Paula (20 page)

One hundred days. It has been exactly one hundred days since you fell into your coma. My mother is drained; yesterday she could not get out of bed. She is so exhausted that finally she has bowed to our pressure to return to Chile. I bought her a ticket, and just a couple of hours ago took her to the plane. “Now, don't you dare die and make me the orphan of all orphans,” I warned as we said goodbye. When I returned to the hotel, I found my bed turned back, a pot of lentil soup on the burner, and her prayer book left for company. And so that is the end of our honeymoon. Never before have we had so much time together; never, except when my children were babies, have I shared such a long and profound intimacy. With men I have loved, living together has always included elements of passion, flirtation, and modesty—or has degenerated into frank disgust. I didn't know how comfortable it is to share a space with another woman. I will miss her, but I need to be alone and gather my energy in silence: I am being deafened by hospital noises.

Ernesto's father is leaving soon, and I will miss him, too. I have spent hours in the company of this very manly man who takes a chair beside your bed to watch over you with uncommon delicacy and to divert me with his life's adventures. He lost his father and his uncles in the Spanish Civil War; of all his family, only the women and youngest children survived. Your husband's grandfather was executed against the wall of a church; during the confusion of those days, his wife, unaware that she was a widow, escaped from village to village with her three children, suffering hunger and terrible deprivations. She saved all three, and they grew up in Franco's Spain without modifying their strong Republican convictions. At eighteen, Ernesto's father was a young student; it was the height of General Franco's dictatorship, just when repression was at its worst. Like his brothers, he secretly belonged to the Communist Party. One day a female comrade fell into the hands of the police. He was immediately advised, and he told his mother and brothers goodbye and fled before the girl was forced to reveal his whereabouts. He first rambled through North Africa, but his steps led him to the New World, and finally to Venezuela; he worked there for more than thirty years, married, and had children. At Franco's death, he returned to his village in Cordoba in search of his past. He located some of his old comrades and from them found the address of the girl he had thought about every day for three decades. In a barren flat with stained walls, the woman was waiting, sitting by the window with her embroidery. He did not recognize her but she had not forgotten him, and held out her hands, thankful for that long overdue visit. That was when he learned that she had been tortured but had confessed nothing, and realized that his flight and his long exile had been unnecessary; the police had never been looking for him because no one had informed against him. It is too late now to think of changing things, the map of his destiny has already been drawn. He cannot return to Spain because his soul has been tanned like leather in the forests of the Amazon. During the countless hours we share in the hospital, he recounts, in the calmest of voices, incredible adventures: rivers wide as seas, peaks where no man had trod before, valleys where diamonds burst from the earth like seeds and serpents kill with the mere scent of their venom; he describes tribes wandering naked beneath centuries-old trees, Guajiro Indians who sell their wives and daughters like cattle; soldiers in the hire of drug traffickers; cattle rustlers who rape, kill, and burn with impunity. Then there was the day he went into the jungle with a group of laborers and a mule train; they were using their machetes to hack their way through the vegetation, until one of the men swung too wide and his machete slashed his leg to the bone. Blood gushed in torrents, despite a tourniquet and other measures to stop the flow. Then someone remembered the Indian who drove the mules—an ancient of days with a reputation for being a healer—and ran to get him from the end of the train. The Indian took his time coming, glanced at the leg, waved away the curious, and began his treatment with the parsimony of one who has often seen death. He fanned the mosquitoes away from the wound with his hat, soaked the leg in his spit, and traced a few crosses in the air, all the while chanting in some singsong jungle tongue. “And that stopped the hemorrhaging,” Ernesto's father concluded in a casual tone. They bound up the frightful wound with a rag, tied the man onto an improvised travois and, without his losing another drop of blood, traveled with him several hours to the nearest first-aid station where his leg could be stitched and splinted. He is lame, but he has his leg. I told this story to the nuns who visit you every day and they were not particularly surprised; they are accustomed to miracles. If an Amazon Indian can staunch a stream of blood with saliva, just think, Paula, how much more science can do for you. I must get more help. Now that I am alone, the days are longer and the nights are darker. I have more than enough time to write, because once I have finished the rituals of your daily care, I have nothing more to do, except remember.

