It’s my opinion that these are two happy women. They work for a living but don’t kill themselves just to make money, and they agree that their priority is the children, at least until they’re grown and independent. I remember the days when Celia used to run, hide, and throw up because she was trapped in a life that wasn’t right for her. They had the good luck to be living in California, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In a different place and a different time they would have been condemned by implacable prejudices. Here their being gay does not pose a problem even at the girls’ Catholic school; that’s not what defines them. Most of their friends are couples, with children, ordinary, everyday families. Sally unhesitatingly took on the role of housewife, while Celia tends to behave like a caricature of a Latin American husband.
“How do you put up with her, Sally?” I asked once, when I saw her cooking and helping Nicole with her arithmetic lesson while Celia, in her scandalous pants and crazy helmet, went pedaling around mountain trails with tourists.
“Because we have such a good time together,” she replied, stirring the pot.
In this adventure of forming a couple, chance plays a large role, but so does intent. Often during an interview someone will ask me “the secret” of Willie’s and my notable relationship. I don’t know what to answer because I don’t know the formula, if indeed there is one, but I always remember something I learned from a composer and his wife who visited us. They were in their sixties but they looked young, strong, and filled with enthusiasm. This musician explained that they had married—or, more accurately, renewed their commitment—seven times during their long life together. They had met when they were university students, fallen in love at first sight, and had been together for more than four decades. They had passed through various stages, and in each one they had changed and been near the point of separating but had opted to review their relationship. Following each crisis, they had decided to stay married a little longer, for they discovered that they still loved each other even though they were not the same persons they’d been before. “In all, we have gone through seven marriages and no doubt there are more to come. It isn’t the same thing to be a couple when you are raising children, with no money and no time, as when you are in your mature years, established in your profession, and expecting your first grandchild,” he said. He told us, as an example, that in the 1970s, at the height of the hippie madness, they had lived in a commune with twenty idle young people; he was the only one who was working; the others spent the day in a cloud of marijuana smoke, playing the guitar, and reciting in Sanskrit. One day he grew tired of supporting them and kicked them out of the house. That had been a crucial moment when he, with his wife, had had to revise the rules of the game. Then came the materialistic stage of the 1980s, which nearly destroyed their love because they were both running after success. On that occasion, too, they had opted to make basic adjustments and start over again. And so it went, again and again. It seems to me that theirs is a formula that’s right on the mark, and one Willie and I have had to put into practice more than once.
The Twins and Gold Coins
ERNESTO AND GIULIA’S TWIN GIRLS were born on a splendid morning in June of 2005.
I got to the hospital at the moment that Ernesto had just welcomed his two daughters and was sitting with two rosy packages in his arms, crying. I started crying too, happy tears because these infants represented a definitive end to his being a widower and the beginning of a new stage in his life. Now he was a father. When Willie saw them, he said that one looked like Mussolini and the other like Frida Kahlo, but a couple of weeks later, their features took shape and we could see that they were a pair of beautiful little girls: Cristina, blond and happy, like her mother; Elisa, dark and intense, like her father. They are so different in looks and personality that they could have been adopted: one in Kansas and the other in Tenerife. Giulia gave herself completely to her daughters, to the degree that for more than a year she hasn’t talked about anything else. She managed to get them on a schedule of sleeping and eating at the same time; that gave her a few minutes of freedom between naps that she uses to restore order from chaos. She’s bringing them up with Latin music, the Spanish language, and with no fear of germs or accidents. Pacifiers go from the floor into the mouth and no one makes a fuss, and later, before they learned to walk, the twins discovered how to go up and down tiled stairs with the sharp edges of the steps scraping their bellies. Cristina is a little weasel who can’t stop moving for a minute; she approaches the abyss of balconies with suicidal indifference. Elisa, on the other hand, sinks into somber thoughts that tend to bring on attacks of inconsolable tears. I don’t know how, but Giulia finds the energy to dress them like dolls, in embroidered booties and sailor hats.
The previous year, precisely on December 6, the anniversary of your death, Ernesto was accepted at the university to study for his master’s degree at night; at the same time he was hired to teach mathematics in the best public school in the county, fifteen minutes from his house. He had been without a job for a few months, and had gone around with a dark cloud over his head, meditating on his future. Giulia, always sparkly and optimistic, was the only one in the family who never doubted that her husband would find his way, though the rest of the family was getting a little nervous. Tío Ramón reminded me in a letter that men suffer a crisis of identity somewhere around the age of forty; it’s part of the process of maturing. It had happened to him in 1945 when he fell in love with my mother in Peru, over sixty years ago. At that time he’d gone to a hotel in the mountains, locked himself in the silence of a room for days, and when he came out he was a different person. He had shaken off his Catholic religion, his family, and the woman who was then his wife. There he had grown up, been educated, had matured, and had realized that until that moment he had lived confined in the straitjacket of social conventions. When he tore that off, he lost all fear of the future. It was he who coined the phrase he taught me in my early adolescence, and that I have never forgotten: Everyone else is more afraid than you are. I repeat those words when I have to face some frightening situation, from an auditorium filled with people to loneliness. I have no doubt that Tío Ramón determined his fate in that drastic way because I have seen his decisiveness on other occasions. Like the time he caught my brother Pancho smoking—he was only about ten. Tío Ramón crushed out his own cigarette butt before us and announced, “This is the last cigarette of my life, and if I catch any of you smoking before you’re adults you will have to deal with me.” He never smoked again. Fortunately Ernesto overcame his forty-year crisis, and when his daughters were born he was ready to welcome them, already settled in his position as a high school math teacher and studying to be a college professor.
