Paula (37 page)

I awaited Michael's rare visits with impatience, but when finally we were together I felt inexplicably disillusioned. He arrived worn out from work and life in the camp; he was not the man I had invented in the suffocating nights of Caracas. In the following months and years, we ran out of words; it was all we could do to manage a neutral conversation sprinkled with commonplaces and polite phrases. I had the impulse to seize Michael by the shirt and shake him and scream at him, but I was inhibited by the rigorous sense of fairness instilled in my English schools and, instead, welcomed him with a tenderness that welled up spontaneously when I saw him but disappeared within minutes. The man had just spent weeks in the jungle working to support his family, he had left Chile, his friends, and the security of a good job to follow me in an unpredictable adventure, and I had no right to bother him with my heart's impatience. “It would be much healthier if you two would grab each other by the hair the way we do,” was the comment of my mother and Tío Ramón, my only confidantes in that period, but it was impossible to confront a husband who offered no resistance; all Michael's aggression had sunk out of sight, converted into boredom in the cottony texture of our relationship. I tried to convince myself that despite the difficult circumstances nothing actually had changed between us. I did not succeed, but in trying I deceived Michael. If I had spoken frankly, the final disaster might have been avoided, but I lacked the courage to do it. I was burning with unanswered desires and worries; that was a time of several love affairs embarked upon to while away my loneliness. No one knew me, I owed no one explanations. I looked for release where I was least likely to find it, because in truth I am not cut out for sneaking around. I am very clumsy in the tangled stratagems of the lie; I left signs everywhere, but Michael was too decent to suspect that anyone could be untrue to him. I argued with myself in secret, and boiled with guilt, divided between disgust and rage against myself and resentment toward a remote husband floating imperturbably in a fog of ignorance—always pleasant and discreet, with unflagging equanimity, never asking for anything but expecting to be waited upon with a distant and vaguely grateful air. I needed an excuse to break off the marriage once and for all, but he never provided one—just the opposite, during those years his reputation for saintliness actually grew in the eyes of others. I suppose he was so absorbed in his work, and his need to have a home was so great, that he chose not to delve too deeply into my feelings or my activities. A chasm was widening beneath our feet but he did not want to see the signs and clung to his illusions to the last moment, when everything came crashing down with a roar. If he suspected anything, he may have attributed it to an existential crisis, thinking it would go away, like the twenty-four-hour flu. I realized only years later that blindness in the face of reality was the strongest facet of his character; I always assumed total responsibility for the failure of our love, that is, that I wasn't able to love him as much as he apparently loved me. I never asked myself whether he deserved more dedication, I only wondered why I couldn't give it. Our paths diverged; I was changing and drifting away from him and could do nothing to prevent it. While he was working in the exuberant vegetation and steamy humidity of a wild landscape, I was butting my head against the walls of the apartment in Caracas like a crazed rat, always looking south toward Chile and counting the days until our return. I never dreamed that the dictatorship would last seventeen years.

