to explain. When Willie discovered the sign, he nearly had a stroke.

  From time to time the alarm in the brothel goes off without any provocation, which tends to cause difficulties. Like once when Willie got there in time to hear the deafening clamor of the alarm and ran inside through the kitchen—on the lower floor—to turn it off. It was a winter evening and near dark. At the same moment he ran in, a policeman, who had kicked in the main door, came running down the steps, still wearing his sunglasses and carrying a pistol in his hand. He yelled at the top of his lungs for Willie to put up his hands. “Take it easy, man, I’m the owner,” my husband tried to explain, but the cop ordered him to shut up. He was young and inexperienced and perceptibly nervous; he kept yelling and calling for backup over his phone, while the white-haired man with his face plastered against the wall boiled with rage. The incident dissolved without consequences when other armed police arrived in combat gear and, after patting Willie down, listened to what he was saying. That episode set off an endless string of curses from Willie as Lori doubled over with laughter—though she might have laughed a little less had she been the victim. A week later when we were all at work, some of Lori’s friends, who were also good friends of ours, began to filter in. I thought it was a little strange, but I was on the phone with a journalist in Greece and merely waved at them from a distance. I finished my conversation just as a policeman came in—tall, young, blond, very handsome, sunglasses, and pistol at his waist—who asked to speak with Mr. Gordon. Lori called Willie, and he came down from the second floor ready to tell that “uniform” that if they kept fucking around and bothering him he was going to sue the police department. All Lori’s friends stationed themselves on the stairs to watch the show.

  The handsome policeman held up a bundle of papers and told Willie to have a seat because he needed to sign some forms. Grousing, my husband obeyed. Then we heard strains of Arabic music, and the man began to dance like an enormous odalisque. First he took off his hat, then his boots, then the pistol, jacket, and pants, to the absolute horror of Willie, who pushed his chair back, red as a lobster, sure than the man had escaped from some institution. The howls coming from the stairway gave him the clue that the “policeman” was an actor Lori had hired, but by then the dancer had nothing on but his sunglasses and a thong that came up short in covering his private parts.

  Considering that we all work at the same site, that we run Willie’s office,
the foundation, and my office among us, that we see each other nearly every day, that we go together on vacations in the far corners of the planet and live within a radius of six blocks, it’s surprising we get along so well. A miracle, I’d say. Therapy, is Nico’s explanation.

  My Favorite Writer

  CONTRARY TO WHAT I MIGHT HAVE EXPECTED, my cutting comments on Willie’s novel and his perverted dwarf did not provoke a war between us, which would have been the case had Willie been reckless enough to offer a negative criticism of one of my books; it was evident, however, that I wasn’t the right person to help him, he needed a professional editor. About that time a young literary agent appeared who was at first very interested in the book and devoted herself to boosting my husband’s ego, but little by little her enthusiasm cooled. At the end of six months, she congratulated him on the effort, assured him that he had talent, and reminded him that many authors, including Shakespeare, had written pages whose final destination was a trunk. We had several trunks in our home where the dwarf could sleep the sleep of the just indefinitely, while Willie was thinking about another subject, but he ignored everyone’s opinion and sent the book to various agents who returned it with courteous, but unmistakable, rejections. Far from deflating him, those letters of condemnation reinforced his fighting spirit—my husband is not a person to be stymied by reality. This time I didn’t make fun of his writing; it had occurred to me that literature could give meaning to the later years of his life. If what the agent had told him was right, and Willie had talent, and if he took the matter seriously and was capable of becoming a writer already past the age of sixty, then down the road I wouldn’t have to look after a gaga old man. It would work out well for both of us. A creative life would keep him happy and healthy well into an advanced old age.

  One night, embraced in bed, I explained the advantages of writing about something you know. What did he know about sodomite dwarfs? Nothing, unless he was projecting onto that lamentable character some aspect of his own personality that I didn’t know about. On the other hand, he had been a lawyer for more than thirty years, and he had a formidable memory for details. Why didn’t he explore the genre of the detective novel? Any of the many cases he had tried could serve as a point of departure. Nothing is as entertaining as a good, bloody murder. He lay there thinking, without saying a word. The next day we were driving through Chinatown in San Francisco and Willie saw an albino Chinese man standing on a corner. “I know what my next novel will be about. It will be a criminal case with a Chinese albino like him,” he told me in the same tone he’d used at the sadomasochist fair in San Francisco where he’d seen the dwarf wearing a dog collar and first mentioned his literary aspirations. Two years later, his novel was published in Spain under the title Duelo en Chinatown, and several other editors bought it to translate into their various languages. We went together to the launch of his book in Madrid and Barcelona, accompanied by his sons and a couple of faithful friends eager to applaud him. Everywhere he went, the press welcomed him with curiosity, and, after talking with him, published cordial articles because he won everyone over, especially women, with his simplicity. No pretension, only the blue gaze and the dashing smile beneath the brim of his eternal hat. The day of the launch in Madrid, one of the journalists asked him if he wanted to be famous, and he answered, with deep feeling, that he already had more than he’d ever dreamed: the fact that journalists were there, and people wanted to read his book, was a gift. He disarmed them, while his publisher twisted in his chair because he’d never had such an honest author. For once, it was my turn to carry the suitcases and repay Willie in some small part for the irksome tasks he’d performed all those years of traveling around the world with me.

