A Voice in the Palace
THE PALACE OF THE MAHARAJAH, all gleaming marble, stood in a Garden of Eden where time did not exist, the climate was always gentle, and the air carried the scent of gardenias. Water from the fountains ran along sinuous canals among flowers, golden birdcages, white silk parasols, and majestic peacocks. The palace was now owned by an international hotel chain that had had the good judgment to preserve the original charm. The maharajah, ruined, but with dignity intact, occupied a wing of the building, protected from the curiosity of outsiders by a screen of palms and purple bougainvillea. In the calm of the afternoon he liked to sit in the garden and have tea with a girl who had not yet reached puberty, and who was not his great-granddaughter but his fifth wife. That interlude was assured by two guards in imperial uniforms and plumed turbans, with scimitars at the waist. In our profusely decorated suite, worthy of a king, there was not one inch where you could rest your eyes. From our balcony we had a view of the entire garden, which was separated by a high wall from the neighborhoods of the poor stretching as far as the horizon. After traveling dusty roads for weeks, we could rest in this palace, with its army of silent employees to carry our clothing to be washed, bring us tea and honey cakes on silver trays, and prepare our foaming baths. It was paradise. We dined on the delicious cuisine of India, which Willie was already immunized against, and fell into bed disposed to sleep forever.
The telephone rang at three in the morning—the time indicated by the green numbers on the travel clock glowing in the darkness—waking me from a hot, heavy sleep. I put out my hand, feeling for the phone, finding nothing, until my fingers touched a switch and I turned on the lamp. I didn’t know where I was, or what the transparent veils floating above my head were, or the winged demons threatening me from the painted ceiling. I was aware of moist sheets stuck to my skin and a sweet scent I couldn’t identify. The telephone kept ringing, and with every jangle my apprehension grew; it had to be something calamitous to justify the urgency of calling at that hour. Someone died, I said aloud. Be calm, be calm, I told myself. It couldn’t be Nico. I had already lost a daughter and according to the law of probability I would not lose another child in my lifetime. And it wasn’t my mother, she’s immortal. Maybe there was news about Jennifer. Had she been found? The continued ringing guided me to the far end of the room, where I discovered an antiquated telephone sitting between two porcelain elephants. From the other side of the world, with the clarity of an omen, came the unmistakable voice of Celia. I couldn’t find the strength to ask her what had happened.
“It seems that I’m bisexual,” she announced in a quavering voice.
“What is it?” Willie asked, dazed with sleep.
“Nothing. It’s Celia. She says she’s bisexual.”
“Oh!” My husband snorted and fell back to sleep.
I suppose that Celia called to ask me for help, but I could think of nothing magical that would help at that moment. I begged my daughter-in-law not to rush and do anything desperate, since we are all more or less bisexual and if she had waited twenty-nine years to discover that, she could wait until we returned to California. A matter as important as this should be discussed within the family. I cursed the distance that prevented me from seeing the expression on her face. I promised that we would come back as quickly as possible, although at three in the morning there wasn’t much we could do to change our airline tickets, a process that even by day was complicated in India. The call had killed any chance of sleeping, and I did not go back to the veil-draped bed. Neither did I dare wake Tabra, who was in a different room on the same floor.
I went out on the balcony and waited for morning in a polychrome wood swing with topaz-colored silk cushions. A climbing jasmine and a tree with large white flowers were releasing that courtesan’s fragrance I had noted in our room. Celia’s news had produced a rare lucidity. It was as if I could see my family from above, floating overhead. “This daughter-in-law of ours never fails to surprise me,” I murmured. In Celia’s case, the word bisexual could have several connotations, but none would be without pain to my people. Hmmm. Without thinking, I wrote my. . . . That’s how I feel about all of them; they all belong to me: Willie, my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandchildren, my parents, and even my stepchildren, with whom I lived from skirmish to skirmish . . . they’re all mine. It had been an effort to bring them together, and I was prepared to defend that small community against the vagaries of fate and bad luck. Celia was an uncontainable force of nature; no one had any influence over her. I didn’t ask myself twice whom she had fallen for, the answer was obvious to me. “Help us, Paula, this is no joke,” I begged you, but I don’t know whether you heard me.
