The Japanese Lover

by Isabel Allende

  “So, Grandma, my father isn’t Nathaniel’s son? In that case I’m Ichimei’s grandson! Tell me whether I’m a Fukuda or a Belasco!” exclaimed Seth.

  “If you were a Fukuda, you’d have Japanese features, wouldn’t you? You’re a Belasco.”

  THE CHILD NEVER BORN

  During the first months of married life, Alma was so caught up in her pregnancy that her anger at having renounced her love for Ichimei became a bearable inconvenience, like having a stone in her shoe. She settled into a placid, ruminant existence, secure in Nathaniel’s tender care and the shelter the family provided. Although Martha and Sarah had already given them grandchildren, Lillian and Isaac were expecting this baby as if it were royalty, because it would bear the name Belasco. They set aside a sunny room decorated with children’s furniture and Walt Disney characters painted on the walls by an artist brought specially from Los Angeles. They devoted themselves to looking after Alma and satisfied her every whim. By the sixth month she had put on too much weight; her blood pressure was high, her face blotchy, her legs swollen, and she lived with a perpetual headache; she could not fit into her shoes and was forced to wear beach slippers, and yet from the very first signs of life in her belly she fell in love with the creature she was bringing into the world. It was not Nathaniel or Ichimei’s, but entirely hers. She wanted a boy, to call him Isaac and offer her father-in-law the grandson who would continue the name of Belasco. She had promised Nathaniel that nobody would ever know they did not share the same blood. She remembered, with stabs of guilt, that if Nathaniel had not prevented her, the child would have ended up in some Tijuana sewer.

  As she became increasingly besotted with the baby, so she was more and more horrified at the changes to her body, even though Nathaniel assured her that she was radiant, more beautiful than ever, and increased her weight problems by bringing her orange-filled chocolates and other treats. Their happy relationship as brother and sister continued. Elegant and neat, he always used the bathroom near his study at the far end of the house and never undressed in front of her. Alma however lost all sense of shame with him and gave in to her misshapen state, sharing the prosaic details, her ailments, the nervous crises of maternity in a fulsome manner she had never demonstrated before. In these months she broke the fundamental rules her father had instilled in her of never complaining, never asking for favors, and never trusting anyone.

  Nathaniel became the center of her existence; beneath his wing she felt happy, safe, and accepted. This created a lopsided intimacy between them that seemed natural as it fitted both their characters. If they ever spoke of this imbalance, it was to agree that once the baby was born and Alma had recovered they would try to live as a normal couple, although neither of them seemed in any great hurry to do so. Alma meanwhile had discovered the perfect place on his shoulder, just below the chin, where she could lay her head and doze.

  “You’re free to go with other women, Nat. All I ask is that you’re discreet, I don’t want to be humiliated,” Alma often said.

  He responded each time with a kiss and a joke. Even though she found it impossible to free herself from the impression Ichimei had made on her mind and body, she was jealous of Nathaniel; half a dozen women were pursuing him, and she guessed that seeing him married might not be a drawback, but for several of them could even be an incentive.

  They were at the family house on Lake Tahoe, where the Belasco family went to ski, drinking hot cider at eleven in the morning while they waited for a snowstorm to subside so that they could go outside, when Alma came stumbling barefoot into the living room in her nightgown. Lillian rushed over to steady her, but Alma pushed her away, trying to focus.

  “Tell my brother, Samuel, my head is exploding,” she murmured.

  Isaac tried to lead her over to a sofa and called out to Nathaniel, but Alma seemed rooted to the spot, as heavy as a piece of furniture, clutching her head in her hands and muttering some nonsense about Samuel, Poland, and diamonds in the lining of a coat. Nathaniel arrived in time to see his wife collapse with convulsions.