At the beginning of the sixties, my work had progressed from forestry statistics to a faltering beginning in journalism, which, in turn, and by pure chance, led to television. The rest of the world was already transmitting in color, but in Chile, the farthest corner of the hemisphere, we were still in the first stages of experimental programs in black and white. The privileged owners of a television set became the most influential persons in their district; neighbors, as if hypnotized, clustered around the few existing sets to watch a motionless geometric design on the screen and listen to elevator music. They spent entire afternoons, openmouthed, eyes glazed, awaiting some revelation that would change the course of their lives, but nothing happened: just the square, the circle, and the same irritating melody. Eventually we moved from basic geometry to a few hours of educational programming on the functioning of a motor, the industrious character of the ant, and classes of first aid demonstrating mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a pallid manikin. We were also offered news, narrated as if on radio and without images, and occasionally some silent film. For want of more interesting subjects, my boss in the FAO was assigned fifteen minutes to expound on the problem of world hunger. It was the era of apocalyptic prophesies: population growth was out of control, there was not enough food to go around, the soil was exhausted, the planet would perish in less than fifty years and the few survivors would be murdering each other for the last crumb of bread. The day of the program, my boss was indisposed and I was sent to the station to make his excuses. “I'm very sorry,” the producer said coldly, “but at three o'clock this afternoon someone from your office must appear before the camera, because that was our agreement and I have nothing to fill that time.” My feeling was that if the viewers could tolerate the square and the circle, or Chaplin's
The Gold Rush
five times a week, this emergency was not critical. I returned with a piece of film edited with scissors and featuring a few feeble water buffalo plowing a drought-parched paddy in some remote corner of Asia. Since the documentary was in Portuguese, I invented a dramatic voice-over that more or less fit the sequence with the emaciated beasts, and narrated it with such emphasis that no one was left with any doubt about the imminent extinction of buffalo, rice, even humankind itself. When the fifteen minutes was over, the producer, with a sigh of resignation, asked me to come back every Wednesday to campaign against hunger—the poor man was frantic to fill his schedule. That was how I ended up in charge of a program for which I had to do everything from the script to the design of the credits. Working in that station consisted of arriving on time, sitting before a red light, and talking into a void; I was never aware that on the other side of the light two million ears were awaiting my words and two million eyes judging my hairdo, and I was always amazed when strangers spoke to me on the street. The first time you saw me on the screen, Paula, you were a year and a half old, and the shock of seeing your mother's decapitated head peering through a pane of glass left you nearly catatonic. My in-laws had the only set within the radius of a kilometer, and every afternoon their living room was filled with viewers whom Granny treated like guests. She spent the morning baking cookies and turning the crank of an ice cream maker and nights washing plates and sweeping up the circuslevel mess on her floors, with never a word of thanks for any of it. I became the most conspicuous person in the neighborhood; adults greeted me with respect and children pointed at me. I could have continued in that career the rest of my days, but finally the country tired of starving cattle and diseases of rice. When that happened, I was one of the few people around with television experience—rudimentary as it was—and could have undertaken a different program, but by then Michael had graduated and we both itched for adventure: we wanted to travel before we had more children. We obtained two scholarships and set off for Europe with you by the hand. You were nearly two years old and a complete lady in miniature.

Tío Ramón has not been the inspiration for any of the characters in my books; he is too decent and has too much common sense. Novels are made of the demented and the villainous, of people tortured by obsessions, of victims of the implacable mills of destiny. From the narrative point of view, an intelligent, good man like Tío Ramón is useless; on the other hand, as a grandfather he's perfect. I knew that the instant I handed him his first grandchild in the Geneva airport and watched tenderness surface from a secret wellspring hidden until then. He came to meet us wearing a large medal on a tricolor ribbon; he handed you a velvet box containing the keys to the city and welcomed you in the name of the Four Cantons, the Bank of Switzerland, and the Calvinist Church. At that moment, I realized I truly loved my stepfather and, with a single stroke, the tormenting jealousy and rages of the past were erased. You were wearing the Sherlock Holmes hat and coat I had dreamed before you were born and that Mama Hilda, following my precise instructions, had stitched for you on her sewing machine. You spoke with propriety and behaved like a little lady, as your Granny had taught you. In Chile I had been working full time, and had little idea how to bring up children; it was very comfortable for me to delegate that responsibility, and now, in view of the splendid results, I realize that my mother-in-law did a much better job. Granny took it upon herself, among other tasks, to toilet train you. She bought two potties, a small one for you and a large one for her, and you both sat for hours in the living room, playing visitors, until you caught on. She had the only telephone in the neighborhood, and friends who came to make a call became accustomed to seeing that gentle English lady sitting opposite her granddaughter with her posterior bared to the world. It was Mama Hilda who discovered a way to get you to eat, because you had the appetite of a nightingale. She improvised a saddle that she strapped on her dog, a huge black beast with the stamina of a burro, and as you rode she followed with a spoon. In Europe, those two exemplary grandmothers were replaced by Tío Ramón, who convinced you that he was the world owner of Coca-Cola and that no one in all the universe and beyond could drink one without his personal authorization. You learned to call him on the telephone in French, interrupting sessions of the United Nations Council, to ask his permission to have a Coke. He also made you believe he was the owner of the zoo, the children's programs on television, and the famous fountain in Lake Geneva. Knowing the times the fountain was turned on, and trusting Swiss punctuality, he set his watch and then pretended to call the president of the republic to give the order by telephone; you watched out the window, and your face lighted with wonder when the water shot up from the lake like a majestic column rising toward the sky. He shared such surreal games with you that I came to fear for your mental health. He had a box containing six little dolls he called “Death Row Inmates,” whose fate was to be executed at dawn the following morning. Every night you presented yourself before that nonpareil executioner to plead for clemency, and always obtained a twenty-four-hour stay of sentence. He told you that he descended directly from Jesus Christ and, to prove that they both had the same last name, years later took you to the Catholic cemetery in Santiago to see the mausoleum of don Jesús Huidobro. He also assured you he was a prince, and that the day he was born people embraced each other in the street as church bells rang announcing the good news:
Ramón is born! Ramón is born
. He hung all the decorations he had received in his long diplomatic career around his neck and told you they were medals for heroism won in battles against the enemies of his kingdom. For years, Paula, you believed everything he told you.