Nothing Deserving Thanks
THE DISASTER—I can think of no other word to describe it—unfolded at the end of November, Thanksgiving Day. It’s true, that seems ironic, but we don’t get to choose the dates for such episodes. We returned to California as quickly as we could, but to find flights, change the tickets, and fly across half the planet took more than three days. The night that Celia waked me, I’d told Willie what was going on, but he was asleep; he hadn’t really heard me and I had to tell him again the next morning. It made him laugh. “That Celia is a loose cannon,” he said, not considering the consequences my daughter-in-law’s announcement would have for the family. Tabra had to go on to Bali, so we said good-bye without much explanation. When we got to San Francisco, Celia was waiting for us at the airport; we didn’t, however, discuss anything until the two of us were alone. This was not a confidence she wanted to share in front of Willie.
“I never dreamed this was going to happen to me, Isabel. You remember what I always thought of gays,” she told me.
“I remember, Celia. How could I forget? Have you gone to bed with her?”
“With who?”
“With Sally, who else?”
“How do you know it’s her?”
“Oh, Celia, no need of a crystal ball for that. Did you sleep with her?”
“That isn’t important!” she exclaimed with burning eyes.
“To me it seems very important, but I may be mistaken. . . . The heat of passion passes, Celia, and it’s not worth destroying a marriage for. You’re confused by the novelty, that’s all.”
“I am married to a marvelous man, and I have three children I will never live without. You can imagine how long I thought about this before I told you. You don’t make a decision like this lightly. I don’t want to hurt Nico and the kids.”
“It’s strange that you make your confession to me, I’m your mother-in-law. You don’t think that unconsciously. . . ?”
“Don’t come at me with your fucking psychology!” she interrupted. “You and I tell each other everything.” And that was true.
I endured a week of brutal anxiety, but nothing compared with the weeks it had taken Celia and Sally to decide their future. They had lived in the same house, worked together, shared children, secrets, interests, and fun, but they were very different in character, and maybe that explained the mutual attraction. Abuela Hilda had pointed out to me earlier that “those girls love each other very much.” Nothing got by that quiet, discreet, nearly invisible grandmother. Had she been trying to warn me? Impossible to know; that diplomatic woman would never have made a malicious comment.
Confused about carrying that secret, I debated with myself as I was preparing the Thanksgiving turkey. I was following a new recipe, one my mother had sent me in the mail. You put a pile of herbs in the blender with olive oil and lemon, then with a syringe inject the green mixture beneath the skin of the bird and let it marinate for forty-eight hours.
Sally had stopped coming to work in my office, but we saw each other nearly every day when I looked in on my grandchildren; she spent a lot of time in that house. I tried not to stare at her and Celia when they were together, but if they accidentally brushed against each other, my heart gave a leap. Willie, tired from the long trip to India and hung over from his intestinal infect
ion, stayed on the fringe of things with the hope that passions would evaporate.
Luckily, I was able to get an appointment with my psychologist, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time. He had moved to southern California but had come to San Francisco to spend the holidays with his family. We met at a coffee shop since he no longer had an office, and as he was sipping his green tea and I my cappuccino, I brought him up to speed on the family soap opera. He asked me if by any chance I was deranged. How had it occurred to me to act as the go-between in a situation like this? It wasn’t a secret it was up to me to keep.
“You are the mother figure, in this case an archetype: mother of Nico, stepmother of Jason, mother-in-law of Celia, grandmother of the children. And future mother-in-law of Sally—if this hadn’t happened,” he explained.
“That I doubt. I don’t think Sally would have married Jason.”