  This attack of eclampsia occurred in the twenty-second week of her pregnancy and lasted one minute fifteen seconds. None of the three other people in the room understood what it was: they all thought it was epilepsy. Nathaniel only managed to lay her on her side, hold her to stop her harming herself, and keep her mouth open with a spoon. The terrible shuddering soon calmed, leaving Alma exhausted and disoriented. She had no idea where she was or who was with her; she was groaning from her headache and the stomach spasms. They put her in the car wrapped in blankets and skidded along the icy track down to the local clinic, where the duty doctor, a specialist in skiers’ broken bones and bruises, could do little more than bring her blood pressure down. The ambulance took seven hours to get from Tahoe to San Francisco, battling the storm and obstacles along the highway. When at last an obstetrician examined Alma, he warned the family of the imminent risk of fresh convulsions or a brain seizure. At five and a half months, the child had no hope of surviving; they would have to wait six weeks before inducing the birth, but during that period both mother and child ran the risk of dying. As if hearing this, a few minutes later the baby’s heartbeat ceased in the womb, thus saving Nathaniel from a tragic decision. Alma was quickly wheeled to the surgical ward.

  Nathaniel was the only one who saw the child. Shaking with exhaustion and sadness, he took him in his hands, pushed apart the folds of the toweling, and saw a tiny being, all shriveled and blue, the skin as fine and translucent as an onion, completely formed and with half-open eyes. He bent down and gave his head a long kiss. The cold shocked his lips, and he could feel the deep rumble of silent sobs rising from the soles of his feet, shaking his whole body and emerging as tears. He wept, thinking he was doing so for the dead child and for Alma, but in fact he was doing so for himself, for his constrained, conventional life, the weight of the responsibilities he could never free himself from, the loneliness that had oppressed him since birth, the love he longed for but would never know, the marked cards he had been dealt, all the underhanded tricks destiny had played on him.

  * * *

  Seven months after the miscarriage, Nathaniel took Alma on a trip to Europe to help her forget the overwhelming melancholy that was paralyzing her. She had started talking about her brother, Samuel, at the time they lived together in Poland; a governess who haunted her nightmares; a blue velvet coat; Vera Neumann and her owl spectacles; a pair of horrible classmates from school; books she had read whose titles she couldn’t remember but whose characters she felt sorry for; and other nonsensical memories. Nathaniel thought that a cultural tour might reawaken Alma’s inspiration and her enthusiasm for her silk screens, and if that happened, he intended to suggest she study for a while at the Royal Academy of Arts, the United Kingdom’s oldest art school. He considered the best therapy for Alma would be to get away from San Francisco, from the Belascos in general and from him in particular. They had not mentioned Ichimei again, and Nathaniel assumed she had kept her word and was not in contact with him. He intended to spend more time with his wife, cut down on the hours he worked, and whenever possible took cases and studied his pleas at home. They continued to sleep in separate rooms but gave up the pretense that they spent the night together. Nathaniel’s bed was installed once and for all in his former bedroom, surrounded by walls covered in hunting scenes, with horses, dogs, and foxes. Neither of them could sleep, but any sensual temptation had dried up between them. They stayed up reading until past midnight in one of the living rooms, both on the same sofa and covered in the same blanket. On those Sundays when the weather was too poor to go sailing, Nathaniel persuaded Alma to accompany him to the movies, or they took a nap side by side on their insomnia sofa, which took the place of the marriage bed they did not have.

  The journey was to range from Denmark to Greece, including a cruise on the Danube and another in Turkey. It was to last two months and end in London, where they would separate. In the second week, strolling hand in
hand through the narrow back streets of Rome after a memorable meal and two bottles of the best Chianti, Alma came to a halt beneath a streetlamp, grabbed Nathaniel by the shirt, pulled him toward her, and kissed him full on the lips. “I want you to sleep with me,” she ordered. That night, in the decadent palace-cum-hotel where they were staying, they made love intoxicated by the wine and the Roman summer, discovering what they already knew of each other, feeling as though they were committing a forbidden act. All Alma’s knowledge of carnal love and her own body was thanks to Ichimei, who compensated for his lack of experience with unfailing intuition, the same he used to revive any drooping plant. In the cockroach motel, Alma had been a musical instrument in Ichimei’s loving hands. She experienced nothing of this with Nathaniel. They made love hastily, as awkward and anxious as two schoolkids playing hooky, not giving themselves time to explore each other or smell each other’s skin, let alone to laugh or sigh together. Afterward they were overcome by an inexplicable unease that they tried to disguise by smoking in silence covered by the sheet, with the moon’s yellow light spying on them from the window.