  “Cherish this moment, Willie, because it will never happen again. The joy of seeing the first copy of your first book is unique. If you have other publications in the future, they won’t compare with this one,” I warned him, remembering what I’d felt when I saw the horrendous first edition of The House of the Spirits, which I keep wrapped in silk paper, signed by the actors in the film and those in the London play.

  Willie’s barrio Spanish splashed with Mexican idioms and words in English won him points, and the rest was accomplished by his Italian Borsalino fedora, which gives him the air of a detective of the 1940s. He appeared in many magazines and newspapers, he was interviewed on several radio stations, and we have pictures of a bookstore in Spain, and another in Chile, where Duelo en Chinatown is displayed in the window among the best sellers. On a radio program, he mentioned the pathetic dwarf from the unpublished book, and later in the hotel a man came up to him to tell him he’d heard his interview on the radio.

  “But how did you know it was me?” Willie asked, amazed.

  “The interviewer mentioned your hat. I want to tell you that I have a friend who’s a dwarf, and he is as perverted as the one in your novel. Pay no attention to your wife, just publish it. It will sell like hotcakes, everyone likes depraved dwarfs.”

  A month later, in Mexico, someone told Willie that in the 1900s there was a bordello in Juarez staffed by two hundred female dwarfs. Two hundred! He even gave Willie a book about that Fellini whorehouse. I worry that it might inspire Willie to retrieve his abominable little man from the trunk.

  I had never seen Willie so happy. I will definitely not have to take care of a drooling old man, because on the plane he pulled out his pad of yellow paper and began to write another book. The same astrologer who once told Willie that his children were his worst enemies, also told him that the last twenty-seven years of his life would be very creative, so I can relax until he’s ninety-six.

  “Do you believe in those things?” I asked Carmen Balcells, my agent, when I told her the story.

  “If you can believe in God, I don’t see why you can’t believe in astrology,” was her answer.

  A Bourgeois Couple

  IN FEBRUARY, 2004, the mayor of San Francisco had committed the unpardonable political sin of trying to legalize the union of homosexuals; that galvanized the Christian right to defend “family values.” Preventing gay marriage became the rallying cry of the Republicans during Bush’s reelection campaign that same year. It’s astounding how that issue weighed more heavily in the voting booth than the war in Iraq. The country wasn’t mature enough for an initiative like the mayor’s. He had issued it on a weekend, when the courts were closed, so no judge was able to block the order. The minute the news was announced, hundreds of couples lined up at the city hall, an unending queue in the rain. During the next hours, messages of congratulations poured in and bouquets of flowers carpeted the street. The first couple to be married was two women of eighty-some years, white-haired feminists who had lived together for more than fifty years, and the second was two men, each of whom was carrying a baby in a sling on his chest: adopted twins. The people in that long line wanted a normal life, to raise children, buy a house, inherit from a mate, and be together at the hour of death. No family values there, obviously. Celia and Sally were not part of that throng; they thought that the mayor’s initiative would quickly be declared illegal, which is in fact what happened.

  By then it had been a long time since Celia’s brother had left the scene. The strategy of marrying Sally to obtain a U.S. visa had not been effected and he had instead decided to return to Venezuela, where finally he married a pretty young girl, bossy and entertaining, had an enchanting little boy, and found the destiny that had eluded him in the United States. That had allowed Sally and Celia to be legally joined in a “domestic partnership.” I imagine that it would have been a little complicated to explain to the clerks if Sally had “married” two people with the same surname but different sexes. As for the children, who had seen the wedding photo of her and their uncle, not much explanation was required; they understood from the beginning that Sally was only doing him a favor. I think that nothing regarding the family shocks my grandchildren now.

  Celia and Sally have become so stable and bourgeois that it’s difficu
lt to recognize them as the daring young women who years before defied society to love each other. They like to go to restaurants, or lie in bed watching their favorite television programs, or organize parties in their tiny home, where they somehow manage to greet a hundred people with food, music, and dancing. One of them is a night owl and the other goes to bed at eight, so their schedules don’t coincide.

  “We have to make a date to meet at noon, agendas in hand, or we’d live like friends rather than lovers. Finding moments for intimacy when you have three kids and so much work is a real challenge,” Celia confessed, laughing.

  “That’s more information than I need, Celia.”

  They remodeled their house, converting the garage into a TV room and a room for Alejandro, who’s at an age when he wants privacy. They have a dog named Poncho, black, easy-going, huge, like the Barrabás of my first novel, who sleeps on the children’s beds by turns, one night with each one. His arrival terrified the two spitfire cats, which fled across the rooftops and were never seen again. When my grandchildren spend the week in their father’s house, an unhappy Poncho throws himself at the foot of the stairs, with soulful eyes awaiting the following Monday.

  Celia discovered the passion of her life: mountain biking. Although she’s over forty, she wins prizes in endurance races competing with twenty-year-olds, and she started a small side business leading biking tours: Mountain Biking Marin. Fanatics come from remote places to follow her up rugged trails to the heights.