Dedication
To the members of my small tribe who allowed me to tell their stories.
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
The Capricious Muse of Dawn
Part One
Darkest Waters
Every Life a Melodrama
An Old Soul Comes to Visit
A Nest for Sabrina
A Gypsy at Heart
Powerful Circle of Witches
Days of Light and Mourning
A Peculiar Daughter-in-Law
Green Tea for Sadness
A Girl with Three Mothers
Little Everyday Miracles
Marijuana and Silicone
The Angel of Death
Family Life
Messages
Four Minutes of Fame
The Depraved Santa Claus
An Enormous Rock
Ballroom Dancing and Chocolate
Children, Those Pint-Sized Lunatics
Plumed Lizard
Life Comrade
The Empty Well
Who Wants a Girl?
A Voice in the Palace
Nothing Deserving Thanks
Unfavorable Winds
But We Keep Paddling
A Tribe in Distress
Part Two
The Onset of Autumn
In Bad Hands
Searching for a Bride
Five Bullets
Matchmaker
Mother-in-Law from Hell
Lori Comes in Through the Front Door
Mongolian Horsemen
A Memorable Wedding
To China in Search of Love
Stormy Weather
A New House for the Spirits
Strokes of the Pen
Labyrinth of Sorrows
Mail-Order Bride
Magic for the Grandchildren
Empire of Terror
Juliette and the Greek Boys
Jason and Judy
Buddhist Mothers
The Perverted Dwarf
Prayers
The Golden Dragon
Disastrous Mission
Yemayá and Fertility
Traffic in Organs
Children that Didn’t Come
Striptease
My Favorite Writer
A Bourgeois Couple
The Twins and Gold Coins
Doña Inés and Zorro
Summer
Rites of Passage
Forbidden Love
Abuela Hilda Leaves with You
Reflections
The Tribe Reunited
A Time to Rest
A Quiet Place
About the Author
Also by Isabel Allende
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
This book could not be published without the cooperation—in some cases reluctant—of the main characters in the story. As my son says: it is not easy to have a writer in the family. So thanks to all of them for putting up with my never-ending questions and for allowing me to dig deeper and deeper into their private lives. In some cases I have disguised the names and identities of certain people to protect their privacy. My very special gratitude goes to Margaret Sayers Peden, who went back and forth with the translation into English, enduring patiently the innumerable changes that I made along the way. Also to my agents, Carmen Balcells and Gloria Gutiérrez; my attentive reader, Jorge Manzanilla; and my editors Nuria Tey, in Spain, and Terry Karten in the United States. And most important, thanks to my mother and pen pal, Panchita, for our daily correspondence. Our letters keep my memories fresh.
The Capricious Muse of Dawn
THERE IS NO LACK OF DRAMA IN MY LIFE, I have more than enough three-ring-circus material for writing, but even so, I always approach the seventh of January with trembling. Last night I couldn’t sleep. We were shaken by a storm; the wind roared among the oaks and rattled the windows of the house, the culmination of the biblical deluge of recent weeks. Some neighborhoods in our area were flooded; the firemen were not equipped to cope with such a major disaster, and neighbors waded out into the streets in water up to their waists to save what they could from the torrents. Furniture sailed down the main streets, and bewildered pets awaited their owners atop drowned cars, while reporters in helicopters captured scenes of this California winter you would have thought was a Louisiana hurricane. In some places traffic was blocked for a couple of days, and when at last the skies cleared and the magnitude of the damage could be seen, crews of Latino immigrants were given the task of pumping out the water and removing debris by hand. Our house, set high on a hill, takes face-on the fury of the wind, which bends the palms and from time to time tore the proudest trees out by the roots, the ones that do not bow their heads, but we escaped the flooding. Occasionally at the height of the wind, capricious waves rise up and overflow the one access road, and at those times we were trapped, observing from above the unusual spectacle of the raging bay.
I like it that winter forces us to turn inward. I live in Marin County, to the north of San Francisco, twenty minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge, among hills golden in summer and emerald in winter, on the west shore of the enormous bay. On a clear day we can see two other bridges in the distance, the hazy outlines of the ports of Oakland and San Francisco, the slow-moving cargo ships, hundreds of sailboats, and gulls like white handkerchiefs. In May we begin to see a few intrepid adventurers hanging from multicolored comets gliding swiftly across the water, disturbing the quiet of Asian grandfathers who spend their afternoons fishing from the rocks. From the Pacific one does not see the narrow access to the bay, which greets the dawn wrapped in fog, and the sailors of yesteryear passed on by, never imagining the splendor hidden a little farther in. Now that entrance is crowned by the elegant Golden Gate Bridge, with its proud red towers. Water, sky, hills, and woods; that is my landscape.
