The Sum of Our Days

by Isabel Allende

  Five Bullets

  LORI PASSED WITH HIGH MARKS. She was just as Amanda had described her: a clear mind and natural goodness. Discreetly and efficiently, she lightened the load for the rest of us, resolved annoying details, and soothed inevitable frictions. She had good manners, fundamental for sane coexistence, long legs, never a negative, and a frank smile that undoubtedly would seduce Nico. She had the advantage of being a few years older than he, since experience is always helpful, but she looked very young. She was striking, with strong features, a stupendous head of dark, curly hair, and golden eyes. None of that was relevant since my son doesn’t place any importance on physical appearance; he scolds me because I use makeup and does not want to believe that when my face is washed clean I look like a rifleman. I observed Lori the way a hyena observes its prey, and even set a few traps for her, but I could not catch her in any fault. That made me a little uneasy.

  After a couple of weeks, exhausted, we returned to Rio de Janeiro, where we were to take a plane to California. We stayed at a hotel in Copacabana, and instead of sunning on the white sand beaches, it occurred to us to go visit a favela, to get an idea of how the poor live, and to look for another seer to cast the jogo de búzios, since Tabra kept annoying me with her skepticism about my goddess Yemayá. We went with a female Brazilian journalist and a driver, who took us up to the hills of the unimaginably poor, an area where the police never went, to say nothing of tourists. In a terreiro much more modest than the one in Bahía, we were greeted by a middle-aged woman wearing jeans. The priestess repeated the ritual of the shells that I’d seen in Bahía, and without hesitation said that I belonged to the goddess Yemayá. It was impossible that the two seers had reached some kind of accord. This time, Tabra had to swallow her sarcastic comments.

  We left the favela and on the way back saw a modest café where they sold typical food by its weight. It seemed to me it would be more picturesque to have lunch there rather than eat shrimp cocktail on the hotel terrace, and I asked the driver to stop. He stayed in the van to look after the photographic equipment while the rest of us stood in line at the counter where they were dishing stew onto paper plates with a wooden spoon. I don’t know why I walked outside, followed by Lori and Amanda; maybe to ask the driver if he wanted something to eat. When I looked out the door, I noticed that the street, which had been bustling with traffic and activity, had emptied; no cars were driving by, the shops all seemed to be closed, people had disappeared. Across the street, some thirty feet away, a young man wearing blue pants and a short-sleeved T-shirt, was waiting at the bus stop. At his back, a man not unlike him was advancing toward him; he, too, was young, wearing dark pants and a similar T-shirt. He had a large pistol in his hand, making no effort to hide it. He raised the weapon, aimed at the first young man’s head, and fired. For an instant I didn’t know what had happened; the shot wasn’t explosive like those in the movies, but a muffled kind of cough. Blood gushed from the victim’s head before he fell. And when he hit the ground, the murderer shot four more times. Then, calm and defiant, he walked on down the street. Like an automaton, I ran toward the man who lay bleeding on the ground. He shuddered convulsively once or twice, and lay quiet, as a pool of luminous blood grew around him. Before I could kneel to help him, my friends and the driver, who had hidden in the van during the crime, dragged me to our vehicle. In minutes the street was again filled with people. I heard screams, horns, and saw clients come running out of the restaurant.

  The Brazilian journalist forced us to get into the van and told the driver to take us to the hotel by way of the side streets. I thought she wanted us to avoid the blocked traffic that undoubtedly would follow, but she explained that it was a strategy to avoid the police. It took us forty minutes to get back to the hotel, which seemed eternal. On the way I was assailed by images of the military coup in Chile, the dead in the streets, the blood, the sudden violence, the sensation that at any moment something fatal could happen, that no one was safe anywhere. The press was waiting at the hotel with television cameras; inexplicably, they had learned what had happened, but my editor, who was also there, didn’t allow us to speak with anyone. She led us quickly to one of our rooms and ordered us to stay inside until they could take us directly to the airplane. The assassination might have been a settling of accounts among criminals, but the way it happened, outdoors and in broad daylight, it seemed more like one of the infamous executions by agents of the police, which at that time had taken the law into their own hands with full impunity. The press and the public commented on these kinds of events but there had never been proof, and had there been any, it would have opportunely disappeared. When they learned that a group of foreigners—I among them, my books are reasonably well known in Brazil—had witnessed the crime, the journalists supposed that we could identify the assassin. If that were the case, we were told, any number of people would make it their business to see that we didn’t testify. Within a few hours we were on the return flight to California. The journalist and the driver had to go into hiding for weeks.