“That isn’t the point, Isabel. You must confront them and demand that they confess the truth to Nico and Jason. Give them twenty-four hours. If they don’t do it, you will have to do it yourself.”
I followed his advice. The twenty-four hours would be up precisely during the long weekend of Thanksgiving, a sacred holiday for Americans.
TO CELEBRATE THE FESTIVE DAY, the family was going to get together for the first time in months, including Ernesto, who called and said he had fallen in love with a girl he worked with. Her name was Giulia, and he was bringing her to California to meet the family. This was not a propitious moment! He would arrive first from New Jersey and Giulia would appear the following day, which gave us a little time to tune everyone in. It was good that Fu, Grace, and Sabrina were having their dinner at the Zen Center, so there would be three fewer witnesses. Willie and I were so befuddled we couldn’t help anyone. I don’t know how we survived that horrendous weekend without violence. Celia locked herself away with Nico and I can’t imagine how she told him; there was no diplomatic way to do it or to avoid the emotional anguish of her news. It would be impossible—as she feared—not to wound him and the children. I think that at first Nico did not fully realize the dimensions of what had happened, and believed that with imagination and tolerance things could be sorted out. Weeks, perhaps months, would go by before he understood that his life had changed forever.
Jason and Sally were separated not only by distance but also by the fact that they had little in common. It was difficult to imagine Sally living a nocturnal, bohemian life amid intellectuals in the chaos of New York, or Jason in California, vegetating in the bosom of the family and bored to death. Many years later, when I spoke with both of them about these events, I realized that their two versions were contradictory. Jason assured me that he was in love with Sally and convinced that they would get married, and because of that he had lost his head when she called to tell him what had happened.
“I have something to tell you,” she announced. He immediately thought that she had been unfaithful and a wave of anger swept over him, though his next thought was that it wasn’t anything too serious, since she was prepared to confess it. When she managed to get out the words to explain that it had to do with a woman, Jason drew a breath of relief: he was not actually facing a rival; this was a foolishness women do out of curiosity, but then Sally added that she was in love with Celia. With that dual betrayal, Jason felt as if he had been clubbed. He was not only losing someone he thought was still his sweetheart, he was also losing a sister-in-law he loved like a sister. He felt betrayed by everyone, including Nico, who hadn’t stopped it from happening. He appeared that accursed weekend looking thin and drawn; he had lost I don’t know how many pounds. He marched into the house with his knapsack on his back, unshaven, teeth clenched, smelling of alcohol and pale with rage. He had to deal with the situation without any support from anyone; all of us were lost in our own passions.
Sally picked up Ernesto at the airport. He was coming from New Jersey, where he’d lived since 1992, when we brought you, in a coma, to California. She took him to a café to warn him of what was going on. He could not just be dropped into the middle of the melodrama or he would think we had all gone mad. How would he explain all this to Giulia? His girlfriend was a tall, chatty blond with sky-blue eyes, with that freshness of people who have faith in life. We Sisters of Disorder had prayed for several years that Ernesto would find a new love, and Celia had charged you, Paula, with the same task, which you had not only fulfilled but in addition given us a wink from the Beyond: Giulia was born the same day as you—October 22. Her mother was named Paula and her father was born the same day and year that I was. Too many coincidences. I couldn’t help but think that you had chosen her because she would make your husband happy.
Ernesto and Giulia hid their dismay concerning the disaster as best they could. Despite the dramatic circumstances we were living in, we had immediately given Giulia two thumbs up. She was perfect for Ernesto: strong, organized, happy, and affectionate. According to Willie, we shouldn’t worry about it, since that couple didn’t need the approval of a family they had no blood ties with. “If they marry, we will have to bring them to California,” I answered.