It wasn’t the end-of-the-world windstorm or the machine-gun hail on the roof tiles that kept me awake last night, it was the anxiety of knowing that with the light of day it would be the eighth of January. For twenty-five years, I have begun a book on that date, more from superstition than discipline. I’m afraid that if I begin on any other day the book will be a failure and that if I let an eighth of January go by without writing, I’ll not be able to start for the rest of the year. January arrives after a few months without writing, months in which I’ve lived turned outward, in the uproar of the world, traveling, promoting books, giving lectures, surrounded by people, talking too much. Noise and more noise. Most of all I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence. Without silence, I’m done for. Last night I got up several times to wander through the house, using a variety of excuses, wrapped in Willie’s old cashmere sweater, so worn it’s become my second skin, with successive cups of hot chocolate in my hands, thinking and thinking about what I was going to write within a few hours, until the cold forced me back to bed, where Willie, bless him, lay snoring. Pressed against his naked back, I tucked my icy feet between his long, firm legs, breathing in the surprising scent of a young man that hasn’t changed in all these years. He never wakes up when I press against him, only when I move away. He is used to my body, my insomnia, and my nightmares. And the same is true with Olivia, who sleeps on a bench at the foot of our bed. She never stirs. Nothing interrupts that silly dog’s sleep, not the mice that sometimes creep out of their holes, or the funk the skunks emit as they make love, or the wandering souls murmuring in the darkness. If a madman armed with a hatchet should attack us, Olivia would be the last to know. When she came to us she was a wretched little beast the Humane Society had picked up from the dump. She had a broken leg and several broken ribs. For a mo
nth she hid among my shoes in the closet, shivering, but little by little she recovered from her previous ill treatment and emerged with her ears drooping and her tail between her legs. We knew then that she would never be a guard dog; she sleeps like a log.
By daybreak, finally, the wrath of the storm had ceased, but it was still raining. With the first light at the window, I showered and got dressed, while Willie, wrapped in his jaded sheik dressing gown, went to the kitchen. The smell of freshly ground coffee enveloped me like a caress. Aromatherapy. These everyday routines unite us more than the clamor of passion; when we’re apart it is this silent dance we miss most. We each need to feel that the other one is near, always there in that intangible space that is ours alone. A cold dawn, coffee and toast, time to write, a dog that wags her tail, and my lover. Life could be no better. Willie gave me a good-bye hug, for I was leaving on a long journey. “Good luck,” he whispered, as he does every year on this day, and I took my coat and umbrella, went down six steps, skirted the swimming pool, walked through fifty feet of garden, and reached the casita where I write, my study, my cuchitril. And here I am now.
I had barely lit a candle—one always illuminates my writing—when Carmen Balcells, my agent, called me from Santa Fe, a tiny town of crazed goats near Barcelona, where she was born. She intends to spend her mature years there in peace, but as she has energy to burn, she is buying the village house by house.
“Read me the first sentence,” demanded this larger-than-life mother figure.
I reminded her once more of the nine-hour difference in time between California and Spain. No first sentence yet. No nothing.
“Write a memoir, Isabel.”
“I already wrote one, don’t you remember?”
“That was thirteen years ago.”
“My family doesn’t like to see itself exposed, Carmen.”
“Don’t worry about anything. Send me a two- or three-hundred-page letter and I’ll take care of the rest. If it comes down to choosing between telling a story and offending relatives, any professional writer chooses the former.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Part One
Darkest Waters
IN THE SECOND WEEK of DECEMBER, 1992, almost as soon as the rain let up, we went as a family to scatter your ashes, Paula, following the instructions you had left in a letter written long before you fell ill. As soon as we advised them of your death, your husband, Ernesto, came from New Jersey, and your father from Chile. They were able to tell you good-bye where you lay wrapped in a white sheet waiting to be taken to the crematory. Afterward, we met in a church to hear mass and weep together. Your father was pressed to return to Chile, but he waited until the weather cleared, and two days later, when finally a timid ray of sun peered out, the whole family, in three cars, drove to a nearby forest. Your father went in the lead, guiding us. He isn’t familiar with this region but he had spent the previous two days looking for the best site, one that you would have chosen. There are many places to choose from, nature is prodigal here, but by one of those coincidences that now are habitual in anything related to you, he led us directly to the forest where I often went to walk to ease my rage and pain while you were sick, the same one where Willie had taken me for a picnic shortly after we met, the same one where you and Ernesto liked to walk hand in hand when you came to visit us in California. Your father drove into the park, followed the road a little way, parked the car, and signaled us to follow him. He took us to the exact spot that I would have chosen, because I had been there many times to pray for you: a stream surrounded with tall redwoods whose tops formed the dome of a green cathedral. There was a fine, light mist that blurred the contours of reality: the light barely penetrated the trees, but the branches shone, winter wet. An intense aroma of humus and dill rose from the earth. We stopped at the edge of a pond formed by rocks and fallen tree trunks. Ernesto, serious, haggard, but now without tears because he had spilled them all, held the clay urn containing your ashes. I had saved a few in a little porcelain box to keep forever on my altar. Your brother, Nico, had Alejandro in his arms, and your sister-in-law, Celia, held Andrea, still a baby, wrapped in shawls and clamped to her breast. I carried a bouquet of roses, which I tossed, one by one, into the water. Then all of us, including Alejandro, who was three, took a handful of ashes from the urn and dropped them onto the water. Some floated briefly among the roses, but most sank to the bottom, like fine white sand.
