Paula (36 page)

“What do you want me to do?” she asked finally, tears in her eyes.

“Help me keep Paula healthy and comfortable, help at the moment of her death, and help in seeking other avenues of treatment. I know that traditional doctors can't do anything for her, I'm going to try alternative medicine: healers, plants, homeopathy, everything I can find.”

“That is just what I would do if she were my daughter, but you should set a time limit for these experiments. You can't live on wishful thinking, and things here don't come cheaply. Paula could remain in this condition for many years, so you must husband your strength and your resources with care.”

“How long, then?”

“Let's say three months. If in that period of time there are no appreciable results, you stop trying.”

“All right.”

She introduced me to Dr. Miki Shima, a colorful Japanese acupuncturist whom I am saving to be a character in a novel, that is, if I ever write fiction again. The word spread quickly, and soon I had a parade of unconventional practitioners offering their services: one who sells magnetic mattresses for energy, a hypnotist who tapes stories from end to beginning and plays them to Paula on earphones, a holy woman from India who incarnates the Universal Mother, an Apache who combines the wisdom of his great-grandfathers with the power of crystals, and an astrologer who sees the future, but in visions so confused they can be interpreted in contradictory ways. I listen to all of them, at the same time trying not to disturb Paula's comfort. I also made a pilgrimage to a famous psychic in Utah, a man with dyed hair and an office filled with stuffed animals, who, without moving from his home, examined Paula with his third eye. He recommended a combination of powders and drops quite complicated to administer, but Nicolás, who is very skeptical about such things, compared the ingredients with a bottle of Centrum, an everyday multivitamin tablet, and found they were almost identical. None of these strange doctors has promised to restore my daughter's health, but perhaps they can improve the quality of her days and achieve some form of communication. The healers also offer me their prayers and natural remedies; one of them sent for holy water from a sacred spring in Mexico, and sprinkles it with such faith that maybe a miracle will happen. Dr. Shima comes each week and lifts our spirits; he examines Paula carefully, places his slender needles in her ears and feet, and prescribes homeopathic remedies. From time to time he strokes her hair as if she were his daughter, and his eyes fill with tears. “She's so pretty,” he says. “If we can keep her healthy, maybe science will find a way to renew damaged cells, even transplant brains. Why not?” “No way, Doctor,” I reply. “No one is going to conduct Frankenstein experiments on Paula.” For me, he brought Oriental herbs which translate as, “For sadness provoked by grief or loss of love,” and I suppose it is thanks to them that I continue to function with relative normality. Dr. Forrester observes all this with sadness. Maybe she also prays for a miracle. This kind woman has become a friend. She seems concerned about my health, too; she finds me depressed and drained, and has prescribed sleeping pills, warning me not to take more than one because they can be fatal.

It does me good to write, even though at times I can barely force myself to it because each word sears like a burn. These pages are an irreversible voyage through a long tunnel; I can't see an exit but I know there must be one. I can't go back, only continue to go forward, step by step, to the end. As I write, I look for a sign, hoping that Paula will break her implacable silence and answer somehow in these yellow pages—or perhaps I do it only to overcome my fear and to fix the fleeting images of an imperfect memory. It also helps to walk. A half-hour from our house there are hills and dense forests where I go to breathe deeply when I am choked by anguish or ground down by exhaustion. The landscape, green, humid, and rather somber, reminds me of the south of Chile: the same centuries-old trees, the sharp scent of eucalyptus, pine, and wild mint, the streams that turn to cascades in winter, the cries of birds and shrill of crickets. I have discovered a solitary place where verdant treetops form the high dome of a Gothic cathedral and a thread of water slips with its own music among the stones. I like to sit there, listening to the water and the rhythm of the blood in my veins, trying to breathe calmly and retreat within my own skin, but instead of finding peace, premonitions and memories thunder through my mind. In the most difficult moments of the past, I also sought solitude in a forest.