  The next day they exhausted themselves visiting ruins, climbing ancient stone steps, peering inside cathedrals, losing themselves among marble statues and extravagant fountains. After nightfall they again drank too much, staggered back to the decadent hotel, and for a second time made love without any great desire but with the best will in the world. And so, day by day and night after night, they toured the cities and cruised the waters of the trip as planned, gradually establishing the married couple’s routine they had so carefully avoided so far, until it became natural to share the bathroom and wake up on the same pillow.

  Alma did not stay on in London. She returned to San Francisco with piles of museum leaflets and postcards, art books, and photos of picturesque corners taken by Nathaniel. She was keen to take up her painting again; her head was filled with colors and images from all she had seen: Turkish rugs, Greek urns, Flemish tapestries, paintings from every age, icons overlaid with precious stones, languid Madonnas and starving saints, but also fruit and vegetable markets, fishing boats, laundry hanging from balconies in narrow streets, men playing dominoes in taverns, children on beaches, packs of stray dogs, sad donkeys, and ancient roofs in villages dozing under the weight of centuries of routine and tradition. Everything came alive in broad brushstrokes of vibrant color on her silk screens. By then she occupied a workshop of eight thousand square feet in San Francisco’s industrial district, a place that had remained unused for many months and that she aimed to bring back to life. As she submerged herself in work, weeks went by without her thinking of either Ichimei or the child she had lost. On their return from Europe, the intimacy with Nathaniel dwindled away to almost nothing; each of them was very busy, and so the sleepless nights reading together on the sofa came to an end, although they were still united by the tender friendship they had always enjoyed. Alma seldom dozed off with her head in the exact spot between her husband’s shoulder and chin where she had once felt so secure. They no longer slept between the same sheets or shared the same bathroom. Nathaniel used the bed in his study, leaving Alma on her own in the blue room. If they occasionally made love it was by coincidence, and always with too much alcohol in their veins.

  “I want to free you from your promise to be faithful to me, Alma. It’s not fair to you,” Nathaniel said to her one night when they were admiring a shower of shooting stars from the garden pergola, smoking marijuana. “You are young and full of life, you deserve more romance than I can give you.”

  “What about you? Is there someone out there who is offering you romance that you want to be free for? I’ve never stood in your way, Nat.”

  “It’s not about me, Alma.”

  “You’re freeing me from my promise at a bad moment, Nat. I’m pregnant, and this time you are the only possible father. I was going to tell you once I was sure.”

  Isaac and Lillian Belasco greeted the news of the pregnancy with the same enthusiasm as the first time. They refurbished the room they had ready for the other baby and prepared to pamper it. “If it’s a boy and I’m dead by the time he is born, I suppose you’ll give him my name; but if I’m still alive you can’t do that, because it would bring bad luck. In that case I want him to be called Lawrence Franklin Belasco, after my father and the great president Roosevelt, may they rest in peace,” the patriarch declared. He was fading steadily and was hanging on only because he couldn’t leave Lillian; his wife had become his shadow. She was almost deaf, but she didn’t need to hear. She had learned to decipher other people’s silences with great accuracy: it was impossible to hide anything from her or fool her, and she had developed an incredible ability to guess what people were about to say, and to reply even before they spoke. She had two obsessions: improving her husband’s health, and seeing that Nathaniel and Alma loved each other as they should. For both of these she turned to alternative therapies, which went from magnetized mattresses to healing elixirs and aphrodisiacs. At the forefront of naturalist witchcraft, California offered a wide variety of people selling hope and consolation. Isaac resigned himself to hanging crystals around his neck and drinking alfalfa juice and scorpion syrup, while Alma and Nathaniel put up with massages of ylang-ylang essential oil, Chinese shark-fin soups, and other alchemical remedies Lillian turned to in order to boost their lukewarm love.

