Paula (6 page)

Pancho, the least cowed by our uncles' “Ruffin,” was a blond little boy, sturdy and calm, but if he lost patience he could turn into a tiny beast with a savage bite. Margara adored him and called him her King; he was lost when she was out of the house. As an adolescent he left home to join a strange sect that lived in the desert region of northern Chile. We heard rumors that they tripped to other worlds on hallucinogenic mushrooms, indulged in unspeakable orgies, and brainwashed the young to make them slaves of the leaders. I never learned the truth, because no one who lived through that experience ever spoke of it—but they were marked by it. My brother renounced his family, cut all emotional ties, and hid behind a shell that nevertheless failed to protect him from pain and insecurity. Eventually, he
twice
married and divorced
two
wives, had children, and has lived nearly all his adult life outside Chile. I doubt that he will ever return. There is not much I can say about him because I don't know him. Like my father, he is a mystery to me.

Juan was born with the rare gift of likableness. Even now, a solemn professor in the mature years of his life, people immediately are attracted to him. When he was little, he looked like an angel, with dimpled cheeks and a helpless air capable of melting the hardest heart. Small, but prudent and astute, his many illnesses hampered his growth and condemned him to eternal poor health. We thought of him as the intellectual of the family, a true genius. At five, he could recite long poems and instantly calculate how much change we should get from a peso if we bought three caramels at eight cents apiece. He earned two master's degrees and a doctorate from North American universities, and currently is working toward a degree in theology. He was a professor of political science, an agnostic and a Marxist, but after experiencing a spiritual crisis he decided to seek the answer to humanity's problems in God. He abandoned his teaching position and began divinity studies. Because he is married, he can never become a Catholic priest, a choice he would have preferred because of family tradition, so he opted to become a Methodist—to the initial discomfort of my mother, who knew very little about that church and could picture the genius of the family reduced to singing hymns in a public square while accompanying himself on the guitar. Such sudden conversions are not rare among my mother's people; I have many mystical relatives. I cannot imagine my brother preaching from a pulpit, because no one would understand his learned sermons—especially in English—but he will be an outstanding professor of theology. When he learned that you were ill, he dropped everything, caught the first plane, and came to Madrid to give me support. “We must have hope that Paula will get well,” he keeps telling me.

Will you get well, Paula? I look at you in that bed, connected to a half dozen tubes and wires, unable even to breathe without help. I scarcely recognize you; your body has changed and your mind is in shadows. What goes through your thoughts? Tell me about your loneliness and your fears, about the distorted visions, the pain in your rock-heavy bones, the menacing silhouettes leaning over your bed, the voices, the murmurs, the lights. Nothing must make any sense to you. I know you hear because you flinch at the sound of metal on metal, but I don't know whether you understand what it is. Do you want to live, Paula? You spent your life trying to be one with God. Do you want to die? Perhaps you have already begun. What meaning do the days have for you now? Have you returned to the place of total innocence, to the waters of my womb, like the fish you were before you were born? I count the days, and they are too many. Wake up, Paula, please wake up. . . .

I place one hand over my heart, close my eyes, and concentrate. There is something dark inside. At first it is like the night air, transparent shadow, but soon it is transformed into impenetrable lead. I try to lie calmly and accept the blackness that fills my inner being as I am assaulted by images from the past. I see myself before a large mirror. I take one step backward, another, and with each step decades are erased and I grow smaller, until the glass returns the reflection of a seven-year-old girl. Me.