  This incident was Lori’s test of fire. When we scrambled into the van, Lori was trembling in Amanda’s arms. I admit that the sight of a man bleeding to death from five pistol shots is terrible, but Lori had been assaulted two or three times in New York and had traveled through much of the world, this wasn’t the first time she had found herself in a violent situation. She was, however, the only one who was having an extreme reaction; the rest of us were mute, but processing it. Her reaction was so intense that when we reached the hotel, we had to call a doctor to give her a tranquilizer. That serene young woman who through all the previous weeks had smiled under pressure and had demonstrated good humor when inconvenienced, had dared to swim in the piranha infested river, had firmly dealt with the drunken Russians who though they had treated Tabra and me with the respect due two Ukrainian grandmothers had pressed Amanda and her with unwelcome attention, had crumbled at the time of those five bullets. Perhaps Lori could assume responsibility for my three grandchildren and hold her own with our strange family without bodily injury, but when I saw her in that state, I realized that she was more fragile than she had appeared at first view. She would need a little help.

  Matchmaker

  THE AMAZON FIRED MY IMAGINATION. I finished writing Aphrodite in a few weeks and added erotic recipes from Dadá’s kitchen in Bahía as well as others invented by my mother, and then I asked Lori to design the book, a good way to lower her defenses.

  Amanda was my accomplice. Once the three of us went to a Buddhist retreat, at Lori’s initiative, and, after long sessions of meditation, had ended up sleeping on pallets in cells with rice paper walls. We had to sit for hours on safus, round, hard cushions that are part of the spiritual practice. Whoever can survive the cushion is already halfway to illumination. This torture was interrupted three times a day in order to eat a variety of grains and take slow walks, circling a Japanese garden of dwarf pines and rigorously arranged stones. In complete silence. In our austere cell we choked back our laughter with the safus, but a woman with gray braids and limpid eyes came to remind us of the rules. “What kind of religion is this that doesn’t allow you to laugh?” Amanda asked. I was a little disturbed because Lori seemed to enjoy this little corner of peace and murmurs, which possibly would fit well with Nico’s even temperament but was not compatible with the task of raising three children. Amanda explained that Lori had lived two years in Japan and still had a Zen remora attached to her, but not to worry, that could be cured.

  I invited Lori to have dinner with Amanda and Tabra at our house, and introduced Nico and the other two children, who, compared with Andrea, seemed bland. I had told Lori that Nico was still angry about the divorce, and it would not be easy for him to find a partner, since no woman in her right senses would want a man with three runny-nosed kids. To Nico I commented in passing that I had met an ideal woman for him, but since she was older than he was, and already had a boyfriend of sorts, we would have to keep looking. “I th
ink that’s up to me,” he replied, smiling, but a shadow of panic flashed across his face. I confessed the plan to Willie—he had already guessed it anyway—and instead of repeating his usual warning for me to keep my nose out of it, he put extra effort into preparing an appealing vegetarian meal for Lori; he had seen her and said that she had class and would fit very well into our clan. You would have liked her, too, daughter; you have a lot in common. During dinner, Lori and Nico did not exchange a single word; they didn’t even look at each other. Amanda and Tabra agreed with me that we had failed miserably, but a month later my son confessed that he’d been out with Lori several times. I can’t understand how they kept that from me for a whole month.

