The Sum of Our Days

by Isabel Allende

  I remembered two days later, when a theater work based on my book Paula was premiered. On the way to the theater, we passed the Folsom Street fair in San Francisco. We had no idea that it was the day for the sadomasochists’ carnival: blocks and blocks crowded with people in the most outrageous garb. “Freedom! Freedom to do what I want: fuck!” shouted a good man dressed in a monk’s cassock open in the front to display a chastity belt. Tattoos, masks, revolutionary Russian hats, chains, whips, hair shirts of every nature. The women had black-or green-painted mouths and fingernails, stiletto-heeled boots, black plastic garter belts, in short, all the symbols of this picturesque culture. There were several monumentally fat women sweating in leather pants and jackets with swastikas and skull decals. Ladies and gentlemen wore rings or studs through their noses, lips, ears, and nipples. I didn’t dare look any lower. A young woman with bared breasts was riding on the hood of a ’60s car, her hands tied behind her back; another woman, dressed as a vampire, was lashing her chest and arms with a horsewhip. It wasn’t a joke; she was badly bruised and her screams could be heard through the entire area. All this was taking place before the amused eyes of a pair of policemen and various tourists taking pictures. I wanted to intervene, but Willie grabbed my jacket, lifted me off the ground, and dragged me away, feet kicking in the air. A half block farther on we saw a fat-bellied giant carrying a dwarf wearing a leash and dog collar. The dwarf, like his master, wore combat boots and nothing else except a sheath of metal-studded black leather on his whacker, held precariously by a few invisible little ties threaded up the crack of his butt. The little guy barked at us but the giant greeted us very amiably, and offered us some candies in the shape of penises. Willie let go of me and stood gaping at the pair. “If I ever write a novel, that dwarf will be my protagonist,” he said, totally out of the blue.

  The play Paula began with the actors in a circle, holding hands, summoning your spirit, daughter. It was so moving that not even Willie could contain his sobs when at the end they read the letter you had written, “To be opened when I die.” A slim girl, ethereal and graceful, played the leading role, dressed in a white shirt. Sometimes she lay on a cot in a coma; other times her spirit danced among the actors. She didn’t speak until the end, to ask her mother to help her die. Four actresses represented different moments of my life, from child to grandmother, and passed from hand to hand a red silk shawl that symbolized the narrator. One actor played Ernesto and Willie; another was Tío Ramón, and he drew laughs from the audience when he declared his love for my mother, or explained to Paula how he was a direct descendent of Jesus Christ—just go look up the tomb of Jesús Huidobro in the Catholic cemetery in Santiago. We left the theater in silence, feeling that you were floating among the living. Did you ever imagine, Paula, that you would touch so many people?

  The next day we went to the forest of your ashes to greet you and Jennifer. Summer had ended, the ground was carpeted with crunching leaves, some trees had dressed in the colors of fortune, from dark copper to shining gold, and in the air was the promise of the first rain. We sat on a redwood tree trunk in a chapel formed by the high treetops. A couple of squirrels were playing with an acorn at our feet, giving us sideways glances, not at all afraid. I could see you, whole, before your illness wrought its devastation: at three, singing and dancing in Geneva, at fifteen, receiving a diploma, at twenty-six, dressed as a bride. I sat thinking about my dream and the horses that fell and rose again. I have fallen and risen many times in my life, but no fall was as hard as the one of your death.