In the meantime, the turkey had turned green from the subcutaneous injection of herbs, and had come from the oven looking as poisonous as the air we were breathing in the house. Nico and Jason were undone, and could not take part in the wake—because that’s what that day was, a wake. Alejandro and Nicole were sick in bed with a fever. Andrea was running around sucking her finger and dressed for the occasion in my sari, which she had wrapped herself in like a sausage. Willie was indignant because neither of his two sons had shown up. He was hungry, but no one had taken charge of the dinner, which on any normal Thanksgiving is a banquet. Following an uncontrollable impulse, my husband picked the green turkey up by one leg and threw it into the garbage.
Unfavorable Winds
THE COLLAPSE OF THE FAMILY didn’t happen overnight; for several months Nico, Celia, and Sally debated back and forth, but they never for a moment forgot the children. They tried to protect them as much as possible, despite the less than perfect situation they found themselves in. They took special pains to give the kids a lot of affection; in these dramas, however, suffering is inevitable. “It’s all right, they will work it out later in therapy,” Willie said to calm me. Celia and Nico kept living in the same house for a while because they had nowhere to go, while Sally came and went in her status of auntie. “This seems like a French film, I don’t want to go over there any more,” Tabra declared, scandalized. Even my tolerance didn’t stretch that far; I decided not to go myself, but every day without seeing my grandchildren was like a funeral.
As I tried to keep close ties to Nico, who didn’t give me much room, my relationship with Celia passed from tears and hugs to recriminations. She accused me of not understanding what was happening; I had a closed mind and I meddled in everything. Why the hell didn’t I leave them in peace? I was offended by her explosive nature and brusque manners, but two hours later she would call and apologize and we would be reconciled . . . until the cycle was repeated. It was very painful for me to see her suffer. The decision she had made came at a very high cost, and all the passion in the world would not save her from paying it. Celia wondered if there weren’t something perverse in her that led her to destroy the best of everything she had: her home, her children, a family in which she was safe, comfortable, cared for, loved. Her husband adored her and he was a very smart and very good man. Even so, she felt trapped in the relationship; she was bored, she didn’t fit in her skin, her heart escaped in longings she couldn’t name. She told me that the seemingly perfect edifice of her life had come tumbling down with Sally’s first kiss. That was enough for her to realize that she could not go on living with Nico; in that one instant her destiny changed course. She knew that the reaction against her would be merciless, even in California, which prides itself on being the most liberal place on the planet.
“Do you think I’m abnormal, Isabel?” she asked me.
“No, Cel
ia. A certain percentage of people are gay. The bad thing is that you came to that knowledge a little late, after you already had three children.”
“I know that I’m going to lose all my friends and that my family will never talk to me again. My parents will never understand, you know the world I come from.”
“If they can’t accept you as you are, you can get along without them for the moment. There are other priorities right now; first of all, your children.”
She stopped coming to my office because she didn’t want to be dependent on me, she told me, but if she hadn’t decided that, I would have had to. We couldn’t go on working together. It was nearly impossible to replace her; I had to hire three people to do the work she had done alone. I was used to Celia, I had blind confidence in her, and she had learned to imitate me, from my signature to my style. We joked that one day in the not too distant future she’d be writing my books. Celia, Nico, and Sally began going to therapy, separately and together, to work out details. Celia was again prescribed antidepressants and sleeping pills; she was stupefied with medication.
As for Jason, no one thought much about him because he had decided to stay in New York after he graduated; there was nothing to attract him to California and he didn’t want ever to see Sally or Celia again. He felt isolated; he had lost his family. He kept losing weight, and his looks changed. He was no longer a layabout kid, he’d turned into an angry man who spent a good part of the night wandering the streets of Manhattan because he couldn’t sleep. There was no shortage of late-night girls he could tell his misfortunes to, who then consoled him in bed. “It would be three or four years before I trusted a woman again,” he told me much later, when we could talk about it. He had also lost confidence in me because I hadn’t gauged the degree of his suffering. “Stop acting like a pansy,” Willie told him the first time he mentioned it; it was his favorite phrase for resolving his sons’ emotional conflicts.
The Sum of Our Days Page 14