From the moment I crossed the cordillera that marks the boundary of Chile, everything began to go badly, and got progressively worse as the years went by. I did not know it yet, but I had begun to live the prophecy of the Argentine seer: many years of immobility. It was not to be within the walls of a cell or in a wheelchair, as my mother and I had conjectured, but in the isolation of exile. My roots were chopped off with a single whack and it would take six years to grow new ones nurtured in memory and in the books I would write. During that long period, frustration and silence were to be my prison. The first night in Caracas, sitting on a strange bed in a bare room, with the uninterrupted uproar from the street filtering through a small window, I took an accounting of what I had lost and contemplated the long road of obstacles and loneliness that lay ahead. The impact of arrival was that of having fallen onto a different planet. I had come from winter, the petrifying order of the dictatorship, and widespread poverty to a hot and anarchical country in the midst of a petroleum boom, an oil-rich society in which profligacy reached absurd limits: everything was flown in from Miami, even bread and eggs, because it was easier to import than to produce them. In the first newspaper that came into my hands, I read about a birthday party, complete with orchestra and champagne, held for some society woman's spoiled lapdog and attended by other pampered pooches in party togs. For me, raised in the sobriety of Tata's house, it was hard to believe such exhibitionism; with time, however, I not only got used to it, I learned to enjoy it. Love of revelry, the sense of living in the present, and the optimistic vision of the Venezuelans that at first terrified me later became the lessons I valued most from that period of my life. It took years to learn the rules of that society and to discover a way to slip over the rugged terrain of exile without creating too much friction, but when finally I succeeded, I felt freed of the back-bowing burdens I had carried in my own country. I lost my fear of appearing ridiculous, of social sanctions, of “coming down in the world,” as my grandfather referred to poverty and my own hot blood. Sensuality ceased to be a defect that had to be hidden for the sake of gentility, and was accepted as a basic ingredient of my temperament and, later, my writing. In Venezuela, I cured myself of some ancient wounds, along with new animosities. I shed my old skin and met the world with my nerves laid bare until I grew another, tougher hide. In Venezuela, I educated my children, acquired both a daughter- and a son-in-law, wrote three books, and ended my marriage. When I think of the thirteen years I lived in Caracas, I feel a mixture of incredulity and lightheartedness. Five weeks after my arrival, when it was obvious that a return to Chile anytime soon would be impossible, Michael came and brought the children, leaving the house locked up with our belongings inside. He was not able to rent it because so many people were leaving the country that it made more sense to buy at a bargain price than to pay rent; furthermore, ours was a rustic cabin whose only value was sentimental. While it sat empty, the windows were broken out and the contents stolen, but we didn't know that until a year later, and by then it didn't matter. Those five weeks away from my children were a bad dream. I still remember with photographic clarity Paula's and Nicolás's faces when they got off the plane holding their father's hand and felt the hot and humid breath of that eternal summer. They were both wearing wool clothes; Paula had her rag doll under her arm and Nicolás was carrying the heavy iron Christ his teacher had given him. He looked smaller, and thin; I learned afterward that he had refused to eat in my absence. A few months later, thanks to visas obtained with the help of Valentín Hernández, who had never forgotten the promise he made my mother in the Romanian hospital, the entire family was reunited. My parents moved into an apartment two floors above our own, and, after complicated negotiations, my brother Pancho and his family were allowed to leave Moscow and join us in Venezuela. Juan also came, with the intention of staying, but he could not endure the heat and general commotion and so made arrangements to go to the United States on a student scholarship. Granny stayed in Chile, worn down by loneliness and sorrow; overnight, she lost the grandchildren she had raised and found herself facing an empty life of looking after an aged man who spent his days in bed watching television and a neurotic Swiss dog inherited from my mother. She began to drink more and more, and since the children were gone and she had no need to keep up appearances, she made no attempt to hide it. Bottles piled up in corners while her husband pretended not to see them. She practically stopped eating or sleeping; she spent her nights with a drink in her hand, rocking disconsolately in the chair where for years she had sung the children to sleep. Worms of sadness were eating away inside; the aquamarine of her eyes faded and her hair fell out in clumps; her skin grew thick and furrowed, like a turtle's. She stopped bathing and dressing, and wandered about in her robe and slippers, drying her tears on her sleeve. Two years later, Michael's sister, who lived in Uruguay, took her parents to live with her, but it was already too late to save Granny.

