Paula (25 page)

T
HIS IMMOBILITY IS A STRANGE EXPERIENCE
. T
HE DAYS ARE MEASURED
grain by grain in an hourglass of patient sand, so slow the calendar does not record them. It seems I have been forever in this wintry city of churches, statues, and imperial avenues. All the resources of magic are futile, messages in bottles thrown into the sea with the hope they will be found on some distant shore and someone will come to rescue us—until now, however, there has been no answer. Through forty-nine years of a life of action and struggle, I have run after goals I can no longer recall, pursuing something nameless that was always a little farther on. Now I am forced to inaction and silence; no matter how much I run I get nowhere, and if I scream, no one hears. You, Paula, have given me this silence in which to examine my path through the world, to return to the true and the fantastic pasts, to recover memories others have forgotten, to remember what never happened and what still may happen. Absent, mute, paralyzed, you are my guide. Time moves so slowly. Or perhaps it doesn't move at all and it is we who pass through it. I have day after day to reflect, with nothing to do, only wait, while you lie in this mysterious state, like an insect in a cocoon. I ask myself what kind of butterfly will emerge when you awake. . . . I spend my hours by your side, writing. Elvira's husband brings me coffee and asks me why I put so much effort into this endless letter you cannot read. You will read it some day, I'm sure, and you will make fun of me in that teasing way you use to demolish my sentimentalism. Looking back, I view the totality of my fate and, with a little luck, I shall find meaning for the person I am. With a brutal expenditure of energy, I have been rowing upstream all my life. I am tired, I want to turn around, drop the oars, and let the current carry me gently toward the sea. My grandmother wrote in her notebooks to safeguard the fleeting fragments of the days and outwit loss of memory. I am trying to distract death. My thoughts swirl in inexhaustible eddies; you, on the other hand, are fixed in a static present, totally aloof from loss of the past or presages of the future. I am frightened. I have known fear before, but there was always an escape; even during the terror of the military coup there was the salvation of exile. Now I am in a blind alley with all doors closed to hope, and I don't know how to handle so much fear.

I imagine that you would prefer to hear about the happiest part of your childhood, the days when Granny was still alive, and your parents loved each other, and Chile was your country, but this notebook is coming to the seventies, when things began to change. I was very slow to realize that history had made such an abrupt about-face. In September 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president by a coalition of Marxists, Socialists, Communists, segments of the disillusioned middle class, and Christian radicals, all of whom grouped together under the emblem of the Popular Unity, determined to embark on a program of transition toward socialism without altering the nation's long bourgeois and democratic tradition. Despite evident contradictions in such a project, a wave of irrational hope mobilized many, many people in the society who had been waiting for the emergence of a New Man, a more generous, compassionate, and just individual motivated by high ideals. At the very instant Allende's triumph was proclaimed, his adversaries began to sabotage it, and the wheel of fortune took a tragic turn. The night of the election I did not go out in the street to celebrate with Allende's supporters, not wanting to offend my in-laws and my grandfather, who feared the rise in Chile of a new Stalin. Allende triumphed with his fourth candidacy, although there had been a widespread belief that he had used up his luck in the three earlier, failed campaigns. The Popular Unity doubted he could win, and came very close to choosing Pablo Neruda as its candidate. The poet had no political ambition, and he felt old and exhausted; he was interested only in his bride: poetry. Nevertheless, as a disciplined member of the Communist Party, he was prepared to respect orders. When, after many internal discussions among party members, Salvador Allende finally was designated the official candidate, Neruda was the first to smile in relief and rush to congratulate him. The deep wound that split the country into irreconcilable factions began during that campaign, when families were divided, couples dissolved, and friendships lost. My father-in-law covered the walls of his house with rightist propaganda. We argued passionately, but stopped short of insults, because the affection we both felt for Granny and the children was stronger than our differences. At that time, Michael's father was still a handsome, healthy man, but the slow decline that would lead to the abyss of oblivion had already begun. He spent the mornings in bed wrapped up in his mathematics, and religiously followed the three soap operas that consumed a good part of the afternoon; sometimes he didn't dress at all, but wandered around in pajamas and slippers, waited on by his wife, who brought him his food on a tray. His obsession with washing his hands became uncontrollable: his skin was ulcerated and his elegant fingers like condor claws. He believed in his candidate's victory, but occasionally felt a twinge of doubt. In rhythm with the approaching elections, winter began to abate and spring burst into bud. Granny, busy in the kitchen with the first preserves of the season and with her grandchildren, did not participate in the political discussions but became very upset when she heard our heated voices. That year I became aware that my mother-in-law was secretly drinking, but she did it so discreetly no one else noticed.

On election day, those most surprised by their triumph were the winners; they honestly had not expected it. Behind the closed doors and windows of upper-class neighborhoods the defeated shuddered, convinced that the class hatred built up over centuries would cause mob violence, but that never happened, only peaceful demonstrations of rejoicing. A crowd chanting “The people, united, will never be defeated” marched through the streets waving banners and flags as the United States embassy staff met in emergency session. The North Americans had begun to conspire a year earlier, financing rightist extremists and trying to seduce certain generals sympathetic to a coup. In the barracks, a military in a state of alert awaited instructions. Tío Ramón and my mother were happy that Salvador Allende had won. Tata acknowledged his defeat, and, when Allende unexpectedly visited my parents' home that same night, he made an effort to greet him like the gentleman he was. The next day, as on any other day, I went to work; I found the building abuzz with contradictory rumors and the owner of the publishing house stealthily packing his cameras and readying his private plane to fly him, his family, and a major portion of his belongings out of the country, while a private sentry stood guard over his Italian racing car to prevent the supposedly inflamed rabble from defacing it. “We will carry on as if nothing has happened,” Delia Vergara announced, using the same tone Miss St. John had employed years before in Lebanon when she decided to ignore the war. And so we did for the next three years. At dawn on the morning after the election, my father-in-law was one of the first in line at the bank to withdraw his money; he was planning to flee the country as soon as the Cuban hordes debarked or Soviet communists began executing Chilean citizens. “I'm not going anywhere, I'm staying here with my babies,” Granny assured me, weeping behind her husband's back. The grandchildren had become her reason for living. But the moment for flight was postponed and the tickets lay on the mantelpiece, always at hand but never used, because none of the worst predictions ever came to pass: no one took the nation by assault, the borders remained open, there were no firing squads, as my father-in-law feared, and Granny stood firm that no Marxist would separate her from her grandchildren, certainly not one who had the same name as her daughter-in-law.