It has been raining for several days; I am leaping over puddles, my leather bag bouncing against my back. I am wearing a blue coat that is too large for me and a felt hat pulled down to my ears; my shoes are sodden. The huge wooden entry door, swollen by rain, is stuck; it takes all my weight to pull it open. In the garden of my grandfather's house is a gigantic poplar with roots growing above the ground, a scrawny sentinel standing guard over property that appears abandoned—shutters hanging from their hinges, paint peeling from walls. Outdoors it is just getting dark, but inside it is already deepest night. All the lights are off, except in the kitchen. I walk through the garage toward the light. The walls of the cavernous kitchen are spotted with grease, and large blackened saucepans and spoons hang from iron hooks. One or two fly-specked lightbulbs cast a dull light on the scene. Something is bubbling in a pot and the kettle is whistling; the room smells of onion, and an enormous refrigerator purrs in a corner. Margara, a large woman with strong Indian features and a thin braid wound around her head, is listening to a serial on the radio. My brothers are sitting at the table with cups of hot cocoa and buttered bread. Margara does not look up. “Go see your mother, she's in bed again,” she scolds. I take off my coat and hat. “Don't strew your things about; I'm not your slave, I don't have to pick up after you.” She turns up the volume on the radio. I leave the kitchen and confront the darkness in the rest of the house. I feel for the light switch and a pale glow barely fills the hall with its several doors. A claw-foot table holds the marble bust of a pensive girl; there is a mirror with a heavy wood frame, but I don't look because the Devil might be reflected in it. I shiver as I climb the stairs; currents of air swirl through an incomprehensible hole in this strange architecture. Clinging to the handrail, I reach the second floor. The climb seems interminable. I am aware of silence and shadows. I walk to the closed door at the end of the hall and tiptoe in without knocking. A stove furnishes the only illumination; the ceilings are covered with the accumulation of years of paraffin soot. There are two beds, a bunk, a sofa, tables and chairs—it is all I can do to make my way through the furniture. My mother, with Pelvina López-Pun asleep at her feet, is lying beneath a mountain of covers, her face half-hidden on the pillow: straight nose, high cheekbones, pallid skin, finely drawn eyebrows above closed eyes. “Is it you?” A small, cold hand reaches out for mine.

“Does it hurt a lot, Mama?”

“My head is bursting.”

“I'll go get you a glass of warm milk and tell my brothers not to make any noise.”

“Don't leave. Stay here with me. Put your hand on my forehead, that helps.”

I sit on the bed and do as she asks, trembling with sympathy, not knowing how to free her from that crushing pain. Blessed Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen. If she dies, my brothers and I are lost; they will send us to my father. The mere idea terrifies me. Margara is always telling me that if I don't behave I will have to go live with him. Could it be true? I have to find out, but I don't dare ask my mother, it would make her headache worse. I mustn't add to her worries or the pain will grow until her head explodes. I can't mention it to Tata, either; no one may speak my father's name in his presence. “Papa” is a forbidden word, and anyone who says it stirs up a hornet's nest. I'm hungry, I want to go down to the kitchen and drink my cocoa, but I must not leave my mother, and besides, I don't have the courage to face Margara. My shoes are wet and my feet feel like ice. I stroke my mother's poor head and concentrate: everything depends on me now. If I don't move, and pray hard, I can make the pain go away.

I am forty-nine years old. I place one hand over my heart and say in a little girl's voice: I do not want to be like my mother, I will be like my grandfather—independent, healthy, strong. I will not allow anyone to order me about, and I will not be beholden to anyone. I want to be like my grandfather and protect my mother.

I think Tata was always sorry I wasn't a boy; had I been, he could have taught me to play jai alai, and use his tools, and hunt. I would have been his companion on the trips he made every year to Patagonia for the sheepshearing. In those days one traveled south by train, or by automobile over twisting dirt roads that could turn into quagmires, immobilizing cars until a team of oxen pulled them free. Lakes were crossed by rope-drawn ferries, and mountains on muleback. Those were demanding expeditions. My grandfather slept beneath the stars, wrapped in a heavy Castilian blanket; he bathed in raging rivers fed by snowmelt from the peaks and ate garbanzo beans and tinned sardines until he reached the Argentine side of the mountain. There a crew was waiting for him with a truck and a lamb roasting over a slow fire. Rough men, they hunkered around the fire in silence. They lived in a vast, forsaken landscape where the wind tore the words from their mouths. With gaucho knives they sliced off great hunks of meat and devoured them, their gaze fixed on the glowing coals. One of them might strum a plaintive song on his guitar while the maté passed from hand to hand, the aromatic brew of bitter green yerba they drink there like tea. I treasure indelible memories of the one trip to the south I made with my grandfather—even though I was so carsick I thought I would die, a mule threw me twice, and then as I watched them shearing the sheep I was struck dumb, unable to speak until we returned to civilization. The sheepshearers, who were paid by the animal, could zip off a fleece in less than a minute, but, however careful they were, they often sliced off strips of skin with the wool, and I saw more than one wretched lamb split open, its guts stuffed back any which way in its belly before being stitched up with an upholstery needle and returned to the flock with the hope it would survive and continue to produce wool.