“What is this?” Alejandro asked.
“Your aunt Paula,” my mother told him, sobbing.
“It doesn’t look like her,” he commented, confused.
I WILL BEGIN BY TELLING YOU what has happened since 1993, when you left us, and will limit myself to the family, which is what interests you. I’ll have to omit two of Willie’s sons: Lindsay, whom I barely know—I’ve seen him only a dozen times and we’ve never exchanged more than the essential courteous greetings—and Scott, because he doesn’t want to appear in these pages. You were very fond of that thin, solitary boy with thick eyeglasses and disheveled hair. Now he is a man of twenty-eight; he looks like Willie and his name is Harleigh. He chose the name Scott when he was five; he liked it and used it a long time, but during his teens he reclaimed the one given him.
The first person who comes to my mind and heart is Jennifer, Willie’s only daughter, who at the beginning of that year had just escaped for the third time from a hospital where she had gone to find rest for her bones because of yet another infection, among the many she had suffered in her short life. The police had not given any indication that they were going to look for her; they had too many cases like hers, and this time Willie’s contacts with the law didn’t help at all. The physician, a tall, discreet Filipino who by dint of perseverance had saved her when she arrived at the hospital with a raging fever, and who by now knew her because he had attended her on two previous occasions, explained to Willie that he had to find his daughter soon or she would die. With massive doses of antibiotics for several weeks, he might be able to save her, he said, but we had to prevent a relapse, for that would be fatal. We were in the emergency room—yellow walls, plastic chairs, and posters of mammograms and tests for AIDS—which was filled with patients awaiting their turn to be treated. The doctor took off his round, metal-framed glasses, cleaned them with a tissue, and guardedly answered our questions. He had no sympathy for Willie or for me; he perhaps mistook me for Jennifer’s mother. In his eyes we were guilty; we had neglected her, and now when it was too late, we had showed up acting distressed. He avoided going into details—patient information was confidential—but Willie could deduce that in addition to multiple infections and bones turned to splinters, his daughter’s heart was on the verge of giving out. For nine years Jennifer had persisted in jousting with death.
We had been going to see her in the hospital for several weeks. Her wrists were tied down so that in the delirium of fever she couldn’t tear out the intravenous tubes. She was addicted to nearly every known drug, from tobacco to heroin. I don’t know how her body had endured so much abuse. Since they couldn’t find a healthy vein in which to inject medications, they had implanted a port in an artery in her chest. At the end of a week they had moved Jennifer from the intensive care unit to a three-bed room she shared with other patients, where she was no longer restrained, and where she was not watched as closely as she had been before. I started visiting every day, bringing things she had asked for: perfumes, nightgowns, music, but it all disappeared. I supposed that her buddies were coming at strange hours to furnish her drugs, which, since she had no money, she paid for with my gifts. As part of her treatment, she was given methadone to help her through withdrawal, but in addition to that she was using any drug her providers could smuggle to her—and which she injected straight into the port. Sometimes it was I who bathed her. Her ankles and feet were swollen, her body covered with bruises, marks from infected needles, and a scar worthy of a pirate on her back. “A knife,” was her laconic explan
ation.
Willie’s daughter was a blonde with large blue eyes like her father’s, but few photographs have survived from the past and no one remembered her as she had been: the best student in her class, obedient, and well groomed. She seemed ethereal. I met her in 1988, shortly after moving to California to live with Willie, a time when she was still beautiful, although she already had an evasive look and that deceptive fog that encircled her like a dark halo. My head was spinning with my newly inaugurated love affair with Willie, and I was not overly surprised when one winter Sunday he took me to a jail on the east side of San Francisco Bay. We waited a long time on an inhospitable patio, standing in line with other visitors, most of them blacks and Latinos, until the gates were opened and we were allowed to enter a gloomy building. They separated the few men from the many women and children. I don’t know what Willie’s experience was, but a uniformed matron confiscated my handbag, pushed me behind a curtain, and put her hands where no one had dared, more roughly than was necessary, perhaps because my accent made her suspicious. Luckily a Salvadoran peasant woman, a visitor like me, had warned me in the line not to make a fuss, because that would make things worse. Finally Willie and I met in a trailer set up for visiting the prisoners, a long narrow space divided by hen-coop wire; Jennifer sat behind that. She had been in jail, without drugs and well nourished, for two months. She looked like a schoolgirl in Sunday clothes, in contrast with the rough appearance of the other prisoners. She greeted her father with unbearable sadness. In the years that followed I came to realize that she always cried when she was with Willie, whether from shame or rancor I don’t know. Willie introduced me briefly as “a friend,” although we had been living together for some time, and stood before the wire with crossed arms and eyes cast on the floor. I watched them from a short distance away, listening to bits of their dialogue through the murmurs of other voices.
“What’s it for this time?”
“You already know that, why do you ask me. Get me out of here, Dad.”
The Sum of Our Days Page 1