  A Memorable Wedding

  TWO YEARS AFTER THE FIRST NIGHT they spent together, in January of 1999, Nico and Lori were married. Up till then she had resisted because she couldn’t see why it was necessary; he, however, thought that the children had been through a lot and would feel more secure if he and Lori were husband and wife. The children had seen Celia and Sally always together and didn’t question their love, but I think they were afraid that if we were careless Lori would get away. Nico was right; the children were happier about the decision than anyone. “Now Lori will be with us more,” said Andrea. They say that it takes eight years to adapt to the role of stepmother, and that the most difficult of all is the task of the childless woman who comes into the life of a man who is a father. It wasn’t easy for Lori to change her life and accept the children; she felt invaded. Nevertheless, she took over all the thankless tasks, from washing clothes to buying shoes for Andrea, who wore only green plastic sandals—and not just any sandals, they had to be from Taiwan. Lori killed herself working to be the perfect mother, never overlooking a single detail, but she really didn’t need to take such pains, since the children loved her for the same reasons the rest of us did: her laugh, her unconditional affection, her friendly jokes, her tempestuous hair, her boundless goodness, her way of being there in good and bad times.

  The wedding was a joyful ceremony in San Francisco, which culminated with a group class in swing, the first time Willie and I had danced together since the humiliating experience with the Scandinavian instructor. Willie, in his dinner jacket, looked like Paul Newman in one of his films, though I don’t remember which one. Ernesto and Giulia came from New Jersey, Abuela Hilda and my parents from Chile, but Jason couldn’t get away from work. He was still single, though he was not wanting for women to keep him company for one night. According to him, he was looking for someone as reliable as Willie.

  We met Lori’s friends, who came from the four points of the compass. Over time, several of them became Willie’s and my best friends, despite the difference in ages. Later, when we received our photos of the party, I realized that they all looked like magazine models; I have never seen a group of such beautiful people. Most were talented, unpretentious artists: designers, graphic artists, caricaturists, photographers, filmmakers. Willie and I immediately were friends with Lori’s parents, who did not see in me any incarnation of Satan, as Celia’s parents had, even though in my brief words at the reception I made the bad mistake of alluding to carnal love among our children. Nico still hasn’t forgiven me. The Barras, uncomplicated, loving people, are of Italian origin and have lived for more than fifty years in the same house in Brooklyn where they brought up four children a block away from the old mansions of the mafiosi, which can be distinguished from others in the neighborhood by the marble fountains, Greek columns, and statues of angels. Lori’s mother, Lucille, is slowly losing her eyesight, but she makes light of it, not so much because of pride as not to be a bother. In her house, which she knows by memory, she moves with assurance, and in her kitchen she is invincible; she continues to prepare by touch the complicated recipes handed down from generation to generation. Her husband, Tom, a storybook grandfather, embraced me with genuine affection.

  “I’ve prayed a long time that Lori and Nico would get married,” he confessed.

  “So they wouldn’t go on living in mortal sin?” I asked as a joke, knowing that he is a practicing Catholic.

  “Yes, but more than anything because of the children,” he answered, absolutely serious.

  Tom had owned a neighborhood pharmacy before he retired. That had prepared him for stress and fright, since he’d been assaulted on several occasions. Although he’s no longer young, he still shovels snow in the winter and climbs a folding ladder to paint ceilings in the summertime. He has steadfastly battled the rather peculiar renters who through the years have occupied a small apartment on the first floor of their house, such as the weightlifter who threatened him with a hammer, the paranoid man who stacked newspapers from floor to ceiling and left barely an ant corridor from the door to the bathroom and from there to the bed, or the third renter who exploded—I can’t think of another word to describe what happened—and left the walls covered with excrement, blood, and organs, which Tom, of course, had to clean up. No one could explain what had happened because no trace of explosives was found; my theory is that it must have been something like the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion. Despite these and other m
acabre experiences, Lucille and Tom have maintained their trust in humanity.

  Sabrina, who was already five years old, danced the entire night, clinging to various people, while her vegetarian mothers took advantage of the occasion to try, surreptitiously, the lamb and pork chops. Alejandro, in a grave-digger suit and tie, presented the rings, accompanied by Andrea and Nicole, dressed like princesses in amber satin that contrasted with the bride’s long purple gown. Lori was radiant. Nico was very full of himself in black and a Mao shirt, with his hair tied back at the nape of his neck and looking more than ever a sixteenth-century Florentine nobleman. It was an ending I will never be able to use for my novels: they got married and lived happily ever after. That’s what I told Willie as he danced to the swing band and I tried to follow. The man leads, as that Scandinavian always said.