The man I fell in love with in 1978 was a musician, one more political refugee among the thousands from the south who flocked to Caracas in the decade of the seventies. He had escaped the death squads, leaving a wife and two children behind in Buenos Aires while he looked for a place to settle and find work, with a flute and a guitar as his only letter of introduction. I suppose that the love we shared caught him by surprise, when he least desired and needed it, just as it did me. A Chilean theater producer who lighted in Caracas, hoping to make a killing like so many attracted by the oil bonanza, got in touch with me and asked me to write a musical comedy on a local theme. It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up, I was out of a job and feeling desperate about how my small hoard of savings had evaporated. We needed a composer with experience in this type of show to write the songs, although I'm not sure why the producer preferred someone from the south to one of many excellent Venezuelan musicians. That was how, there beside a dusty baby grand piano, I came to meet the man who would be my lover. I remember very little about that first day; I did not feel comfortable with that arrogant and bad-humored Argentine, but I was impressed with his talent: with no effort at all, he incorporated my vague ideas into precise musical phrases, and he played any instrument by ear. To someone like myself, who can't sing “Happy Birthday,” he seemed a genius. He was as slim and taut as a toreador, ironic and aggressive, with a Mephistophelian beard, cut rather short. He was as lonely and lost in Caracas as I, and I suppose that circumstance drew us together. A few days later, we went to a park, out of hearing of indiscreet ears, to go over the songs; he took his guitar and I brought a notebook and a picnic basket. That and other long musical sessions turned out to be pointless because, overnight, the producer vanished like smoke, leaving a theater under contract and nine people who never got paid. Some of us had wasted time and effort; others had invested money that disappeared without a trace—at least I was left with a memorable adventure. During that first outdoor repast, we shared the stories of our lives; I told him about the military coup and he brought me up to date on the horrors of the Dirty War and the reasons why he had to leave Argentina. The conversation ended, to my surprise, with my defending Venezuela against his criticisms, which were the very same I had made the day before. “If you don't like this country, why don't you go somewhere else? I for one am very grateful to be living with my family in this democracy; at least here they're not murdering people the way they are in Chile and Argentina,” I said with an excess of passion. He burst out laughing, picked up his guitar, and began to strum a mocking tango. He made me feel like someone from the sticks, something that would happen many times in our relationship. He was one of those Buenos Aires night-owl intellectuals who frequent its old taverns and cafés, a part of the theater, music, and literary crowd, a voracious reader, a quarrelsome man with a quick answer for everything. He had seen the world and met famous people and was ferociously competitive, and I was seduced by his stories and his intelligence. In contrast, I doubt that I impressed him much at all; in his eyes, I was a thirty-five-year-old Chilean émigré who dressed like a hippie but had bourgeois mores. The one time I scored with him was when I told him that Che Guevara had dined at my parents' house in Geneva; from that moment on, he showed real interest in me. All my life, I have found that with most men that dinner with the heroic guerrilla of the Cuban Revolution acts as an irresistible aphrodisiac. Within a week, the summer rains had begun and our bucolic meetings in the park became far from private sessions in my house. One day he invited me to his apartment, a squalid, noisy room he rented by the week. We had coffee, he showed me photographs of his family, then one song led to another, and then another, until we ended up playing the flute in his bed. That is not one of the gross metaphors that horrify my mother, he did in fact treat me to a concert. I fell in love like a schoolgirl. After a month, the situation had become untenable; he announced that he was going to divorce his wife, and pressed me to leave everything and go with him to Spain, where other Argentine artists were already successfully established and friends and work were at his disposal. The rapidity with which he made those decisions seemed to me to be irrefutable proof of his love, until I later discovered that he was an unstable Gemini and that just as quickly as he was ready to fly with me to another continent, he could change his mind and return to the original status quo. Had I been a little more astute, or at least had I studied astrology when I was dashing off the magazine horoscopes in Chile, I would have observed his nature and acted more prudently but, as things turned out, I fell headfirst into a trivial melodrama that nearly cost me my children, even my life. I was in such a nervous state that I kept having automobile accidents; once I missed a red light, struck three moving vehicles, and was knocked unconscious for a few minutes. I felt stiff and sore when I came to—completely surrounded by coffins; helpful passersby had carried me into the nearest building, which happened to be a funeral parlor. In Caracas there was an unwritten code that replaced traffic laws; when you came to a corner, you looked at all the other drivers and in a split second decided who went first. The system was fair, and worked better than lights—I don't know whether it has changed, I suppose it's the same—but you have to be alert and know how to interpret the other drivers' expressions. In my emotional state, those signals, and others that allowed me to navigate in the world, were all mixed up. In the meantime, the atmosphere in my house was electric; the children could sense that the floor was moving beneath their feet and, for the first time, began to give me problems. Paula, who always had been a child too mature for her years, starting throwing the first tantrums of her life, slamming doors and locking herself in to cry for hours. Nicolás was acting like an outlaw at school, his grades were a disaster and he was bandages from head to foot: he cut himself, fell, split his head open, and broke bones with suspicious frequency. He discovered the joy of using his sling to catapult eggs against neighboring apartment buildings, as well as at pedestrians in the street below. Despite the fact that we were consuming ninety eggs a week, and that the wall of the building opposite us was one giant omelet baked hard by the tropical sun, I refused to accept the neighbors' accusations—until the day one of the projectiles was a direct hit on the head of a senator of the republic who happened to be passing beneath our windows. Had Tío Ramón not intervened with his diplomatic skills, they might have revoked our visas and thrown us out of the country. My parents, who suspected the reason for my nocturnal outings and prolonged absences, interrogated me until finally I confessed my illicit love. Mother took me aside to remind me that I had children to watch over and to point out the risks I was running, and also to tell me that, no matter what, I could count on her help if I needed it. Tío Ramón also led me aside to advise me to be more discreet—“You don't have to marry your lovers”—and to say that whatever my decision might be, he would stand by me. “You are coming with me to Spain right now or we will never see each other again,” the man with the flute threatened between two impassioned arpeggios, and as I could not make up my mind, he packed up his instruments and left. Within twenty-four hours, the urgent telephone calls from Madrid began; I was on edge during the day and awake most of the night. Between the children's problems, automobile repairs, and peremptory amorous demands, I lost track of the days and was taken by surprise when Michael arrived for his visit.