ALFREDO LÓPEZ LAGARTO-EMPLUMADO appeared on the Spanish TV channel, handsomer than ever, dressed in black with an Indian band around his forehead and several silver and turquoise necklaces around his neck. Tabra called me at ten o’clock at night to tell me to turn on the television and watch, and I had to admit that the man was very attractive, and that if I hadn’t known him so well, his image on the screen would undoubtedly have impressed me. He was speaking English—with subtitles—with the calm of an academic and the moral conviction of an apostle, explaining the justice of why he had been drawn to the mission of recovering Moctezuma’s crown, a symbol of the dignity and tradition of the Aztec people that had been appropriated by European imperialism. After so many years of not being heard, at last his message had reached the ears of the Aztecs and their hearts had ignited like gunpowder. The president of Mexico had sent a commission of jurists to Vienna to negotiate with the congress of that country for the return of the historic trophy. Lagarto ended by calling on Mexican immigrants in the United States to join in the struggle with their brothers and enlist the aid of the North American government to put pressure on the Austrians. I congratulated Tabra for her friend’s leap to fame, but she answered with a deep sigh. If Lagarto had been elusive before, now it would be i
mpossible to hunt him down. “Maybe he will follow me to Costa Rica after he gets the crown back,” she suggested, but without conviction. “Well, that’s if I ever save enough money to move there.” Be careful what you ask for, I thought, heaven might grant it, but I didn’t say it to her. For a long time, Tabra had been buying gold coins that she hid in nooks and crannies, creating the danger of having them stolen.
Doña Inés and Zorro
WHILE TABRA WAS PREPARING TO EMIGRATE, I was deep into researching a subject I’d been thinking about for four years: the legendary epic of the one hundred and ten heroic rogues who conquered Chile in 1540. With them was one Spanish woman, Inés Suárez, a seamstress from Plasencia, a city in Extremadura, who traveled to the Indies following the footsteps of her husband and thus ended up in Peru, where she discovered that she was a widow. Instead of returning to Spain, she stayed in the New World and later fell in love with Don Pedro de Valdivia, an hidalgo whose dream was “earn fame and leave glory to my name,” as he reported in his letters to the king of Spain. For love, and not greed for gold or glory, Inés went with him. For years I had carried in my mind the image of that woman who crossed the desert of Atacama, the most arid in the world, fought like a brave soldier against the Mapuche Indians, the most ferocious warriors in the Americas, founded cities, and died an old woman, loving another conquistador. She lived in cruel times and committed more than one brutal act, but compared to any of her companions on that adventure, she appears as honest and upright
I have often been asked where I find the inspiration for my books. I wouldn’t know how to answer that. As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing? I have explored many genres and diverse themes, and it seems to me that in each book I invent everything anew, including the style, but I have been doing this for more than twenty years and I can see repetitions. In nearly all my books there are defiant women, born poor or vulnerable, destined to be subjected, but they rebel, ready to pay the price of freedom at any cost. Inés Suárez is one of them. My female protagonists are always passionate in their loves and loyal to other women. They are not moved by ambition but by love; they throw themselves into adventure without measuring the risks or looking back, because to remain paralyzed in the place society holds for them is much worse. That may be why I am not interested in queens or women who come into the world in a cradle of gold, nor do I favor beautiful women who have their path paved by men’s desire. You always laughed at me, Paula, because pretty women in my books die before page sixty. You said it was pure envy on my part, and I’m sure you were partly right since I would have liked to be one of those beauties who get what they want without any effort; for my novels, however, I prefer heroines with courage for whom no one does any favors; they make their way on their own. It isn’t strange, therefore, that when I read about Inés Suárez between the lines in a history book—only rarely are there more than a couple of lines when women are mentioned—she piqued my curiosity. She was the kind of character that normally I have to invent. When I did my research I learned that nothing I could imagine could surpass the reality of her life. What little is know about her is spectacular, nearly magical. Soon I would begin to tell her story, but my plans were altered by three unexpected visitors.