Caracas in 1975 was happy and chaotic, one of the world's most expensive cities. New buildings and broad highways were springing up everywhere and money was squandered in a surfeit of luxuries; there were bars, banks, restaurants, and hotels for love nests on every corner, and the streets were permanently clogged by the thousands of late-model automobiles that could not move in the pandemonium of the traffic. No one respected traffic lights, but they would stop dead on the freeway to let some distracted pedestrian cross. Money seemed to grow on trees; thick wads of bills changed hands with such speed that there was no time to count them. The men maintained several mistresses, the women went shopping in Miami every weekend, and children considered an annual trip to Disney World to be an innate right. Without money, you could do nothing, as I quickly learned after going to the bank to change the dollars I had bought in the black market in Chile and found to my horror that half were counterfeit. There were slums where people lived in misery, and regions where polluted water killed as many people as it had in the colonial era, but in the euphoria of easy wealth, no one remembered that. Political power was divided in a friendly manner between the two most powerful parties—the Left had been annulled and the guerrilla movement of the seventies, one of the most organized on the continent, defeated. Coming from Chile, it was refreshing to find that no one talked about politics or illness. The men, strutting with power and virility, wore ostentatious gold chains and rings, joked and spoke at a shout, and always had one eye on the women. Beside them, discreet Chileans with their high-pitched voices and delicate Spanish seemed like dolls on a wedding cake. The most beautiful women on the planet, the splendid product of many combined races, swayed their hips to a salsa rhythm, exhibiting exuberant bodies and winning every international beauty contest. The air vibrated, every opportunity was seized to break into song, radios blasted on the street, in cars, everywhere. Drums, four-string
cuatros,
guitars, singing, dancing, the country was one continuous fiesta on a petroleum binge. Immigrants came from the four cardinal points to this land to seek their fortunes—especially Colombians, who poured across the border by the millions to earn a living doing jobs no one else wanted. A foreigner was at first accepted only grudgingly, but soon the Venezuelans' natural generosity threw open the doors. The most disliked immigrants were from the Southern Cone—Argentines, Uruguayans, and Chileans—because they were primarily political refugees, intellectuals, technicians, and professionals who competed with Venezuelans at the higher echelons. I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you're from or what you did before. I met people who were truly eminent in their own country yet were unable to revalidate their professional licenses and ended up selling insurance door to door—also nobodies who invented diplomas and pedigrees and somehow fought their way to the top: everything depended on audacity and good connections. Anything could be had through a friend, or by paying the fee for corruption. A foreign professional could be granted a contract only through a Venezuelan associate who sponsored him and lent his name to the deal; otherwise, a newcomer had no chance at all. The going rate was fifty percent; one did the work and the other signed and collected his percentage up front, as soon as the first payments were made. Within a week of his arrival, a job came up for Michael in a broiling region in the eastern part of the country, an area just beginning to be developed because of the boundless treasure beneath the soil. All Venezuela was sitting on a sea of black gold; anywhere you buried a pick in the ground, a thick stream of oil shot up. The natural riches of that country are paradisaical; there are regions where nuggets of gold and raw diamonds are scattered across the earth like seeds. Everything grows in that climate; along the highways you see wild banana and pineapple trees, you toss a mango stone on the ground and within a few days have a tree—a flowering plant even budded on our television antenna. Nature there is still in a stage of innocence: warm beaches with white sand and matted trees, mountains with snowy peaks where lost ghosts of conquistadors still roam, vast lunar plains suddenly interrupted by prodigious
tepuys,
towering cylinders of live rock that look as if they were set there by giants from other planets, impenetrable jungles inhabited by ancient tribes that have yet to discover the Iron Age. Everything gives of itself unstintingly in that enchanted land. Michael became part of a gigantic project on one of the largest dams in the world, in a green and overgrown region of snakes, sweat, and crime. The men were housed in temporary camps, leaving their families in nearby cities, but my chances of finding work in that part of the country, or of finding good schools for the children, were nonexistent, so we three stayed in Caracas and Michael came to visit us every six or seven weeks. We lived in an apartment in the noisiest and most densely populated district of the city. For the children, who were used to walking to school, riding their bicycles, playing in their garden, and visiting Granny, it was hell; they couldn't go out alone because of the traffic and violence in the streets, they were bored to tears confined within four walls watching television, and every day they begged me, Please, could we go back to Chile? I did not help them bear the anguish of those early years; on the contrary, my bad humor rarefied the air we breathed. I could not find employment in any of the jobs I knew how to do, and past experience was less than useless—all doors were closed. I sent out hundreds of résumés, answered countless newspaper ads, and filled out a mountain of applications, all without a single bite; everything was left hanging while I awaited an answer that never came. I hadn't caught on that in Venezuela the word “no” is considered in bad taste. When I was told to “Come back tomorrow,” my hopes were renewed; I failed to understand that postponement was an amiable form of rejection. From the modest celebrity I had enjoyed in Chile from my television and feminist reporting, I slumped to the anonymity and daily humiliation of a person looking for work. Thanks to a Chilean friend, I published a weekly humor column in a newspaper and continued to do so for several years just to keep a byline, but I was working for love of the art—the remuneration was equivalent to what I paid the taxi when I delivered the article. I did some translating, wrote some television scripts, and even a play. For some of my efforts, I was paid royally but the work never saw the light of day; in other cases, it was used but I never saw a cent of payment. Two floors above me, Tío Ramón dressed every morning in one of his ambassador suits and went out to look for work, but, unlike me, he never complained. His fall was more to be lamented than mine because he had risen higher, had lost more, was twenty-five years older, and must have had twice the dignity to be injured; even so, I never saw him depressed. On weekends, he organized trips to the beach with the children, veritable safaris that he tackled head on at the wheel of the car, with Caribbean music on the radio and a joke on his lips, sweating, scratching mosquito bites, and reminding us not to forget we were filthy rich, until finally we could take a dip in the warm turquoise ocean, elbow to elbow with hundreds of others with the same idea. Occasionally, on some blessed Wednesday, I would escape to the coast and enjoy a clean, empty beach, but such solitary excursions were filled with risks. In those times of loneliness and impotence, I more than ever needed some contact with nature—the peace of a forest, the silence of a mountain, the whisper of the sea—but women were not expected to go alone to the movies, much less somewhere in open country where anything could happen. I felt like a prisoner in the apartment, and in my own skin, just as my children did, but at least we were safe from the violence of the dictatorship, sheltered in the vastness of Venezuela. I had found a secure place to scatter the soil from my garden and plant forget-me-nots, but I didn't know that yet.