  “I can die right here of a timely heart attack because my labor in this world is now complete: I have placed my son,” I told him.

  “Don’t even think of it; it’s now that they’re going to need you,” he replied.

  Toward the end of the evening, when the guests were beginning to leave, I crawled under a long cloth-covered table with a dozen children drunk on sugar and revved up by the music, their clothes in tatters from all the running around. The word had spread among them that I knew all the stories there were; all they had to do was ask for one. Sabrina wanted the story to be about a mermaid. I told them about the tiny siren who fell into a whisky glass and was drunk by Willie without his realizing. The description of the voyage of the unfortunate little siren through their grandfather’s organs, the vicissitudes of swimming through his digestive system, where she encountered every manner of obstacle and repugnant hazard, until she was floating in his urine and emptied into a sewer and from there into San Francisco Bay, left them speechless. The next day, Nicole, wild-eyed, came to tell me she hadn’t liked the story of the little siren at all.

  “Is it a true story?” she asked.

  “Not everything is true, but then not everything is false either.”

  “How much is false and how much is true?”

  “I don’t know, Nicole. The essence is true, and in my work as a storyteller that’s all that matters.”

  “There aren’t any mermaids, so everything in your story is a lie.”

  “And how do you know that the siren wasn’t a bacterium, for example.”

  “A mermaid is a mermaid, and a bacterium is a bacterium,” she replied, indignant.

  To China in Search of Love

  TONG ACCEPTED A SOCIAL INVITATION for the first time in the thirty years he’d worked as bookkeeper in Willie’s office. We had resigned ourselves to not inviting him, since he never came, but Nico and Lori’s wedding was an important event, even for a man as introverted as he. “Is obligation to go?” he asked. Lori said yes it was, something no one had dared tell him before. He came alone; finally his wife had asked for the divorce, after years and years of sleeping in the same bed without speaking. I thought that in view of the success I’d had with Nico and Lori, I could also look for a girlfriend for Tong, but he informed me that he wanted a Chinese woman, and in that community I was sadly lacking in contacts. In Tong’s favor was the fact that San Francisco’s Chinatown is the most heavily populated and famous Chinese enclave in the Western world, but when I suggested looking there, he explained that he wanted a woman who had not been contaminated by America. He was dreaming of a submissive wife, eyes always cast to the ground, who would cook his favorite dishes, cut his fingernails, give him a son, and in passing serve her mother-in-law like a slave. I don’t know who had put that fantasy in his head, probably his mother, that tiny old lady we all feared. “Do you believe there is such a woman left in this world, Tong?” I asked, perplexed. For an answer, he led me to the computer screen and showed me an unending list of photos and descriptions of girls ready to marry a stranger in order to flee their country or their family. They were classified by race, nationality, and religion, and should the inquirer be more demanding, even the size of their bras. If I had known that this supermarket of female bargains existed, I wouldn’t have agonized so over Nico. Although, thinking it over, it’s better I didn’t. I would never have found Lori on those lists.

  The search for Tong’s future bride turned out to be a long and complicated office project. At that time we had divided the old Sausalito whorehouse into Willie’s law office, my office on the first floor, and Lori’s on the second, where she managed the foundation. Lori’s elegant touch had changed that house as well, which now was resplendent with framed posters of my books, Tibetan rugs, blue and white porcelain jardinières filled with plants, and a complete kitchen where there was always everything we needed to serve tea, as if we were at the Savoy. Tong gave himself the task of selecting the candidates, which we then criticized: this one has mean eyes, this one is evangelical, this one paints her face like a whore, and so on. We didn’t allow Tong to be impressed by appearance; photographs do lie, as he knew very well seeing that Lori had computer-enhanced his portrait; she had made him taller, younger, and with whiter skin, which seems to be appreciated in China. Tong’s mother installed herself in the kitchen to compare astral signs, and when finally a young Cantonese nurse emerged who seemed ideal to all of us, she went to consult an astrologer in Chinatown, who gave his approval as well. A round face smiled from the photograph, red cheeks and bright eyes that made you want to kiss her.