My love for heights, and my relationship with trees, originated with that trip. I have returned several times to the south of Chile and I always feel the same indescribable love for the landscape. Crossing the cordillera of the Andes is engraved in my soul as one of the true epiphanies of my existence. Now, and during other critical moments when I try to remember prayers and cannot evoke the words or the rituals, the only vision I can turn to for consolation is that of those misty paths through the chill forest of gigantic ferns and tree trunks rising toward the heavens, the sheer mountain passes, and the sharp profile of snow-covered volcanoes reflected in emerald lakes. To be one with God must be very much like being in this extraordinary realm. In my memory, my grandfather, the guide, and the mules have disappeared. I am alone, walking in solemn silence through that temple of rock and vegetation. I am breathing clean air cold and wet with rain. My feet sink into a carpet of mud and rotted leaves; the scent of the earth is a sword piercing my bones. Effortlessly, I walk and walk along the narrow, misty paths, yet never leave that undiscovered world surrounded with century-old trees, fallen trunks, strips of aromatic bark, and roots bursting through the earth like mutilated, vegetal hands. On the path, my face is brushed by strong spiderwebs, lace tablecloths pearled with drops of water and phosphorescent-winged mosquitoes. Here and there I glimpse the brilliant scarlet and white of copihues and other flowers that live at these heights tangled among the trees like glittering beads. You can feel the breath of the gods, throbbing, absolute presences in this resplendent domain of precipices and high walls of black rock polished by the snow to the sensual perfection of marble. Water, and more water. Thin crystalline serpents slip through fissures of rock into the hidden depths of the mountains and join together in small brooks and sounding waterfalls. Suddenly I am startled by the scream of a bird or thud of a rock rolling from above, but the enveloping peace of this vastness descends again, and I realize I am weeping with happiness. That trip, with all its obstacles and hidden dangers, its desired solitude and breathtaking beauty, is like the journey of my own life. This memory is sacred to me; this memory is my country. When I say Chile, this is what I think of. Time and time again I have tried to recapture the emotion that forest stirs in me, a feeling more intense than the most perfect orgasm, than the longest ovation.

* * *

Every year when the wrestling season began, my grandfather would take me to the Teatro Caupolicán. I always wore my Sunday best, my patent leather shoes and white gloves contrasting sharply with the scruffy appearance of the crowd. Thus attired, and holding tight to the hand of the grand old man at my side, I pushed my way through the roaring spectators. We always sat in the first row, “So we can see the blood,” Tata used to say with ferocious anticipation. Once, one of the gladiators landed right on us, a savage mass of sweaty flesh that flattened us like cockroaches. My grandfather had prepared many times for that eventuality, yet when it came he did not know how to react and, instead of beating the man to a pulp with his cane, as he had always said he would, he greeted him with a cordial handclasp to which the man, equally nonplussed, replied with a timid smile. That was one of the great disillusions of my childhood. Tata was demoted from a barbarous Mount Olympus where he had until then occupied the single throne and reduced to human dimensions. I believe that my rebelliousness dates from that moment.

The favorite of the crowd was The Angel, a handsome man with long blond hair, always costumed in a blue cape with silver stars, white boots, and a ridiculously tiny pair of trunks that barely covered his private parts. Every Saturday he bet his magnificent yellow locks against the challenge of the terrible Kuramoto, a Mapuche Indian who wore a kimono and wooden clogs and pretended to be Japanese. They engaged one another in spectacular combat, biting, twisting necks, kicking genitals, and sticking fingers in each other's eyes, while my grandfather, holding his beret in one hand and brandishing his cane in the other, yelled “Kill him! Kill him!”—indiscriminately, since it didn't matter to him who murdered whom. Two out of three contests, Kuramoto vanquished The Angel; with the decision, the referee would produce a pair of scintillating scissors and before the respectful silence of the crowd the phony Nipponese warrior would cut off his rival's curls. The miracle that one week later The Angel again displayed shoulder-length hair was irrefutable proof of his divinity.