That night I tried to speak with my husband and explain what was happening but before I could get a word out, he announced an upcoming business trip to Europe and invited me to go with him while my parents took care of the children for a week. “You must keep the family together, lovers come and go without leaving scars; go to Europe with Michael, it will be good for you two to be alone,” my mother advised. “Don't ever admit an infidelity, even if you're caught in bed, because you'll never be forgiven for it,” was Tío Ramón's counsel. So we went to Paris, and while Michael was working I sat in the sidewalk cafés along the Champs-Élysées to think about the soap opera I was swallowed up in, tortured by the choice between memories of a flute on hot, rainy tropical afternoons and the natural pinpricks of guilt, wishing a lightning bolt would flash from the heavens and put a drastic end to my doubts. I saw the faces of Paula and Nicolás on every child walking by; of one thing I was sure: I could not be separated from my children. “You don't have to leave them, bring them along,” came the persuasive voice of my lover, who had obtained the name of the hotel where I was staying and kept calling from Madrid. I decided I would never forgive myself if I did not give love a chance—possibly my last, since I thought that at thirty-six I was on the verge of decrepitude. Michael returned to Venezuela and I, using the excuse that I needed to be alone for a few days, took the train to Spain.

That clandestine honeymoon—strolling arm in arm through cobbled streets, eating by candlelight in ancient taverns, sleeping in each other's arms, celebrating the incredible fortune of having stumbled upon this love unique in all the universe—lasted exactly three days, the time it took Michael to come looking for me. When I saw him, pale and flustered, and he took me in his arms, the more than twenty years we had shared fell over me like an inescapable cloak. I realized that I felt great affection for this prudent man who offered faithful love and represented stability and hearth. Our relationship lacked passion, but it was harmonious and secure. I did not feel strong enough to face a divorce or to create further problems for my children, they had enough with being immigrants. I said goodbye to my forbidden love among the trees in El Retiro park, which was coming alive after a long winter, and took the plane to Caracas. “The past doesn't matter, it will all work out, we will never mention this again,” said Michael, and he was true to his word. In the months that followed, I tried several times to talk with him but it was impossible, we always ended up skirting the issue. My infidelity remained unresolved, an unconfessable dream hovering like a cloud above our heads; had it not been for the persistent calls from Madrid, I would have thought that the whole matter was another invention of my fevered imagination. During his visits, Michael was seeking peace and rest; he needed desperately to believe that nothing had changed in his orderly existence and that his wife had completely recovered from her mad escapade. Betrayal had no place in Michael's mental processes. He did not understand the nuances of what had happened, but assumed that if I had come back to him it was because I no longer loved the other man; he believed that our marriage could be the same as it had been, and that silence would heal the wounds. It was not the same, however, something had broken, something we would never be able to repair. I would lock myself in the bathroom and cry my heart out, while in the bedroom Michael pretended to read the newspaper so he wouldn't have to ask the reason for my tears. I had another serious car accident, but this time, a fraction of a second before the impact, I was aware that it was the accelerator I had jammed to the floorboard, not the brake.