The Sum of Our Days

by Isabel Allende

  JUST AS WE FEARED, Ben’s wife traveled from Chicago to sniff the air in San Francisco. She installed herself in the office of her husband, who had the good sense to disappear, using a variety of excuses, and within a few hours, her instinct, and what she knew about him, had confirmed her worst fears. She decided that her rival could be no other than his beautiful assistant, and she confronted Juliette with all the weight of her authority as Ben’s legitimate wife, along with the confidence lent by money and her pain, which Juliette could not ignore. The wife fired her, and warned her if she ever tried to communicate with Ben, she herself would see that something bad happened to her. Ben hadn’t shown his face; he limited himself to a phone call, offering Juliette a small compensation and asking her, if you can believe it, to train her replacement before she left. His wife supervised that call, and the whining letter, last of the series, that closed the episode.

  Two days later Willie came home to find Lori and me in the bathroom holding Juliette, who was curled up on the floor like a whipped child. We brought him up-to-date on what had happened. He said that he had seen it coming; it was not an original drama and everyone recovers from a broken heart. Within a year, he said, we would all be enjoying a glass of wine and having a good laugh as we recalled this unfortunate adventure. However, when Juliette told Willie of the wife’s threats, he found it less amusing. He offered to represent her; she was, after all, entitled to file suit. The case could not be more attractive to a lawyer: a young widow with no money, mother of two young boys, and the victim of a millionaire employer who sexually used and then dismissed her. Any jury would crucify Ben. Willie already had the knife between his teeth, but Juliette wouldn’t hear of that possibility because it wasn’t true. They had fallen in love, she wasn’t a victim. She did allow Willie to send a scorching hot letter announcing that if they threatened Juliette again, the matter would be taken to court. On his own initiative, Willie added that if the wife wished to resolve the problem, she should control her husband better. A letter wouldn’t stop her if she was the kind of person capable of hiring mafiosi to do harm to a rival, but it proved that Juliette was not without protection. In less than a week, a lawyer in Chicago called to assure Willie that there had been a misunderstanding and there would be no further threats.

  Juliette suffered for months, wrapped in the tight embrace of the family, but I wouldn’t be recounting this lamentable episode had she not given me permission to do so, and had Willie’s prognostication not come to pass. I hired Juliette to be my assistant; she began studying Spanish and soon was a participant in the Sausalito literary brothel, where she could work in peace with Lori, Willie, and Tong, who charged themselves with protecting her and with keeping at bay any unfaithful husband who rang the doorbell with lustful intentions. Before the year ended, one night when the whole family was eating dinner at the table of the Mistress of the Castle, Juliette lifted her glass in a toast to love affairs of the past. “To Ben!” we said in a single voice, and her laugh was loud and heartfelt. Now I am waiting for the alignment of the planets that will bring the good man who will make this young woman happy. It’s likely that that could be happening soon.

  Abuela Hilda Leaves with You

  FOR SOME TIME, Abuela Hilda had lived with her daughter in Madrid, where she and her second husband were carrying out a diplomatic mission. It had been a year since this peerless grandmother had come for one of her long visits with us; she had aged suddenly and was afraid to travel alone. In the 1960s, in Chile, I was a young journalist juggling three jobs at once to survive, but the births of my two children didn’t complicate my life since I had help. In the mornings, before going to work, I went by and left you either at the house of my mother-in-law, our adorable Granny, or with Abuela Hilda, who took you, still asleep and bundled in a shawl, and looked after you all day until I came to pick you up in the evening. When you started school, it was Nico’s turn; he too was cared for by those fairy-tale grandmothers who spoiled him like the firstborn of an emir. Following the military coup, we went to Venezuela, and what you and Nico missed most were those two grandmothers. Granny, whose only life was her grandchildren, died of sorrow a couple of years later. When Abuela Hilda was widowed, she came to Venezuela since her only daughter, Hildita, lived there, and took turns between Hildita’s house and ours. My relationship with Abuela Hilda had begun when I was seventeen. Hildita was my brother Pancho’s first girlfriend; they met at school when they were fourteen, ran away, were married, had a son, divorced, married again, had a daughter, and were divorced a second time. In all, they spent more than a decade loving and hating each other, while Abuela Hilda witnessed the spectacle without comment. I never heard her say a disapproving word against my brother, who perhaps deserved it.

  At some moment of her life, Abuela Hilda had decided that her role was to help her small family, in which she generously included me and my children, and she did it to perfection, thanks to her proverbial discretion and good health. She was as strong as a mule, which was why she was able, for example, to take you, Nico, and another half dozen teenagers camping on a Caribbean island that had no water. They reached it by crossing a treacherous sea in a small boat, followed closely by sharks. The boatman left them with a mountain of equipment and, to their good luck, remembered to pick them up a week or two later. Abuela Hilda survived the mosquitoes, the nights drinking rum and warm Coca-Cola, the canned beans, the aggressive mice that nested in their sleeping bags, and other inconveniences that I, twenty years younger, could never have endured. With the same magnanimous attitude, she sat herself down to watch pornography when you were studying psychology and decided to specialize in sexuality. You went around everywhere carrying a suitcase filled with paraphernalia for erotic games that seemed in very bad taste to me, but I never dared voice my opinion, fearing that you would have teased me unmercifully for being such a prude. Abuela Hilda sat down with you, knitting without looking at her needles, and watched some hair-raising videos that included trained dogs. She was an active member of our ambitious home theater company; she sewed costumes, painted scenery, and played any role she was asked, from Madama Butterfly to Joseph in our Christmas pageants. As time passed she grew smaller and her voice thinned to a birdsong, but her enthusiasm for participating in family madness never faltered.