  Lawrence Franklin Belasco was born in the spring with none of the problems the doctors had been anticipating as a result of the eclampsia his mother had previously suffered. From his first day in this world his name seemed too big for him, and everyone called him Larry. He grew healthy, fat, and self-reliant, without any need for special attention. He was so placid and quiet that sometimes he would fall asleep under the furniture and no one would notice for hours. His parents handed him over to the grandparents and a succession of nannies, without worrying too much about him, because at Sea Cliff there were several adults who doted on him. He didn’t sleep with his parents, but with Isaac and Lillian, whom he called Papa and Mama; he called his own parents by the more formal Mother and Father.

  Nathaniel spent little time in the house; he had become the city’s most prominent lawyer, earning a vast amount of money, and in his free time played sports or explored the art of photography. He was waiting for his son to grow a little before initiating him into the pleasures of sailing, without ever dreaming that day would never come. Since her in-laws had taken charge of their grandson, Alma began to travel in search of ideas for her work without feeling guilty about leaving him behind. In Larry’s early years she planned more or less short trips in order not to be apart from him for any great length of time, but she soon learned that this didn’t matter, as whenever she returned from either a prolonged or shorter absence, her son greeted her with the same polite handshake rather than the passionate embrace she had been longing for. She concluded with regret that Larry loved his cat more than her, and this gave her the freedom to travel to the Far East, South America, and other remote spots.

  THE PATRIARCH

  Larry Belasco spent the first four years of his life spoiled by his grandparents and the employees at Sea Cliff, cosseted like an orchid, his every whim satisfied. This system, which would have forever ruined the character of a less balanced child, instead made him friendly, helpful, and even-tempered. This did not change with the death in 1962 of his grandfather Isaac, one of the two pillars holding up the fantasy universe he had lived in until then.

  Isaac’s health had recovered when his favorite grandson was born.

  “Inside I feel like a twenty-year-old, Lillian. What on earth happened to my body?”

  He had enough energy to take Larry for a walk every day, showing him the garden’s botanical secrets, and even crawled around the floor with him. Isaac bought him the pets he himself had wanted as a boy: a boisterous parrot, fish in an aquarium, a rabbit that disappeared forever under the furniture as soon as Larry opened its cage, and a long-eared dog, the first of several gene
rations of cocker spaniels that the family had from then on. While the doctors were at a loss to explain the marked improvement in Isaac’s health, Lillian put it down to the healing arts and esoteric sciences in which she had become an expert.

  One day Isaac took little Larry to Golden Gate Park, where they spent the afternoon on a rented horse, with the grandfather in the saddle and Larry sitting in front of him, enfolded in his arms. They returned home sunburned, smelling of sweat, and enthused with the idea of buying a horse and a pony so that they could ride together. Lillian was waiting for them at the garden barbecue to cook sausages and marshmallows, the favorite dinner of both grandfather and grandson. Afterward she bathed Larry, put him to bed in her husband’s room, and read him a story until he fell asleep. She drank her small glass of sherry with a tincture of opium and went to bed herself.

  At seven o’clock the next morning she was awakened by Larry’s little hand shaking her shoulder. “Mama, Mama, Papa’s had a fall.”

  They found Isaac sprawled on the bathroom floor. It took the combined effort of Nathaniel and the chauffeur to move the freezing, stiff body, which had become as heavy as lead, and lay him out on his bed. They tried to keep Lillian from seeing him, but she pushed everyone out of the room, shut the door, and did not open it again until she had finished washing her husband’s corpse slowly, rubbing it with lotion and cologne, closely examining every detail of this body that she knew better than her own and loved so much, surprised to see it had not grown old in any way but was exactly as she had always seen it, the same tall, strong young man who could lift her in his arms with a laugh, tanned from his work in the garden, the same shock of black hair as when he was twenty-­five, and the fine hands of a good man. When she reopened the door she was serene. Although the family was afraid that without him Lillian would soon shrivel up with grief, she showed them that death is not an insurmountable obstacle to communication between those who truly love each other.