Paula

by Isabel Allende

  It was my good fortune that my school was the only one not to close its doors when the crisis began. My brothers, on the other hand, could not go to class and had to spend months of lethal boredom penned up in the apartment. Miss St. John considered that the war was a vulgar occurrence that had nothing to do with the English, and therefore preferred to ignore it. The street in front of the school was cut into two zones separated by piled-up sandbags protecting the two sets of combatants. In newspaper photos, the men and their weaponry were terrifying, but seen behind their barricades from high atop the building they looked like vacationers on a picnic. Among their sandbags, they listened to the radio, cooked, received visits from wives and children, and whiled away the hours napping or playing cards and checkers. Sometimes they arranged a brief ceasefire in order to go for water or cigarettes. The unflappable Miss St. John jammed the green hat reserved for grand occasions firmly on her head and marched out to confer in her atrocious Arabic with the inconsiderate individuals who were obstructing passage in the street and to ask them to allow the school bus through, while the frightened teachers and few girls still in attendance observed from the roof. I have no idea what arguments she wielded, but the fact is that the vehicle continued to operate, and on time, right to the very end when I was the last student riding. I was careful not to tell at home that other parents had withdrawn their children from the school, and I certainly never mentioned the daily negotiations between the driver and the men on the barricades who allowed us to pass. I attended classes until the establishment was deserted and Miss St. John courteously asked me not to return for a few days—“until this disagreeable incident has been resolved and people return to their senses.” By then the situation had become very violent, and a spokesman for the Lebanese government had advised diplomats to send their families home because their safety could not be guaranteed. After several secret councils, Tío Ramón put my brothers and me on one of the last commercial flights to leave Beirut. The airport was swarming with men scrambling to get out; some tried to take their wives and daughters as a kind of cargo—as they did not consider them whole human beings, they could not understand the need to buy tickets for them. Then, to the alarm of the French stewardess, as soon as we were airborne a woman wrapped head to foot in some dark cloth set up a small kerosene burner in the aisle of the plane to prepare food.

  My mother stayed behind in Beirut with Tío Ramón for a few months, until they were transferred to Turkey. In the meantime, the U.S. marines had returned to their carriers and sailed away without a trace, taking with them the corroboration of my first kiss. These were the circumstances of our return to the opposite side of the world and my grandfather’s house in Chile. I was fifteen, and it was the second time I had ever been away from my mother—the first was the time she joined Tío Ramón for their romantic tête-à-tête in the north of Chile, the one that consecrated their love affair. I did not know at the time that we were going to be separated for most of the remainder of our lives. I began writing her my first letter on the plane; I have continued to write almost every day over the years, and she has done the same. We stack this correspondence in a basket and at the end of the year tie it with a red ribbon and put it away on a closet shelf; we have collected mountains of pages this way. We have never reread them, but we know that the record of our lives is safeguarded against poor memory.

  Up till then, my education had been chaotic. I had learned a little English and French, memorized a good part of the Bible, and absorbed Tío Ramón’s lessons in self-defense, but I lacked the most elemental knowledge for functioning in this world. When I reached Chile, my grandfather decided that with some help I could finish my schooling in a year, and prepared to teach me history and geography himself. Later he found out that I also did not know how to add, and so he enrolled me in private math classes. The teacher was a tiny old lady with jet-dyed hair and several missing teeth, who lived far away from us in a modest house cluttered with gifts from fifty years’ worth of students and permeated with the abiding odor of cooked cauliflower. I had to take two buses to get there, but it was worth the effort because that woman succeeded in cramming enough numbers in my head to allow me to pass the examination, after which they were permanently erased. Boarding a bus in Santiago could be fraught with danger, it required a resolute temperament and an acrobat’s agility. The bus never ran on time; you had to wait for hours, and then when it came it was jammed, with so many passengers hanging from the doors that it tilted to one side. My stoic formation and double joints helped me survive in this daily warfare. I shared the class with five other students, one of whom always sat beside me, lent me his notes, and walked me to the bus stop. While we stood patiently waiting in sunshine or rain, he listened, never commenting, to my exaggerated tales about trips to places I could not locate on the map but had read about in my grandfather’s Encyclopaedia Britannica. When the bus came, this friend helped me clamber over the cluster of humanity bulging from the entrance, pushing me from the rear with both hands. One day he invited me to go to the movies. I told Tata I had to stay and study with the teacher, and set off with my beau to a neighborhood theater where they happened to be showing a horror film. When the antediluvian lizard head of the Monster from the Green Lagoon appeared only a few centimeters from the inattentive maiden swimming there, I let out a yell, and he used the excuse to grab my hand. The boy, I mean, not the monster. The rest of the movie went by in a haze. I cared nothing about the fangs of the giant reptile or the fate of the stupid blonde paddling in the lagoon; my attention was focused on the warmth and moistness of that hand caressing mine—an experience nearly as sensual as biting the ear of my beloved in La Paz and a thousand times greater than the North American soldier’s kiss stolen in the Beirut ice-skating rink. I was walking on air when I reached my grandfather’s house, convinced that I had met the love of my life and that our intertwined hands signified a formal engagement. I had heard my friend Eliza in Lebanon say that a girl could get pregnant by splashing in the same swimming pool with a boy, and I suspected, logically, that an entire hour of intermingling the sweat of our hands could have the same effect. I lay awake all night, imagining my future married life and anxiously awaiting the next math class. The next day, however, my friend did not show up; all during class I sat in torment, watching the door, but he did not come that day, or the rest of the week, or ever again; he simply vanished. Eventually, I recovered from that humiliating abandonment, and for years completely forgot about him. Twelve years later, however, I felt as if I had seen him again; that was the day I was called to the morgue to identify my father’s corpse. I have asked myself many times why that boy disappeared so suddenly, and, from turning it over and over in my mind, finally reached a dark conclusion, but I think I would rather let the matter drop, because only in soap operas do lovers discover one day that they are brother and sister.