  “Are you two in love?” I asked.

  “I think that’s a little premature,” he replied with his habitual caution.

  “Love is never premature, particularly at your age, Nico.”

  “I’m only thirty!”

  “Thirty, you say. But it was only yesterday that you were breaking bones on your skateboard and firing eggs at people with your slingshot! The years fly by, son, there’s no time to lose.”

  Years later, Amanda told me that the day after Nico met Lori, my son planted himself at the door of her office building with a yellow rose in his hand, and when finally she came out to go to lunch and found him standing there like a post in the hot sun, Nico told her that he was just “passing by.” He doesn’t know how to lie; his blush betrayed him.

  Soon the man Lori was having an affair with, a rather famous travel photographer, quietly disappeared beyond the horizon. He was fifteen years older than she, thought he was irresistible to women, and in fact may have been before vanity and the years made him a little pathetic. When he wasn’t on one of his excursions to the ends of the earth, Lori moved into his apartment in San Francisco, a garret with no furniture but with a superb view, where they shared a strange honeymoon that seemed more like a pilgrimage to a monastery. With good humor she tolerated the man’s pathological need for control, his bachelor manias, and the lamentable fact that the walls were covered with pictures of scantily clad young Asian women whom he’d photographed when he was not in the ice of Antarctica or the sands of the Sahara. Lori had to absorb his rules: silence, bows, remove shoes, touch nothing; no cooking because the smells bothered him, no telephones, and certainly no permission to have visitors; that would have been a major lack of respect. She had to walk on tiptoes. The only plus about this fine fellow was that he was often out of town. What did Lori see in him? Her women friends couldn’t understand. Fortunately, she was beginning to tire of competing with the Asian girls, and she was able to leave him with no sense of guilt when Amanda and other friends took on the task of ridiculing him while praising the real and imaginary virtues of Nico. When she bid the photographer farewell, he told her not to show up at any of the places where they’d been together. I remember the moment when Nico and Lori’s love was made public. One Saturday he left the children with us—in their minds there was nothing better than sleeping with their grandparents and stuffing themselves with sweets and television—and came to pick them up on Sunday morning. One look at his scarlet ears—the color they get when he wants to hide something from me—and it was clear to me that he had spent the night with Lori and, knowing him, that things were getting serious. Three months later they were living together.

  The day that Lori brought her belongings to Nico’s house, I left a letter on her pillow, welcoming her to our tribe and telling her that we’d been waiting for her, that we’d known she was out there somewhere, and it had only been a question of finding her. In passing, I gave her a bit of advice that had I put in practice myself would have saved a fortune in therapists: Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are. Why hadn’t I done that with my stepsons? If I had accepted them as naturally as I would a tree, I would have had fewer tiffs with Willie. Not only did I try to change them, I assigned myself the thankless role of guardian for the whole family during those years they were dedicated to heroin. I added in that missive that it is futile to try to control children’s lives, or to protect them from all harm. If I hadn’t been able to protect you from death, Paula, how could I protect Nico and my grandchildren from life? More good advice I don’t practice.

  IN ORDER TO LIVE WITH NICO, Lori had to change her life completely. From being a sophisticated young single woman in a perfect apartment in San Francisco, she had to change into a suburban wife and mother, with all the boring tasks that come with it. She previously had every detail of her life under control, and now she had to keep her head above water in the turbulent disorder of a houseful of children. She got up at dawn to do her household chores, then drove to San Francisco to her design studio or spent hours on the road to meet clients in other cities. She didn’t have much time left for reading, her passion for photography, travel, numerous friends, or her yoga and Zen, but she was in love and she assumed the role of wife and mother without a word. The family quickly absorbed her. She didn’t know then that she would have to wait ten years—until the children could look after themselves—before with conscious effort she regained her old identity.