  After a formal correspondence between Tong and the hypothetical bride, which lasted several months, Willie announced that they would go to China to meet her. I couldn’t go with them, though I was dying of curiosity. I asked Tabra to stay with me because I don’t like to sleep alone. My friend’s business was in the black again. She wasn’t living with us anymore; she had found a house, small, but with a patio that looked out toward golden hills, where she could create the illusion of the isolation that was so important to her. I’m sure that living with our tribe must have been torture for her. She needs solitude but she agreed to stay with me while Willie was gone. For a while she stopped going out on blind dates because she was working day and night to get out of debt, but she never stopped hoping for the return of her Plumed Lizard, who did appear on the horizon from time to time. Suddenly his recorded voice on the answering machine would order, “It’s four thirty in the afternoon; call me before five or you will never see me again.” Tabra would get home at midnight, bone-weary, and find this charming message and be upset for weeks. Fortunately, her work forced her to travel, and she had interludes in Bali, India, and other distant places from which she sent me delicious letters filled with adventures and written with that fluid sarcasm that is her trademark.

  “Sit yourself down and write a travel book, Tabra,” I begged her more than once.

  “I’m an artist, I’m not an author,” she said defensively. “But if you can make necklaces, I suppose I can write a book.”

  Willie took his heavy suitcase of cameras to China and returned with some very good photographs, especially portraits of people, which is what most interests him. As always, the most memorable photo is the one he didn’t get to take. In a remote village in Mongolia, where he had gone by himself because he wanted to give Tong the opportunity to spend a few days with the proposed bride without him as a witness, he saw a hundred-year-old woman with bound feet, feet like girls had once suffered in that part of the world. He went up to her and tried to ask with signs if he could take a photo of her diminutive “golden lilies,” but the centenarian ran away as fast as her tiny deformed feet would take her, screaming. She had never seen anyone with blue eyes and thought that Death had come to carry her away.

  The trip was nonetheless a success, according to my husband, because Tong’s future bride was perfect, exactly what his bookkeeper was looking for: timid, docile, and unaware of the rights women enjoy in America. She seemed healthy and strong, and surely she would give him the desired male child. Her name was Lili and she earned her living as a surgical nurse, sixteen hours a
day, six days a week, for a salary equivalent to two hundred dollars a month. “No wonder she wants to get out of here,” Willie commented, as if living with Tong and his mother would be any easier.

  Stormy Weather

  I GOT READY TO ENJOY A FEW WEEKS of solitude, which I planned to use on the book I was writing about California in the days of the gold rush. I had been putting it off for four years, though I already had a title, Daughter of Fortune, a mountain of historical research, and even the image for the jacket. The protagonist of the novel is a young Chilean girl, Eliza Sommers, born around 1833, who decides to follow her lover, who has left to join in the chase for gold. For a young girl of the time, a journey of that magnitude was unthinkable, but I believe that women are capable of amazing exploits for love. Eliza would never have thought of crossing half the world for the lure of gold, but she never hesitated to do it in order to find the man she’d lost. However, my plan to write it in peace did not work out because Nico wasn’t well. To have a couple of wisdom teeth pulled, it had been necessary to give him a general anesthesia for a few minutes, something that tends to be dangerous for people with porphyria. He got out of the dentist’s chair, walked to the reception area where Lori was waiting, and felt the world going black. His knees buckled and he fell backward, stiff as a board, striking his neck and back against the wall. He lay on the floor unconscious. It was the beginning of months of suffering for him and anguish for the rest of the family, especially for Lori, who didn’t know what was happening to him, and for me, who knew all too well.