As there was no absolute majority, the congress was called on to decide the election. Until then, the rule of plurality had always been respected and the candidate who had one vote more than any other won, but, in this instance, the Popular Unity had awakened too much distrust. A long tradition, however, outweighed the fear of the parliamentarians and the power of the U.S. embassy, and after long deliberations by the congress—which was dominated by Christian Democrats—a document was drawn up demanding that Allende respect constitutional guarantees. He signed it and two months later, in a solemn ceremony, accepted the presidential sash. For the first time in history, a Marxist had been elected by democratic vote; the eyes of the world were on Chile. Pablo Neruda was appointed ambassador to France, where a year later he was informed he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. When the aged King of Sweden handed him the gold medal, the poet dedicated it to all Chileans—“because my poetry belongs to my nation.”

President Allende named Tío Ramón ambassador to Argentina, and so my mother became the administratrix of an enormous edifice on the one hill in Buenos Aires, with several grand salons, a dining room for forty-eight guests, two libraries, twenty-three bathrooms, and an indeterminate number of valuable rugs and artworks left from previous governments, a luxe difficult to reconcile with the Popular Unity, which aspired to an image of austerity and simplicity. There were so many service personnel—chauffeurs, cooks, waiters, chambermaids, and gardeners—that it took the acumen of a quartermaster to organize work and eating schedules. The kitchen functioned full-time, preparing cocktail parties, luncheons, ladies' teas, official banquets, and diets for my mother, who had developed stomach trouble from all her responsibilities. Although she barely tasted them, she invented recipes that made the embassy table famous. One of her triumphs was a turkey, presented intact, with feathers fanned from its rump and staring eyes; with the removal of four pins the skin peeled off like a dress to reveal moist meat and a body cavity stuffed with small birds that were in turn stuffed with almonds—a thousand light years from my Lebanese school lunches of slices of liver floating in tepid water. At one of those feasts, I met the most celebrated seer in Buenos Aires. She was sitting across the table from me, and never took her eyes off me until the meal was over. She must have been about sixty, aristocratic in appearance, and dressed in black in a somber and rather antiquated style. As we left the dining room she came up to me, saying she would like to talk with me in private; my mother introduced her as María Teresa Juárez, and accompanied us to a library. Without a word, the woman sat down on a sofa and pointed me to a place by her side; she took my hands, held them in hers for a few minutes that, not knowing what she intended, seemed very long, and finally made four predictions. I wrote them down at the time, and have never forgotten them: There will be a bloodbath in your country, You will be motionless or paralyzed for a long time, Your only path is writing, and One of your children will be known in many parts of the world. Which of them? my mother wanted to know. The seer asked to see their photographs, studied them for a few seconds, and then pointed to you, Paula. As the other three predictions have been fulfilled, I suppose the last will be too; that gives me hope that you will not die, since you haven't lived out your destiny. As soon as we leave this hospital, I intend to contact that lady, if she is still alive, and ask what she sees for you in the future.

Tío Ramón, enthusiastic about his mission in Argentina, opened the door of the embassy to politicians, intellectuals, press—anything and anybody that would contribute to Salvador Allende's project. Seconded by my mother, who demonstrated great fortitude, organization, and courage during those three years, he dedicated himself to normalizing the difficult relations between Chile and Argentina, two neighbors that had had considerable friction in the past and now had to overcome the suspicion inspired by the Chilean socialist experiment. In hours he stole from sleep, my stepfather examined the inventory and the nettlesome embassy accounts to assure that no funds were lost in excess or oversight. Every move of the Popular Unity was scrutinized by its political enemies, who were always on the lookout for the slightest excuse to denigrate its actions. His first surprise was the budget for security; he questioned his colleagues in the diplomatic corps and discovered that private bodyguards had become a real problem in Buenos Aires. What had begun as protection against kidnapping and assassinations had spiraled out of control, and by that time the guards numbered more than thirty thousand and were still growing. These private security forces constituted a true military unit, armed to the teeth, lacking ethics, superior officers, norms, or rules, and promoting terror to justify their own existence. It was an open secret that it was easy to kidnap or assassinate someone; all that was necessary was to meet the sum demanded by the guards and they would take on the task themselves. Tío Ramón, however, decided to take the risk, and fired his guards because he believed that the representative of a people's government could not be surrounded by hired killers. Soon thereafter, a bomb exploded in the consulate that reduced lamps and windows to a mountain of crystal dust and forever destroyed the nerves of my mother's Swiss dog, but no one was wounded. To smooth over the scandal, a press release was issued blaming the incident on a faulty gas line. That was the first terrorist attempt my parents confronted in Buenos Aires. Four years later, they would have to slip away in the dead of night to save their skins. When they accepted the post they had no concept of how much work was required in that embassy, Chile's most important after Washington, but they used experience accumulated through a lifetime of diplomatic service to fulfill their mission, and did it with such brilliance that they would pay for it with many years of exile.