  One of the reasons I forgot my short-lived love was that I met another boy—and here, Paula, is where your father enters the story. Michael had English roots. He was from one of those families that have lived and died in Chile for generations but still call England “home.” They read weeks-old English newspapers and maintain a nineteenth-century lifestyle and social code appropriate to the arrogant subjects of a great Empire, a way of life not found today even in the heart of London. Your paternal grandfather worked for a North American copper company in the north of Chile, in a town so insignificant it rarely appears on maps. The gringo colony consisted of twenty or so houses surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, a sphere in which—with air-conditioning, bottled water, and a profusion of catalogs from which they could order from the United States anything from condensed milk to terrace furniture—the inhabitants attempted to reproduce as faithfully as possible the mode of life of their home cities. Each family dutifully cultivated a garden, despite harsh sun and drought. The men played golf among the sandpits and the ladies competed in contests for best roses and pies. On the other side of the fence were the Chilean laborers who lived
in rows of shacks with common bathrooms, their only diversions a soccer field drawn with a stick on the hard dirt of the desert and a bar on the outskirts of the camp where they got drunk every weekend. It was said that there was also a brothel, although I never found it when I went looking, perhaps because I was expecting at least a red light and the house must have been in a hovel indistinguishable from all the others. Michael was born and lived the first years of his life in that place, in Edenic innocence, protected from all harm, until he was sent to a British boarding school in the center of Chile. I think he did not have the slightest idea he was in Chile until he was old enough for long pants. His mother, whom everyone remembers as Granny, had large blue eyes and a heart that never knew an unkind thought. Her life was lived between kitchen and garden; she smelled of fresh baked bread, butter, and plum preserves. Years later, when she had given up her dreams, she smelled of alcohol, but not many knew that because she kept a prudent distance and covered her mouth with her handkerchief when she talked, and also because you, Paula, who were eight or nine, hid the empty bottles so no one would discover her secret. Michael’s father was a good-looking man, dark as an Andalusian but very proud of the German blood that coursed through his veins. He cultivated virtues he considered Teutonic, and grew to be the model of an honest, responsible, and punctual man, although he was also inflexible, authoritarian, and cold. He never touched his wife in public, but he always called her “my young lady,” and his eyes shone when he looked at her. He spent thirty years in that North American camp earning sound U.S. dollars, retired when he was fifty-eight, and moved to Santiago, where he built a house on the edge of a private golf club. Michael grew up in a boys’ school dedicated to study and manly sports, separated from his mother, the only person who could have taught him to express his feelings. During his vacations, he and his father shared polite conversation and chess games. I met Michael soon after his twentieth birthday, when he was in his first semester of civil engineering. He rode a motorcycle and lived in an apartment with a housekeeper who treated him like a young lord; he never washed a pair of socks or boiled an egg. He was tall, young, handsome, and very slender, with large caramel-colored eyes, and he blushed when he was nervous. A mutual girlfriend introduced us. He came to see me one day under the pretext of helping me with my chemistry, and soon asked formal permission from my grandfather to take me to the opera. We went to see Madama Butterfly, and I—totally ignorant about anything musical—thought it was a comedy, and laughed aloud when I saw a rain of pink plastic flowers falling from the ceiling over a fat woman singing at the top of her lungs as she knifed herself in the belly before her son, a pitiful child, blindfolded and waving a flag in each hand. That was the beginning of a long, sweet courtship destined to last many years before being consummated, since Michael had six years of university course work ahead of him and I was still in school. It was several months before we held hands at the Wednesday concert, and almost a year before our first kiss.