  Abuela Hilda’s last days were not spent with us but with her daughter, who cared for her during her rapid decline. It began with repeated bouts of pneumonia, a vulnerability left from her days as a smoker, the doctors said, and after that she began forgetting her life. Hildita recognized her mother’s final stage as a return to childhood and decided that if you can squander patience on a two-year-old child, there was no reason to deprive an old woman of eighty of the same indulgence. She watched lovingly to see that her mother bathed, ate, took her vitamins, and went to bed. She had to answer the same questions ten times and pretend that she was listening when her mother finished telling a meaningless anecdote and then like a recording repeated the same words over and over. Finally, Abuela Hilda tired of swimming through a nebula of confused memories, of being afraid to be alone, of falling, of the creaking of her bones, and of the assault of faces and voices she couldn’t identify. One day she stopped eating. Hildita called me from Spain to tell me what a battle it was to feed her mother a spoonful of yogurt and the only thing I could think to tell her was not to force her. That was how my grandfather died; he lost his appetite when he decided that one hundred years was too much living.

  Nico caught a plane to Madrid the day after Hildita called. Abuela Hilda knew who he was immediately, even though she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror. Feeling suddenly flirtatious, she asked for her lipstick, and suggested they play a game of cards, which was accomplished with their usual cheating. Nico got her to drink a warm Coca-Cola with rum, in homage to the Caribbean adventures, and in the next half hour he fed her a small bowl of soup. The visit of her proxy grandson, and the promise that if she gained weight she could come to California and smoke marij
uana with Tabra, worked the miracle. Abuela Hilda began to eat again, but that lasted only a month or two more. When she again declared a hunger strike, her daughter decided with sorrow that her mother had every right to go in her own way and at her own time. Abuela Hilda, who was always a small, slim woman, in the next weeks became a minuscule, big-eared sprite so light she could be lifted up on the breeze through the window. Her last words were, “Hand me my purse; Paula came to get me and I don’t want to make her wait.”

  I reached Madrid a few hours later, but not in time to help her daughter take care of the details demanded by death. A few days later I returned to California with a small box containing a handful of Abuela Hilda’s ashes to scatter in your forest; she wanted to be with you.

  Reflections

  I BEGAN THESE PAGES IN 2006. My January 8 ritual has become more complicated with the years; I no longer have the arrogant certainty of youth. To throw myself into another book is as grave as falling in love, a crazed impulse that demands fanatic dedication. With each one, as with a new love, I wonder whether I will have the strength to write it, even whether the project is worth the trouble; there are too many pointless pages, too many frustrated affairs. In the past I submersed myself in writing—and in love—with the temerity of someone who ignores the risks, but now it takes several weeks before I lose my respect for the blank screen of the computer. What kind of book will this be? Will I make it to the end? I don’t ask myself those questions about love because I’ve been with the same lover for eighteen years and have banished any doubts; now I love Willie every day without questioning what kind of love it is or how it will end. I want to believe that it’s an elegant love, and that it will not have a vulgar ending. Maybe what Willie says is true, that we will go hand in hand to the other side of death. All I want is for neither of us to lose our way in senility and cause one of the partners to care for a decrepit body. To live together, lucid, to the last day; that would be ideal.

  The ritual of beginning another book is more or less the same every year. So I thoroughly cleaned my study, aired it out, changed the candles on what my grandchildren call “the ancestor altar,” and got rid of boxes filled with texts and documents used in researching last year’s undertaking. I left nothing on the shelves lining the walls other than the tightly aligned first editions of my books and pictures of the living and dead who are always with me. I took out anything that might muddle inspiration or distract me from this memoir that demands clear space in which to express itself. It was the beginning of a time of solitude and silence. I always take a while to get started; at first the writing moves along in ragged spurts, like a rusty machine, and I know that several weeks must go by before the story begins to take shape. Any distraction frightens off the muse of imagination. What does imagination feed on, anyway? In my experience, on memories, the vast world, the people I know, and also the persons and voices I carry within that help me on the journey of living and writing. My grandmother used to say that space is filled with presences, of what has been, is, and will be. My characters live in that transparent atmosphere, but I can hear them only if I am silent. Toward the middle of the book, when I am no longer me—the woman—but another—the narrator—I can see them as well. They emerge from the shadows and appear before me whole, with their voices and their smell; they assault me in my cuchitril, invade my dreams, occupy my days, and even follow me down the street. That doesn’t happen with a memoir in which the protagonists are my own living family, filled with opinions and conflicts. In this case, the plot is not an exercise of imagination but an attempt to present the truth.