  She transformed Nico’s life and his dwelling. The unrefined furniture, artificial flowers, and discordant paintings all disappeared. She remodeled the house and planted a garden. She painted the living room, which before had looked like a dungeon, Venetian red—I nearly fainted when I saw the sample but it turned out really well—bought light pieces of furniture and tossed silk cushions here and there, the way you see them in magazines of home décor. She hung photos of the family in the bathrooms and added thick towels and candles in tones of green and magenta. In their bedroom she had orchids, necklaces hanging on the walls, a rocker, antique lamps with lace shades, and a Japanese trunk. Her hand could be seen in every detail, even the kitchen, where reheated pizzas and bottles of Coca-Cola were replaced with the Italian recipes of a great-grandmother in Sicily, tofu, and yogurt. Nico likes to cook—his specialty is that Valencia paella you taught him to make—but when he was on his own he hadn’t had time or spirit for pots and pans. With Lori beside him, he recaptured his skills. Lori brought a feeling of home that had been greatly needed, and Nico soaked it up; I had never seen him so content and playful. They held hands and kissed behind doors, spied on by the children, while Tabra, Amanda, and I congratulated ourselves on our selection. Occasionally I went by their house at breakfast time, because the spectacle of an apparently happy family comforted me for the rest of the day. The morning light would be flooding into the kitchen; you could see the garden through the window, and a little farther in the distance, the lake and wild ducks. Nico would be cooking stacks of pancakes, Lori cutting fruit, and the children, smiling, disheveled, and still in pajamas, would be wolfing everything down. They were still very young; Nicole had just turned three, and their hearts were open. The atmosphere was festive and tender, a relief after the drama of illnesses, deaths, divorce, and fights we had borne for so long.

  Mother-in-Law from Hell

  I SAID THAT I “SOMETIMES” DROPPED BY, but the truth is that I had a key to Nico and Lori’s house and had established bad habits. I went at any hour, without previous notice, interfered in the lives of my grandchildren, treated Nico as if he were still a boy . . . in sum, I was a pernicious mother-in-law. Once I bought a rug, and without asking permission moved all the furniture and put it in their living room as a surprise. I didn’t stop to think that if anyone rearranged the décor of my house they’d get a crack on the head in way of thanks. You, Paula, would have given back the rug and dressed me down at the same time—though I wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving a nine-by-fifteen Persian rug in your home to begin with. Lori thanked me, pale but courteous. Another time, I bought some nice dishcloths to replace the ones they were using, and threw the old ones in the trash, never suspecting that they had belonged to L
ori’s dead grandmother, and that she had treasured them for twenty years. Using the excuse of waking my grandchildren with a kiss, I would slip into my son’s house at dawn. It wasn’t a rare event for Lori, coming nearly naked from her shower, to find her mother-in-law in the hall. And as if that weren’t enough, I was secretly visiting Celia, which in all truth was a betrayal of Lori, though I was incapable of seeing it in that light. By one of those jokes of fate, Nico invariably found out. Although I saw Celia and Sally much less, I never lost contact with them, sure that eventually things would smooth out. The lies and omissions on my part, and resentment on Nico’s, were building up. Lori was confused; everything around her was in flux, nothing was clear and concise. She didn’t understand that my son and I had been absolutely open with each other except in the matter of Celia. It was she who insisted on the truth; she said that she couldn’t bear that slippery terrain, and asked how long we were going to avoid a healing confrontation. It’s superfluous to say that we had several.

  “I have to maintain some kind of relationship with Celia,” Nico explained. “I hope it can be civilized, but minimal. She’s abrasive, she aggravates me with her bad temper and the fact that she is constantly changing the rules on me.”

  “I understand that, but I’m not in a similar position. You’re my son and I adore you. My friendship with Celia has nothing to do with you or with Lori.”

  “Yes, it does, Mamá. It makes you feel bad to watch her going through bad times. But can’t you think about me? Aren’t you forgetting that she provoked this situation? She was the one who split up this family and she has to pay the consequences.”