That year we divided our time between Switzerland and Belgium, where Michael was studying engineering and I participated in a television course. In Brussels we lived in a tiny attic apartment above a barbershop. All the other renters were damsels with very short skirts, very low décolletages, a rainbow variety of wigs, and tiny, curly-haired dogs with bows around their necks. At any hour, we heard snatches of music, heavy breathing, and quarrels, as clients rushed in and out. The elevator opened directly into the single room of our floor, and when we forgot to shoot the bolt we sometimes awakened at midnight with a stranger by our bed asking for Pinky or Suzanne. My fellowship was part of a program for Congolese, to whom Belgium was indebted for many years of brutal colonization. I was the single exception, a light-skinned woman among thirty black males. After suffering a week of humiliations, I came to the conclusion that I was not willing to run such a gauntlet, and offered to withdraw, even though we would be badly strapped without the fellowship money. The director asked me to explain my sudden departure to the class, and I had no choice but to face that united front and in my lamentable French tell them that in my country men did not enter the women's bathroom unzipping their fly, did not shove women aside to go through a door first, did not knock each other down for a place at the table or to get on a bus, and that I felt badly mistreated and was leaving because I was not used to such foul behavior. A glacial silence greeted my peroration. After a long pause, one of them spoke to say that in his country no decent woman publicly exhibited her need to go to the bathroom, nor did she try to go through a door before the men but in fact walked several steps behind, and that his mother and his sisters never sat at the table with him, they ate what the men left. He added that they felt permanently insulted by me, that they had never seen a person with such bad manners, and, as I was a minority in the group, I would just have to make the most of it. “It is true that I am a minority in this course, but you are a minority in this country,” I replied. “I am willing to make concessions, but you must do that, too, if you want to avoid problems here in Europe.” It was a solution worthy of Solomon; we agreed upon certain basic rules, and I stayed on. They never wanted to sit with me at the table or on the bus, but they stopped bursting into the bathroom and physically shoving me. During that year, my feminism got lost in the shuffle: I walked a modest two meters behind my companions, never looked up or raised my voice, and was the last one through the door. Once, two of them came to our apartment to get some class notes and that same afternoon the concierge came to warn us that “people of color” were not welcome, and that she had made an exception in our case because though we were South American, we were not terribly dark-skinned. As a souvenir of my Belgian-African adventure, I have a photograph in which I appear in the center of my companions, my face like raw dough lost in a sea of thirty ebony visages. On our fellowships, Michael and I were paupers, but we were in our twenties, an age when poverty is fashionable. Many years later I returned to Belgium to accept a literary prize from the hands of King Baudouin. I was expecting a giant in a cape and crown, like the royal portraits, but found myself before a small, gentle, weary gentleman with a slight limp, whom I did not recognize. He asked me amiably whether I knew his country, and I told him about my time as a student, when we lived on such a tight budget that we ate nothing but fried potatoes and horse meat. He looked at me with dismay, and I was afraid I had offended him. “And do you like horse meat?” I asked, in an attempt to make amends.