One Saturday about noon, three people came to our home; at first we took them to be Mormon missionaries. They weren’t, fortunately. They explained that they owned the world rights to Zorro, the California hero we all know. I grew up with Zorro because Tío Ramón was an ardent admirer of his. You remember, Paula, that in 1970 Salvador Allende appointed your grandfather to serve as ambassador to Argentina, one of the most difficult diplomatic missions at that time, and he performed that duty with honor until the day of the military coup, when he resigned his post because he was not disposed to represent a tyrannical government. You often visited them. You were only seven years old but you made that plane trip by yourself. In that enormous building with its innumerable reception rooms, twenty-three bathrooms, three grand pianos, and army of employees, you felt like a princess; your grandfather had convinced you that it was his palace, and that he was royalty. During those three years of intense service in Buenos Aires, at four in the afternoon the honorable ambassador excused himself from any appointment in order to enjoy in secret the half hour of the serial version of Zorro on television. With that background, I could do no less than welcome those three visitors with open arms.
Zorro was created in 1919 by Johnston McCulley, a California author of dime novels, and since then has lived in the popular imagination. The Curse of Capistrano narrated the adventures of a young Spanish hidalgo in Los Angeles in the nineteenth century. By day, Don Diego de la Vega was a hypochondriacal and frivolous young man, but by night he dressed in black, donned a mask, and was converted into Zorro, avenger of Indians and the poor.
“We’ve seen Zorro in every form: films, television serials, comic books, costumes, everything except a literary work. Would you like to write that?” they proposed.
“What are you talking about! I’m a serious writer, I don’t write on commission,” was my first reaction.
But then I remembered Tío Ramón, and my honorary grandson Achilleas disguised as Zorro for Halloween, and the idea began to haunt me, so much so that Inés Suárez and the conquest of Chile had to wait their turn. According to the owners of the rights to Zorro, the project fit me like a glove: I’m Hispanic, I write in Spanish, I know California, and I have some experience of writing historical and adventure novels. It was the classic case of a character in search of an author. I, however, did not see things quite that clearly because Zorro isn’t like any of my protagonists; he wasn’t a subject I would have chosen. With the last book of the trilogy, I had considered the experiment with juvenile novels ended. I had discovered that I prefer to write for adults; it has fewer limitations. A book for a young reader requires as much work as one for adults but you have to be prudent in matters referring to sex, violence, evil, politics, and other elements that give flavor to a story but that the editors do not think appropriate for that age. It irks me to have to write with “a positive message.” I don’t see any reason to protect young people, who already have a lot of filth in their heads; on the Internet they can see fat women fornicating with burros, or narcotraffickers and police torturing each other with the greatest ferocity. It is disingenuous to stuff positive messages into the pages of a book: the only thing that will be achieved is turning off all the readers. Zorro is a positive character, the hero par excellence, a mixture of Che Guevara, obsessed with justice, Robin Hood, always ready to take from the rich to give to the poor, and Peter Pan, forever young. I would have to work really hard to make a villain out of him, but, as his owners explained, that wasn’t what it was about. Further, they warned me that the novel could not contain explicit sex. To put it briefly, it was a great challenge. I thought it over very carefully and in the end resolved my doubts in the usual way: I tossed a coin in the air. And that was how I ended up in my study with Diego de la Vega for several months.
Zorro had been greatly exploited; there wasn’t much left to tell except his youth and old age. I opted for the former, since no one likes to see his hero in a wheelchair. What was Diego de la Vega like as a boy? Why did he become Zorro? I researched the historical period, the early 1800s, an extraordinary time in the Western world. The democratic ideals of the French Revolution were transforming Europe, and from them were born the wars of independence of colonies across the Americas. The victorious armies of Napoleon invaded several countries, including Spain, where the population rebelled and waged a bloody war that finally drove the French from Spanish soil. It was the era of pirates, secret societies, slave traffic, Gypsies, and pilgrims. In California, by cont
rast, nothing novelistic was happening; it was a vast rural expanse with cows, Indians, bears, and a few Spanish colonists. I would have to take Diego de la Vega to Europe
My research turned up more than enough material, and the protagonist already existed. My task was to create the adventure. To that purpose, Willie and I visited New Orleans, to follow the trail of the celebrated pirate Jean Lafitte, and we were lucky to know that exuberant city before Hurricane Katrina reduced it to a national shame. In the French Quarter, night and day, we heard brass bands and banjos, the golden voices of the blues, the irresistible call of jazz. People drank and danced to the hot rhythm of the drums in the middle of the street: color, music, the smell of food, and magic. There was enough for a whole novel, but I had to limit Zorro to a brief visit. I try now to remember New Orleans as it was then, with its pagan carnival in which people of every sort blended together in dance; New Orleans, with its venerable residential streets and centuries-old trees—cypresses, elms, magnolias in bloom—the wrought-iron balconies where two hundred years ago the most beautiful women in the world sat to enjoy the cool evening air, the granddaughters of Senegalese queens and the masters of the time, sugar and cotton barons. But the most lasting images of New Orleans are those of the recent hurricane: floods of filthy water and its citizens, always the poorest, struggling against the devastation of nature and the negligence of authorities. They became refugees in their own country, abandoned to their fate while the rest of the nation, stunned by scenes that seem as remote as a monsoon in Bangladesh, wondered whether governmental indifference would have been the same had the injured parties been white.
The Sum of Our Days Page 29