  There was a sense of frustration in the country that had dragged on for a long time. The future of the world looked as dark and impenetrable as tar. The escalation of violence in the Middle East was terrifying, and international condemnation of America was unanimous, but President Bush paid no attention; he wandered like a madman, detached from reality and surrounded by sycophants. He could no longer obscure the calamity of the war in Iraq, even though the press showed only aseptic images of what was happening: tanks, green lights on the horizon, soldiers running through deserted villages, and occasionally an explosion in a market where supposedly the victims were Iraqis. No blood, no dismembered children. Correspondents were embedded in units of the troops and information was filtered through a military apparatus; however, on the Internet anyone who wanted to be informed could consult the media of the rest of the world, including Arab television. Some courageous reporters—and all the comedians and cartoonists—denounced the government’s incompetence. Images of the prison at Abu Ghraib flew round the world, and in Guantanamo prisoners indefinitely detained without being charged died mysteriously, committed suicide, or agonized in hunger strikes, force-fed through large stomach tubes. Things were happening that could not have been imagined a short time before in the United States, which thinks of itself as a beacon of democracy and justice: the writ of habeas corpus was suspended for prisoners, and torture was legalized. I expected the public to react with one voice, but almost no one gave those matters the importance they deserved. I come from Chile, where for sixteen years torture was institutionalized: I know the irreparable harm that leaves in the souls of victims and victimizers—indeed the entire population, which becomes an accomplice. According to Willie, the United States had not been this divided since Vietnam. Republicans controlled everything, and if the Democrats didn’t win in the November elections, we’d be screwed for good. How could they not win? I asked myself, considering that Bush’s popularity had plummeted to numbers Nixon had in his worst days.

  The person who was most disturbed was Tabra. When she was young she had left the country because she could not support the war in Vietnam, and now she was prepared to do the same thing, even to renounce her U.S. citizenship. Her dream was to end her days in Costa Rica, but a lot of foreigners had had the same idea and the price of property in that country had soared beyond Tabra’s resources. That was when she decided to move to Bali, where she could conduct her business dealings with the local silversmiths and artisans. She would leave a couple of sales representatives in the United States and all the rest could be done over the Internet. That was all we talked about on our walks. Tabra saw fatal signs on every side, from the television news to mercury in salmon.

  “Do you think it will be different in Costa Rica or Bali?” I asked her. “Wherever you go the salmon will have mercury, Tabra.”

  “At least there I won’t be an accomplice to the crimes of this country. You left Chile because you didn’t want to live under a dictatorship. Why can’t you understand that I don’t want to live here?”

  “This isn’t a dictatorship.”

  “But it can become one, sooner than you think. What your Tío Ramón told me is true: people get the government they deserve. That’s the downside of a democracy. You should leave, too, before it’s too late.”

  “My family is here. I’ve put a lot into bringing them together, Tabra, and I want to enjoy them because I know it can’t last much longer. Life tends to separate us, and it takes a lot of effort to stay together. At any rate, I don’t think we’ve reached the point where it’s necessary to leave this country. We can still change things. Bush won’t be around forever.”

  “Well, good luck. As for me, I’m going to settle down in some peaceful place where you can come with your family when you need somewhere to go.”

  I began gradually to tell Tabra good-bye as she dismantled the workshop it had cost her so many years to establish. She had help from her son, Tangi, who left his job to be with her in her last months in this country. One by one she said good-bye to the refugees she had worked with for so long, worried about them because she knew that for some it would be difficult to find another job. She got rid of her art collections, with the exception of some valuable paintings I’m keeping for her. She couldn’t completely cut her ties with the United States. She would have to come back at least a couple of times a year to see her son and to supervise her business int
erests; her jewelry requires a much larger market than tourist beaches in an Asian paradise. I assured her that when she came to California she could always count on having a room in our home. Then she emptied her house of furniture and put it up for sale.

  Those preparations and my sad walks with Tabra infected me with the delirium of my friend’s uncertainty. I would go home and hug Willie, feeling blue. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to put our savings into gold coins; we could sew them into the hem of a skirt and be ready to flee. “What gold coins are you talking about?” Willie asked me.

  The Tribe Reunited

  ANDREA’S ENTRANCE INTO ADOLESCENCE was sudden and dramatic. One night in November she came into the kitchen, where the family was gathered, wearing contact lenses, lipstick, a long white dress, silver sandals, and drop earrings made by Tabra; she had been chosen to sing in the chorus at the school Christmas festivities. We didn’t recognize that sensual, golden beauty from Ipanema with her distant, mysterious air. We were used to seeing her in scroungy blue jeans and clumsy outback boots, with a book in her hand. We’d never seen that girl who was shyly smiling at us from the doorway. When Nico, whose Zen serenity we had so often laughed at, realized who it was, he was thunderstruck. Instead of celebrating the young woman who’d just made an appearance, we had to console her father over the loss of his awkward little girl. Lori, who had taken Andrea to buy the dress and the makeup, was the only one in on the secret of the transformation. While the rest of us were recovering from our stupefaction, she took a series of photographs, some with Andrea’s thick dark honey-colored hair loose on her shoulders, some with it piled on her head, in a model’s poses that were all affectation and spoof.