  “I like this young man, he is going to improve the race,” my grandfather chuckled when finally I admitted that we were in love.

  DEATH LAID ITS HANDS ON YOU MONDAY, PAULA. IT CAME AND POINTED to you, but found itself face to face with your mother and grandmother and, for now, has backed off. It is not defeated, and is still circling round, grumbling, in its swirl of dark rags and clicking bones. You were on the other side for a few minutes, and in fact no one can explain how or why you are back. We had never seen you so ill; you were burning with fever, and we could hear a terrifying rumble from your chest and see the whites of your eyes through a slit between your eyelids. Suddenly your blood pressure plummeted almost to zero and the alarms on the monitors sounded and the room filled with people, all working so hard around you that they forgot about us, and that was how we came to be present when your soul escaped your body, as they injected drugs and administered more oxygen and tried to make your exhausted heart start beating again. They rolled in a machine to give you electric shocks, terrible charges that lifted you from the bed. We heard orders, tense voices, running; other doctors came with new machines and new syringes. Who knows how many minutes went by, it seemed hours, an eternity. We couldn’t see you; the bodies of the people attending you blocked our view, but your anguish and the triumphant breath of Death were all too clear. There came a moment when all the feverish agitation suddenly congealed, as in a photograph, and then I heard my mother’s muted murmur begging you to fight, Paula, commanding your heart to keep on beating in the name of Ernesto and the precious years you had still to live and for the good you had yet to give. Time stopped on the clocks; the green curves and peaks on the screens flattened into straight lines and a buzz of distress replaced the shriek of the alarms. Someone said, “There’s nothing more we can do . . . ,” and another voice added, “She’s gone.” People moved away; some left the room, and we could see you, lying motionless and pale, like the marble statue of a girl. Then I felt my mother’s hand in mine, pulling me forward, and we walked to your bedside and without a single tear we offered you the entire reservoir of our energy, all the health and strength of our most recondite genes from Basque sailors and indomitable American Indians, and in silence we invoked all the gods known and yet to be known, and the beneficent spirits of our ancestors, and the most formidable forces of life, to race to your rescue. Our unvoiced wail was so intense that from fifty kilometers away Ernesto heard it, clear as a bell; he knew that you were on the edge of the abyss and started immediately for the hospital. In the meantime, the air around your bed was frozen and time was suspended, but when the clock again began to mark the seconds, Death had lost. The vanquished doctors had left and the nurses were preparing to disconnect the tubes and cover you with a sheet, when one of the magic screens gave a sigh and the capricious green line began to undulate, signaling your return to life. Paula! my mother and I cried in a single voice, and the nurses repeated, Paula! and the room was filled with your name.

  Ernesto arrived an hour later; he had burned up the highway and streaked through the city like lightning. He had never, ever, doubted you would get well, but on this occasion, defeated, kneeling in the chapel, he prayed only that your martyrdom would end and you would find rest. Even so, when he put his arms around you the next morning, the vehemence of his love and his desire to keep you with him were more powerful than resignation. He feels your body in his own; he knows your state before the clinical diagnoses; he perceives signs invisible to other eyes and is the only one who seems to communicate with you. “Live, live for me, for us, Paula, we’re a team,” he begged. “You’ll see, everything will be fine. Don’t leave me, I will be your support, your refuge, your friend; I will heal you with my love. Remember that blessed third of January when we met and everything changed forever. You can’t leave me now, we’ve just begun, we have a half a century ahead of us.” I don’t know what other pleas and secrets and promises he whispered in your ear on that dark Monday, or how he instilled the wish to live in every kiss he gave you, but I am sure that you are breathing today because of his tender tenacity. Your life is a mysterious victory of love. You have lived through the worst of the crisis; they are giving you the exact dose of antibiotics, they have controlled your blood pressure, and little by little your fever is going down. You are back where you were. I don’t know what this kind of resurrection means. You have been in a coma for more than two months, and I am not fooling myself, Paula, I know how ill you are, but you can recover completely. The porphyria specialist swears that you have no brain damage, that the illness has attacked only the peripheral nerves. What blessed words. I repeat them over and over as a kind of magic spell to save you. Today they turned you on your side in the bed and in spite of the tortured look of your poor body your face was the same, you looked as beautiful as a sleeping bride, with blue shadows under your long eyelashes. The nurses have sprayed you with cologne and combed your hair into a long braid that hangs from the bed like a sailor’s rope. There are no signs of your conscious intelligence, but you
are alive, and your spirit is still within you. Breathe, Paula, you must breathe. . . .